Let Them Wade In

A Friendship, Before And After

Winslow Homer, “Northeaster,” via Cosmos

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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TW: Mentions of suicide, harassment, bullying

Thomas¹ is telling me, via Skype, how he dragged his young sons to an art museum so he could see Hokusai’s “Great Wave off Kanagawa.”

Of course, he also wanted them to see what may be one of the, if not the most, singularly influential pieces of East Asian art in modern culture. But then, they’re both still in grade school and have a propensity to bicker and whinge and not really appreciate things that are culturally significant, especially when it is a drawing inside a glass frame surrounded by people they can’t see over. Thomas, who studied painting at our university, said he eventually had them just sit on a bench and stay there so he could have just a few minutes to examine a piece of art that he will likely never get another chance to see in his lifetime.

Thomas is ashamed he essentially sidelined them so he could do something for himself but he was also frustrated. “They could tell their kids and grandkids that they actually got to see this great piece of art but they’d rather irritate the shit out of each other and me.”

He doesn’t think he’s the best father to them, that he doesn’t have the patience for their games or their attitudes. He says he feels like he has to be on the defensive whenever he and his wife are in couple’s therapy, but that he also understands why. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re both several beers in on our respective sides of the screen but Thomas sounds more than tired. He sounds lonely.

“Other than my therapist you’re the only other guy I can talk to about things,” he says.

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Years ago, when the subject of men’s mental health was just beginning to gain cachet with talking heads and nascent influencers, I remember hearing something about how every man needed to have three close friends to maintain his well-being.²

These are supposed to be more than drinking buddies, gym partners, acquaintances from work who share your disdain for the same micromanaging supervisor. These friends have to be individuals you open up to, whose counsel you value, who you are not afraid to be vulnerable with.

Of course, a lot of men, according to said talking heads but also experts in sociology, psychology and any other science concerned with human relationships, don’t have those close friends. We read about men overall experiencing a “friendship recession.” We hear about the male loneliness epidemic, which may not be true but still highlights how shitty men are at forming connections with other people.

Plenty of men my age have friends they’ll socialize with regularly, seek advice from, but relationships between men tend to be more about networking and affirming masculinity alongside the occasional emotionally-charged experience necessary to maintain a semblance of daily functioning. They are about seeing who can still handle their liquor, who can lift the most in the gym, who has the most outrageous stories, who can best prove their manliness, all while maintaining some veneer of closeness.

A lot of this derives from how boys are taught to consider their place in the world and how friendships figure into that. Western culture, especially in the United States, highly prioritizes individualism over community. Men are modeled as taking this to an extreme, as being able to take on more work, more responsibility, more stress to provide for themselves and their family. I was never taught to not have friends, but I was definitely taught that I needed to be the best to get ahead in life. To view everyone as a competitor. That mindset doesn’t exactly lend itself to developing, much less maintaining, friendships with others.

Then there’s emotions. Men, we were told, are not meant to be soft. We are not meant to wash over people, crash into them, knocking them to the ground.

It wasn’t always this way. As recently as the early 20th century it wasn’t unusual for men to be physically affectionate with one another, even sleep in the same bed together without any sexual intention. Men wrote letters to each other, freely admitting they missed each other. Men told each other they loved each other.

Fear of homosexuality has always existed but as queer folk began asserting their existence publicly in the mid-20th century, homohysteria and homophobia evolved into more stringent policing of male behaviors and public admonishments and proclamations against “the gay agenda” seeping into culture.

Boys were told it wasn’t ok to be physically affectionate with other boys. That love was only to be between a man and a woman. Boys were told that they shouldn’t let their emotions show, that to do so would make them girly. Only if necessary should they be shared with a woman, such as a spouse or female friend.

The paper “Privileging the Bromance: A Critical Appraisal of Romantic and Bromantic Relationships” reviews this cultural history and the damage it has wrought upon society in creating emotionally stifled, disregulated and anxious men.

Restrictive masculinity found its routes in the lives of even very young boys. Exemplifying this, Pollack (1999) showed that fathers of this era would withhold their love and affection from their children, and before boys even reached their teenage years, they could be subjected to abusive and shaming torments from peers and teachers for performing feminine behaviors such as skipping and poetry readings for not being “real boys” (Pollack 1999). The literature consistently documents a cultural zeitgeist of homophobia, hypermasculinity, and emotional abstention among men from the 1970s (Olstad 1975) through the 1990s (Pollack 1999), leaving a generation of men with a life of nonintimate male-to-male connections (Collins and Sroufe 1999; Tognoli 1980).

This was how we grew into men.

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My first memory of Thomas is of him in the entryway of our small college dormitory during the first week of freshman year. He wore nothing but a pair of black Chucks, sparkly blue go-go shorts and a pair of small angel wings drawn on his back with a Sharpie.

We didn’t interact—he was on his way to a Rocky Horror Picture Show performance with his upperclassmen roommates.

A year later Thomas picked me up from a friend’s place when I decided drinking half a bottle of tequila in one night was a good idea. Then I started going with him to the art school late at night to drink beers with him as he worked on lithography or painting assignments. We roomed together junior year and I helped bankroll the parties he organized for our dorm. I and several of our other friends stood beside him at his father’s funeral after his sudden death.

After Thomas graduated and I was a super senior, we got a dive apartment off-campus where we’d sit up and get drunk on cheap wine or whatever we could get a hold of and try not to freeze while also not throwing the breaker from using a space heater.

We planned to keep living together after I graduated, albeit in a proper house with a third friend. Then at the last minute I backed out so I could move across the country to a place I had never been and knew no one to start my career and, ostensibly, a new life.

Somehow, our friendship continued long distance, via email, phone calls, even some letters where I told him how much I missed him. We talked about going to Munich together for Oktoberfest. Instead, we managed a few canoe trips—one I arranged for Thomas’ bachelor party—when I was able to go back for a visit. We reveled and commiserated long distance through the experience of parenthood. I stood by him—albeit from a distance—after he totaled his car and got a DUI. He didn’t shirk from saying he loved me when I told him years ago during one our late night Skype call that I had contemplated suicide and was pursuing therapy.

For all intents and purposes, Thomas and I are vulnerable with each other. We are close. I think we have something akin to what

Stephen Bradford Long

has called a “covenant friendship” in discussing the relationship he has with two friends.

I feel bonded to David and Angie in a way that we don’t have language for today. It certainly isn’t romantic. David and Angie are married to each other, and I exchanged rings with Jon a decade ago. Nor is it family in the way my biological sisters are my family. I feel the tie fiercely, and it’s a tie that lacks language. I love them, but it is an entirely different creature from romantic love, or erotic love, or familial love. It is covenant friendship. I miss them when I don’t talk to them for a period, and I feel committed to working through hardships with them in a way I don’t think I would if I hadn’t said those words to them in a ritual context.

But, just like everybody else, I never told Thomas I was queer. To be fair, I didn’t know I was because, well, I didn’t think that was allowed, much less for me. I’d never touched a man in any intimate way. Never confessed my love to a man. Yes, I’d obsessed over them, fantasized about them, but those were thoughts and feelings to be controlled and subdued, not shared.

And Thomas said in conversation, late one night several drinks deep watching dubbed anime, something that affirmed that.

“If you think you’re gay and you haven’t had sex with a man, you’re just confused.”

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There are signs men are getting better at being friends with each other. The researchers behind “Privileging The Bromance” found the smattering of straight college-aged men they interviewed in the United Kingdom in 2014 reported physical affection, the erasure of boundaries and full emotional acceptance in their “bromances.” In fact, they found that some of those they interviewed seemingly valued the comfort and intimacy of their bromantic relationship(s) over their romantic ones with women.

Hamish spoke about when he was in hospital. “Charlie was there for me all the time when I was recovering. But, when my girlfriend came, I kind of wanted her to leave so that I could have a laugh with Charlie instead of being all serious like she is.” George gave a different kind of example. He spoke of his desire for his girlfriend to finger him (penetrate his anus during sex). However, he thought his girlfriend would think he was gay, and thus ruining the relationship, he had only told his bromance about his sexual desires.

And an even more recent study published in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality found that many friendships between men do not change or even strengthen in the wake of one friend’s coming out to the other who is straight. One subject actually wondered if they should have been more effusive in their support.

I think I handled it as if he had told me any other random mundane thing.That was my attempt to be as accepting as possible, acting like it wasn’t a big deal at all, but in retrospect, maybe it was a big deal to him, so I should have made it out to be bigger? I don’t know what the “appropriate” handling of this is though.

(28, heterosexual)

There were, of course, those friendships that ended after disclosure. No surprise that some were because of the straight friend’s outright rejection/disgust of their queer friend’s identity. But then, there were the negative reactions that seemed more based on, well, betrayal.

It was more common for heterosexual friends to react negatively because they were either upset or unsure how to react. One individual stated, “It was not a positive experience. He acted in a very non-supportive way. He wasn’t homophobic, more like he didn’t know how to react” (23, gbMSM). A second response suggested the heterosexual friend was initially upset because he felt lied to: “He was then upset at me when I told him, not because I am gay because all these times I lied to him. For example, when we saw a girl in a gym, I [would] tell him she is hot, etc., which were lies” (36, gbMSM). Further more, some responses described how the heterosexual friend avoided or distanced themselves from the gbMSM friend initially: “Yes .At first, I avoided him. Later on, I did still talk to him but it was kind of [weird]” (35, heterosexual).

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I wanted to tell him in-person but we live half a continent from each other and there was no telling how long it would be before we’d get to see each other in the flesh. But I needed to tell him. I needed him to know this part of me.

And I did, during one of our long calls that stretched into the night, sitting on my front porch, the old incandescents in the recessed lights above casting an orange sheen on everything.

And yet, even after telling him, even after him saying he still loved me and remained my friend, I felt I needed to keep that part of myself closed off from him. I had let my surf wash over his feet, let him feel the sand be drawn around and from under his feet by the retreating tide. That, I told myself, should be enough.

As the months went on and we had our occasional calls, I didn’t tell him about my wife and I opening our marriage. I didn’t tell him about Harry or any of the other men I’ve come to know. I didn’t tell him about going to San Francisco Pride and getting my first harness. In telling him about my first tattoo I played down how much my coming out was tied to its symbolism.

Even after all these years, I still couldn’t let myself crash into the people I love.

But when Thomas started talking about the Hokusai exhibit, the same one Harry and I went to in Seattle during one of our weekends together and I bought the exhibit catalog book as a memento…I wanted to share that experience. There was nothing sordid about us going to the exhibit together, but I wanted to say I went with my boyfriend. I went with someone special to me that I wanted him to know about.

The conversation had already moved on but eventually I drunkenly steer it back around to talking about the Hokusai exhibit.

“I, uh, wanted to tell you that I saw it with my boyfriend,” I half slur, half stutter.

There’s a pause.

“Ty, I’m here.”

This wasn’t the first time Thomas had said something during our chats that made my eyes start burning and I was left with not knowing what to say next.

Because I can’t accept that I am this wanted by a person who has been in my life for more than half of it. That someone who I haven’t lived near for nearly two decades and I’m lucky to see in-person maybe every couple of years values me so much as to open his chest and let me see all the beautiful mess that lays there but also welcome in the mess that I bring to him.

“When you told me you’re bi, I knew that wasn’t going to be the end of it. I’m here.”

We all have a great wave in us, this feeling of something burgeoning and powerful and dangerous. And we are convinced that we should hold it back, spare anyone in our lives from witnessing it and its terrible power. It swells with our fears and our hopes, swirls with our truths and our pains and everything that truly makes up who we are.

The key is finding the people who are excited to run into the surf.

I don’t remember how the rest of our chat went. But I don’t need to. I know we can always pick up where we left off.

1. A pseudonym

2. Actually, it may have been three types of friends every man needs. Or five types. Whatever. Pop psychology gonna pop.