Hey, since i have accepted me being gay, i have now a new challenge i am facing. While i have been coming out at school to more and more people, my innocent motive of being able to be myself and to not lead on women who showed interest in me, has gotten some dynamic. While most of my friends were accepting in the beginning, i put one of them into an identity crisis because he has been raised strictly religious and me being gay has most likely shattered some stereotypes that helped him to dissociate himself from homosexuals, i try to be supportive, but he is hanging around a lot of bad influences and i do not want to be intrusive. Also, we are quite a multicultural environment and while my German friends seem to be supportive there seem to be some rumors from the people of less tolerant backgrounds around me now which kind of hurt. Since one of my close friends stayed at home due to his identity crisis i have been hanging around a lot with my other friend who is 19 and who i like a lot, and people have started suspecting me of having a crush on him, but in some kind of predatory way, as a means to disguise their homophobia and see me as some kind of pedophile predator. What is even worse is, that while he is way too young to really be my type in a sexual sense, i have to admit to myself that i have caught some feelings for him, and i do not really know how to deal with it. I am not proud of it, because i am 8 years older than him, and while i would pursue something if he was up to it i simply wanted to preserve our friendship. I am very well-behaved around him and even try him to get with women because he is lacking some courage regarding this. So i am basically being a good friend, but still he starts to become evasive because he either suspects me having a crush on him, or is afraid of how he is going to be perceived when he is spending too much time with me. While i gauged if he feels like i am being too clingy, he was like no it is fine. But on the next day when i asked him if he is attending a party in our peer group, he ignored my message, read it, but still proceeded to tell me excuses why he did not answer me. When we met at the party, i was distancing myself from him, because i am getting a bit jealous seeing him with others and also i want to respect his needs even though he seems to feel some obligation to voice a standpoint that clearly does not align with his behavior. I also supported his voiced desire to get a girlfriend regardless of how much this was possibly driven by heteronormativity, with asking a woman at the party of how he can better his chances in dating and joining in the group efforts to get him to a strip club in order to get a bit out of his shell. Later that evening when we all were leaving together and i was a bit drunk i brought this up, told him that i am angry not because he does not want to spend time with me, but because he feels the need to lie to me, and that's what hurt me. Overall i feel kind of bad with this, i do not want to see me as someone who likes people way younger than himself, i do not want to be seen as the gay pedophile even if i suspect very strongly that this is simply an easy excuse for people to voice their homophobic sentiments in a socially more acceptable way, since i am not behaving in any kind of predatory or sexualized way and i am completely fine with just being his friend, also he is an adult, so it is his and my free decision to do whatever we want to do on the bedroom with other consenting adults. Still it is quite hard for me to deal with this, i simply like him as a person and like to spend time with him but for some reason this makes me a monster to some people and puts him in a position where he not only does not feel comfortable around me anymore but does not even allow himself to admit that even when i address it in a setting that should make him feel safe to voice his concerns.
