More Than Friends?

Im Gay???

After we graduated thing got pretty hard for me. I was in a dark time with family issues and religious stuff. After a couple counselors, a handful of different pills, and a lot of arguing with my mom I kinda gave up and went back to acting like I was happy so she'd leave me alone. It was during this time when I stumbled across some gay porn. Of course I watched porn on my phone and loved some of the fanfiction stuff to a certain extent. But then I a gay video of this huge jaguar pounding this adorable little fox. It had never crossed my mind before but after that video and my bodies reaction to it I knew I wasn't straight. More and more videos, fanart, fanfiction, etc. for #boyxboy stuff found its way onto my phone. I kept it hidden but was addicted. I wanted this for myself. I started to notice some of the qualities in guys that I found attractive. Messy but not dirty fur, slim builds, shorter than me or taller than me by a few inches. There was this one guy at work that fit all of these perfectly, I fell for him hard. But one day I heard him make a homophobic joke and all my hopes went out the window. It was around then that I noticed Tom fit most of these qualities. He was a bit taller than me. I'm pretty short for a brown bear so it wasn't surprising. His fur was always just washed and combed in a rush so odd hairs would poke out here and there. And he wasn't that bad looking in other ways either. We still hung out all the time, he was pretty much my only friend that hadn't moved away for school or left to serve a mission for my church(more on that later). I saw him more than anyone besides coworkers and immediate family. It kinda made sense that I would start to notice these things about him. And so I started to try and drop hints, jokes, memes, anything to get him to show me his view on the LGBT community. And it worked wonderfully. He laughed at my jokes, shared some of his own, and we even talked about gay marriage rights and we both agreed that people should be allowed to marry whoever they love. The only problem was, he kinda had a girlfriend. For those of you who dont know I'm LDS, and all the youth are asked to serve missions. Males for 2 years and females for 1.5. His girlfriend/love interest had left for a mission but he still talked her all the time. It made me so nervous to bring up my feelings because I felt like he knew I was gay for him and was trying to let me down nicely by reminding me that he liked this girl. It was so frustrating. I knew he would accept me for being gay, he had a few friends that were open about it. But i didnt know if he would love me the way i loved him. And i still wanted to be friends if he didnt. I just really didnt want to make our friendship super awkward by admitting my feelings for him and driving him away. I fought with myself for weeks about this. Those weeks turned into a couple of months. We had been out of high school for a little over a year when I finally decided to break the news.