Old Friends...

Before August 27^th, 2006, I had a lot of friends. Sure, I have friends now, but let’s just say that these friends were of another variety. Not better. Not worse. Just different. After August 27^th, they were all gone. Imagine that friendships are really just kites, each one flying through the air. Now, imagine a huge pair of scissors. We’ll call them social scissors, because sometimes a friendship will go awry and you’ll need to cut that string loose. Now, imagine that on a large scale, that all of your friends are all flying high in the sky, totally unaware, and then you suddenly and without warning, cut them all loose. That’s exactly what I did.

I’ll admit that if I heard that one of my friends ever did this, I’m pretty sure my internal response would be something like, “What a jerk!” And more than likely, there would have been a few more expletives as well.

But nevertheless, that’s what I did. Why did I commit social holocaust? And why on August 27^th? Because August 27^th was the day I was baptized. Before I joined the Church, I didn’t know a whole heck of a lot, but I knew that if I was ever going to make this new life work, I was going to have to make some tough decisions. I was going to have to cut a lot of strings. And just like that, my old life was gone. But not really…

Unlike normal kites, my friends didn’t just get carried off in the wind. I think I had expected them to. I had thought, “If I just stop calling them and stop returning their phone calls, surely they’ll just move along.” That was the plan, anyways. And, for a while, it worked.

I wasn’t alone though. I had a lot of new friends. The Wanderlys were probably my biggest supporters at the time. They treated me like their own family and actually let me live with them for a year and a half. I think, though, that if it wasn’t for the missionaries and for my constant interaction with them, I probably wouldn’t have lasted very long.

It wasn’t until a little past the first year that I discovered the wonders of Facebook. Through it, I was able to keep in better contact with all of the YSA in the area, as well as those missionaries who had gone home by this point.

What I didn’t expect was that other people were also looking for me. Old friends from Texas, from Southern California, from Northern California… They all began adding me as their friends. Unprepared as I was, I didn’t know what to do. At this point, I had been in the Church long enough to know that just because I was LDS didn’t mean that I couldn’t have non-LDS friends. But how could I possibly mingle those two worlds together? It wasn’t just people who knew me prior to becoming LDS. Oh no! This was so much more. Half of these friends I’d had sexual relationships with. The other half were supportive of those sexual relationships. It wasn’t just a matter of going into the garden and mingling the vegetables in with the fruits (no pun intended). It was more like Winnie the Pooh meets the Borg. (I’m not sure which is which, but that’s not the point.) They both wanted such different things, how could they possibly coexist? So, I ignored those old friends. But there was one person who I could not ignore…

Side Story: Nick Pine…

The last relationship I had before joining the Church was a guy I had met on Myspace. I believe that I’ve made mention to him in previous posts. He was the one who shared the same nickname as me and who knew I wanted to be Mormon before I did. Nick Pine was a boyfriend of mine for about five or six months before I broke it off suddenly. And in case you are wondering, it had nothing to do with me joining the Church. It was just me being immature and scared of my feelings.

One day three years ago, Nick found me on Facebook. When we first began speaking, things were a little tense. I had broken his heart and he had no problem with telling me so. But he was willing to be friends again. Not boyfriends, just friends.

This interaction happened right around the same time that Prop 8 was going on. I’m not sure if Prop 8 was as big of a deal in other states as it was in California, but it was flipping crazy out here, let me tell you! At that time, I was living in the Bay Area and with San Francisco just on the other side of the Bay, you can probably imagine how heated an area this was during the debate over same sex marriage.

On an individual level, I was struggling a lot from the proposition. Sure, I agreed with my Church leaders, that wasn’t the problem. The difficulty arose when other members began saying not-so friendly things about people who dealt with same gender attraction. It was getting to me. I knew that if they knew I was gay, they wouldn’t say those things around me. But I also knew that me telling them would probably only stop them saying it to my face, and if nothing else, they’d still be thinking it. Even so, the YSA were asked to be active participants in the campaign in favor of Prop 8.

My Facebook page reflected that participation. And when Nick spotted that, our conversation suddenly changed from renewing our old friendships to instant anger. He was actually more angry at me for supporting the proposition than he was for me braking his heart two years before. In his mind, I was abandoning who I was along with all of the gay people I had ever known and loved. I was even abandoning him. In his eyes, it was as though I was erasing him from my life, despite how willing I was to rekindle our friendship.

To make this whole thing a little more clear, I’ve only loved two guys. Sure, I crushed and messed around a lot, but there have only been two guys who can ever claim that I have told them that I love them. The first was a guy from Southern California. The second was Nick Pine. Yes, I broke up with him two years earlier, but really, it was because I was afraid that I loved him too much, not too little. Like I said, I was immature.

So when Nick told me that I was erasing our relationship as if it never happened, I was devastated. Even so, I tried telling him about the Church’s stance on same sex marriage. I tried telling him why I believed what I believed. I tried and I tried… and he hated me for every word that I told him. By the time we had finished talking, I was in tears. I went to my apartment, locked the door, and hid in the shower for an hour until the hot water ran out. And through my tears, a little voice whispered to me, “My, how your testimony has grown.”

Amazing how the Spirit works, huh? I was so wrapped up in worrying about my old friendship with Nick that I hadn’t realized that I had stood my ground, despite the cost. I didn’t budge, nor did I buckle and say things like, “Well that’s only what the Church says. I don’t think they know how things really are,” or, “I’m not sure if I agree with their decisions,” or, “I’m just doing what they told me to do.”

I’m not trying to toot my own horn , but I realized two things about my other relationships of old. Thing one: I can stand firm in the face of opposition, even when that person means a great deal to me. So, if my worry was them corrupting what I believe, I guess I didn’t have to worry about that as much. Thing two, sometimes people won’t accept this “new me” and they’ll choose to not be my friend. I can’t help that. I don’t know if this would warrant being called ironic, but I find it interesting that I was quite alright with cutting them loose just a little while before, but the idea that they could return the favor and reject me scares the crap out of me. I think the difference is, they’re would not be rejecting me for some weird personality quirk or even some negative attribute (which I’ll admit that I have plenty of both). They would be rejecting me for my religion, my beliefs.

These realizations have not made befriending my old friends any easier, and even now, I’m not exactly sure what to do. I don’t know if I told anyone this, but a few months ago, I wrote Nick a message on Facebook. It was pretty lengthy because, as you know, I like to write and write… and write. Don’t judge! Heh! But in that message, I told him that even though I was still an active member of the Church, I would still like to be his friend. I told him how I felt, though it made me very uncomfortable being so totally honest. I asked for his forgiveness and told him that I forgave anything he may have done as well.

In reply, he told me to eff off.

And I suppose he had every right to. Agency hurts sometimes.


Old Friends (resumed)…

The worry I have, though, is everyone else’s agency. I’m not good at laying my heart on the line and putting myself in exposed situations. I can’t control their reactions, good or bad, and that whole ‘not knowing’ is like Russian Roulette where the gun has five bullets, not one.

As I’ve been writing this, I keep asking myself, “Why do you care? That was your old life, let it go. You let them go once before, you can do it again.” And that’s true. So why don’t I take my own advice? The answer is one that has taken me a long time to realize. Even in writing this blog, I had to take several days to dig deep and come up with the answer. I think the reason why it is so hard to let my old friends go completely is that I want so badly to belong with them. Let me clarify. In a very real way, I DO belong with them. They could sympathize in ways that my straight friends simply can not. I need people who understand what it is I’m going through and can just be a shoulder to cry on.

But…

I don’t feel completely comfortable telling all my woes to my old gay friends either. They would probably just try to persuade me to abandon the Church and rejoin their merry crew. I mean, I wanted to be able to let my hair down once in a while, but they’d want me to have it down permanently, and if I did that, my forehead would break out. I need something in between.

As I’ve said in the past, I have yet to meet an active LDS guy who was also gay. Actually, that’s a bit of a lie. As of a few days ago, I can not longer say that. I’d like to give a nod to Calvin Thompson, nothing less than a beacon of hope for me. Even so, and most unfortunately, Cal isn’t here.

So what is my solution? How do I solve this problem? I haven’t figured that out yet and I’m open to suggestion. Shed some light on how I can bring these worlds of mine together.