ESSAY: Confounding homosexuality with pedophilia

I don't remember when exactly I took notice of him. Thinking back, Adrian would have been there in the surf lineup even before I came on the scene.

I took notice of him only because one day after a surfing session he waited for me to come out of the water as sunset approached.

He waited until I had put on my shirt and came over to me and quite out of the blue requested me to attend a communal meal in his neighborhood marking the circumcision ceremony of a Jewish neighbor's son.

I replied in the affirmative and we exchanged numbers and addresses and I went to my flat to take a shower and get ready to go to his neighborhood which was just a ten minute ride on my scooter.

He had shoulder length hair, dark like his eyes, and high cheek bones which I liked. He was also on the lean side which was another plus point.

However, as I later came to realize, me and him were not meant to be.

We put some barbequed beef and potato wedges on plates and sat on chairs next to each other.

We then started exchanging stories about our lives so that we can get to know each other well.

But in the deep recesses of my mind, there was a nagging question why he was suddenly interested in becoming my "friend". May be it was a late trigger that set off a subconscious desire that resided deep in his mind, I presumed.

He told me he was 23 and I told him I was 29. I had seen him surfing a lot and knew that he was a goofy foot while I was a regular.

He told me he was a civil servant at a government agency and I told him I was a freelance copywriter.

He told me his hobby is been a street artist and that he gets a lot of work, sometimes overwhelming, in way of painting graffiti and murals.

I told him he may find it more profitable to resign from his government job and forgo the meagre salary in favor of more lucrative art deals.

I am not sure why he took the advice as I was more or less a stranger to him still.

After the celebration was over, he told me to come to his nice suburban dwelling the next morning to go to town and post a cheap advertisement in the classified section of the town's local paper.

Immediately the next day he started getting phone calls of inquiries. Within a month he resigned from the civil service post and became a full time street artist.

The problems between me and he started when he introduced me to his girlfriend, Amanda, who he said he plans to marry "really soon".

But he began to share private secrets with me which convinced me beyond a shadow of doubt that the marriage will not last: he told me within 10 days he is going to inform Amanda that he is going to break up with her.

My main reason why I didn't provide him any advice is that he had told to me that he found cunnilingus unsettling because he found the vagina "disgusting".

I may have been wrong in my perceptions at the time but I did find it odd that a heterosexual man found a woman's vagina disgusting.

This also made me wonder whether he was a closeted homosexual and that he began to become closer to me because he couldn't deal with his repressed homosexuality anymore. But I made a decision not to give in to his sexual advances until I was sure that he wanted a sexual relationship with me.

So I didn't voice any thoughts regarding his relationship with Amanda because at such a tender age, the human mind is confused in various ways and makes it difficult to take certain major decisions of life. So I didn't provide him any advice which he might come to dislike later and blame me for wrecking his life and his relationship with Amanda.

In fact, our friendship actually soured from that point. What happened was when Amanda was told by Adrian that he was breaking up with her, Amanda asked me to arrange a date with one of our mutual friends, Albert. When I mentioned this to Albert, he told me that it's good that Adrian broke up with her because both Albert and Amanda had hit it off at a mutual friend's birthday party.

So I arranged the date because they were two consenting adults and both looked forward to meeting each other.

But Adrian took it really badly. He questioned me how I could "behind his back" get involved in match making between his "girlfriend" Amanda and Albert. I told him both Amanda and Albert requested me to arrange their date.

"I am your friend first. So your loyalty must be to me, not Amanda. She came into our picture only after I introduced her to you," Adrian said to me.

This possessive attitude first emerged from Adrian when I became close with Adrian's younger brother Alex. When Alex started hanging out with me more, Adrian one day gathered the three of us and bitterly warned Alex from getting too close to me and said to Alex, "Don't steal my best friend".

This made me wonder why Adrian was becoming so possessive of me, going to the extent of openly warning his brother to stay away from me.

It was much later that another mutual friend told me that Adrian was angered when Alex told him that I had asked Alex to go on a "date" with him. It was a gross misunderstanding on Alex's part: he had misinterpreted my invitation to go for a dinner with him after I had confessed to both Alex and Adrian that I was gay.

I found it odd that Adrian still regarded Amanda as his girlfriend even though he had informed her that he had dumped her.

So I was proven right not to get involved in the romantic affairs of young friends who have yet to come to their senses as far as life's big decisions are concerned.

Not a month passed after he had told me he was going to break up with Amanda when Adrian actually married her.

A few years later they had two kids and divorced.

Then Adrian started hanging out with me again but I was wary of him because of our troubled friendship in the past.

There were two mistakes I made that resulted in him cutting off all relations with me. One of them was when I detected that he had painted on the perimeter wall of a skating park a graffiti of a nude male fantasy character with a touch of the brush as if to prevent the figure's penis from seeming too obvious. But upon closer inspection, I detected it and told him so. He didn't react to my reaction.

But later that night, under the influence, he told me that once when he was high on MDMA, he had allowed a mutual male friend to draw him nude, "just like Rose wearing nothing as in Titanic".

The second mistake that led to the breaking up of our friendship was when one night while sober he asked me whether I found him sexually attractive.

It was a situation that cannot end well whichever answer I gave him: if I told him I didn't find him physically attractive, his ego would be hurt; and if I said I found him attractive that will also seal the breakup of our friendship, because if he doesn't like to be desired by other men, he would find it psychologically debilitating to enjoy close relations with a person who he believes is sexually attracted to him.

After that debacle, I didn't initiate any contact with him and neither he initiated contact with me though there were two instances where I met him on the street and he told me it was "good to see you" and asked me to call him and set a day to go eat out. I did call him but he said he was busy for the next three months and I wondered what kind of a person cannot set aside just an hour to meet someone with whom he enjoyed a close friendship.

The final blow came when he sent me a Viber message saying that he always defended me when some other surfers accused me that I was a pedophile because I often did hang out with younger surfers but only because I found their fresh outlook on life interesting.

"That's how you have sex with children," he concluded his message by saying.

Of all the people I became friendly with, he was one of the few who were privy to my most discreet thoughts and actions. So I was deeply hurt that he accused me of been a pedophile.

It is well documented that some people erroneously confound homosexuality with pedophilia although I am not sure when, why, or how this confusion arose in societies.

I showed Adrian's message to one of his ex- girlfriends and this is what she had to say: "What an ignorant asshole".