Gay Friends

The boy who danced in his underwear, and the one who never said a word

I’m in Cleveland this week, doing an assessment of the LGBTQ+ initiatives in the area and putting together a general investment thesis for the region.

It’s the kind of work I’ve done many times. Straightforward on paper.

But something has been happening that I didn’t expect.

When people ask what I’m doing here and I tell them, I keep noticing the same reaction. A wince. A small charge. A flicker of something defensive that passes across the face before the words come.

And then, almost always, a story.

One woman told me about walking into a bathroom and finding a man there. Another person told me about an LGBTQ+ club at a local school whose posters kept getting torn down. Small stories. Quiet ones. But each one carrying a pulse of fear underneath — the kind that sits in the body and waits to be asked.

I kept thinking, I know this feeling. I’ve seen this before.

And then I realized where.

From a young age, I had a lot of friends who later turned out to be gay. So many, in fact, that one of my first girlfriends sat me down one afternoon and gently asked if I was sure I wasn’t secretly gay and simply hadn’t admitted it yet.

I told her I was sure.

She did not seem convinced. And honestly, if you looked at the data, she had a point. My taste in music, my taste in friends, and my taste in socks all pointed in a direction I was not, in fact, going.

But it was never about sexuality. It was about character.

I was drawn to people who had already been through something. People who had been rejected. People who didn’t quite fit the template. The ones who had to build a spine before most of us even knew we needed one.

In the 80s, being gay was not what it is now. It wasn’t neutral or celebrated or wrapped in rainbow branding. It was risky. It meant you were different in a way that could cost you something — family, belonging, safety. And I think, unconsciously, I was drawn to the people who had already confronted that cost.

One friend recently reminded me of something I had forgotten. He transferred into my high school sophomore year. Flamboyant. Not officially out yet, but very clearly himself, comfortable in a way that most 16-year-olds are not, and that most 40-year-olds still aren’t. At one school event, he did the full Risky Business underwear dance on stage. Fully committed. Fully exposed. Fully unbothered by whatever anyone might project onto him.

I remember watching him and feeling anxious.

Not because he was gay.

Because he was free.

And at that age, I wasn’t. I told him once, years later, that I admired him but wasn’t brave enough to stand that close to the fire. So we stayed friends, but we kept a little distance. I still needed the safety of the majority.

But not everyone I knew was that visible. Some carried it in complete silence.

Years later, when I was living in Vienna — a city where people can go an entire dinner without telling you anything true about themselves, and often do — a letter arrived from my college roommate.

We had lived together. We had been close in the way young men are close when they haven’t yet learned how to name anything. I thought I knew him.

I did not know him. I didn’t even know I didn’t know him, which is a particular kind of not knowing.

The letter told me he was gay. And that he had a crush on me the entire time we lived together. And had never said a word. To me. To anyone. It also told me how his parents had responded. They could not accept it, and they were pushing him toward counseling — toward being talked out of the thing he had finally said out loud.

I read it and sat with it for a long time. Then I picked up the phone and called him.

We talked for a long time. There was no scramble to reframe the past, no careful re-editing of shared memories — just two people who had known each other for years finally having the conversation one of us hadn’t been able to have at the time.

The only thing I remember saying with any force was about that. His parents were still pressing. I told him: you’ve waited twenty-five years to finally reach this point. Please don’t go back.

What struck me most wasn’t the revelation. It was the silence that had preceded it.

He had lived next to me, eaten meals with me, talked about girls with me, walked across campus with me — and carried something enormous that he could not say out loud. Not because I would have rejected him. Because the world around us had already taught him, long before we met, that some things had to stay buried to survive. His own parents had just proven the lesson correct.

That is the part that stays with me. Not that he was gay. That he was alone in it. And whatever was in the air that told him to stay silent, I had been breathing it too.

People conflate sexuality and character, as if being gay says something essential about a person’s moral structure. It doesn’t. But surviving rejection does. There is a muscle that only builds when standing in your truth costs you something — internal muscle, the kind that doesn’t show on the outside but carries you through life.

When I zoom out, I realize my life has been shaped by people who had to build themselves. And maybe that says more about me than it does about them. Maybe somewhere in me, I was trying to do the same. Or maybe standing near them let me borrow a courage I wasn’t yet willing to pay for myself.

And maybe that’s also why I’m in Cleveland this week. Why I keep noticing the wince. Why I keep listening for the story underneath it.

Because somewhere in me, I am still that young man in Vienna, holding a letter, wishing my friend had not had to wait so long to say it — and wondering what it was about the room, and about me, that made him think he had to.

Favorite Rainbows Through the Years