But deep down, I suspect, this was one of many moments when I began plotting my eventual escape into open gayness. At this point, I still hadn’t said I was gay out loud to anyone except myself, which seems unbelievable, since I was a twenty-year-old man who listened to Lady Gaga, obsessively watched The Bachelorette, and purchased a set of martini glasses to make cosmopolitans in his dorm room. But fear is a powerful thing, and it convinces you that nobody could possibly know your glaringly obvious secret, and that you should keep it a secret, because once you say it out loud, everything will be different. On top of the fear of having to have the awkward, intimate coming-out conversation with my family and the fear of my identity being co-opted by some gay stereotype, there was this new, extra fear of losing my best friend and the person I’d hoped would love me back. He came from a conservative Texas family, after all, and I’d already made it intensely awkward between us without voicing my deep dark gay secret. What would he do once he knew that I was into dudes? Would all of my obviously gay advances register as too obviously gay to tolerate further? I suppose there was a part of me that saw Kellan as an opportunity to come out without having to actually come out. To just skip the awkward, personal, intimate part where you have to tell people you’re gay, and jump right to the part where you’re getting gay married on a beach in Bora Bora, if only he’d love me back. But coming out is never that easy.

The summer before our junior year of college, Kellan got a girlfriend, and I felt like I was being replaced. My obsession deepened to its darkest point, and again, this is embarrassing to admit, but I stooped low and, at one point, surreptitiously borrowed his phone and glanced at his text messages, which seems like a totally normal thing for a best friend to do (right?!), but when you’ve already crossed about a thousand boundaries, the other person is rightfully pissed.

We didn’t speak for a few weeks.

I decided, finally, that if I ever hoped to have the type of relationship I really wanted with Kellan, like the one that he’d been developing with his new girlfriend, I had to do the thing. I had to come out and be gay and find gay people and do gay things and have faith that the consequences that I feared would be overcome by the rewards of my new fabulous life. And that’s the thing about coming out. Before you do it, it feels very much like you’re preparing for a kind of metamorphosis. That there will be a Before Gay and an After Gay, and that things will be so massively different that you’ll hardly recognize the life you had before.