Like a lot of people that grew up in small towns in the 80s and 90s, I had only a dim awareness of the many varieties of sexuality. Although I learned later that several of my friends in middle and high school were gay, I didn’t know anyone openly gay until college, and I’ll be honest that I wasn’t completely comfortable around the gay men I met.

I wanted to be. Intellectually, I knew I should be, but growing up in the conservative South left its mark. While I was tolerant and friendly, I also kept my distance.

Until I met Chris.

I didn’t like him much at first. He had a kind of personality that I found grating. Outsized and over the top, a natural actor who could hold an audience, any audience, for as long as he wanted, it seemed to me that when he walked into the room he sucked every bit of air out of it. I was shy and awkward, and I hated him a little bit for his ability to be everything I wasn’t.

It was only later, when we worked together on a production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown (I played Linus), that my feelings changed. We spent hours together every day building and painting sets, and away from other people I got to know the real Chris. Funny without being over-the-top, sweet in a weird way, and really sincere about music and theatre, I liked this previously unknown Chris a lot. We became close friends during that summer, spending most of our free time together.

We developed a Sunday night tradition of church followed by watching The X-Files at my house, and usually a movie after that. It sounds outrageously geeky now, but it was a lot of fun.

Still, I didn’t know he was gay. I wasn’t naive. I’d thought from the beginning that he was, but he always talked about girls he liked and his plans to go into the ministry after college. So maybe I was a little naive, but I took all of this at face value. 

He went home for Christmas break that year, and we didn’t speak again until January. This wasn’t just pre-Facebook. It was pre-internet and pre-text messaging, at least for me, so I didn’t know what he’d just been through until the first Sunday night after he got back. We met up as usual, but as we got into his car after church, he said, “I need to tell you something.”

I don’t remember everything he said, but he’d had a confrontation with his parents. They’d asked him before if he was gay, and he’d always denied it, but this time he didn’t. This time he told them the truth, and now he wanted to tell me.

I remember what I said that night, and though it wasn’t perfect I feel like it was the best I could do at that point. I said, “Hey, that’s fine. I’ll be friends with anybody,” which wasn’t strictly true, and wasn’t quite right, but it’s all I could get out.

——-

I don’t want to make coming out about straight people, but if our friends are going to come out to us, then we need to be ready. I’m sure those of you who grew up in sophisticated urban areas could have done better, but there are a lot of people, like me, that couldn’t. 

So here’s my advice- when a close friend come out to you, all you have to say is this: “Thank you for telling me. I know that sharing that was hard, and I want you to know that I’m you’re friend just as I’ve always been.”

Don’t say it like that, though. Only Dear Abby talks that way. 

You may feel differently about your friend afterward. That’s normal. I can tell you that I felt a little hurt after Chris came out to me. All of those times he’d gone out of his way to seem straight, and I’d gone out of my way to believe him, felt like betrayals to me, even though I understood why he’d had to lie.

Fortunately, I had enough sense by that point to know that feelings aren’t always our friends. Work out your feelings on your own time. If you feel like you have to share them with your friend, do it a day or a week later. Make it a separate conversation. Your friend has just made a huge emotional leap with you, one that required a lot of courage, and probably doesn’t have any reserves left to deal with your hurt feelings.

——-

I wish I could say we lived happily ever after. In some ways we did, I guess, but friendships are so complicated. We stayed close friends after that night. We grew much closer, in fact. We worked together, lived together, wrote and produced a movie together, but  a lot of things have come between us over the years. Some of the things were petty squabbles and some were deep seated issues (mine, mostly), and though they seem smaller now, time and distance have conspired to keep us from mending the gap. 

I miss him so much sometimes. We see each other every few years, and when we do, we fall right into the same old rhythm, and it’s fantastic.

A few months ago, I presided over the wedding of two friends. I’ll be honest, I was good. I was funny when I needed to be, sincere when it was called for, and managed the crowds and the individuals deftly. I was a million years away from the shy and awkward college freshman that resented Chris for his way with an audience.

It was about halfway through the weekend when I realized I was being Chris. Maybe I wasn’t as natural or as good, I’m sure I wasn’t, but everything I did to handle that weekend I’d learned from him. Thinking about it, I realized that I’d been doing it for years.

I owe him so much. He made me into me. So much of what I like about myself is wrapped up in what I got from him. That’s why I care about LGBT issues. They aren’t abstract to me, they go straight to the best parts of myself. 

——-

I originally wrote this piece for National Coming Out Day, a day dedicated to celebrating the place that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Americans hold in our nation and also to encouraging people to be open and honest in their sexuality. I didn’t publish it then because I wasn’t quite sure about it, but at a time when the media is reporting an epidemic of young people taking their own lives because of the abuse they’ve received over their sexual orientations, and a day after an Arkansas schoolboard member wrote some unbelievably hateful words about gay men and women, I don’t want to hold it back anymore.