GETTING TO KNOW MY BEST FRIEND WHO’S GAY

FOREWORD: Another ally speaks the message of love. Her name is Sally Dadzie, and what she has to say is very compelling. Check on it.

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When I met him, I didn’t know he was gay. He was just a guy I found easy to be with. He was a good dancer and I loved to dance then. With that common interest, we soon became friends. He would visit my house and I’d visit his. Then I had an unhealthy obsession for Cosmo magazines and he had a pile of GQ mags as well. We would exchange them often, especially when he was not in town or I went away. Sometimes I visited him and he’d play some music and pull me to dance with him. He would hold me so close and I’d grind my bum in his groin, but nothing would happen between us. As much as he told me he was crazy about my bum, he never once did have a boner while dirty-dancing with me. Someone once watched us dance and was certain that we were constantly shagging.

My friend, he loved to cook and I loved to eat his food. I hardly cooked. He didn’t mind. He just enjoyed being with me. I asked him why he didn’t have a girlfriend and he told me girls were too much stress. I kept pushing him to get into a relationship, but he never took me seriously. There was a time I slept over at his because my place was occupied for the night. There was only one bed in his house. Only one room, and we had to sleep together. I was nervous. I thought: Oh, God. Today we might cross the line from friends to friends with benefits. To avoid that, I went to bed first. He retired later, and even covered me with a bedspread. I woke up in the morning to find him still asleep, his face turned the other way. Nothing had happened between us.

Still I did not suspect a thing. However, his rating in my book of guys shot to the top. No other male held that much respect in my life. Well, apart from my dad. I had no boyfriend then.

But soon I fell in love with some guy. I introduced my boyfriend to my friend. We visited his house a day after his birthday, and went with a bottle of wine. My friend was elated, the perfect host. But my boyfriend was quiet. In my mind, I felt like he was seeing my friend as competition.

When we left, he asked me a question: “What is your relationship with this guy?”

“Nothing,” I said. “We’re just friends. Are you jealous?”

My boyfriend laughed. “Jealous ke? I can’t be jealous of a gay guy. If anything, he had his eyes on me.”

I was stunned by this.

My boyfriend noticed and laughed harder. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know,” he said with some incredulity.

I could not speak. Everything started making sense to me. But I remained in denial, and two or so weeks would pass before another close friend would tell me the same thing.

“You do know your friend is gay, right?” this close friend said to me.

“That’s a lie,” I said in protest. “You people just don’t like the guy.”

He laughed. “Don’t like who? That guy? Please! Ask him if he’s ever smashed a girl before.”

I didn’t find this funny. I walked away. But then I stayed away from my ‘gay’ friend for a while. Maybe for a very long time. And I didn’t know why. He noticed. He visited me one day. I was just coming back from my boyfriend’s house. The silence between us was uncomfortable, not at all like it used to be. I could sense that he could sense that I could sense something about him. But neither of us spoke.

Some days went by before I went to his house. And I asked him point-blank. “Are you gay?”

He was quiet. Maybe it was because of the way I said it, the tone of my voice. He denied. I was relieved. We were back to being friends. But our bond was beginning to wane.

One day, I was at his place and his friends visited. They were in high spirits and were bringing up tales from the past. And then the big secret was revealed that my friend was gay.

They even talked about the time when they, worried about his sexuality, locked him in a hotel room with a prostitute they hired to sleep with him. He couldn’t sleep with her, much as he tried. It was all a disaster. The incident scarred him because his friends would never let him forget it. And as they recalled the story in my presence, they ridiculed him. He simply smiled, but I could read his eyes. I felt his pain. I was sad. He meant that much to me. To his friends, he was the butt of their jokes. They kept calling him a fag.

I’ll stop the story here. It was not meant to entertain you. He is still my friend. He is still gay. For a long time, I wanted him to be straight, but I realized that it was not in my power to want somebody to be what they do not want to be. I’d been there too, where people saw me in a certain way and expected me to be the person they cooked up in their heads. And I think that was where it hit me – when I had one of those episodes with those people who was bent on policing my life. That was when I came to grasp that my friend and I – we were no different from each other. I should have known better, and treated him the way I would have longed to be treated. With respect and love.

I tried to heal the rift between us, but he wanted to be on his own, away from everyone. And I didn’t blame him at all. I was one of the realest friends he had and I blew it, because I was uncomfortable with who he was. He left the country some years ago and all we do now is chat. Once in a blue moon. No more “Salome dearest” as he usually called me. No more talks about sexy guys on the covers of GQ. No more discussions about the deep things of life.

When I think about it, I wonder what I would have done to change the situation. At that stage in my life, I guess, nothing. Because I was ignorant and uninformed about the LGBT. But I’m glad that my conscience burned within me. I’m not patting myself on the back, but I could have acted worse. I could have stopped being his friend entirely because I’d found out about his homosexuality. Would I have felt better? Would God have approved of my behavior? Would I have been an example of a good Christian?

What about him? How would he have felt? How much would I have hurt him? Or was he without a human heart because he is gay?

As a Christian, the greatest commandment given to me is to love God. The second greatest: to love my neighbor as myself. There is no specifying who this neighbor could be. So yeah, he could be gay and I am to love him as I love myself. She could be a lesbian, like another friend of mine, and I am to love her without terms and conditions. If we, as Christians, still do not understand what love means, we need to ask ourselves what we’re really doing. We need to understand 1st Corinthians 13. The Bible didn’t mince words there. God is not going to come down one day and eliminate all the gays so that we can live happy. No, he gave us enough heart to love.

And love sometimes just means allowing people be who they are. You may have strong convictions over how they live their lives, but it’s not for you to police it. It’s not for you to make the world a little harder for the next person. There’s too much hate going around. Hate for people of color. Hate for people of certain tribes. Hate for feminists. Hate for people of faith. Hate for atheists. Hate. Hate. Hate! It’s all tiring.

Before I got married, I got one of the best pieces of advice from someone I admire so much. She said to me: “It’s very tempting to want your husband to change certain things about his life that you’re not comfortable with. You would even spend the bulk of your energy doing that, but know that it’s going to be a waste of time when you don’t pray first, that God changes you. Maybe all you need is to adjust and make room for those things you don’t like about your husband.”

As people of faith, we’re constantly advised to pray away what we cannot stomach. But I’ve come to learn that you can’t pray away certain things. And one of them is ‘the gay’.

You can’t pray away the gay – my favorite lines from the TV show, Grey’s Anatomy. I had to lose the warmth of a good friend to understand this.

Life has never been black or white. Straight or curved. We are convoluted and elaborate as humans. Colorful too. And as the world evolves, so do our bearings. Some things will never change. Some people will be who they want to be, no matter how much we wish them to be the way we want them to be. And if this is the case, why then do we hate so much? Why can we not simply let people be who they desire to be?

Written by Sally Dadzie

You may follow Sally on Twitter @moskedapages and @Moskeda_Pages