Fridae

My childhood friend and partner in crime deflated my great coming-out speech at the tender age of sixteen by coming out to me first. I suppose it was understandable that we had become friends. We could sense that we were both different and found mutual comfort in our isolation from the in-crowds. And with a wicked sense of humour that bounced off each other, we actually ended up being quite the toast of the town.

Eamonn was and remains dashingly handsome with delicate white skin, naturally flushed cheeks and cheekbones to die for, as well as full red lips and eyes like jade. His thick head of black hair was always perfectly coiffed and there was a smile on his face and a sparkle in his eye most of the day. And he was very generous with his sexual favours. Simply put he was the town bike: everyone had had a ride on him.

Like a lot of gay men we lived exclusively in a gay world, socializing in gay bars, eating at gay restaurants, using gay businesses whenever possible and reading only gay-themed books and magazines.

We attended every pride march we could get to, and Eamonn was particularly vocal in his defense of gay rights. I remember him throwing eggs at Ian Paisley when he visited our hometown. Paisley had spearheaded the "Keep Sodomy Out Of Ulster" campaign in the early 1980s when the British government finally de-criminalized consensual gay sex between men over 21. And you thought the West was progressive...

So imagine my shock, nay consternation, one day when I found Eamonn playing tonsil hockey with a WOMAN on St. Stephen's Green in central Dublin. I stopped, did a double take and then dashed behind a tree to avoid being seen.

There was no mistaking it: it was Eamonn and he was all over his female companion, even fondling her breast under her sweater. Eamonn had been acting strangely for a few weeks, standing me up on numerous occasions and not going out on Saturday nights (a cardinal sin in the gay catechism). Now I could see why. Eamonn had done the unthinkable and gone straight!

Now I consider myself to be an understanding and open-minded person, but when confronted by Eamonn's new-found heterosexuality, I had to admit to being prejudiced.

Gay men and lesbians feel that their suffering before they came out automatically turns them into liberals who empathize with every oppressed group. The sad truth is that we are just as reactionary and conservative as the wider world.

When Eamonn finally came out to me for the second time in his life, I found myself paying lip-service to tolerance, but feeling deep down that he had betrayed me. I did not recognize my dear friend any more and felt that our whole friendship had been a lie.

It took lots of soul-searching and long drunken conversations with Eamonn before I could meet his girlfriend, and only recently have I been able to fully accept him as straight. That's right: it's not just a phase.

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But my reaction was mild compared to that of the rest of our friends. Eamonn became a pariah overnight. He stopped getting invitations to parties, people would blank him on the street and he even started receiving hate mail and crank calls. And the bitchy comments behind evil geisha hands became too much to bear. I slapped a few faces and dressed a couple of particularly nasty offenders in gin and tonic in the months after the word spread round the scene.

For someone as gay as Eamonn - gay to the very core, or so we thought - to say he was no longer one of us was an attack on our identity. If someone as gay as Eamonn could turn straight, then who would be next? It was like Night of the Living Dead.

The truth, of course, is that Eamonn was not against us. Our instinctive heterophobia dictates that all straight people are prejudiced against us, which is why we often restrict ourselves to gay spaces and gay friends.

We should have been able to identify with him more than straight people. We have lived in closets, and experienced the liberation of coming out and then the joys and pains of the gay scene. Eamonn was going through this all over again. Only this time he was in fact experiencing the negative reactions that kept us in our closets as children; but they didn't happen when we came out as gay.

Both of us found nothing but love and acceptance that time. Now the very people that could understand what Eamonn was going through were the ones that turned their backs on him.

He really hated being labeled as bisexual. Once he met Jenny he had become exclusively heterosexual and was no longer sexually attracted to men. He admitted to me that he had lost interest in men about a year before that, but was too confused to know why. Jenny had cleared that confusion up.

We have all heard the heated debates on nature versus nurture, and when someone like Eamonn comes along to flip the bird at the nature debate, fundamental beliefs are called into question. And some people deal with that by trying to ignore the evidence and pretending that it doesn't exist.

Eamonn told me that being ostracized by his gay friends was the worst thing for him. He had never really lived in a straight world and felt very out of place among his grilfriend's friends. She knew that he had been gay and had told her friends, but if Eamonn had a penny for every time they asked him what it was like being bisexual, he would be a rich man. They didn't really know how to treat him as his jokes were all about cocks and assholes, and he was very effeminate.

Campier than a row of pink tents in fact. Those friends also slowly disappeared and stopped calling. Eamonn was now almost totally alone. I was the only one that stood by him, and I wasn't 100-percent sure that I could cope with his new life.

Now that I am finally able to accept Eamonn for what he is, our friendship has grown stronger. Eamonn still goes to gay bars with me, and is now seen by our new group of friends as a straight man who enjoys the company of gay men. They have all met Jenny and were the guests of honor at their wedding - and baby Mihail has six godfathers and one fairy godmother.