My cousin Emily has been crushing on Sam, her longtime BFF (her words, not mine). Emily, a junior in high school, took a while to work up the courage to tell him. When she finally did, things didn’t work out as she’d expected.
According to Emily, when they got together, she and Sam simultaneously blurted out, “I have to tell you something!”
“You go first,” he said.
“No, you go first,” she said.
Emily was hoping to hear the same words she’d planned on telling Sam, just in reverse — that he liked her.
Instead, Sam spoke the two words every straight woman dreads to hear from the object of her affection: “I’m gay.”
Many of the women I talked to while researching this column have had similar experiences. When I related Emily’s story to four or five straight girlfriends, they each said the same thing: “I feel her pain. I have definitely been there.”
My friend Karen dated a man in college who wrote to her while he was in boot camp and asked, “Is it cheating if it is with the same gender?” She told him he was dealing with a bigger issue than cheating.
All the women who shared their “first gay love” stories with me had one thing in common: The men initially came out as bisexual. And they offered to date the women.
Even Sam, my cousin’s pal, offered to date Emily. She wisely squashed the idea.
When I told my girlfriends about this, they asked me why gay men do that.
Coming out is a difficult and confusing process. Closeted people may be having a hard time accepting that they’re gay, so it might be easier for them to come out as bisexual. At least that was my experience.
Also, a gay person might think his friends and family won’t react as badly learning he is bisexual.
It’s sort of like buying an environmentally friendly car. You ease in by buying a hybrid before going all out with an electric car.
I did the bi thing for a while. Well, I said I was bisexual but never acted on the hetero side of that.
I even “dated” a friend, Colleen, for a short time, but that was a disaster. We both knew I was gay and not really interested in dating, but at the time it seemed like a good idea. I didn’t want to upset her because I knew she liked me. But in the end, we broke up and never spoke again.
After explaining all this to my girlfriends, I posed a question: If you knew the guys were gay, why did you date them?
“In college, when you find a guy who treats you right, has the same interests, dresses well and is great to be around and he tells you he is bi, you have a 50/50 chance in your favor, especially when the alternative is a frat boy,” said my friend Michelle.
Fair enough.
As for my other girlfriends, individual parts of Michelle’s answer rang true with each of them.
Emily seems to have weathered the storm of her first gay crush. In fact, she’s happy with the situation because now she has a gay BFF with whom she can “go shopping and to classy vegetarian restaurants.”
Really, that’s all any gay guy and his girlfriend want.
