I Write Letters

Dear Teen Vogue:

I had a gay best friend in high school. We are still friends now and I still LHLAS.

We became friends when I was a girl of 15, and he was a closeted gay boy of 14, a friendship formed in the discovery that we shared a peculiar and ironic sense of humor, back in the age of the dinosaurs when irony wasn't cool and was damning evidence of vulnerability, rather than an advertisement of indifference. There only needed to be one other person in a school of 3,000 who knew down to his bones what I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar really means to make the world perfect, and I found him, or he found me, and so it was.

Todd and I were two peas in a pod, attached at the hip, like-minded misfits in mail-order t-shirts and Doc Martens, whose collective nirvana was making light-headed pilgrimages to Wax Trax records to browse their dusty bins for long-awaited releases or rare bootlegs, shuffling among the other angsty shoegazers there for the same purpose. We dyed our hair and graffitied our leather jackets with images of the deities—The Smiths, The Cure, Siouxsie. Our tribe. We staked out our place among them and locked arms.

We've now known and loved each other longer than we lived on this earth without our friendship—and we have been there fast and hard for each other through difficult things that lesser friendships would not have weathered. He came out; I was raped; we have both fallen in and out of love, sometimes in spectacularly heartbreaking fashion, including with one another; and we have seen each other in both good times and bad as our worst and best selves.

Our intertwined lives have left me with indelible memories of all the things we've done as a duo—writing an underground paper, writing a shitty screenplay, writing shitty songs, making silly movies, going to university together, living together, working together, vacationing together, attending innumerable concerts together, celebrating our 9-days-apart birthdays, marching in Pride parades, seeing thousands of films, eating thousands of meals, getting drunk, doing drugs, hanging out, wasting time, shopping, swimming, singing along to The Smiths at the top of our lungs, spending nights talking 'til dawn, laughing until we are gasping for air and swearing we shall never recover.

One of the things we have never done is treat one another like accessories.

It would be a lie to say that Todd's being gay didn't matter to me; it always mattered, primarily insomuch as anyone who dared to treat him as less than because of it was clobbered with the blunt end of my ire. And we may, in an indirect way, have become friends because he is gay, which gives him a particular perspective on the world that informs many of the things I like about him, and trust about him.

But I did not collect him like a trading card. And I was not friends with him because friendships with women are somehow more difficult. I am still friends with my female BFF, who I've known since we were 11, too.

That you would even pose the question "Is a GBF (Gay Best Friend) the New Must-Have Accessory for Teen Girls?" appalls me. That you would insert an editor's note trying to justify such unmitigated horseshit by asserting "Friendships with other girls—even the healthiest and most supportive of relationships—are always a teeny bit complicated" fills me with contempt.

And the truth is, if my friendship with Todd hadn't had some "teeny complications" over the course of two decades, I don't guess it would have been much of a friendship.

Sincerely,
Liss