A Friend’s Bonfire

I always wonder, if my current sat down and chatted with my past self (like maybe from 7 or 8 months ago), who would slap the other person first?

I went to the bonfire last Saturday thinking that I could have some fun, but not enough to make time unexpectedly fly by fast. Generally nowadays, I have fun going to gay functions, so I don’t know why having fun still surprises me.

When I arrived at the bonfire, there was about two and a half hours left before 9, the official start time. Cameron was there with about ten other friends saving a bonfire pit, and we all chilled. There was some pleasant guitar and some banter and some getting to know each other. I liked that. It’s more chill and easier to get to know people when there aren’t like a million homos drunk off their asses. I didn’t stay for the drinking, and I don’t know what I would’ve thought of the bonfire overall if I had. Though I can say from experience that drunk gay guys aren’t that bad either.

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“Life Savers”
Written June 9th, 2009 (Excerpted)
Dear Cameron,
When we first met each other at move-in week, we knew right off the bat that we didn’t like each other that much. I saw your rainbow studded belt and a million other happy happy gay pride accessories and dismissed you as another flaming gay (which you are), and you saw me and my very dull and unexciting personality and dismissed me as an overly straight guy in denial (which I am).

But we grew acquainted, enough so that I asked you to come along with me on a random trip to the Asian Garden Mall in Westminster so I could relive a bit of my childhood. From there, we started building our friendship. We became good friends. Probably not as much as you and Charles or you and Bryan or you and San Francisco, but whether or not you really know it, you’ve had some profound effects on my life.

[…]

The other, even bigger effect you’ve had on me, I haven’t really realized it until recently. When I came to college, I really had this whole “Fuck you” ideology and mentality about the 95% of gay guys who didn’t meet my extremely high standards of tolerable. Between the two teams, Team Anti-Gay and Team Pro-Gay, I played a pretty weird role. I didn’t really play in a team at all. I was sometimes with the gays, and sometimes I wasn’t. I took pride in where I stood outside the gay community. I stood there as someone different from the rest, someone who was more of an individual and who was more rational. (I’m not saying that the gay community isn’t full of individuals. I just had this thought that I could be even more individualistic by not being part of a certain community.) But you came along, and in less than two (academic) quarters, you tore down an ideology that I had been developing for over two years. Through you, I realized that the role I was playing—no matter how much pride I took in playing it—it was nonetheless a lonely role.