Born This Way

My Best Friend

Organisers Note: This story and all stories hence forth are among the top 10 stories but have not been ranked. Happy Reading!

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My Best Friend

My best friend is a capitalist whore.

I've known him for more than half a decade now and we bicker and argue more than an old married couple.

There are days when I hate him from all my heart and days when I love him from the same.

Two years ago my best friend came out to my friends and I. Upon learning he was gay, naturally we all saw him differently at first.

A thick veil of homosexuality had dampened all his other more finer personality traits, and it risked our relationship with him to easily become one of those where he became "the gay best friend."

Our relationship with him could have become nothing more than gay jokes and stereotyping and generalizing and oversimplification.

And if he had only been out with us, or if he was the only non-straight person we had stayed in contact with, it would've probably stayed that way.

Over the following two years however, we saw him learn to exist more freely and openly whenever he was with people he had come out to, and we watched him find like-minded and even different-minded people from the community who supported him and he in turn supported them.

It wasn't until we had experienced love that was without restrictions, relationships that were allowed to grow and flourish without pretense, including mine with my best friend, that I learned just how important a healthy environment is for people to express their sexual or emotional identity.

It's not that coming out to so many people as gay turned him into a different person. It's that coming out finally allowed him to become the person he always was.

That fact that he was always meant to become a capitalist whore is less than ideal, but when he's your best friend, so you kinda learn to accept it. And that's really the point of this whole thing, the fact that a person belongs to the community does not make him only that thing, it does not overshadow everything else he is as a person and it does not invalidate your relationship with him.

It only adds to his life, and yours in a positive way, so there's nothing to be scared of. Just accept it as the normal thing it is — and I personally can't wait for the day when people gawk and gasp at my best friend and instead of saying, "he's that gay guy", they say, "he's that capitalist whore."

-Pushkar Mankar