Gay Roommates

During my summer holidays, my uncle asked me if there was anything that made me think, uh oh, this is going to be hard to get used to. And yes, there most certainly was.

In my first year, I shared a suite with three guys, and I have assigned fictitious names for each for the purpose of this story. I was rooming with Dean, who was straight as was I. Then there was Dale who was very theatrical and gay, and Brian: well, would you call him religious?, ... or conservative?, ... or redneck?, ... or homophobic? Each of these sometimes seemed to apply. Neither Dale nor Brian was completely bad. Each had a serious side, a perceptive side, and a considerate side. But they didn't belong together.

Dale clearly wanted to be in college for the “college experience”. He partied every night and came home drunk out of his mind. Brian ended up coming out as gay three years later but at that time, you could only suspect what his real orientation was. We did: what made him so emphatic, so obsessed? As the Bard said, he “doth protest too much, methinks” (Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 230, in case you were wondering.)

Brian was a fun-loving guy but he had grown up in an extremely religious community and he could say or do prejudiced things without realizing it; where he had come from, everyone was like him so he didn’t have a concept of what was offensive. He would do things like post racist posters on the wall, complete with ugly caricatures and offensive names for an entire ethnic group. (I won't repeat any of them here; they were unacceptable even between semi-consenting semi-adults in semi-private.) Brian would also write homophobic bible slogans on the whiteboard above where his gay roommate slept, such as: “You shall not lie with a male as those who lie with a female; it is an abomination”, and “If a man lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination and they shall surely be put to death”. Brian thought this kind of stuff was funny and okay.

It didn’t bother Dean and me that these guys were gay. Even so, Dale would sometimes do things with the sole intention of shocking me. Knowing full well that I wasn’t gay, he would come in late at night after I was in bed, exhausted after working late; he would shut the door, lock it and look at me and make a completely inappropriate suggestion which I can’t write down here or it won’t get published. I wasn’t worried that he was coming on to me and knew that he was just saying these things to get a rise out of me. The only response was to laugh, and I did. Like I say, he was theatrical.

Many of the things he did were with the intention of just having fun and trying to be funny; he was not directly trying to offend us. But he would also do really aggressive things that made Brian, the guy who hadn’t come out yet, uncomfortable. He had taken a particular interest in Brian; he was very suspicious of him, realized he was most likely gay, and found it completely absurd that Brian wasn’t admitting it. So he would specifically do things to offend him, like having sex in his bed with a male partner while Brian was there. If it was Dean or me, he wouldn't have done it. But Brian didn't seem to see anything wrong with offending Dale; in fact he revelled in it. That was a mistake, because Dale was much more creative, and could be much more offensive than Brian if he wanted to. And he did want to.

As a result, Brian and Dale developed a really antagonistic relationship. (Yeah, I know, Duh.) Brian would post a new homophobic bible slogan and Dale would do something new to make Brian feel really uncomfortable. It got so bad that Brian moved out halfway through the year because Dale was getting to him. An interesting twist was that, unbeknownst to him, his new roommate was bisexual.

I felt badly for Brian as this was an example of someone having to come and adjust to a new and unexpected situation. It must have been hard for him since he would have been conflicted, knowing he was gay and what all of his friends and family back home would have thought of that. It would have been difficult for someone from a protected environment who was inculcated with lots of things all his life that weren’t true, and which would conflict with the reality of certain situations, to come to terms with it.

I don’t really know what happened to Brian or Dale. While some of the drama could be pretty amusing, I really don’t miss it. But it did teach me lots about how people from different backgrounds can conflict with each other. Life would certainly be dull if everyone were the same and no one disagreed. And that first year was certainly not dull for me.