(from left: Greg, Rex, LA, Jason)
I love gay men. They make the best friends for straight girls. They can get right up next to your heart without the stress of intimate straight male/female relationships or the passive/aggressive nonsense girls give each other.
Plus, they'll listen to your stories, agree that your girlfriends are bitches and men are asses, they'll tell you when your outfit looks stupid, and they can lift heavy objects for you.
The intimacy of straight women and gay men is a story as long as time. Fancy ladies always had companions their rich husbands could trust to escort them to events. My mother had a friend who loved taking her out to fabulous events and having her on his arm because she was so pretty. He was a pageant judge. Enough said.
My next-door neighbor, Michael, was a year older than me and heart-breakingly beautiful. His family moved in when I was 11 and he was 12. We were just like peas and carrots from the get-go. We started out playing hide and seek. Before we knew it, we were making up elaborate dance routines (including dramatic lifts) a la the Solid Gold dancers. In 1983, though he was a Carolina fan, he watched the NCAA Championship game with me and hugged me tight when my Wolfpack won! During my Duran-Duran crazed Freshman year, Michael would come over at 11 p.m. to stay up all night watching "Friday Night Videos" with me, as our hometown didn't yet have MTV.
He was my friend, but he was my mother's pet. He spent hours at our house talking to my mother. Michael was a football hero in high school and a top scholar. But he never had a girlfriend. On prom night, when he was a junior and I was a sophomore, we both had "dates" we didn't care for, but we posed together in my parents' living room in our finery, and for years after, I showed friends the picture of the two of us and said he was my date, because he was so much cuter than my real date.
Just after college, my best friend Tonya and I were total club girls. We loved early-90s techno and were more interested in dancing than being hit on, so we started going to gay bars in Myrtle Beach (where she lived) and Raleigh (where I lived). We were at Offshore Drilling in Myrtle Beach one night and ran into Michael for the first time in five years. He swept me up into his arms and spun me around. With no conversation at all, we had a mutual love and acceptance moment. Then we ran off to dance to Utah Saints.
I didn't see Michael again for three years. The next time we met, I was standing in the bathroom at my parents' house putting on makeup before my sister's funeral in 1994. He walked right in and put his arms around me. We stood there for a good minute, crying and not saying anything. That was the last time I saw him. I've heard he lives in Atlanta.*
At the time of that very bad thing, I was living with Rexy. I'd sped home three hours away with no clothes and had to call Rex the next day to please bring me some. He not only packed me a bag of clothes and girlie underwear, he packed himself a bag and stayed for the funeral. After that happened, he welcomed my sister Jill, my best friend and my boyfriend into our flop apartment and never complained.
Fast forward a few years, I was living in the house I bought with my by-then ex-boyfriend and was working retail. I couldn't pay the mortgage by myself and needed a roommate badly. A friend recommended one of his friends, a straight guy. He moved in and we immediately clashed. His girlfriend freaked my cat out and made him throw up. We rarely spoke and I was relieved when he moved out after six months.
But I found myself without a roommate and source of income, so I put the feelers out among my friends again. Enter Jason (J$). J$ and I didn't know each other at all when he moved in. He was a chef (voted #1 in the Triangle in the Spectator while he lived with me) and worked completely different hours from me. I'd come home from work at five and he and his crazy boyfriend would have already got the party started.
My favorite J$ story was when he and his boyfriend took me to Flex, a leather bar, on a Sunday afternoon around Thanksgiving. I was the only girl in the place, which didn't bother me a bit. After a while, a group of bears and leather daddies started setting up a table and bringing out covered dishes a la a family reunion. It was beautiful, me and the fellas having Thanksgiving together, and none of them treated me as anything less than a member of the family.
Jason moved out after 18 months and I was in a position where I could pay the mortgage by myself. I was working at the agency then. I went to a going-away luncheon for a co-worker about a year later and sat next to a designer named Greg. He told the group he'd bought a condo that was under construction and was planning to move back in with his mother until it was finished.
"Don't go home, move in with me!," I blurted out.
So he did. Greg and I barely knew each other, but on the night he moved in, I invited him to a Christmas party at Rex and Ray's, and he went along and a beautiful group friendship was born.
That was on a Saturday, and the following Friday night, as we were both single, we decided to spend the evening together, getting to know each other. We'd established we both loved 80's music trivia, so we bought "Songburst" on e-Bay and settled in to play. "I want to play you a song," Greg said, putting a remix of a Cher song on the stereo. I stood there listening for about a minute before I blurted out, "This is killing my buzz."
For the next eight months, we played Songburst, listened to 80's compilations we could both agree on, cuddled up under a blanket on the couch to watch movies, shared the occasional smooch, and took care of each other. Though I hadn't intended on having a roommate again, I was sad when my Greggy moved out.
I spent the next few years on my own at home, though I had regular play-dates and vacations with my boys. Rex, Greg, four other friends and I were in a beach house for a week (a tradition that's on its sixth year now). I needed something from one of them and said, "Hey Angel?" Greg and Rex both responded "Yes?" in unison. Then we all gasped. I felt like I'd been caught cheating.
Rex and I went shopping and had fabulous dinners and parties at his house. Ray and I spent hours swapping Southern stories. J$ and I got in lots of trouble. Greggy and I cuddled up and played games regularly. Robby was my number one state fair ride buddy, Will Ferrell movie and concert date.
The time came, though, when I realized I needed to find a straight boy companion, as I wasn't getting any younger. I can't remember how I stated it in my match.com profile, but I pretty much said, "If you're scared gay boys are going to hit on you, don't contact me."
I met and married Steve, who became best buds with all my best buds. And if I'm a queen bee, he's a lesbro. At least three of our girlfriends call him their fake husband.
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*(UPDATE 8/1: Michael found me! He's in Atlanta and is happy, safe, warm and loved by a wonderful man. Check out this pic he sent me: it's the two of us at the NC State Fair in 1982.)
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