Advice for Coming Out to My Best Friend

First, realize one thing. You cannot change his convictions. He can, if he chooses to...which it is his right not to. Let your friend fight his own spiritual battles. You have neither the right nor the responsibility nor the capability of doing it for him. This is hard for him, too. He struggles with these questions, like you would and like you most likely have.

However, you correspondingly must place a certain responsibility on him. He must decide whether his prejudice is worth losing a friend over. Stop treating him as a child who needs to be spoken to in half-truths. Stop trying to take responsibility for his potential failings. If he chooses to turn his back on you over something so petty, then that is his choice to make, and it is his right to make that choice. It might be a dishonorable choice, but he must bear the responsibility. He's a grown man, now.

Give another person a chance to make a mistake if that is what he chooses. Give him a chance, also, to show himself to be a true friend if that is what he chooses. If you are living a lie around him, then you are denying him that right. You are controlling him, which is not how a friend behaves. That control belongs to him, and it is for him to define what kind of man he is.

These are a few truths that I have had to face, myself. It is hard to invest that kind of trust in another person, knowing that that trust might be betrayed, but if you are not willing to invest that trust, then why call yourself that person's friend at all? Sometimes, friends hurt each other or let each other down, but being hurt is better than never having a friend.

 

Your friend has somehow "gotten the idea that you are straight" because you are pretending to be straight when you are around him. If you tell him that you are not straight, he will then be able to understand who you are, not who you are pretending to be.

The way you are saying "the act of homosexuality" is rather strange. Homosexuality is not an "act" (i.e. "action") it is an orientation or feeling or attraction to people of the same sex as you. If you are referring to having sex with a person of the same physical sex as you, you are referring to the behavior of people who are expressing their love for each other by some physical interaction. Simply BEING born homosexual cannot be a "sin", because it is not something consciously chosen by an individual, it is simply who you are. If your friend would hold that against you, then he is being prejudicial and bigoted, and not worthy of being your friend. From what you say about him having other friends who are gay, it does not sound like he would hold your being gay against you. You simply have not been honest with him and trusted him to know who you really are, and given him the chance to show you who HE really is. You can do that, and also tell him that you do not have romantic feelings for him at the same time, so that is no reason not to tell him the truth. He might even be flattered to imagine you had a crush on him, but since you don't, it would be best to tell him the truth about that also.

There are Christians like you who see relationships between loving homosexuals as acceptable, and other people who call themselves Christians, but are judgmental and prejudiced, and fail to see physical relations between homosexuals as just as normal as physical relations between heterosexuals. This really has nothing to do with religion; you both are reading the same Bible, so one of you has it wrong. I think that your friend is the one who has it wrong, so I would disagree with him, but my point in mentioning this at all is that I can see this as a stumbling block between your friendship with him. Once he knows the truth about who you are, he may suppress expressing his prejudice around you, and you may avoid discussing it around him, but there is going to be a "rippling undercurrent" going on in the background of your friendship caused by this mismatch. You have been avoiding it by pretending to be someone who you are not. When you come out to him, the outward relationship may or may not change because of this difference in your beliefs. Whatever happens, it will be better for you to be able to be yourself, and let him be whatever he is intelligent enough to be. If he is worthy of being your friend, he will not abandon the friendship to nurture his own prejudices; maybe it will eventually lead him to understand the flaws in his own beliefs and becoming a non-judgmental Christian who understands the message of "loving thy neighbors as thyself" in the Bible.

 

Well, that hard-headedness is not due to him being unwilling to change, though. He just has to come to terms to things in his own way, in his own time. The worst way you could potentially estrange him would be to try to force HIM to change. When he is ready to change, he will.

But for now, you're going to have to make an investment in him, hoping that his friendship toward you matters more than his theological conclusions. Not all investments work out, but you would be poorer if you never invested. I'm not enough of a lying jerk to tell you there's no way you could damage your friendship with him over this, and that is partly because you have led him wrong for such a long time, not even really because you are gay. Think about how embarrassing it will be to him that he might have said a few things that might have hurt you deeply. It might be hard for him to face you just because of that guilt, and you have set him up for that.

You know that you cannot sustain living a lie, though. It doesn't last. Eventually, you have to either face the truth or no longer be able to face him. Like a bad debt, a falsehood like this eventually comes to haunt you. It finds you eventually, when it's most inconvenient. In my honest opinion, there is a chance that this could wound you deeply if you face it now. There is virtually a guarantee that it will hurt you if you try to run away from it. I would consider investing some faith in your friendship with this man.