Missed Connections

by Brian Francis

  I was the one who suggested that I move out for our fourth year. I needed my own space and I was officially dating someone. I didn’t want to have to keep sneaking around with my boyfriend or risk the chance of being overheard on the phone with him. I didn’t want to have to keep up the lies. I wanted to finally feel free. To date. To have sex in my own bed. To fall in love. I needed to get away from my friends so that I could finally deal with the person I’d been avoiding for all those years—myself.

  I felt guilty about causing this upheaval and inconvenience for my friends. And there wasn’t a good reason for it, or at least not one I could honestly tell them. I don’t know if they were angry or if they had known this was coming. “Francis hasn’t been part of this house for months,” they might have said to one another.

  But in spite of everything, I wanted to maintain our friendships, to try to fix the bonds that I had broken and explain the reason for my absence, both physical and mental.

  So I made the decision to come out to them. Now that we’d be living apart, it would give them time to get used to the idea that I was gay. My gay friends told me not to bother. It wasn’t worth it, they said. What was the point, we were all going our separate ways anyway? But that was the point, I reasoned. I didn’t want us to continue to drift apart. I needed to take responsibility for these friendships, and to honour our shared history with one another.

  I sat down to write them a letter, but my nerves got the better of me. So I waited until we were done our school year. Until our final exams were written and the furniture had been cleared out of the house and we had all returned to summer jobs in our hometowns. A few weeks after that, I sent this letter to them.

  MAY 26, 1993

  Hi guys.

  I had originally planned to give you this letter before we all moved out, but with exams and all, I couldn’t find the time. Besides, the circumstances had to be right. To be truthful, I’ve been postponing this letter. And I don’t really want to write it, but I feel that I have to. And I have to get this out to you before too much time passes. Right now, you’re probably wondering what the hell I’m talking about. You’re gonna have to be patient with me, because this is really scary and I can’t say that I’m looking forward to telling you what it is that I want to say. But I can’t walk away from our three years together without saying something. As I said, be patient with me.

  Before I start, let me just say that in all honesty, I had a really great three years with you guys. I don’t think I could have asked for better roommates or better friends. And, as a general rule, good friends should always be honest with each other, right? Even though that may mean the end of a friendship. This is what I’m most afraid of. Nevertheless…

  As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been a little different the past two years. I’ve become more distant, going off to different places, meeting up with different friends. And I have to hand it to you guys. If I had been you, I would have been pretty pissed off. Suddenly, I’m not there and our friendship suffers as a result. I apologize for this. I never wanted our friendship to drift, but there were a lot of things going on in my life which inevitably caused me to drift away from a lot of people that I was once close to.

  I’ve been telling a lot of lies the past three years and for this I’m really sorry. But I felt that I didn’t have a choice. You see, guys, I’m gay. I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t joke about something like this. I can imagine that this is probably coming as a big shock right now. Please continue reading this so that I can have a chance to explain myself. Maybe then, some good will come out of this.

  I’ve always known I was gay. Some people have a day of “revelation,” but for me, I’ve always known. Even before I knew what the technical term was. Being gay wasn’t something that I accepted easily. This year was pretty rough for me because I was living a double life. On the one hand, I valued your friendship, and on the other, I was scared that if you knew about me, our friendship would be over. I wanted to keep things in the house as calm as possible, because school work suffers as a result, too.

  I’m sitting here racking my brain, trying to think of all the questions you would ask, trying to get all of this down in a coherent manner, but I’m not so sure I’m doing a good job.

  A lot of my friends said I was stupid for writing this letter. They said I should walk away. But I couldn’t do that. I had to be truthful. Friends deserve to know the truth, no matter how painful it is to tell it.

  Please give yourselves time to get used to this. It’s taken me twenty-two years to become comfortable (somewhat) with it. I don’t expect you guys to be OK with it any sooner. If this is, in fact, the end of our friendship, I can’t say that I will understand, but I will reluctantly accept it. What other choice do I have? If you can’t accept this, then at least I’ll know that straight men and gay men can be friends, can be roommates, and more importantly, can relate to one another. The past three years have proved that to me.

  Sincerely,

  Brian

  Reading this letter all these years later makes me cringe. So. Much. Drama. But coming out was dramatic. I didn’t know if I was going to lose their friendship, if those memories of our time together would forever be tarnished. I could be ostracized, only this time it would be for the person I truly was, not the person I was pretending to be.

  I consider this letter to be one of the milestones of my life. Writing it was one of the bravest things I’ve ever done.

  It was specific to me. And I had no idea what would happen.

  * * *

  —

  There are moments in every queer person’s life when it’s tempting to simply turn your back on the truth of who you are. When choosing silence over honesty feels like the easier path. And there’s the emotional weight to consider. Coming out, no matter what the response to it, will have an immediate effect on your emotions and your mental state. It’s both empowering and terrifying. It gives you armour and yet exposes you. Everything is about to change, to shift. There’s no predicting how someone will react. Everything hangs in the balance, while you hold your breath and wait for those first few words of response.

  But without that risk, where’s the gain? Without placing your trust in other people, how will you ever know they won’t let you down?

  My roommates didn’t let me down. They didn’t turn away. They immediately reached out to me. But I also knew there was a long road ahead of us. That’s one thing I’ve learned. There’s the initial reaction that someone might have when you come out to them—

  I didn’t know.

  I’m flattered that you trusted me enough to tell me.

  It must be so hard for you.

  —and then there’s the reaction that comes a few weeks or months later, once they’ve had time to mull things over.

  So you were lying to me that entire time?

  Are you sure something in your past didn’t cause this?

  I walked around in my underwear in front of you.

  There were issues we had to work through. The lies, my secret life, the perceptions of “otherness.” They had to reassess who I was and come to terms with the idea that one of their friends was gay. They had to question their own prejudices, those living room comments.

  But I’ve also come to learn that, eventually, if you hang in there, if you’re patient, if you count to ten as many times as you need to, you can usually make it through to the other side. My former roommates and I continued to hang out in our final year. We went drinking and acted just as stupid as we did before. We have been good friends ever since.

  Decades later, and less than a year before he died of a heart attack, one of my old roommates came across my coming- out letter again and texted me.

  “I read it again,” he wrote, “and I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to write it. As your friend, I want you to know that your sexual orientation didn’t mean
anything to me, now or then. You are Brian, my weird friend from Sarnia. I’m sorry that you had to live life afraid to express who you really are inside.”

  Imagine what it felt like to read his words, even all these years later. This was how our story turned out, even if it was impossible for me to believe at a time in my life when there were only clouds.

  I’m sorry I didn’t meet you that day, Unsigned, for whatever reason. I hope the five minutes that you waited weren’t too stressful. I hope you didn’t run into one of your roommates. I hope no one asked who you were waiting for. I hope you made it out of the house okay. I hope you’re happy.

  Sincerely,

  Hey!

  Your ad was great. I bet you’re a cool guy to hang out with. No point beating around the bush. I’m already 28. Is that too old for you? Hoping not. I bet we could have some fun times together.

  I majored in French and Geography. I’m interested in art, landscape photography and wine. I like to work out and wrestle. I’m 5′10″ and 170 lbs with short black hair.

  How about you?

  In my mind, you’re 6 feet with dark hair that’s just long enough to hang in front of your eyes. You’re wearing a Penguins sweater with a white turtleneck underneath. You’re also wearing a pair of jeans that are worn in the ass and so tight I can just make out your package inside, nice and snug. You pull up in a Honda Nighthawk 750.

  Does that look like you?

  I’m wearing jeans too, tight enough to show off my hard-on. I’m wearing a black turtleneck underneath a New York Islanders sweater. We’re wrestling. You get me in a front headlock but I wiggle free and take control. My hand brushes against your cock, straining to be set free. I help you stand up and slap you on your tight ass. Afterwards, I pull down your jeans and suck your throbbing cock until a massive load of cum spurts out.

  Does this sound like you?

  I’d like to meet you on Tuesday, October 6, at the Wendy’s at Horton and Baxter Road at 4:30 p.m.

  Yours,

  Patrick

  Dear Patrick,

  This does not sound like me. I would never wear a white turtleneck under a sweater.

  Sincerely,

  Hi! I love your ad. You sound interesting.

  A little about myself. I’m 19 and in college. I’m 5′6″ with reddish-blond hair. I’m often told that I have a boyish face and that I’m “adorable” on account of my green eyes. I’m also straight-acting. (No one knows.) I’m always busy on account of school. I also work part time at the mall but I’m not going to tell you where.

  Anyway, I hope this letter interests you and that you’ll write me back. I live with very nosy roommates so I’m giving you my friend’s address to write back to.

  Looking forward to hearing from you.

  Brett

  Dear Brett,

  You gave me your friend’s address because your roommates were nosy? Nosy enough to open your mail? You do know that’s a criminal offence, right? If so, I hope you found other roommates.

  Call me paranoid, but I wasn’t about to mail a letter to someone else’s address. I’m not saying there was anything untoward about your letter or your suggestion. But the whole mail-it-to-my-friend-my-roommates-are-nosy excuse seemed…a bit fishy. Or maybe it was your real address but you didn’t want me to know. In any case, you were playing games, Brett. Games. We had yet to meet and already I didn’t trust you.

  Trust was a big deal when I was twenty-one. It was a word I tossed around a lot in those days.

  Can I trust you?

  I’d never do anything to betray your trust.

  How can I trust you if you don’t even trust yourself?

  My dating life was a love-song lyric. But a lot was riding on trust, especially since I was still closeted. I needed to take risks, to trust that other gay people wouldn’t out me or call my house. That they wouldn’t spread rumours about me behind my back. That someone I was dating wouldn’t fool around on me, or, if he did, that he would practise safe sex.

  Trust, in short, was an enormous word. It meant everything. And, as these things tend to go, trust also meant nothing.

  It had its place when I was feeling pious or self- righteous. It was a way of demonstrating my worth and moral fabric. But my trust could also be bestowed on anyone, whether they had earned it or not, if the timing was right. Or if I’d had enough beer. Or, let’s face it, if he was hot enough. There were so many nights when I literally put my life into the hands of strangers. I trusted them with my safety. And, honestly, wasn’t that kind of trust more important than all that love-song bullshit?

  It’s true that if you went out regularly to the city’s gay bars, you became familiar with most people who frequented them. It was a small enough community, and connections could usually be made. Someone was a friend of a friend. Or I knew someone who had dated the person. Or small talk had been exchanged at a party once. It was rare to come across a complete stranger at the bar, a person with no ties to anyone. So I usually had some assessment of character, even if those assessments were often assumptions or hearsay. There was a lot of bar-scene gossiping. Who was needy. Who was crazy. Who had a big dick, who had a small one. Which couples were into threesomes. If someone was boring in bed. Naturally, this led me to feel very authoritative about people. I was convinced I had the ability to size someone up immediately, as any twenty-one-year-old can. It’s a magical skill at that age.

  But what could I really know about someone?

  The bar was, after all, a gathering place for people living double lives—people who had been damaged or hurt or betrayed. Growing up gay in the times and places we did had fucked us up to one degree or another. Not to say we were all sobbing heaps at the end of the night, but it was impossible to have gone through what most of us had—and, in fact, were still going through—and not be profoundly affected by it. Years of conditioning had resulted in pain, rejection, fear, guilt, low self-esteem, and loneliness. And while it would be nice to say that the bar was the only place where we were free and could truly be ourselves, I don’t think that was true. I’m not sure many of us even knew how to be ourselves. How could we when we had never been given that permission? Where would we even start?

  There were other places besides the bar for gay men to meet one another. Classified ads, for one. But I think we’ve already established that. Telephone chat lines were just starting around that time, but I had reservations about them. I was concerned that friends would recognize my voice and I’d be called out.

  “Was that you on the line last night claiming to be a bi-curious jock? Girl, please.”

  Based on all the silent pre-recorded caller “greetings” I had to skip through whenever I called the chat line, most guys felt the same way. And what was the point of a chat line if everyone was afraid to talk?

  There was also a bathhouse in the city that I went to once with a friend. I was inside for all of five minutes and kept my clothes on the entire time, paranoid I was going to be spotted by someone I knew and then get labelled a “bathhouse queen.” There were a couple of public washrooms around the city rumoured to be sex havens, but I never saw anything that raised an eyebrow.

  And then, of course, there were the parks.

  This might not come as a surprise, but I was never good at cruising. I lacked the bravado it took to stroll through a park at night, sending out signals for sex. (And what, exactly, were those signals? A wave? Two tugs on your right earlobe? A few steps of the Electric Slide?) I also wasn’t good at cruising because I needed to talk. To tell people that I was living with straight guys, that I was studying English at the university, and that I could eat a whole bag of Cool Ranch Doritos in one sitting if I wasn’t careful. The talk, of course, was a mask for my insecurities. Words had always been a smokescreen for me, a means of circumvention. Cruising meant no words. No introductions. No small talk. But why would I want to deny some
one my effervescent personality? Wasn’t that part of the foreplay?

  The truth was, I had difficulty engaging in anonymous sex. I couldn’t be casual about it. I needed to date, to process the situation, to understand what the other person wanted out of life and should I consider us in a relationship now that we’d gone out for coffee twice? For me, dating was the pilot episode for the long-term relationship series. Why date if it wasn’t going to go anywhere? Why spend all that energy reading between the lines, looking for red flags? Wondering if he was really over his ex and open to falling in love again, and if I could trust him with the most precious gift of all—my scarred and fragile heart?

  I know, Brett. I’m rolling my own eyes. But that’s what I was like.

  I was judgy about the cruising thing, too. It seemed old school to me. Why walk through a park at night when bars were more comfortable stomping grounds? Why go to the bathhouse and wear a towel when the right shoes on a Saturday night could make you the envy of everyone? And why would anyone want to have sex in a public washroom? Sure, the threat of getting caught might add to the thrill. But the germs alone.

  Don’t get me wrong. The idea of cruising excited me. The promise of instant gratification and the escape. The riskiness. The danger. I understood its appeal. Something that had been denied to me for so long was suddenly there, in abundance, available for the taking. All I had to do was reach out.