Are all of your friends the same sexuality? If you had a choice, would you want them to be?

For many of us, friendship is a cornerstone in our lives. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life sums it up beautifully:

“[Friendship] was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going.”

Friends are the people who find each other along the journey of life and decide to intertwine their paths for reasons unrelated to blood relations or romantic love. For queer people especially, where lack of acceptance and safety can be commonplace, our friends (or chosen family) sometimes are the only support system we have.

Our queerness is our common ground to build roots on top of. But if friendships are supposed to be “unbounded” and built on common ground, what does it mean to be friends with someone who has a different sexuality? Are these relationships doomed to fail? Will they rarely work? Are they more boring?