For some reason this week I’ve been reflecting on the nature of true friendship. And on the way in which illness, [which, at it’s onset may be seen as an affliction] can ultimately act as a blessing, illuminating those people you know who have the capacity to rise to the challenge of supporting you in difficult times and pushing the fair-weather friends into the realms of acquaintanceship.
For that reason, I suppose, my partner and I have been lucky. His fight against Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and my support for him have been flies in the ointment of a selfish hedonistic network of good-time party boys. One by one- [well actually more like a swathe followed by a steady trickle] -friends have rapidly then gradually disappeared leaving the old friends we had before we moved to Brighton and one or two who have stuck with us through these difficult times.
The whole experience burst the bubble of a fantasy that there was a ‘gay community’ around us and illustrated that folk, masquerading as wannabe friends, didn’t have the endurance we might have expected of them. It’s hard to know if, when we first made friends with people when we first arrived 10 years ago, we pinned our colours to the wrong masts and gathered a superficial, youth-loving, negativity averse crowd around us and so as a result we are reaping the misfortunes of that folly. Or maybe it was just bad timing and friendships need a good few years to take root before they can be expected to sustain themselves through the years of relative social privation associated with poor health. Or it’s maybe a combination of the two. Because of illness and the effect it has on social opportunities, having to cancel, being unable to plan, not coming up with ideas and generally being miserable and poor company; the net effect is that illness acts as a friendship crucible, burning off the impurities and leaving behind the pure gold of genuine friendship. People who are happy for you to be you even though you’re under the weather.
My other big theme for this week –maybe triggered by having seen Milk- the movie biopic about the political career of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to a mainstream political office in 1970’s California who was ultimately shot by a political colleague – is how Pride festivals have evolved into an irrelevant froth from their origins in a protest movement. Pride marches aimed to protest against the oppression of gay people and the human rights injustices they endured in the face of inequalities in the law. Now these laws have been changed and repealed in the UK so that gay and straight people have equal[ish] rights and the struggle for equality in that sense is now over.
I was discussing this with a friend I bumped into last week and he saw some parallels with the Feminist movement, which required women to identify themselves as feminist in order to fight the inequalities women faced in the eyes of the law. As these fights were won, the need for women to identify as feminist has diminished and now we have women who are able to take advantage of equal[ish] treatment without having to don battle gear and war paint!
Maybe this will apply to gay and lesbian people as acceptance and equality begin to bed in. Maybe ordinary people will be able to take advantage of the chance to express their sexuality without it being skewed by fear of the implications. And maybe we won’t need to be radically queer any more. And maybe, in years to come, Pride Festivals will be seen as a rather strange twisted quirk of the times!
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