Advice on Best Friend

This is my first post on this forum, having hardly come out to myself yet, but I am hoping I can get some advice on my version of a problem i'm sure nearly all of us have experienced before. So my best friend we will call C. I am very in love with him. I have been in love with him for four or five years without him knowing I was gay (he still doesn't know), and he is essentially the only reason i realized I was gay. I have two questions, essentially the first being do you think there is a chance he is gay (evidence to be provided later in the post) and the second being when it is right to tell him i am gay, because the whole relationship has been bothering me a lot more lately.

Reasons I don't think he's gay: I will start off with my least favorite things to think about.
1) I would start with the fact that he has told me he is a homophobe (although I am almost certain I have talked him out of it).
2) Next, he told me about times when he was in middle school and made out with a girlfriend.
3) He insists he's not gay even though he is teased about it often by mutual friends of ours.
4) He says he has crushes on some girls and is obviously awkward around them the way I assume people who couldn't talk to girls would be.
5) Finally, I have recently been sending him lots of messages which, if he sent them to me, I would immediately understand that he was gay and that he liked me. Since he has told me is a homophobe and I don't want to ruin our friendship I am doing my best to let him know without telling him, so that if he was also hoping I was gay he would pick up on it, but he doesn't. He doesn't understand why it makes me sad for him to say he loves me like a "brother," and he doesn't pick up on what i mean when I ask why he doesn't like me. He says he does, and I say I mean I know he likes me but why doesn't he like me. He seems completely oblivious to these things, and maybe he is hiding still because his family is homophobic but I think it is also a bad omen for our love.

Reasons I hope he is gay: I say hope, because when I think about these things this much I am obviously going to read into them which is why I want an outside opinion. I will start by refuting the previous points to the best of my ability.
1) He told me he was a homophobe randomly, only a little after we became friends and i didn't know what being gay was. It kind of just blurted out spontaneously as if he was warning himself of becoming too close to me as we walked together, I mean it was really out of context.
2) This girlfriend from middle school he dumped without reason around 7th grade, which is probably around the time he would actually start to realize he was gay if he was going to.
3) The fact that all of these people told me they thought he was gay without me asking seems like a good omen to me.
4) He hasn't had a relationship with these girls since the one in middle school, and he systematically chooses a new girl every school year without really pursuing anything.
5) I have no solution to this one so i will list new points. A lot of our friends thought that we actually had something going on for a while until I took a girl to prom as a friend (because apparently that means I'm straight). We actually "hold hands" whenever I say I am cold because he will offer to warm my hands with his. He told me he never hugs his family, but we hug every day after school before we go home usually twice. We spooned the last time I went to his house, and he lets me lay on his shoulder when we watch TV together. We do cheesy couple things like him giving me his sweatshirt, and when I told him I liked how it smelled like him he was okay with it. Other cheesy couple things include me sitting on his lap while we play games and him reaching his arms around me with his hands on top of mine on the same controller or our pet names we have for eachother . He also told me once that he didn't like me touching his hair (which I like) because he didn't like how random people said "look at the little gay boy." However, the times he was referencing were times I wasn't there, which makes it seem like he was self identifying as gay and that upset him, because there is no way random people would go up to him and say that. Finally, we text eachother goodnight with lots of hearts every night.

If you were brave enough to read those walls of text you have my eternal gratitude, because I really need a third party to analyze my acquired data since my viewpoint is hopelessly skewed. I hope every night that he is gay and we can live happily ever after, but I just feel like it is so hopeless sometimes

The final question I have is whether or not / how to come out or if I should. A year ago I tried to come out and I threw up for a few days because of the toll it took on my body so I just gave up.

Thanks!