Lessons I have learnt about finding friends

I've just watched the movie Love, Simon and not only is it a brilliant movie with some amazing cast (notably Tony Hale, who plays Gary in Veep) but it is the first mainstream Hollywood movie with the main plot about a teenage gay romance. Watching the movie has inspired me to write this piece about my evolving relationship with the gay community and I don't think this is something that people talk about enough. You see, many gay themed feel-good movies often paint the gay community in a very positive light, whilst there's plenty of hate directed at the gay community in the mainstream media in some countries - what I liked about Love, Simon is the way the movie actually explores the relationship of the central character Simon with his friends and family, all of whom are straight (apart from two characters, who weren't that central to the plot). This is not a movie review, there's plenty of movie reviews for this film and I would encourage you to watch it.  So instead, I am going to share with you my own journey of coming out and my relationship with the gay community.

I first realized that I was gay probably from the age of about 9 or so, I didn't quite know what it was at that age and it wasn't even sexual. All I knew was that I felt a certain attraction to certain kind of men that I saw in TV and movies, in my innocence, I thought it was merely me looking for alternative role models since my parents were just primary school teachers and there was nothing wrong with looking up to these men whom I thought had certain admirable qualities. I simply wanted a better father figure to look up to rather than the one I was given. You have to bear in mind the context of my childhood in the 1980s in Singapore, my parents were stuck in this routine teaching at the local primary school in Ang Mo Kio. There was very little fun or excitement to be had and everything was extremely routine - watching TV offered some form of escapism to a world where the heroes in the action movies lead an exciting life. The James Bond type characters flew around the world, fighting crime and looking extremely suave in the process. So from that young age, I already had this rather strong attraction to men like that - I had fallen in love with an idealized image of the hero from an action movie; in hindsight of course, that was my reaction to the tedium and boredom I experienced as a child, growing up in a working class family in Ang Mo Kio rather than anything sexual per se, but that did set the tone for my sexuality.

I wasn't exactly out in my teenage years - I never denied my sexuality, my closest friends in school knew I was gay of course but since my sexuality never really defined my life in those days, it simply wasn't an important issue then. Singapore was and still is a homophobic country and I kept a low profile, choosing to focus on my sports and my studies. The big difference came in the year 1996 when many of us in Singapore finally managed to get on the internet - I remember getting my first Pacific Internet account, along with that painfully slow dial-up modem then. That was when a real gay community formed in Singapore for the very first time, when there were several IRC (internet relay chat) channels created for gays in Singapore to talk to each other for the first time completely anonymously. Nobody knew who you were, you could simply log into a chatroom with a pseudonym and how much or little revealed about yourself was entirely up to you. The vast majority of the people on those IRC channels then were so deep in the closet they were happy just to be able to speak to another gay man anonymously and never revealed anything about themselves; they never tried to meet anyone or try to make any real friends. Nonetheless, a number of us were open enough to want to make friends and meet up, that led to the first time in my life when I really managed to meet a number of other gay men.

Okay, I know what you're going to ask: you're 20, you're meeting gay guys for the first time, surely you had a lot of sex? Actually, no - far from it. I don't think there was hardly any sex in that group of us apart from one happy couple whom I envied. I guess anyone could get laid if you lowered your standards enough, but what is the point of sex if you're not even meeting your own standards? How could bad sex with someone you don't even fancy possibly be pleasurable? There were guys I fancied who didn't fancy me and then there were guys who fancied me whom I didn't find at all attractive. But it didn't matter to me, I was just happy to be in the company of gay friends with whom my sexuality wasn't an issue at all because we were all gay. We all knew what it was like to look at the floor uneasily when our relatives started asking awkward questions during family gatherings, we all knew what it was like to worry about whether or not the people we studied or worked with were homophobic or not - thus it was with this mutual understanding that we created a small gay community to offer each other that safe space, knowing that everyone else there was gay too; thus we could at least let our guard down and relax in this community. Like I said, this was the 1990s and Singapore was extremely homophobic back then - most straight people were extremely ignorant about gay issues and unfortunately they had many misconceptions about gays even if they weren't inherently malicious and evil people filled with homophobia.

Just one year later, in 1997 - I had finished my NS and moved to Europe. First I spent some time in France before moving to the UK to start my university studies: suddenly, I was in a very liberal Western European capital city, London. I had gone from a very homophobic country to one that was extremely progressive when it came to gay rights - being gay was not just legal, but totally accepted to the point were we have had countless numbers of high profile LGBT politicians who have arisen to the highest ranks in government. That's right, being gay is simply not an issue that a gay politician can win an election because the voters don't care about his sexuality - the Brits clearly don't think that is an issue at all and focused more on the politicians' ability to do their job well. This is a sharp contrast from Singapore were politicians could get into trouble simply for expressing a pro-gay  opinion in public. Naturally, I looked for friends within the gay community in London which wasn't hard, given that London has a huge gay scene - it's not like Singapore was a small town with no gay men, but most gay men in Singapore back then were terrified of anyone finding out about their sexuality they kept an extremely low profile. Whereas in London, even straight men with the slightest fleeting inclination of bisexuality had no qualms about exploring their options. Such was London for you - I wonder what it would have been like if I had gone to a university in a town like Oxford or Cambridge, where there simply wasn't much of a gay scene.

I remember my student days in the late 1990s and I used to frequent a gay bar in Soho called Ku Bar on Charing Cross Road - I was such a regular there that I could pop in there any evening of the week and probably run into someone I knew. The bar has since moved but there are now two more Ku Bars in Soho, though I'm not sure if it has changed management since the 1990s. My group of friends there were mostly university students but a few young working adults, none of them were poor. Oh you need money if you want to party in style London - I remember going to see some incredible concerts with my gay friends then. It was so incredibly fun, there were all these bands struggling to get to the top of the charts and London was a great place to be if you liked live music. I saw so many of the biggest names in pop music in the late 1990s with my friends then - Kylie Minogue, All Saints, B*Witched, Aqua, Madonna, Steps, Billie, Vengaboys, E17, Alice Deejay, Geri Helliwell, Sonique, Gabrielle and many more. Remember, I was the boy who spent most of the 1980s being incredibly bored in Ang Mo Kio, thus being able to party with a group of gay guys who shared my passion for live music was beyond my wildest dreams come true. Yeah I was on a scholarship at UCL then, but I did spend most of my days partying then instead of studying and yet somehow still managed to get through my degree.

To be honest, I probably saw life through rose-tinted lenses then, as the adrenaline filled experience of screaming your head off when you saw your favourite singer on the stage in front of you was a regular Saturday night experience. Looking back at the late 1990s, I did have a lot of fun and made great friends, I have some great memories. Let me give you an example though, there was this guy Greg and I think I'm a few years older than him. He was an extremely funny guy to be around, his party trick was to memorize complete scenes from famous movies and he would then play all the characters, recreating the scene in front of all of us and we would beg him to perform for us each time as we knew how good he was. Fast forward 20 years, he has since become a teacher in a rather small town with some quite extreme left-wing views. We're still friends on Facebook but I have not seen him in an incredibly long time mostly because I thought that I don't agree with a lot of things he is saying on Facebook but I'm not close enough to him to start a political debate with him about left vs right wing politics. We may have had a lot in common in the late 1990s but today, in 2018, we actually don't have much in common at all. To be honest, if I met Greg this year, I doubt we would have even become friends on that basis, never mind become best buddies who partied a lot together. What would we do if we met today, talk about what we did back in the late 1990s? Now, please don't get me wrong, this is by no means a criticism of Greg at all: I'm sure he's a brilliant teacher today, it's just that we have evolved into very different adults over the last two decades.

I suppose back in the day, I was convinced that the only way to protect myself from homophobia was to surround myself with gay people and that led to me forming friendships with people whom I actually don't have that much in common with apart from the shared belief that this was indeed the most rational way to pick one's friends. The biggest difference between then and now is that most of my friends back then were gay but the majority of my friends today are straight - this is because London is an extremely progressive city and I do not face any kind of homophobia as a gay man who is totally open about my sexuality at work. So instead, I pick friends who have a lot in common with myself in terms of my political opinions, my interests, my hobbies and interestingly enough, when I moved house a a few years ago, I called upon five of my closest friends to help me - to be honest, that was a brutal task, to move my heavy furniture up all those stairs is no fun and yet I managed to round up quite a number of friends who were willing to help me out and every single one of them are straight. Oh to be fair, I didn't manage to move everything in that one day, so I called on another friend with a big car to help me finish the moving - now that friend with the big car is indeed gay; but that does show you the ratio of my straight to gay friends in my social circle today. Once sexuality is no longer an issue at all, I get to select my friends on based on other criteria instead, such as whether I can rely on them to help me do something difficult like that!

This is only possible in a city like London of course, which is so incredibly gay-friendly. In Singapore, where there is still a huge stigma associated with being openly gay, where gay people still worry about encountering homophobia, there is still the tendency to prefer to create a circle of gay friends where you get to be relaxed about being gay. Now in London, I can be totally relaxed about being openly gay with my straight friends, knowing that if one of them dared to express any kind of homophobia, others would jump in and slap that bigot down immediately. Homophobia and any kind of bigotry like that is not just frowned upon here in London, under British law it is downright illegal. I think when you look at the high profile gay events like the annual Gay Pride festival and parade, you may get the impression that there's some kind of 'gay community' here in London. But even though there is a commercial element to the gay scene manifested in the bars, clubs and other entertainment venues, you're still trying to bring together a group of people who are only united by their sexuality, by the fact that they are attracted to members of the same gender. You can try to ignore the other divisions such as religion, social class, wealth, political persuasions and other cultural factors still manifest divisions and make it impossible to treat this 'gay community' as a cohesive entity that somehow comes together, but really, at best you have various small communities that coexist under the umbrella of the label 'gay' -  it is anything but one big happy gay family.

Therefore, do we naturally seek friends who are strikingly similar to ourselves or are we able to establish meaningful relationships with people we don't actually have that much in common with? The answer to that question would vary person to person; some people like my dad are freaked out by people who are the slightest bit different from himself so his social circle comprises entirely of people of a very similar age, gender, social class, political persuasion and culture whereas I tend to draw my friends from a much wider pool of people from across the spectrum. So for example, I love gymnastics and spend a lot of the time at my local gymnastics club training as part of the adult gymnastics programme - so I make many friends there for the obvious reason that we all like to do gymnastics as adults, despite this being a sport that is primary catering for children. However, if I were to walk into a gay bar today, I would wonder what I have in common with the next gay man I happen to stand next to in the bar apart from the fact that we are both attracted to members of the same gender. But even if you get that out of the way, sexual attraction is such a complex issue and the chances of two gay people actually liking the same kind of sex is actually extremely low - like I said before, if you're not fussy, you can probably get laid pretty easily but most of us are actually pretty darn fussy when it comes to sex as we know that the kind of low quality, bad sex you get when you lower your standards is not just pointless, but just terrible.

It has taken me many years to get to where I am today and what I am about to say sounds totally like common sense, but you'll be amazed how hard it is to be rational sometimes. I used to be motivated by the fear of rejection and homophobia when it came to looking for friends, now I am motivated by something a lot more simple: I simply look for nice people to be friends regardless of their nationality, religion, sexuality, age, social class or skin colour. I remember there was one particularly nasty character who used to frequent Ku Bar in the late 1990s, he would get drunk and do stupid things like throw his glass against the wall, just to see the broken glass shatter all over the floor. I don't even know where to begin with that kind of character - like how on earth is that funny? Did he once think about the consequences of his actions? Someone could get hurt or at the very least, the staff at the bar would have to clear up that mess. Yet somehow, his presence was tolerated by the rest of us as he was gay too, rather than because we actually liked him. Of course some gay people can be idiotic, neurotic, thoughtless, irresponsible and obnoxious - simply picking your friends based on the fact that you have something in common with them can actually lead to hanging out with some very dubious characters. This was just one obnoxious gay man I have met over the years - there are plenty more I'd rather never meet again. Yet somehow, when you put one criteria over others in your search for friends, it can impair your judgement and affect the results. All I can say is that I have looked back at what I've done and hindsight is always 20/20.

This is a topic that I had talked about some time ago: do shared experiences make people bond? In the case of gay people, can growing up gay somehow make them bond as a result, having faced the same challenges like coming out to your friends and family? Well clearly, the answer is no based on everything I have just presented and also, my most recent post was about how I had behaved like an autistic moron when I tried to help an old friend who was in financial difficulties. He never asked me for help, but we had known each other for a long time, we had a very similar childhood and thus I simply assumed that he would want my help - well I was quite wrong, it was a huge miscalculation on my part and I had mortally offended him by acknowledging his poverty (which had been the elephant in the room I wasn't supposed to have talked about). That was entirely my fault but why did I make such a dumb mistake? I made the assumption that a lot of other people made: that just because you have a lot in common that somehow you would bond and become great friends. Heck, I only have to look at my father and he fell out with my late uncle: same family, same parents, same languages, so much in common growing up together in Malaysia yet they hated each other to the point where my father refused to go to see his brother as he lay dying in a hospital in Johor Bahru. What is done is done - I just want to learn from my mistakes, become a wiser person and so I will know how to choose the right friends in the future.

I shall finish by taking you way back to my primary school. Naturally, the tallest kids in the class sat at the back, the shortest kids sat at the front so the short kids wouldn't be blocked by someone taller whilst trying to see the teacher at the front of the class. We were incredibly lazy then, you could see the tall kids playing with the other tall kids in the playground and the short kids barely got to know someone sitting all the way at the back of the class - it was not like there was any kind of discrimination based on height in the way we made friends, we were just too lazy to befriend people sitting a few meters away, we just stuck to the people closest to us. To go from that world to today, where we are building all kinds of interesting social networks online, making friends from all over the world through social media, boy we have all come a long way. What are your criteria when it comes to picking your friends? Who are your closest and best friends? Are you guilty of simply sticking to the people who are closest to you, or do go out of your way to search online for people who share your interests? Are you motivated by the fear of homophobia, racism, sexism, ageism or any other form of bigotry? Can you make friends with people who don't have that much in common with you simply on the basis that they're nice people? Let me know what you think please, do leave a comment below. Many thanks for reading.