There are questions you learn, fairly quickly, not to answer when you live in England.
“You alright, mate?”
“Yeah, you?”
Done.
It is a greeting. Not a request for clinical documentation.
One day I made the mistake of answering properly.
“Yeah… not great, to be honest. Got a few things going on.”
I had not asked for money.
I had not asked for a kidney.
I had not even announced that I intended to spend the next six hours explaining, in chronological order, everything that had gone wrong since 1987.
I had simply answered the question.
And yet something changed.
I have often thought that How are you? works beautifully as long as nobody expects it to actually mean how are you?
Perhaps the word friendship sometimes works in much the same way.
We use it a lot.
Mate. Friend. Darling. Love.
After enough drinks, family may even appear, which is always touching considering we may not yet know the other person’s surname.
Then Tuesday arrives.
And Tuesday is an excellent editor of Saturday-night friendships.
Some do not survive the first draft.
An expensive word
For me, friendship has always been a demanding word.
It does not simply mean knowing someone.
It does not mean drinking together.
It does not mean knowing who they slept with.
It does not even mean telling each other intimate things at four in the morning.
For me, it means being allowed to give the wrong answer.
“How are you?”
“Not good.”
And not immediately seeing the other person look for the emergency exit.
I have not had many deep friendships with gay men.
That is a fact about my life, not an accusation.
And over time I began to wonder why.
The small geopolitics of desire
One thing I have noticed is that, between gay men, friendship and desire can occupy the same room.
The man who might become your friend also belongs to the same erotic universe.
You might fancy him.
He might fancy you.
He might fancy your partner.
You might fancy his.
That is already four questions too many before the coffee arrives.
Over the years I have even developed my own little social mathematics, entirely without academic value but remarkably resistant to experience.
Two tops and one bottom?
Potential international cooperation.
Two bottoms and one top?
Cold War.
No one officially declares hostilities.
Everyone smiles.
“Darling, you look amazing.”
But somewhere the missiles have already been moved towards the border.
Of course I am joking.
Or at least enough.
There is no serious research proving that tops and bottoms choose friends according to some sexual Yalta agreement.
A shame.
It would make the apps considerably easier.
But I have watched desire change the temperature of a room often enough to wonder about it.
Then the fourth arrives.
New entry.
Unidentified.
No one is entirely sure who invited him.
No one wants to be the one who is not sufficiently open-minded.
“Of course, darling.”
And that is precisely when the controlled demolition of the evening can begin.
Expectations rise.
The possible combinations multiply.
Alliances shift.
What seemed perfectly sufficient ten minutes earlier is suddenly under review.
And I keep asking myself one very simple thing:
If getting bingo with two people is already difficult, why do we feel the need to turn the evening into a casting call?
Two people who like each other already possess enough equipment to fail magnificently on their own.
A guest star is not always necessary.
The problem, obviously, is not being open-minded.
People should live sex, desire and relationships however they choose.
The problem starts when open-minded becomes an elegant way of saying:
I do not want to give up any possibility, even if that means no longer seeing the one already in front of me.
No drama, please
And sometimes the person in front of you is not even a lover.
It is a friend.
A real one.
The one who has known you for years.
The one who answered the phone when you were struggling.
The one who has seen you without the profile, the gym, the filter or the Platinum Card.
Then someone you do not know walks into the room.
Handsome.
Very handsome.
New entry.
And a relationship built over years can suddenly be put at risk for someone whose surname you did not know fifteen minutes ago.
It is remarkable.
Not necessarily in a good way.
Because often the friend is not even asked how he feels.
It is assumed he will understand.
Because he is a friend.
And perhaps that is one of the cruellest ironies of the whole thing:
we ask for understanding from precisely the person we are putting aside.
Then, if he points it out, the magic formula arrives.
“No drama, please.”
Extraordinary sentence.
It can turn a lack of consideration into a character flaw in the person who noticed it.
First I put you aside.
Then, if you notice, you are dramatic.
No drama, please.
Of course.
No drama.
Just a small emotional demolition, carried out with excellent manners.
Perhaps the problem is not drama at all.
Perhaps some people want relationships without consequences.
Desire without responsibility.
Intimacy without presence.
Friendship without ever having to account for how they treat the other person.
The Platinum Card
And this is where status comes in.
I have known men who were discussed as though they were listed securities.
The beautiful one.
The one who was masculine in exactly the right way.
The one with the right body.
The one everyone wanted.
You heard about him for weeks.
Photos. Messages. Performance. Measurements. Neighbourhood. Gym.
Sometimes you possessed information his GP probably did not have.
Then you would say:
“Why don’t you bring him along one night?”
And privacy regulations would suddenly come into force.
I have always found that fascinating.
Some people are perfectly happy to show you the trophy, as long as the trophy remains inside the screen.
Maybe it is jealousy.
Maybe fear of comparison.
Maybe insecurity.
I cannot know what is happening in somebody else’s head.
But sometimes I wondered whether we were no longer talking about a person.
We were talking about a conquest.
Research has found something that makes this impression feel less solitary. A study by John Pachankis and colleagues on what they call intra-minority gay community stress identified four recurring areas of perceived pressure among gay and bisexual men: sex, status, competition and exclusion. Concerns around attractiveness, masculinity and social standing can become sources of pressure within the same community. The study is available here.
It does not prove that “gay men are like this”.
It shows something much more interesting:
a group that knows exclusion well is not automatically immune from creating new forms of it.
Desire can become currency.
Bronze.
Silver.
Gold.
Platinum.
And then, apparently, there is Centurion.
Do not ask me about the requirements.
I am afraid I may know them.
The problem with rankings is that even when you reach number one, you keep watching the scoreboard.
The more people want you, the more valuable you feel.
The more valuable you feel, the more you need to know they still want you.
And at that point you are no longer simply experiencing desire.
You are protecting a valuation.
Perhaps that is also why we sometimes risk real friendships for temporary possibilities.
Desire has a particular talent: it presents itself as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Friendship, because it is usually there, can begin to feel like something we can postpone.
Until one day it is not there anymore.
The hacked copy
Then there is another layer.
Drugs.
I do not want to demonise them.
And I have no interest in judging people who use them.
That would be hypocritical: for a period of my life, I knew that world from the inside too.
And that is exactly why I know how real it can feel.
The laughter is real.
The desire is real.
The people are real.
Even some of the emotions are real.
But everything can become amplified.
Sexuality.
Jealousy.
The need to belong.
The desire to be chosen.
The confessions.
The feeling that you know deeply someone you met only hours earlier.
The chemsex literature describes, among the motivations reported by some men, pleasure, disinhibition, escape, increased self-esteem, socialisation and relief from loneliness. That does not mean every use becomes problematic or produces the same outcome. It means that connection and vulnerability can also be part of the picture. One review of the literature is available here.
The substance therefore does not necessarily invent the need.
It can give the need a perfect environment in which to grow.
And looking back, that gives me an image.
While you are inside, that world feels like reality.
Same people.
Same cities.
Same rooms.
Same phones.
Only after stepping away do you sometimes realise that something in the code had been altered.
It was a hacked copy of reality.
The sandcastle
And inside that copy, you build.
Nights.
Connections.
Secrets.
Acquaintances.
One person after another.
Until it begins to feel like a house.
Then you leave.
And you discover that some of what looked like concrete was wet sand.
Not because everything had been false.
But because once you removed what held the structure together, it began to collapse.
A sandcastle.
And after the collapse, there is not necessarily someone waiting for you.
Some of the people who belonged to the world you left no longer know what to do with you.
Some of those who were never part of it know enough about your past to judge you.
And you can end up in a strange position.
You no longer belong to the first world.
But the second has not made room for you yet.
That is a form of loneliness I know.
I do not write these things because I think I understand them all.
I write them because some of them only made sense after they hurt.
There are experiences that, once they are over, we would like to erase.
I do not want to erase this part of my life.
I am neither proud of it nor ashamed of it.
It belongs to me.
It showed me how badly we can want to be chosen, how easily we can confuse intensity with intimacy, and how painful it is to discover that some people were close only while we belonged to the same world.
But it also taught me to recognise more clearly who stays.
Who stays
And that is why I now think genuine friendship is something even rarer and more precious.
A real friend does not have to approve of everything you have done.
They do not have to turn every past choice into the right one.
But they do not use what you tell them as evidence against you.
They do not take the most vulnerable part of your story and use it to decide which corner of the room you deserve.
They know you for who you are today.
Some people want to know where you come from so they can decide what you are worth.
Others ask because they want to understand the journey better.
Those are the ones who, sometimes, become friends.
Perhaps we cannot change an entire community.
“The gay community”, after all, is an enormous phrase for millions of people who often share little more than being attracted to the same sex.
It is not a block of flats.
We cannot call an extraordinary residents’ meeting and vote jealousy out by 10.30 p.m.
But we can decide which relationships we are prepared to call friendship.
For me, the word is expensive now.
A friend is not necessarily the person you go out with every Saturday.
Not the person who knows the most details about your sex life.
Not the one who tells you at four in the morning how much they love you.
It is the person in front of whom you do not have to protect your valuation.
You can be desirable.
Invisible.
Sober.
Boring.
Fragile.
You can have a past that does not make everyone comfortable.
You can even give the wrong answer.
“You alright, mate?”
“Not great, to be honest.”
The difference will be very simple.
This time, someone will stay.