How My Crush on My Gay Best Friend Hindered Our Friendship

It took leaving Christianity for me to see the light

The author in 1985 with her cardboard double. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Weaver.

Ron came home with a bag of cassettes from Tower Records. “I found a cool-looking guy in the store,” he said. “I asked him to tell me what I should buy.” I didn’t give a second’s thought to the guy in the store. I heard “Presents.” Upstairs at Eric’s by Yaz. Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. Avalon by Roxy Music.

As he walked to the stereo with one of the cassettes, I saw Ron silhouetted in our expansive view of Lake Michigan. It was magic hour, the time of day I’d learned about in film school when the light glowed soft and romantic at dusk. As Roxy Music’s saxophone echoed off the linoleum, I watched him from my end of the sofa: sculpted face, thick dark hair with an early shock of silver. I even loved his feet. Yet I couldn’t reach over and touch them as tenderly as I wanted to do. We were just roommates, his invitation to stay just helping out a friend from church.

Also, he was gay.

Ron wasn’t the first gay person I’d known. But unlike my friends from art school, he was actively fighting it. He flat-out told me, “I came to church to be saved. Set my old life aside. More than anything else I want to marry a woman and have a family.”

Hearing those words, I felt the kind of certainty that’s only possible at 24: God had put me in his path. I was that woman.

At our church, the pastors preached that God wanted to give us everything we asked for. Didn’t that mean, for both of us, the perfect Christian family? With God, all things are possible?

Ron on his couch in 1985. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Weaver.

One afternoon, a thunderstorm brewing over the lake, he gave me his journal and asked me to read his poems. His father shouting at teenaged Ron after throwing his clothes into the driveway. Giving blowjobs to older men in their BMWs, wiping his mouth and pocketing the cash. Strung out in the sun at a bus stop wearing only a Speedo, mink coat, and cowboy boots.

I could see that Gold Coast bus stop, feel the heat of the sun. But he no longer wore a Speedo, and I didn’t see a mink coat or cowboy boots when I peeked in his closet. I also didn’t want to know these things about him. I just wanted to smell his cologne in our bathroom, keep using his shampoo, imagining he was there in the shower with me.

One evening he showed me a scar on his torso, telling me about the night he’d gotten stabbed on an El platform along the Eisenhower Expressway. I imagined how cold he must have felt as he lay there in a pool of flickering light, bleeding and shivering. I shuddered a little, but couldn’t see that this violence, random to me, was targeted at him because he was gay. I was sure if I ran my fingers along his scar, I could kiss it and make it better.

I wasn’t a virgin, but my fantasies about Ron stopped at kissing. I didn’t want to think about him having been with men since he’d said that part of his life was over. In our summery bubble above Lake Michigan, we could love each other chastely. It wasn’t living in sin if we never touched each other. Sitting in our pew at church, I could smell his scent, the mixture of cologne and laundry soap that thrilled me. I loved being on his arm. He turned heads wherever we went. If he chose me, that would mean I was special.

One evening in early August—because all my memories seemed to be evenings—Ron put on Roxy Music and asked me to dance in the space between the living room and the kitchen. I stepped into the perfect fit of his arms, feeling the strength of his biceps, the squared-off fingers of his hands.

We started to slow dance, my head on his shoulder. I didn’t dare do anything, just followed his lead, hoping against hope. I was sure he was going to kiss me. Maybe he thought he was going to kiss me. The hallway phone rang.

“Saved by the bell,” he said, as he stepped away from me.

After he went to bed that night, I lay on my rock-hard futon staring at the wall between us, longing for him so deeply that all I could do was bury my face in my pillow, muffling my sobs.

“Did I hear you crying last night?” he asked over coffee.

“No,” I lied, face hot, “maybe I was dreaming. I don’t know what you heard.”

By summer’s end, everything he’d told me, the impossibility of both our desires—his to be straight, mine to have him love me—filled the apartment like stacks of prickly boxes. It was time for me to go. When the door closed on moving day, we both exhaled. I didn’t realize how quickly we’d drift apart.

In September 1985 I started a master’s program in public health, traveling to school past the El platform where Ron had been stabbed. We learned about a virus that was killing gay men. Sitting in the fluorescent light of the classroom I worried about him, parsing my memory of his poems as the professor lectured. He couldn’t have used condoms if he was giving blowjobs. Did strung out mean he’d shot up? How much danger might he be in?

I studied him on Sunday mornings from across the church basement, looking for signs of Kaposi’s sarcoma or weight loss. But I couldn’t possibly ask if he was HIV-positive over Styrofoam cups of coffee.

By 1987, the year I finished grad school, Ron had moved out of state. One day I recognized his handwriting on a letter postmarked San Francisco. He wanted to explain everything: our summer, why he’d moved, how he was doing. He wanted me to know that he’d tried everything, even going to a Christian retreat center to “cure” his homosexuality.

“I couldn’t take more than two weeks of it, Steph. I only felt shame from them. But now I know that God made me in his own image, so God must love me exactly the way I am.”

My heart broke for him again, the hard work he’d done to come to a place of peace. Holding his letter, my soul finally understood that he was gay. He’d always been gay. Yes, he wanted kids, but he also wanted to reconnect with his family and the father who had disinherited him. My feelings for him may have been real, but they were built on a fantasy.

Five years after our Avalon summer, Ron died of AIDS while I was overseas. I didn’t even know he was sick. I missed his memorial service. I missed it all.

Ron’s death shocked me out of my dreamy relationship with Christianity. I’d seen cruelty toward him and others at church. Felt it myself as I shared my own unwelcome truth: my church-deacon father had sexually abused me as a kid.

I swapped Sunday services for working in my garden, eventually giving up church altogether. I no longer felt certainty about anything. Black-and-white believers made that more painful. Once I stepped outside the church box, I discovered a world in color. It turned out that having no answers wasn’t scary, but a beautiful relief.

Over the years I stitched Ron’s name into the AIDS Memorial Quilt, walked the labyrinth at the cathedral where his ashes rested, stood vigil after the Pulse massacre. I thought of him every October when my husband and I set up our Dia de los Muertos altar, his photo showing off his lovely eyes that crinkled at the corners when he laughed, hair silvered too early.

Thirty years after Ron died, Bryan Ferry was touring to celebrate Avalon. I bought tickets for my twentieth wedding anniversary, planning a fun night out with my husband. As he and I walked toward the venue, his hand strong in mine, the magic hour light of mid-summer bathed the city. I breathed in his aftershave, excited to share music with him that I loved.

I didn’t expect to weep through the entire concert.

I cried for Ron’s short life, for the husband and children he never had. I wept at the pressure I’d put on him to join my fantasy, realizing that I’d had the chance to know him and missed it altogether.

I never told him that I loved him exactly as he was, perfect and beautiful and gay.

My husband handed me his handkerchief in the darkened theater.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m okay.”

Stephanie Weaver, MPH is a writer and TED-style speaking coach. She's currently working on a book about family estrangement, faith, and forgiveness. She lives in Southern California with her husband and their Golden Retriever, Daisy May.