Sans Fig Leaf
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"Closer than brothers"
1 June, 2006
From my late teens through my mid-to-late twenties I had a friend, we'll call him Aaron, that others often described as "closer than a brother." We did everything together. We were always there for each other. Each of us would do anything to help the other. Neither of us could imagine a time when we would not be a part of the others' life.
We didn't agree on everything. We would get into rather heated debates on certain topics--especially politics--and they were heated precisely because we were both so fond of one another. I would sometimes wonder how someone I admired so much could be that wrong on such important topics? I know he wondered the same thing.
One of the things we disagreed on was homosexuality. Aaron was emphatically certain that it was among the greatest of evils possible, that no one who engaged in it could possibly feel real love, and so on. He was aware of the relationship I'd had with another guy my age several years before we met. He thought of it as belonging in the same category as the drinking and drug use he had been involved with before he became "born again." It was something to regret, repent, and vow never to do again.
At the beginning of our friendship I didn't exactly disagree with this assessment. I was, at the time, resigned to a life of celebacy, because I thought it was the only option that would not lead to self-destruction. As time went on, my perspective changed. I realized that I could love another man selflessly and truly. More importantly, I realized that if there was a god, he'd made me this way, and there was nothing wrong with that. People who said otherwise were quoting isolated portions of a holy text written 2800 years ago, ignoring sentences immediately before and after that condemned with equal ferocity the eating of shrimp and the wearing of clothing made from more than one kind of thread.
I tried to communicate my new epiphanies to Aaron. I didn't just come out and state my conclusions, I tried to ease him into it. To show him the thought processes and logic that had led me from point A to B. It didn't work. Instead it led to our mosted heated arguments ever.
I tried many times over the next several years to bring up the subject in ways that wouldn't turn into another argument. Every time I ran smack into the same wall of unacceptance.
Some people would have let the friendship die its natural death at that point. Maybe I should have. But it was hard to let go after being so close. Besides, he'd gotten married to one of my demi-cousins (a cousin of a cousin of my cousins -- yes it's distant, but in our family, that still made Aaron family). Besides being a shirt-tail relative, his wife was the best friend of my actual cousin--my almost-twin, one of my closest family members. Even if Aaron and I had decided to part ways, we wouldn't have been able to avoid hearing about each other from time to time.
This was all complicated by the fact that I was still living, generally, a closeted life. I still had a ways to go on my own journey of self-acceptance. When I was finally ready to leave the closet, I decided to tell my mother before she found out some other way. Because we lived some distance apart, and because I didn't want to do it over a holiday dinner or other family visit, I wrote her a letter. After sending it I tried to call her several times, but kept getting her machine.
Then one day one of my aunts--my mom's oldest sister--called to tell me that my mom was very upset about something, but wouldn't tell anyone what was wrong. Then my aunt came right out and asked if I was gay. When I said yes, she admitted that she wasn't surprised. We talked about that, and about Mom. She offered to talk to Mom for me. I thanked her and said I'd also keep trying to get hold of her myself, as well.
Things didn't go well with Mom or most of the family for some time, but I had told, so I moved on to try to tell other people I thought should know. Aaron was at the top of that list.
He wouldn't take my phone calls. His wife clearly wanted to say more than just, "He can't talk right now," but she couldn't. One time I heard him tell her to tell me never to call again. She didn't repeat it, but I'd gotten the message. I received a terse but not very enlightening note from him shortly after that call.
Eventually I pieced together what had happened: After my aunt had talked to me and then my mother, she decided to tell her daughter--my almost twin. Who in turn said something to her best friend--Aaron's wife. The two of them decided to wait and let me tell Aaron myself. Before I could actually talk to him, Aaron heard it from someone else, and he became apoplectic. His wife tried to calm him down, and in the course of that conversation he found out that she known for a while.
That's the reason he said he wouldn't speak to me. She knew before he did, and that, he said, clearly proved that I no longer thought of him as a friend.
It's never that simple, of course.
We had known each other's thoughts so well for so long, that it is almost certain he knew what I had been trying to say years before. Just as I knew that he didn't want me to say it--didn't want me to finish the train of thought. Because he sincerely believed that being gay was evil. He was certain that gay people were incapable of love, incapable of compassion, incapable of being good people. And we had been closer than brothers--we had loved each other, not in a romantic way, but in that equally profound and fierce way that friends who have chosen to call each other brother do. It had been real. It had been true.
If I, a gay man, was capable of sharing a love closer than brotherhood with him, then at least some of the other things he believed couldn't also be true. That was a prospect too terrible to contemplate.
I had never imagined a time when he would not be part of my life. Unfortunately, the only way to keep Aaron as a friend was to go back to living a lie. And I couldn't do that, not even for him.
--Martin Luther King Jr.
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