Koinonia

I should just call this blog "friendship", but I'm being fancy. The two words don't really mean the same thing, but there is kind of a tangential connection between koinonia and friendship, and if you don't know what the former word means, just google it.

I have written many letters and many blog entries discussing the subject of friendship, and if anyone who has read a fraction of these decided they wanted to puke or hang themselves if they had to read anymore, I would understand. It's just that, this is my big Life Issue, the thing I have struggled with more than anything else, and at 36 years old, I still haven't gotten the answers I've been looking for to the questions that still haunt me: What is friendship? How do you form lasting ones? Can you choose your friends or do they choose you...or does God choose them for you? Why do these wonderful relationships end?

I want to talk about some of the greatest days and nights of my life. I had a huge crush on somebody for a long, long time. All through high school in fact, and into college. We were acquaintances and sometimes partners on class projects, but we didn't hang out. There was a mutual respect, but for some reason I never had the nerve to try and turn our casual acquaintance into a friendship. Well, after 5 years of this, I finally got up the nerve to just talk to him about how I felt. I knew he was straight, so there was no possibility of a love connection, but I was hoping that we could form a significant friendship bond that would last. The setting for this conversation was the grounds of Clackamas Community College after hours. I had just seen my first play, Minority Status Quo, be performed for the final time. It was Thursday, June 1, 1995. We talked for hours and he was so amazing and kind, as we just walked around the campus that warm summer night. Basically he said, "In my mind, we were already friends." It would have been perfect had it not been for the fact that he was moving away (to a four year college) and I was staying put. I grieved over hundreds of missed opportunities to hang out, but that one star-filled night...It was so good that it almost made up for all that. And it almost made up for the hell that would follow as the friendship took a nosedive weeks later, and I became, for a few months, the worst person I've ever been. But that one night, June 1, 1995, brothers and sisters, I experienced paradise.

Of course, when paradise is lost, you think you can never gain it back again, but you can, if only briefly. In 2001, I became friends with someone who was more like me than anyone I had ever known...Well, that may not exactly be the case because he was like me in certain ways (he was gay and an aspiring filmmaker) and not like me in others (he was decidedly NOT spiritual). I also had a crush on him, but he was taken, so I had to get used to that fact. We spent lots of time together though, just hanging out and talking, watching movies. One night I was house-sitting for a friend and he came over, and it was kind of a slumber party. We drank a lot and read each other's scripts and watched movies, and then he offered to sleep with me...not have sex, but sleep next to me, with an occasional arm around me. He said he knew there was a void in my life (affection, intimacy, whatever), and he wanted to fill that void that night. So we slept, and here was somebody who really cared about me. And that was heaven.

One of the first gay guys I ever met was at CCC in...oh, I think it was '93, but maybe it was '94. His name was Greg. There was this gay and lesbian support group that met on a weekly basis and there were only a few of us there, and he was one of them. We hung out a couple times, he took me to Hobo's a gay restaurant in Portland, I slept over at his place. We cuddled in bed together, but that's all. Though our relationship wasn't sexual, he was like my initiation into all things gay, cos I had really been sheltered all my life. Now I really wish I could find Greg, I'd love to talk to him.

Meeting gay friends is a challenge living where I live. I don't go to bars. And what's more, since I've made a new commitment to Christ, it's hard for me approach gay guys cos I'm worried that if I'm honest about my faith, they'll reject me. Likewise, if I am trying to make Christian friends and am honest about my sexuality, they will reject me. So now the difficult issue of friendship that I've struggled with all my life is even more difficult than ever.

I don't know how many in the church I go to know I'm gay. I think most Christian guys feel threatened, like if I reach out to them, it means I want to sleep with them. Not true. Why would they assume that? Do they think I'm just a sinner and can't be a real Christian? Do they think I can't possibly have anything to offer them? What am I supposed to do?

When I was working at the store, I tried to make friends with a lot of the younger guys. It's not merely because I was attracted to them, it's because I really felt like I had more in common with them than the middle aged people who worked there. I feel young at heart. But I think people are prejudiced concerning age. They just assume that you can't relate to someone 15 years older than you. I admit that such a friendship would be unusual, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with that. I think in our society we just put these strange arbitrary limits on our lifestyles, that we have to act a certain way, be friends with only a certain group of people, never stray out of the ordinary. And for someone like me who has NEVER been ordinary, well...You can see the problem.