I’m an ally and couldn’t be more proud!

It’s June which means that all around the country we are celebrating graduations, the onset of summer and Pride. My town, to commemorate our commitment to Pride, did an amazing thing last week: we were the first town in New Jersey to paint a permanent rainbow crosswalk. We join a handful of cities around the country, like Philadelphia, San Francisco and West Hollywood, to show their pride for the LGBTQ community. Our community has been heading in this direction for years as one of the first to embrace same-sex marriage, the host of the state’s largest Pride festival and proclamation after proclamation in support of diversity and inclusion.

Let me just say that I am not gay. I am married to a man and we have two straight sons. Nonetheless, when my husband and I chose to move here nearly 20 years ago, one of things that captured my attention was the community’s commitment to inclusion. We escaped an upper middle class community that was frighteningly homogenous. I was committed to ensuring that my children did not grow up surrounded by the same single mindedness that my husband and I had. While I knew we could not shield them from racism and bigotry forever, the goal was to provide them with enough foundational experiences to help them learn tolerance and appreciate difference. Fortunately, my sons have grown up with friends of all races, with two moms, two dads, adopted siblings, single gay parents, you name it.

While I am not a member, the LGBTQ community has always been near to my heart and I’ve enjoyed a beautiful kaleidoscope of friends. Perhaps because of my career or living in NYC or because I, in my own ways, gravitated outside the traditional lines, I have been known to surround myself with a squad of gay pals. I’m not a fag hag (I really loathe that term). I’m an ally. One of my gay besties gave me a rainbow necklace last year for my birthday. He jokingly refers to it as my ally necklace and it is one of my most treasured items. I am so proud to be adjacent to the LGBTQ community and I’m passionate about advancing equality. Of course, I appreciate that I can never understand the struggles and challenges that my friends have endured in their journeys to come out and find acceptance. However, I suppose my own difficulties of feeling unconventional and, often, unaccepted, provide me with an empathetic lens.

In honor of Pride and, in the best way I know how, I am sharing my story of one of my gay best friends to showcase the power of difference and how some of the most unconventional relationships, that we can’t always understand or explain, provide us the greatest dividends.

I have a gay best friend.

Apparently, it has become something of a chic accessory to have one. In 2010, Teen Vogue called GBF’s the hottest fashion accessory. GBFs are listed in the Urban Dictionary as every guy’s gateway to getting a hot girl. However, for me, not being all that trendy and definitely too old to be “of the moment”, my GBF is by no means an accessory. Instead, he is a blessing for which I am very grateful.

Throughout my life, and especially over the past decade, I have developed a rep for being the woman with all the gay friends. I’m proud of this moniker and I selfishly love it because I adore and cherish my circle of gay pals. Admittedly, I have never actually understood my own affinity or affection for these relationships so I decided to do some research to help clarify this phenomenon for myself. I asked a number of my gay friends, particularly my gay bestie, to explain what the attraction is and I’ve received intriguing, yet inconclusive responses. Ultimately, I developed my own hypothesis. Aside from being very direct and probably a bit too snarky (read “bitchy”), which stereotypically makes for a great gal pal for any gay man, I seem to have an indescribable quality that draws these guys to me. Unlike the stereotypes that exist on TV and in the movies, I do not see my gay male friends as simply cute guys with great fashion sense who enjoy going shopping with me. Rather, these relationships have depth and, in some cases, far greater depth than those I have with women. Especially with my GBF, I feel like I’ve established a deep level of vulnerability and am accepted in a non-judgmental, non-competitive way. And, I suspect, the appeal for them is similar. We are all looking for appreciation and acceptance.

Growing up, the female dynamic in my family was very triangulated between my mother, my sister and me. An unhealthy competitive environment was established early resulting in my sister and me vying for my narcissist mother’s attention. I never developed a healthy sense of self and that challenged my friendships with girls. My early experiences with girls left me feeling like a misfit. Even into adulthood I felt like I was missing some girl gene that was required to navigate the complexity of female relationships. In grade school and middle school, I endured bullying from other girls and I tended to gravitate towards the boys who felt safer and kinder (before sexuality came into play, of course). In middle school, when other girls were focused heavily on attracting boys, I was late to figure things out and stuck it out in the friend zone. Plus, I was rarely the object of teenage boys’ adoration being a little chubby and a four-eyed nerd. I was literally the archetypal fat girl that was the ideal best friend of everyone in the outsiders club. Enter the very-deeply-in-the-closet gay boys. It was the 1980s and still not safe for teenagers to come clean about their sexual preferences, especially in my neighborhood in Queens. Not a single boy that I was close to in middle or high school was out of the closet yet today, so many of them are. As an adult, the joke became if you were a male friend of mine as a teenager and you were currently living a straight life, it was only a matter of time before you came out. (Note: If any of you are reading this now, relax. I’m fairly confident I have unearthed all of the closeted gay men lingering in my life. A few straight ones actually managed to squeak past me.) In hindsight, I’m confident that many of the boys with whom I developed friendships in my teens gravitated towards me because they implicitly understood that I was someone who would never judge them. I suspect it was a part of the fabric of our beings, part of the signals that we gave off, that we found those connections. As my GBF will tell you, Like likes Like. We got each other.

Naturally, those relationships were sometimes confusing to me. I don’t know that I fully understood the unspoken boundaries. Not having the sophistication of an adult, I didn’t have the clarity that these boys were bonding with me like a port in a storm. I provided a safe haven because I never put any pressure on them to see me as a romantic partner. The truth is I was struggling with my own self-worth and couldn’t possibly articulate to myself, or anyone else, any romantic expectations. Our parallel struggles made us extraordinary emotional counterparts. Yet, I’d be lying if I did not admit that, in some cases, especially when I got older, I began to question why the relationships never evolved into romance. But, my strong sense of self-deprecation provided me the assurance that the fault lied with me. I was undesirable. I never even considered the alternative. Therefore, their secrets were safe with me because I was clueless.

These sublime relationships provided incredible emotional intimacy — something that was so lacking in my life growing up. I felt loved and nurtured. Unconsciously, I was seeking unconditional love and it was coming at me in abundance. As I got older and started seeking physical intimacy, these perfect relationships grew more challenging and confusing. My reliance on my gay friends for emotional support had spoiled me. It was hard to find similar connections with the men I dated. I was convinced I would never find that perfect combination in a romantic partner and would be sentenced to a lifetime of loneliness. What I didn’t know then but learned later on is that this is a common dynamic that exists in many gay men/straight women relationships. When done right, they fill very unique and powerful needs in the other. However, they also can leave the women feeling abandoned and lost. Thankfully, I figured out my path and was fortunate enough to enjoy the fruits of my relationships with my gay friends and develop a romantic relationship with a partner.

In an article about the power of relationships between gay men and straight women, John R. Ballew, a professional counselor from Atlanta, suggests that “from the perspective of gay men, women offer intimate friendship that is generally free from the complications of sexual interest. For straight women, gay men offer male friendship that’s free from game playing. Women can relax and be themselves with gay men in a way that’s usually not possible with hetero men.” There is a real phenomenon between some gay men and some straight women that is unlike any other relationship. It allows for a level of emotional intimacy that often gets marred in a physical relationship. This has certainly been true for me.

While my early life was a tapestry of extraordinary gay men, I found myself painted inside a very different landscape after marriage and the arrival of my children. In fact, when I met my GBF, it had been years since I had enjoyed such a relationship. Over the years, many of us took different pathways and it became more challenging to bridge the gap. I worked hard on my marriage and was focused on having and raising children. I had changed. The voids in my life that initially led me to many of my gay friends were now filled in other ways. My needs were different and there was not as much fertile soil to cultivate those bonds. When my GBF entered my life, I was caught a bit off guard. Admittedly, I was at a bit of a crossroads. After 20 years in publishing, I was amidst a career change. My kids were now in school, developing their own lives and friendships and required less of my attention. My marriage, well into its second decade, was running a bit on autopilot. I was probably heading into a rut. But, unlike when I was younger, I was not necessarily seeking out a deep emotional connection. My intentions were more focused on finding allies to walk beside me in my journey. My GBF, at first glance, seemed like a good candidate to join me. We met through work, he was open and interesting and, most importantly, he made me laugh. Yet, I never imagined when we met that our friendship would ever come close to blossoming into the type of relationship I had with my gay male friends as a young girl. I just saw him as a fun pal. Our lives could not be more different with him a Kansas boy living in the midwest. At the time, he was single and he had no children. We were living at opposite ends of life’s spectrum and, perhaps, that was the secret sauce. I had become so closed off to people outside my immediate world. For so many years, my focus had been devoted to my marriage, family and career. My other relationships were either somehow aligned to the kids or my husband or my community. There wasn’t a lot of room for much else and I certainly had no expectations of anything different. But, what makes my relationship with GBF so endearing, conformity to expectation is out the window. The improbability of our relationship is one of the things that makes it so delightful and enduring. Unlike the secrecy that existed with my gay friends in childhood, we were both open and clear about our lives and yet the same connection that adhered me to boys in my youth showed up once again with my new friend. We were outsiders in our own ways and found that what made us different, made us so perfectly suited for one another. Despite my belief that our relationship would consist of being great work pals, along with my reluctance to invest in anything more, he quickly and furiously furrowed in and become an essential part of my life and family. No one was more surprised than me because it had been a long time since I let anyone get that close to me. With him living 1000 miles away and only visiting NYC once every few months at best, I couldn’t imagine how we could bridge the distance or lifestyle gap. Yet, we did. And our connection and relationship has endured for many years as both of our lives have continually changed and evolved.

In the years since we became friends I stopped questioning why or how. And, I also gave up on studying my renewed connections with my other gay friends. In the end, what I know to be true is that blessings come in the form of people. And, I am blessed. We are who we are and while we may look like a trendy fad to the outside world, our friendships are pure and meaningful and impact our lives in the most wonderful ways. So today (and everyday), I am grateful for my renewed tapestry. I appreciate and value that my people represent every color of the rainbow.

We are are allies and all better off because of it.