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You are here: Home > Forum > A Place of Safety > General Talk > Trying "not to care"
Trying "not to care"  [message #26073] Thu, 08 September 2005 21:37 Go to previous message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13828



I have a very old friend from my schooldays. I have known him 40 years this month. He is in Australia and we used to write to each other. Now, just sometimes, we email.

I have wanted to tell him I am gay since we were about 17 years old. I needed a friend and I almost trusted him enough to speak. Except I cared. I cared in case he spurned me I suppose.

Today I got up the courage to tell him in an email who I am.

The thing is I tried not to mind what he thinks. But I found as I wrote the words that I minded. I found I was apologising in a way. So I deleted a lot and told him properly.

We were both only children, and both kind of lonely boys. He was the one hunk I never felt anything for in an erotic sense. But he was warm and like a brother. He truly was a hunk, too.

I was able to do it because he'd told me how he had both enjoyed our mutual school and yet had been incredibly alone there. So now he knows thathe has one more gay friend than he knew he had before.

I find I am hoping to see any sort of reaction by email, and doubting I will get any.

I do care, still, but not as much as I did. I htink I care most that I had (did I really have to?) had to lie to my friends when I was a teenager, and had to lie to myself for much of my adult life as well. It seems, in a way, a betrayal of them to tell them now that I am a little different from the person they knew.

[Updated on: Thu, 08 September 2005 21:37]



Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
 
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