What if Drinking Was All My Gay Friend Group Had In Common?

i recently stopped drinking and am starting to feel like i don’t really have anything in common with my gay friend group. like what if our only connection to each other was that we all liked to party? i thought it over and the truth is; most of my genuine interests and hobbies are things i’ve accepted I’ll mostly be pursuing by myself, on my own time. Maybe this has been true for quite a long time, the whole time. I’m okay with that, I think. See, I was always a loner and not upset about being a loner, i just knew society wanted me to be different, and more outgoing, so when i started drinking, that happened naturally. on the group chat they’ll gossip or talk about tv shows, or reality tv shows, and stuff i just have no interest in anymore. i’ll try to go to the queer parties with them and everything just seems so shallow and empty and i want to go home and read Steven King models and bake a complicated cake.

i think that i have this thing in my head that i NEED queer friends to survive but do i, i do have other friends and enjoy my own company? my gay friends are asking me why i don’t want to hang out anymore, why i’m not coming to this or that, one of them even volunteers to be my “sober buddy” to make me feel more comfortable going out. i think they care about me more than i care about them. sometimes i think everyone would be happier if i just broke up with them, should i do that? how do i gently remove my self from a friend group?

Valerie: Before you decide to leave this friend group, try hanging out with them in situations that don’t revolve around drinking like going out and partying do. A picnic in the park, a game night, a hike if that’s something you’re into, a craft day, going out to lunch, or something that revolves around one of your interests or hobbies, even if it’s just a field trip to a craft store or craft fair. If they don’t have interest in doing these types of activities with you at all, or you do try a few and you still don’t feel like you have anything to talk to them about or aren’t having as much fun spending time with them, maybe it’s time to move on. People outgrow friend groups all the time. I had a similar situation happen to me in my late 20s. I realized that I wasn’t fitting into a friend group as well as I once had, and felt myself spending less and less time with them. It wasn’t until I stopped going to every hang that I realized most of the group’s conversations were just rehashing the last time everyone hung out, and I was feeling more and more distanced from them. I exited gently, just politely declining hangs until they stopped inviting me. I do sometimes feel bad about leaving like that, but there wasn’t anything anyone was doing wrong, so I didn’t feel like a confrontation was necessary. And whenever I do see any of them now or talk to them on IG, we’re still friendly, so I don’t think any of them hold it against me for leaving. We just weren’t a good fit anymore. I was starting to embrace my nerdy side, playing D&D and going to comic cons, and that just wasn’t their vibe. And that’s okay! Everyone grows and changes and it’s okay to just slowly extricate yourself from them if that’s what you feel like is best. You also don’t have to! You can just scale back and only go to the events you feel like going to. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

That said, I do think everyone needs SOME friends. And I do highly recommend having queer friends if you’re queer. However, they don’t have to be THESE queer friends. You can find people who are more aligned with your interests, even if they’re solo hobbies. There’s a reason book clubs and knitting circles exist even though those are solitary activities!

Summer: It’s actually really sweet that they care to make you feel included in sobriety. A lot of sobriety attempts die at the hands of peer pressure. However, that doesn’t change the fact that you can’t make this friend be more interesting to you. I suspect the alcohol was doing its age-old job of being social lubricant and making your hangouts more interesting than they were.

You remind me of… well, me. I’m super queer, very sober, and my interests are indoors. My interests don’t overlap with pop culture, either. It can be an isolating life when those interests are misaligned with queer people around me who want to hit the bars and get messy, and watch… RuPaul I guess? Those interests don’t endear me, even if the people are pleasant.

When you start believing that they’d be happier without you… I think that might be your inner voice telling you mean things. They don’t seem like unwelcoming or icy people. But I think you already know that you won’t be happy with them as your primary friend group. Maybe pursue friendships whose temperament and interests align with yours, but keep this group on the periphery so you can still have a positive connection? Maybe, I mean.

Ashni: I know you came to us asking how to gently remove yourself from a friend group, but I think you should give it a bit more time before you make any permanent decisions. It sounds like most of the time that you spent with this friend group was drinking at queer parties; now that you’re sober, I could see a world where suddenly not drinking dramatically dims the sparkle of a night out. It took me several tries before I actually enjoyed an alcohol-free night on a dance floor.

But if you enjoyed your nights out with your friends before, I wonder if you should give them a chance to surprise you. It sounds like they still want connection with you (the one friend offering to be a “sober buddy” is very sweet, and shows that not everyone would be happier if you broke up with this friend group just btw!) but maybe not on a dance floor if that’s not your vibe right now. Would they be interested in doing something more your speed? You mentioned it’s an entire friend group, so I feel like there’s gotta be one person in it who’s down for a more chill night, maybe even with some Steven King (and just know, plenty of queer people like Steven King!).

If you genuinely don’t enjoy their company, though, and have no interest in maintaining the friendships at all, you could always slow ghost and repeatedly decline invitations to go out. I’d probably do that if I were in your shoes. There’s also the braver and more vulnerable approach, which is to send something in the chat about how you’re not really feeling nights out anymore. I do think it’s worth your time to find a queer friend whose company you enjoy FWIW, though it doesn’t need to be this group.

Before I go, I am curious about the things you have no interest in anymore. I’m stuck on that word, and maybe I shouldn’t be, but I wonder if there are other things in your life that you’ve lost interest in recently? If yes, then I think you should wait before you make any decisions around the friend group. It could be that you’re losing interest in many things at once, the friend group included, and I’d hate for you to push away community when you might decide you’d like it later on.

As a kid, Christianity was a big part of my life. I was fortunate to attend a church that wasn’t hostile to queer people (though it wasn’t affirming either). When I went to college, I really struggled making friends at first, and got involved with an evangelical group. I felt a deep sense of belonging with this group, and while I knew that evangelicals tended to be conservative and homophobic, I really didn’t believe that the people in this group were. Well, I also discovered I was gay during the first year of college, and when I came out, I realized that pretty much everyone in this group that I spoke to believed that “homosexuality was not compatible with Christianity.” I left that group, and that experience damaged my relationship with Christianity irreparably, so I stopped being a Christian altogether within a couple of years. It was a profound loss in my life.

Fast forward to now, more than fifteen years later. I’m in my thirties. I’m happily married to a wonderful woman. I live in a progressive state, and have a lot of queer friends. I work in a public middle school where I am out to my students and colleagues, and have had mostly positive experiences in that regard. I’m a bit more reserved, so I didn’t make friends there immediately. But after working there for several years, I now feel like I have work friends! Feeling connected to my coworkers has been really important to me, and has made my job much better.

I have a coworker there that we’ll call Susan. I was initially cautious around her because she has a lot of kids who she homeschooled, and doesn’t curse or drink, which gave me conservative religious vibes. But she started hanging out with our friend group at lunch and we have become more friendly. And all her vibes tell me that she is progressive and affirming to queer people! She had said specific things that have made me think so, other coworkers (including other queers) also seem to see her as a safe person, and I have openly talked with her about my wife and other gay things and she hasn’t seemed at all weird. We now teach the same subject matter, so we have been working more closely together this year, and I feel like we’re becoming friends. She is well liked in my circle of work friends.

At lunch last week, someone asked Susan a question about her church. I couldn’t help but ask what church she went to, and she gave me the name of it and described it as “very Jesusy” and said her husband was the pastor. Well, this was probably stupid, but I looked up the church, and she and her husband are featured prominently on the website. I then searched the church’s website and found their “Beliefs” section. It lists a long lists of broad overarching things (i.e. “God is Good,” “Eternal life through Jesus,” “Healing is possible,”) and then at the very end lists “Marriage is between one man and one woman.”

I’m probably blowing this out of proportion, but I feel really thrown and hurt by this. I have worked with conservatives before, but I knew where we stood, so I knew to keep my distance, and we have cordial relationships and nothing more. I have conservative extended family that I know attend similar churches, but also attended my wedding, and am able to manage this through denial and cognitive dissonance only seeing them once or twice a year. With Susan, I thought I knew where she stood, and I feel like she deceived me. It makes me feel like that nineteen year old, newly out and betrayed by all the close friends her first year of college.

My wife has pointed out to me that perhaps I should base my feelings towards Susan on the many positive interactions we’ve had, and not on a line on the church’s website that she may or may not even agree with. I do think this is the easiest and safest way forward, but I am really struggling to trust these positive interactions. And I don’t have much of a poker face, so I do worry that Susan will pick up on my weird vibes now.

I think I have four options moving forward.

1.Try to pretend I didn’t see the website, trust the positive interactions Susan and have had, and continue our positive working relationship/work friendship.

2. Assume that Susan is a secret homophobe. Try to act normal at work, while also distancing myself.

3. Admit to Susan that I cyberstalked her church and now feel weird and see what she says.

4. Talk to another work friend about this and see their thoughts in the hopes that they can reassure me one way or another.

Thoughts?

Valerie: I personally think, since this is primarily a working relationship, a combination of options one and four is your best bet here. If this was a friend outside of work who you were choosing to spend time with, I would 100% be going for option three because, most of the time, a direct conversation is the answer. Because then you would know for sure, and if she was like “I support you but not your lifestyle” you could say, “Cool bye forever” and that would be that. However, since no matter how this conversation goes you are going to still have to spend time with her and work with her, I think that going off her words and actions is the safer course. If she has been kind and open and not saying anything bigoted or preachy despite you mentioning your wife and other queer things, I think you can take that at face value and use that to inform your working relationship. I do think that this information means it might be worth keeping her strictly a work friend and not elevating her to a real-life friend as well, but you can decide that for yourself. And I think it’s worth chatting with other queer coworkers to see if they ever got bad vibes from Susan. It’s very possible that she doesn’t agree with every aspect of her church and that her and her husband, despite being featured prominently, don’t have any say on what the website says. Even if her husband does run the website, it’s possible she doesn’t agree with every aspect of the church that he does. There are plenty of Christians who take the core messaging of the religion (love thy neighbor and all that jazz) and don’t put stock in the weirdly specific manmade rules that came much later, like being against same-sex marriage. I do think that if she does pick up on your discomfort, it might be worth coming clean and just expressing that you were worried about something you saw on her church’s website, but I also think that if you can try to trust her actions and words, it might not get to that point and you can stay work friends.

Summer: I vote Option 1. My second priority is Option 4. Your disappointment and feeling of betrayal is valid and understandable. You put a degree of trust in someone to be closer to them and the belief system they support(ed) conflicts with that. There hasn’t been a resolution for you.

The most optimistic scenario in my head is that she is a ‘love thy neighbour’ type Christian and the church site is way out of date. Like, church sites can go insanely out of date or inactive. Does the site have evidence of recent activity? Does it seem like it has a specialist custodian or webmaster, or is it just in the hands of whoever is running the church — a person who often has little interest in upkeeping the site.

I’m not seeing an immediate case for her being a closet homophobe or nefarious person. Your professional engagements with her are positive. You are a queer presence in her life and she hasn’t done anything out-of-pocket. In these cases, I’m kind of a consequentialist — an ‘ends justify the means’ person. She’s either polite to you because she’s genuinely a safe person, or she’s polite because she’s afraid of the consequences of being a known homophobe (good.). The outcomes are the same: a polite and functional working environment. If that’s all true, this could be a sustainable working relationship and Option 1 could be fruitful.

And I’m not suggesting you go out of your way to ‘educate her’ or ‘fix her’, but being a positive queer presence in her life might cool any homophobia she holds over time. Being around people tends to make us sympathize with them over time.

Riese: I think try to give Susan the benefit of the doubt until she does something herself in real life that suggests she no longer deserves it. You can’t know for sure how she feels about gay people, and it’s also quite possible she even disagrees with her husband on many of his principles, and probs the worst thing we can do to a straight woman is assume she feels a certain way just because her husband does. We can’t really know anything about their relationship, why Susan is in that marriage or why she participates in that church.

You suffered a lot of trauma and hurt from being rejected by your church after coming out, and it’s possible some of that is being projected onto Susan, that you’re trying to protect yourself now from something you couldn’t protect yourself from back then. But you’re not a part of Susan’s church. Susan is just one person and not an entire community central to your life, without which your life would be notably changed. She’s your work friend. Keep talking about your life and your wife and being yourself. There might come a point in your relationship where she becomes an extremely close friend, and then at that point you might want to ask her directly about her beliefs. But for now I think try to separate your feelings about her from your feelings about your past church.