Hey EC. This is not a problem per se, more of a weird pattern of thinking. Bear with me here. Recently I've had quite a few rather strange and all round confusing thoughts regarding my sexuality and what it actually means. After a long and painful process I decided that yes, I was in fact attracted to guys and as a result came out to my friends and family as being Gay. Now though? I guess I don't regret it, but I almost... Miss? Being 'straight'. I'm not straight. I have some feelings for girls, so I guess you could describe me as Bi, but I am far more attracted to guys than I am to the elusive opposite gender. I really don't know what I'm trying to say here, but I guess I've become a little bit disillusioned with a lot of the things that are typically associated with gay guys. For example. I got invited to go see a movie with one of my friends, and I'm more than happy to go with her, but I still feel a little odd that I'm going. She has a boyfriend, but it's okay for me to go see a movie with her because I'm 'Gay'. Whereas, about two weeks ago all my guy friends got together and went and saw a movie. I wasn't even invited. That actually made me feel pretty bad all in all. It's almost as if now that I'm 'Gay' that I'm suddenly a different person in their thinking... It's actually kind of stupid. :bang: I guess I just feel like even more of an outsider now than I did before. Hence why I miss being straight, to an extent. This is the part where you say 'go and make friends with some other gay people'. I've tried that, and all in all it just didn't suit me at all. A couple of the girls I am friends with are Bi, and I'm pretty close with them, but it's still not quite the same. I guess the thing that annoys me the most is that, because I'm gay, I suddenly am not 'one of the guys'... I couldn't care less about dating people, I just wish that me being gay didn't affect my friendships with the straight guys. Alright... I'm done ranting and feel oddly better now. Comment on my ravings if you want, I'd be interested to know what you have to say. Kaleb.
Well is it you that said "well i am gay now, bye straight friends" or did your straight friends abandon you? Otherwise I don't see where the problem is in being gay and "one of the guys"
i would say that the friends that didnt invite you arent actually your friends. thats a nasty thing for them to do.
Hmmm... Well, it hasn't happened to me very much, but it did on one occassion - some of my guy friends were heading out and I wasn't invited. They weren't hiding it from me, they just didn't invite me. I asked why, and they said they didn't think I'd be interested (they were right, by the way, they were going to a female strip club). I told them that let me decide whether or not I want to come along to something, not you - and thus ended the problem for me. Could you explain to them that you still want to be invited to events, movies, etc... - if you don't want to go, you'll say "thanks - next time". If, however, they aren't inviting you because they are uncomfortable having a gay guy along, then that's different. You could try reasoning, logic, etc... with them - that sometimes works. In the case of younger straight guys, they sometimes have a problem with seeing you the same way they did before. I only encountered this with one of my friends, who was thrown by my being gay. I found that by showing the guy I was just the same person I was before, it ended the problem. I also found that doing so in a method that might be seen as inherently "straight" was also helpful for the guy. In this case, a group of us hit a bar, and I drank him under the table. For whatever reason, once he saw that I could still drink (and that my drinks didn't have tiny umbrellas in them), he was okay with me again. Best of luck.
I must say that I sometimes miss the old days, when I was still "straight" and it was easier to run with what was socially expected. The days before I saw some of my friends hesitate before making any sort of "gay" comment and before I found out some of them discussed my homosexuality behind my back... ...but then I remember the nights spent lying awake, madly obsessing over some minute slip of the tongue the day before and how my friends would find out I was gay. Or the days I spent angsting about how how I would never be able to come out and have to live a lie. It's all too easy to forget those bad moments, sometimes. In the final analysis, even though being out has its bad parts, I do think it was worth it. I never had a falling out with my friends about being gay, but there was a moment, a few years ago, when we were drifting apart. I managed to solve it by just being a bit more active in pursuing get-togethers. If I found out they didn't invite me along, I just mentioned it in passing the next time. Not in a confrontational tone, but I just let it fall I would have liked to go along. And if there was a movie I knew we liked to see, I tried to be the one inviting the rest. So they couldn't overlook me. It worked pretty well, without having big moments of "why didn't you invite me?"-drama. Maybe it would work in this situation as well? If they spend some time with you again and see you still being the same guy as you were before, they'll probably come around quickly enough...
i don't agree. Friendship isn't something that you should just take for granted like that and no one is the same, nor should you expect them to be. With your new status, they just don't know how to act. I DO agree with Filip though. Your friends just aren't sure what to do with this newness around you, so you just need to show them that you're still you. Follow Filip's advice, and I believe that most everything will work out okay. :]
I know how you feel, my friends started treating me differently too. I told them I wanted to be treated the same way, after all they all suspected for as long as they had known me. But they all started to act like I was one of the girls or something like that. You just gotta talk to everyone about these things i guess. There's no other way around it really. My other friend who is gay came out and decided to not hang out with his friends from home as much because we grew up with him straight and he wasnt that person anymore. He reinvented himself, and he's a lot cooler now and everyone likes him, but he wont hang out with us because it's awkward for him.
I would say that it is entirely possible your friends don't even realize they hurt your feelings. They aren't sure if you would want to do the "guy things" or if you would feel weird or anything. It seems strange for them to think you have changed just because they found out about this, but it is very possible that they don't know if you just pretended to like the things they did or if you really did or how to react or deal with you at all now. I would say that the best thing for you to do is to talk to them and let them know how it is making you feel that you are being left out. Remind them that you are still the same person you were before, you are just letting them know a little more of who you are now than before. Ask them to invite you to things and let you make the call of if you want to go or not. If they can't respect that and still leave you out and refuse to hang out with you and let you be one of the guys, then maybe it is true that they aren't really your friends, but if they can take that talk and try to make the changes needed, then it is all just a misunderstanding between friends.
