Growing up, most of my friends were girls, and this is still true today. My best friend, Debbie, is a girl I befriended over 35 years ago at summer camp and we have been inseparable ever since. For whatever reason I feel safe and more at ease around women than I do around men.
Unfortunately, as a very young kid I was taught that being friends with girls was bad. I was often told that only gay boys play with girls. My mom gave me a hard time about all these ?girlfriends? that I had. Obviously, this caused me a lot of stress as a kid. Why can?t I just be friends with whomever I want" And why was this a bad thing" For as long as I can remember, I used to ask my friends who were girls to pretend to be my ?girlfriends.? Partly to keep my family and my friends from suspecting that I was gay, and secondly, it was just easier. This was tough on me, already struggling with so many questions about my sexuality, and not always feeling good about myself. Being gay in the 1970?s, when I grew up, was not easy, neither were the decades before it, for that matter. I grew up at the very beginning of the gay rights movement, in between the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the Toronto Bathhouse Raid in 1981. Not to mention the AIDS epidemic among gay men in the late 80?s. This was not a great time to be gay, but it was a hopeful time I remember. There were no gay rights, gay marriage, no ?gaybies? etc. There were very few ?out? people back then, at least who I knew, and a gay ?lifestyle?...