Affection and intimacy
Last night I dreamt about the great love of my youth.
J was a son of missionaries. I met him in December of 1985 when I was 20 and he was 18 or 19. I went to a prayer meeting at my pastor’s house and J was there. He was starting university. His parents had contacted the church to find a place for him to stay until he could get a proper apartment. I was attracted at once. By the start of the January semester he had found a single room in the same residence where I lived on campus.
J was outgoing and charismatic, with an almost angelic beauty, thinning sandy hair and shining skin. He smiled and laughed easily, and his manner was quicksilver. His voice was a musical tenor with a marked stammer.
His parents had served in Southeast Asia throughout his childhood, and were stationed in Vietnam when the war broke out, but I never heard that story in detail. J had spent his teen years in boarding school in Thailand. His parents seemed duly concerned about his religious development. J was a rebel.
He was also intensely humanitarian. He became good friends with me and H, a woman I had formed a strong bond with in an International Communication course. They were both committed to careers in missions and community development. Unlike other Christians I knew at the time, they were devoted to the social gospel, not the words of salvation but the act of serving humanity. They were concerned with justice, freedom and the elimination of poverty. J hated living in North America and was disgusted with materialism. He took me and his sister to see The Mission when it came out, and it became my favourite movie at the time. His version of Christianity was more action than words.
He helped me with prayer meetings and Bible studies I led on campus at the time. He had led a more worldly and adventurous existence, frequently offering a fresh perspective on things, which I appreciated. I fell deeply in love.
J was warmly and comfortably affectionate, more than any male friend I had known. He carried his sexuality beneath a thin surface, and was candid with me about things like masturbation, which young Christian men were supposed to confess to one another and overcome. One day I told him about my “struggle with homosexuality,” a thing I usually confided in close friends. He didn’t take it hard, commenting only that he had encountered it at boarding school. This knowledge did not change the physical and emotional intimacy of our friendship.
In September 1986, J and I moved into a house together with friends. At first I had my own room, but eventually the living arrangement changed, and in Spring 1987 we shared a room. By then I had finished my biology degree and was studying journalism at college. We would go to bed and lie in the dark talking quietly across the room until he fell asleep, then I would like awake feeling the heat of his deeply breathing presence.
J went through an intense crisis of faith. He was angry at God for allowing so many innocent people to suffer. I, having grown up in a comfortable, middle-class, agnostic home, had no trouble envisioning God as a benign deity who offered salvation from afar and did not interfere in the ignorance and hate humanity inflicted upon itself. But to my friend, this was irresponsible for a loving creator.
He stopped attending church functions and his sexuality erupted. His intense physicality turned toward women, of course, with nearly disastrous outcome. I reproved and reined him in with ironclad spirituality, no doubt motivated in part by jealousy. He went through intense depression. That season brought a wedge between us. We remained friends, but never as close.
He moved into another apartment sometime in 1987. His faith and emotional stability recovered, but he moved away from my evangelical church and refocused on his goal of serving the social gospel.
J asked me to be a groomsman at his wedding in British Columbia in August 1991. I had been married since the previous October and my wife was pregnant with Marian. We flew to Vancouver, visited other friends, and spent two days with J and his bride on his grandparents’ farm in the lush Fraser Valley. In the evening we watched several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first I had ever seen. Later that night before their wedding, we drove to a nearby lake and watched the Northern Lights.
We saw J and his wife once more. They had returned to Ontario for training in preparation for their first overseas posting. In Africa, I think. We stopped at the mission headquarters for a short visit. Marian was a toddler and J’s first child had been born.
In 1997 they had returned to North America. Somehow I tracked down his phone number online. They were staying at his parents’ cabin in the Cascades, Washington State. I called him there. My marriage had broken down and I had come out. I told him everything. His reaction was quiet and considerate. He asked me to write to him, but I never did. That was the last time we spoke.
I had several strong infatuations during my teens and early twenties, but none were met with the intimacy and affection I experienced with J. My romantic feeling for him was in some measure fulfilled, if never consummated. It was one experience that validated same-sex love, and later helped me come to terms with my sexual orientation. If I could find love like that, I knew, I would not always be alone, an outsider.