well, i have several lesbian friends, and one in paticular said to me "it really sucks when i hang out with you or any straight girl 'cause automatically people that know us automatically think 'something's going on', when really, i'm just hanging out with another girl...."
when she said this, i realized that it's so true. i've never thought about it before, but people i know might get the wrong impression if i start hanging out with another man, since i'm married, and yet i never thought about my gay friend as also being thought of as .....well.......'someone of concern'....(you know what i mean) like a 'threat' to my marriage, when all along, i simply just consider it hanging out with any other girl, but people don't always see it that way. not that i care, but just something i never really thought about before. people think crazy things sometimes........
Several years ago, a cute guy came to my office to work. We had to work closely together and over a period of time, as we exchanged pleasantries, discovered we had a lot in common. From very early on, it became abundantly clear to me that he was very heterosexual. But he was also gay-friendly, had worked with gay people in the past and had lived in West Hollywood, whilst working as a chef, before coming to work in my office in Sydney, as a public servant.
We had lunch together a couple of times to start with and this progressed to having lunch together every day. And then we started seeing each other on the weekend occasionally and also had dinner together a couple of times each month.
He knew I was gay and we were always very honest with each other about our personal sexual proclivities, without being explicitly gross about the details. He was of mixed Italio-Hungarian heritage and was very sexy.
Because I respected his friendship so much (besides the fact that he was so overtly straight), I never made a pass at him - and nor did I want to (well, maybe just a little bit, early on in our friendship!).
I'm very open about my sexuality at work, I've worked there for 28 years, and everyone knows I'm gay. It wasn't until after my friend had resigned and moved onto anther job that I started to hear the rumours. Apparently it had been widely believed, for years, that we were an item. Even my boss, a lesbian, thought we were bumping uglies. They were all wrong. We were just friends. Platonic friends.