Gay guys and types of friends

Then you might just be shocked--there's a whole gay league here.

 

Thanks for sharing a bit more of your history, I have a better idea of where you're coming from now.

You're still feeling a lot of the peer pressure you experienced at school, and this can affect us for a long time after we leave school. It can have an impact on how we perceive certain types of people, and how we react to them. And yes, it can make it difficult for us to trust them and try to form friendships with them.

In my school days I was into art, and hated sports. And when I went to uni for my art course, I thought I might meet other gay people who were a bit more like me. I was very disappointed. I was the only gay male student on my course. And when I got a job in a local gay pub to support myself during uni, I thought I might meet some other like-minded gay men. Again, I was disappointed. The gay men I was working with and serving had no creativity about them. All they ever spoke about was sex and clubbing and getting drunk. In some ways it felt like I was back at school, only instead of people making fun of me for being gay, they were making fun of me for not being gay enough.

In hindsight, there are things I probably could have done differently that would have let me feel a bit happier during those times. I think what I did wrong was having too many expectations and making too many assumptions. I had an idea of how i wanted to be treated and what sort of friendships I wanted to have, but the reality did not work out like that. When I realized that the people I was working with and studying with were not the kind of people I dreamed of meeting, I kind of shut myself down and avoided friendships with them. Oh, I was nice and polite to everyone, and I did get along with them, to an extent. But I wasn't truly connecting with them, because I didn't feel that any of them would meet up to my expectations, or that i would meet up to theirs.

I don't know if you can relate to some of what I'm saying, but the point I'm trying to make is: Don't make the same mistakes I made when I was younger. Don't let your expectations and assumptions of people get the better of you. A lot of people you meet during your studies and work might not make the greatest impression on you at first - that's ok. Lots of people make a bad first impression, and turn out to be better than we thought. And lots of people make a good first impression and turn out to be worse than we thought. Nobody is perfect.

Friends don't always just find each other and click straight away. Sometimes it requires a bit more effort. It's about giving people a chance to get to know you, and giving yourself a chance to get to know other people.

 

That's happened to me as well. Within the last year, in fact. I worked with someone who I really admired and thought we had a great working relationship with, and I felt really strongly that we could have a good friendship as well if we took a chance. But we parted ways and he hasn't said a word to me since. It does upset me that he hasn't reached out to me at all. He didn't even send me a happy birthday message on facebook, and I have contacts on facebook who I've only met once in person, and they wished me a happy birthday. So, why couldn't this person be bothered?

Oh well, I'm sure he has his reasons, and if he doesn't want to share them with me, that's his decision, not mine. Fortunately I do have other friends in my life to turn to.

But we do go through life meeting people we like who don't like us back. And we sometimes meet people we don't like, yet they want to be best friends with us. Sod's law.

I think what you need to do is start valuing yourself more. Because I struggled with making friendships when I was younger, and a lot of it had to do with how little I thought of myself. I had ups and downs with my confidence, but there was always something about me that I felt uncomfortable with, and felt like I didn't deserve friendships. I didn't actually learn how to value myself until I reached my thirties. I hope it doesn't take you this long to pick yourself up, and that you figure out how to surround yourself with good friends. Feel free to keep coming back here to ask for advice and opinions.

 

A fresh start would be great for you. I thought I would be getting a fresh start when I finished school and started college, but it wasn't quite enough. I studied at a university close to where I grew up, so I carried on living with my parents and my siblings. I missed out on the experience of being independent and having to fend for myself and living with total strangers, and having the freedom to go out whenever I want and not have to explain to anyone when I would be home. I do think this made it difficult for me to have a social life. Who would want to hang out with the guy still living with his parents? And still having fights with my siblings over what to watch on TV and what video game to play and what music to listen to in my 20s did not do a lot for my self esteem at all.

I do have a good relationship with my siblings now that we are older and living our own separate lives, but looking back, I think my relationship with them held me back. They would often make fun of me, and I would suffer their jealousy because I was the youngest and most spoiled by our parents, and they would often criticize my decisions and just not let me be myself. I always felt judged by them. So while I still love them, I do believe that getting some distance from my siblings had a beneficial effect on me, as I was then able to become my own person without worrying about what somebody else might think.

Distancing yourself from certain people, whatever your relationship with them may be, can be another important step to moving forward.

 

I'm a little biased being someone who is gay myself, but I would say that most the gay people that I have met in person have not been nice to me at all (although that could be because of me).

Gay men tend to like to compete against each other because it's very easy to compare ourselves because we can gauge how sexually attractive we are to others in conjunction with other factors. Therefore, I've only found a couple of gay people I've truly gotten along with: those who are very secure about themselves, those who are better than me (financially, physically speaking, and all other ways), and my boyfriend (because he is an angel that God has made out of the clouds of the stars).

I would say make friends with anyone, it does not matter, but do not sell yourself short because people will use you. Once you put your foot down and show a bit of confidence against people who are fake or who seek to use you, things become so much easier to deal with.

 

Its their own issues, don't take it personally. LGBT folk have that much more baggage to deal with, but like you said, there are amazing guys out there.

 

No idea, perhaps I was just different. My friends have always told me that I am threatening to others, if not in appearance, then in the way I am. Apparently, I am considered intelligent in the small university I attend in America: I'm an international student with a full scholarship. I'm also comparatively well spoken, and I speak the Queen's English (although in Glasgow, I would imagine that I would be considered scum for doing so lol). I'm also relatively tall (6').

They might also sense that I am a little bit insecure about my appearance so they like to prey on it. Maybe it's a bit of racism too (I'm not too sure). I'm the only gay person in my school that is East Asian in ethnicity and we all know the stereotypes that come with that. I think it might just boil down to the fact, that a lot of them are shallow or base most of their value on their appearance with nothing underneath it at all.

Straight guys on the other hand treat me well because, once again, they are scared of me because of my height. But I guess the competition that I have with them is non existent so there's less animosity.

 

Joe, just out of interest, which people are you out to?

 

Perhaps a problem that you have here is that you assume having female friends equates to falling into an unhealthy or undesirable stereotype. You have to ask yourself why you cannot deal with girls being your friends. Upon reflection, I think you may find that your reasons for that are trivial more than not.

Also, "lad" culture really needs to stop, the blatant sexism that comes with it can really be annoying. It should have ended during the Thatcher years. You will come to understand that there are more men in the world than just lads out there, when people mature you will find that lads make up a very small minority of the population of men.

 

How do you think your family will react?

If you don't want to tell them yourself and decide to come out to more people at school, then there's the risk of your family finding out from somebody else.

Maybe you originally wanted to wait until you reach uni so you could come out then, around completely new people?