THE BEST MAN

One of the easiest decisions I made when I was getting married was in my choice of a best man. Emma had always been a close family friend and an easy person to hang out with. He was also aware of my pro-LGBT views and never questioned or harangued me over them. Whether he was aware I’m a member of the LGBT community or not, whether he had any suspicions or not, I don’t know because he never interrupted any of my pro-gay expressions to ask me: “This one you’re always supporting gay people, are you gay?” And he wasn’t vocal about his views either, instead preferring to placidly stay quiet whenever these arguments arose. So, I couldn’t say if he is open-minded or just silently prejudiced.

I am bisexual, and as far as coming out to him goes, I have no intention of doing that. Or of coming out to anybody else for that matter, except Wifey, which I covered in my series HERE.

Emma can pass off as handsome (I have never seen him from a sexual angle), has a well-paying job and is fairly comfortable. As is wont in a wedding, as the best man, he played a major role in helping me put together the nuptials.

My wedding was going to be a two-day affair. As is the way it is done here, there would be the ceremony on Saturday and then the reception the next day, Sunday. By Friday, we – me, my wife, her bridal train and my best man – had moved into our respective hotel rooms. I was rooming with Emma.

Saturday was the church ceremony. On Saturday night was scheduled the bridal shower and the groom’s night out. The ladies were hosting their party in the hotel, whereas we would have our night out at the bar of a different hotel. Friends of mine – both gay and straight, most of them who were lodged in hotels so they could be at both wedding events – came for the night out. Our party ended by 11 pm and everyone dispersed and retired for the night.

Of course, during the revelry, at some point, the information slipped out that Emma and I were rooming together. And judging from the speed with which a gay friend who was at the bar with us slipped into my DM later that night, I knew that information must have planted the seed that Emma and I must be doing it – you know, one last shag before I officially become a married man. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The friend who came to satisfy his thirst in my DM wanted to know if Emma was gay. I told him I didn’t think he was. He had a girlfriend, a woman who was even struggling to hold tight to him and put a stop to his roving eye and philandering ways. Emma was an irrepressible womanizer. With all this evidence I knew about his social life, I was positive he was straight. And I told my friend as much. He agreed with me, saying he’d even observed that Emma didn’t possess that je ne sais quoi that gay men are often known to have. I didn’t know what he meant, but OK.

After my wedding wrapped on Sunday, I was millennial enough to post some pictures on the social media and I tagged those in the pictures, including Emma.

A few days later, Emma called me, saying he wanted to show me something. The next day, he drove over to my place. He looked very perplexed as we got settled in my parlour. Then he dropped a question on me that I didn’t see coming.

“Nuel, do I look like a homo?”

My immediate response was to burst out into laughter. Laughter which slowly died when I saw from the somber look on his face that he wasn’t joking. Dude was serious as fuck.

“I don’t know… Is there a way homo people are supposed to look?” I responded.

He moved uncomfortably in his seat.

“What is the problem?” I asked.

And he began telling me. Apparently, in the past couple of days since my wedding, he’d been getting lots of friend requests, most of them catfish accounts – even though he didn’t know this as he was accepting the requests. He is one of these Facebookers who doesn’t investigate friend requests before accepting or rejecting. And then, following the friend requests were messages in his inbox. Sexual messages starting with words like “Hey honey” and “How are you doing, dear”.  And these were the polite ones. Some others simply started flooding his inbox with dick and ass pics. He showed me the messages. To my trained queer eye, I was at once able to realise that most of his admirers, especially the bold dick-pic-sending ones, were operating from catfish accounts.

To be honest, I found this all really hilarious, and couldn’t stop myself from laughing at intervals. He protested, saying it wasn’t a laughing matter, and he needed to know what to do. He seemed really irritated, less because of the gay attention he was getting, and more because he felt like he was doing something, had probably started looking a certain way that was the way gay people look.

“Do I look like a homo?”

In the end, I simply told him to do whatever he wished to do. I reminded him that his block button was thee for a purpose.

As he left my house that day, I was pretty sure he was still asking himself over and over the perplexing question: Do I look like a homo?

Written by Nuel