Feeling Too Deeply – Is It A Gay Thing?

For as long as I can remember, emotions have run very deep within me.  An event or incident that other guys seem to dismiss without a second thought will profoundly affect me for days, months, even years.  I think this well of emotions colors my world and is a significant part of what makes me so different.  I can recall loving to visit my distant friends when I was in my 20s, but dreading the loneliness that leaving them would bring.  I would quite literally cry for some time on my long drives home because of it.

While I continue to grasp tightly at friendships, over the last few years it has dawned on me how old friends have moved on with their lives.  And while I remain their friend, it is in a warm, good memory way which by happy circumstance occasionally results in an e-mail, phone call or even visit.  It seems now to me that their approach is that my contacts with them are “all well and good, but now back to the wife, the kids, my calling and life.”

How could I read things so very wrong?  How is it that I have spent the better part of 40 years totally oblivious to my true role in their lives?  While it sounds very egotistical, I come by it honestly:  How could I be so convinced that I would be a significant and important part of their lives forever?  I’m not a stupid man.  In fact, many would say I tend toward the more intelligent.  But on this issue, I have been so profoundly clueless.

As reality has dawned on me and I have pondered the issue, I wonder how much being gay has to do with it.  I do think being alone, not having a family, makes me more able to focus on friends.  But that’s not it entirely, or even mostly.  I think it has a lot to do with the same thing that makes me gay.  I am drawn to these friends.  I feel an emotional bound, even where there isn’t even the most remote sexual interest.

I also think that, in some instances, what I thought (or at least wanted to believe) were “brotherly” feelings were often crushes that I couldn’t, or simply wouldn’t, recognize as such.  For instance, I can think of several individuals in high school who I now see my attractions for.  I think, in fact, at least one of them may well have been gay and might just have reciprocated my feelings.  I base this on some physical contact between us that, while not at all sexual, carried an certain charge to it that I’m sure he felt. 

Further evidence with respect to another friend comes from this September 25, 1984 journal entry, with the name changed to protect the innocent:

Donald came over for a while tonight . . . We have a special bond that’s hard to explain.  I really do love that guy . . . He’s so special to me.  He told me he loves me tonight . . . This is the kind of love only best friends could understand.

Now Donald is not gay.  I would bet money on that.  But he had a good heart and took pity on a slightly older, extremely geeky and obviously lonely boy.  And I do think that he had  genuine affection for me.  But I see clearly now what I could see only darkly, and certainly could not admit, then.  I was in love.  Puppy love.  A pure and simple teenage crush that people would “ah shucks” if it wasn’t for its focus on another boy.

I wish I had embraced that part of me.  And understood the longing and deep emotions for what they were.  I realize, of course, the impossibility of doing so as a timid, Mormon teenage boy in the early and middle 1980s.  But, still I wish….

I am grateful, on the other hand, that I understand it now.

What I’m most curious about is, was I alone?  Anyone else experience the same things?  Or continue to experience them today?