It's very hard to live up to loyalty

Nothing much has been happening lately; my computer has been broken for nearly a month so I haven't been on GMM or anything else. However I do have one small thought to recount.

I was watching a movie last night with one of my oldest and dearest friends, and in the course of our conversation he made a dismissive gay joke.

I wasn't offended - taking offense is a sign of a narrow mind, in my opinion - but it did make me sad. It drove home the realisation I've held for a while, that there's no way I'm ever going to be able to come out to him without it completely destroying our friendship. Not because he's especially homophobic, but because he'd be so devastatingly embarassed that he never knew, even after being one of my closest friends for decades.

I'm also pretty sure that he's defended me when I'm not around, if a more casual acquaintance asks "So is GTR gay or what?" I know from my own experiences how humiliating it feels to defend someone's honour against a perceived slight, only to later discover that the slight was in fact completely true and justified. You feel like a fool. You feel betrayed. You feel like everyone's laughing at your naïveté. Humiliation is a catastrophically powerful emotion, and never more so than with this particular person.

For all our closeness and reliance on each other, we interact on a very specific level. Once, a few months ago, I pushed harder than normal and forced him to reveal more of himself than he usually does, and to be honest it was a little alarming to see how emotionally messy things were beneath the calm and convivial outer shell. It's not as if he shares every single thing about his life with me. He's mentioned certain areas of his life but not really gone into the details of why these areas are as they are, and I've learned not to push him. So really, he has no objective reason to be upset if I've kept parts of my life hidden from him.

But people aren't objective, not when their feelings are on the line.