Stan

Stan is my best friend. We first met when we were doing our military service three years ago. He's the kind of guy everybody likes, he's very open, speaks to everyone, jokes a lot about everything, and he's also definitely handsome! A lot of people know him as a "party-animal" who knows everyone and is cool, but as we became closer and closer, I learnt to know him in a different way. He's really sensitive, he has some problems and take a lot of things a lot more seriously that one could think. He's often moody. After a short period we became really good friends and we deeply trust each other now. I think he tells me things he never tells, or told anyone else. We have had a very similar life, in our childhood, with our parents, we both were kidnapped by fake pirats that have a boat on the lake (and as we were only four or five years old we really were scared because we were thinking it was true ones)...

Last year he had some psychological issues, he went into depression, and tried to hide it to his other friends, he was having a lot of anxiety attacks and didn't know how to deal with it. I noticed it was something wrong (he sometimes called me during the week at 1 am...) and he told me about it and I tried to do my best to help him. He's better now and could stop taking drugs a few month ago. He's been having a girlfriend for some month, who is really nice and he's very happy with her.

He invited me to eat at his place a few weeks ago, while his girlfriend was in Brazil to visit her family. He told me he had some issues with his father, who recently told him he was gay. He said he had nobody to tell that, even his girlfriend, and that he really wanted to talk about it with me. He took that very bad, and was really disturbed. His two brothers have been knowing the situation for a while, but his father couln't tell him until recently and asked his two brothers not to tell him. He was really upset that everybody hid that from him. I told him that it was maybe because he had a special relation with his father and that he was maybe affraid he wouldn't approve it at all.

I asked him why he had a problem with the fact his father was gay, if he had issues with gay people in general or if it was only because it was his father. He answered "you know, I had a talk with my older brother, and he said that my father and his boyfriend have a really great relationship, that he could feel they love each other. I always thought being gay was something unhealthy, but I try to reconsider it." I told him that he had time to think about it, but that it would be much better not to cut the bridges with his father and talk with him, and that the most important thing was that he had to take into account that his father would always love him and that he also had the right to be happy.

He called me this morning, and we talked again about gay issues. He has a friend that told him he was gay and asked if he was ok with it. He told me that he was surprised, but that he was really ok with that, as long as his friend is happy, and that he had no problem with it and it wouldn't change his relationship with his friend. I was really happy to hear that, because now I think I will be able to tell him without being scared that he would be uncomfortable with it.