Subject: Friends Indeed: I was straight; he was gay ... Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 20:16:47 -0500 (EST) From: Sam Damon Here's the wonderful Details piece that I alluded to a few months ago. In it, heterosexual Jeremy Mindich tells of the relationship he had with his best friend, a gay man. I especially like this piece because it's written from the straight friend's perspective, a voice that is seldomly heard. Most people here have lived the role of the gay friend, and parents have PFLAG as their voice, but we rarely hear what the straight friend goes through. The piece is also topical here because much of it takes place in college. And it deals with coming out, a subject that's been written about quite often here. Along with "My Last Letter to Mom," it has become a staple in my GayPack, an informal package I make for people. Comments always appreciated... PS - I apologize to those readers who are somewhat depressed (like Hing and myself). Reading this won't help your mood any... PPS - I'd like to thank JMB, my current secret love on the Internet, for SnailMailing me this article... ============================================= FRIENDS INDEED: I Was Straight, He Was Gay. That Wasn't Our Problem By Jeremy Mindich (Details, 1992, pp 88,93) (Jeremy Mindich is a freelance writer living and working in New York City) Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 1983. Kevin was my best friend freshman year. We met during what should have been called disorientation week, seven nights of getting ripped until O'Rourke's Diner opened at 4:30 AM. But the disorientation was more than chemical. High school heroes had to prove themselves again; high school losers got a clean slate. It was like a campus-wide audition. Everybody was trying package themselves as anything from an SAT score to a poet. Kevin didn't claim to be an athlete, an actor, a writer, or a musician. He was just a tall, good-looking guy from Manchester, New Hampshire with a vicious sense of humor and a self-confidence that was magnetic. His charisma gave birth to an orientation-week party tradition: When the song "Maniac" from Flashdance inevitably came on, the floor would clear for Kevin. He would pick some girl from the crowd and she would come out screaming like a contestant on The Price Is Right. It wasn't just that Kevin was a great dancer, he had It, he was a star. Kevin said he was simply possessed by a profound love for Jennifer Beals. Kevin told me that he realized I was a good friend when I walked into a freshman year Halloween party with him on my arm. He was wearing rouge, lipstick, and a short black cocktail dress. The truth was that I had no idea that he was gay. And Kevin knew I didn't. All through sophomore year, he continued to tell me about the women he was seeing. I believed him. We saw each other less and less. I didn't know why. I was spending more time with my new girlfriend. I thought maybe Kevin didn't like her. Our friendship finally just fell apart because I couldn't tell what was going on. Coming out of the closet was the most important decision of his life, and Kevin didn't have enough confidence in me to talk about it. Kevin never actually told me he was gay. I began hearing rumors through the grapevine, but I would always dismiss them. It wasn't that I didn't want to admit he was gay. I didn't want to admit that he could have been lying to me for so long. I couldn't believe people who had no real bond with him already knew and he was still lying to me. I felt embarrassed and betrayed. It was only during senior year, after Kevin had become one of the school's most vocal gay pride spokesmen, screaming "I'm a happy homo!" at one crowded rally, that we became good friends again. But we never really discussed the years when his homosexuality went unspoken between us. We hardly talked about his lying or my ignorance. He told me once that I hurt him with an offhand comment I made about my brother going to Vassar, a "fag" school. I don't remember saying it. It's not the kind of thing I would say seriously. It's not the way I usually talk. Maybe that was all it took, one immature joke. Maybe there were others. Kevin moved to New York after graduation. In the sheltered world of our liberal arts college, homosexuality had been relatively well accepted. It was rare to see outright demonstrations of indigo sentiment except from certain fraternity jocks and townies in Ford pickup trucks, who had a habit of screaming "faggot" as a form of greeting. But whenever I would see Kevin in the city, I was always reminded of the homophobia he confronted every day. Kevin spent his first Christmas Eve in Manhattan alone and depressed. He wasn't going home, but he also didn't want to spend it with someone else's family, a gay refugee. Being a Jew with free time every Christmas, I suggested we go to a comedy club. Bad idea. We got there late. The place was packed. The host led us to a table alongside the stage. We hadn't even sat down when the M.C. turned to Kevin and said, "What's that earring supposed to mean?" Kevin started to speak, but the M.C. cut him off. He turned to the crowd and said, "I'll tell you what it means: *Faggot*!" The audience howled. We probably should have left right then. But we didn't. We didn't want to give him the satisfaction. So for the next two hours we were the subject of the M.C.'s running joke about the "two faggots" in the front row. I have to admit that I wanted to say, "Hey pal, not me!" But then I started to realize the powerlessness that Kevin must have felt. It didn't matter that he was one of the sharpest, funniest people I knew. It didn't matter who I was. We were just "two faggots." And the people laughing at us weren't the frat boys and townies we knew at Wesleyan. They were guys in suits and their wives, people we worked with and for. I saw Kevin every once in a while. One afternoon I ran into him on Broadway. He asked me if I was busy Friday. I said no. I hadn't seen him in a few weeks, so I figured he wanted to catch up. "Good," he said. "Queer Nation is having a rally. I'd really like you to come." I told him I would, though I wasn't sure I wanted to. I knew Kevin had been fired from the trendy SoHo restaurant where the rally would be held. Just because, Kevin said, one of the owners saw him leaving the restaurant with an obviously gay man. I also knew that Kevin had been working with Queer Nation, the then-new radical gay rights group that had been staging kiss-ins in public places as a way of forcing people to confront the idea of homosexuality. I hadn't considered the possibility that these two circumstances would lead me to participate in a Queer Nation demonstration. That Friday night I went out to eat with a friend. After dinner I walked the fifty blocks to SoHo. It was cold out, but I was so nervous I was sweating. I was afraid that I would be spotted by someone I knew. When I finally got to the restaurant, there were forty or fifty men chanting slogans behind police barricades. Kevin was at the front of the pack. I went over and said hi. "I cannot believe you actually showed up," he said. "You don't know how much this means to me." I was glad I hadn't wimped out. After a while Kevin told me the group was going to stage a kiss-in at another restaurant run by the same owners. "A kiss-in?" I said. "Where are the girls!" He laughed: I walked them to the restaurant and said good night. Kevin and I became better and better friends, settling into a very comfortable pattern. He would tell me about boyfriends. I would tell him about girlfriends. Freedom, commitment, sex, infidelity: It's all the same. We had dinner one night at a restaurant where Kevin worked. The next day, the waiter who served us said to Kevin, "I was so nervous about interrupting you two. You seemed like you were so in love." "Don't worry," Kevin told me, "you're not my type. Too skinny." We still never mentioned the problems we had had. I thought we were ready to. But the timing never seemed right. And so it remained, an unacknowledged wedge in our friendship. I saw Kevin the night before I left for a month-long assignment in Thailand. He looked great. He was in a long-term monogamous relationship. He was volunteering with kids with AIDS, hoping to quit waiting on tables and find social service work. The Sunday after I came back, I stopped by a restaurant where Kevin worked brunch. "He hasn't been here for weeks," a waitress said. "He's sick." I called him as soon as I got home. He sounded exhausted. "It's something weird. They think it might be Lyme disease." I don't know if that's what he really believed or what he wanted to believe. I guess I half bought it, too, just because the other, obvious possibility was too horrible to think about. It was only a matter of days before he was diagnosed with a very serious case of AIDS lymphoma, an AIDS-related cancer. He would be lucky to survive the lymphoma, the doctors said. He would never survive the AIDS. Visiting him in the hospital was extremely painful. He wanted everyone to be upbeat, but it was impossible to forget that we were sitting around a deathbed like Socrates' students waiting for the hemlock to kick in. It was just a matter of time. Kevin was very proud of his appearance, and along with his health, his looks were deteriorating rapidly. Sores broke out on his skin, one side of his face became paralyzed. Throughout all of this Kevin maintained incredible composure. There were plenty of times when he felt lousy and pissed off, but he was usually ready to sit around talking and laughing. The massive doses of chemotherapy didn't stop the cancer. A group of five or six of Kevin's friends set themselves up as his support team, running errands, taking care of bills, keeping away the scores of people who wanted to visit. Kevin didn't want to see anyone except his closest friends. I ended up in the out group, even though I was an older friend than any of the team members. I resented them. But I was too insecure about my friendship with Kevin to insist upon visiting him and it seemed ridiculous to ask him for special permission. When it became clear that he was only a few days from dying, I decided to go see him anyway. The AIDS ward was a nightmare, a whole floor of young, dying men, wasted bodies shuffling through the corridors. Nervous relatives, slumped in vinyl chairs, sucking on cigarettes. Kevin's door was shut. I asked a nurse if I could walk in. I was hoping she would go first. She said, "Sure, go ahead." I opened the door and saw Kevin lying in his boyfriend's arms. They were both asleep. I stepped back out and I never saw him again. He died two days later. One gay friend said that Kevin made being gay seem like the greatest privilege in the world. Despite the bashing, despite the AIDS, Kevin never lost his dignity. He taught me how absurdly difficult it is to be gay. But he also taught me a lot about the meaning and importance of honesty and respect. I wept at his funeral. I cried because a beautiful and brilliant twenty-six-year-old was dead. But I also cried because of what would always remain unresolved. I would never be able to tell him how sorry I was that I couldn't be there for him at the beginning or at the end. And he would never tell me that he understood.