“Gustav!” I heard a warm and familiar voice call out my name and turned to find a fellow student named Christian smiling at me, his hands buried deep in his coat pockets to stave off the chilly April breeze.

“Ah, hello Christian!” I called back, returning his smile as he approached me and shook my hand.

After the customary comments on the cold weather he asked where I was going, and when I replied that I was on my way to look at a flat, he stopped me.

“Moving?” he asked. “Whatever do you mean?”

Torn between a genuine desire to be polite to him and not to be late for my appointment with a potential landlord, I quickly filled him in on how my best friend and flatmate Erich had, without warning, vacated his room and I had unexpectedly found myself either forced to pay for a double room that only I was occupying, or to seek out new accommodation.

He listened intently, a sympathetic look on his face.

I’d met Christian in my first year at Uni and we had hit it off immediately.

I always felt welcome in his presence. He was easy to talk to and a colourful character to be around.

I’d often suspected that there was something different about him, but only because he was so nonverbal when the rest of us were conversing about the fairer sex. To all outward appearances he was a healthy, normal young man. He was by far the most handsome of my friends and certainly one of the most interesting, and yet he never spoke of the inevitable success we were all certain he enjoyed with the young women in the city.

It wasn’t until about half a year later that I first entertained the thought that he could be—the word was practically foreign to me then—homosexual. A couple of our mutual acquaintances were discussing him in my presence one day and had hinted at his sexual preferences in no uncertain terms. There was no malice in their words. In fact they mentioned it rather casually, perhaps with a hint of sympathy as one would report a colleague having come down with the flu. I remember how appalled I had been at their accusations, how I had stood up for Christian, retorting that it was absurd and uncalled for to defame a young man’s character in such a way. Still I couldn’t shake the feeling that what they were saying was true.

It was such an alien concept to me, I remember it took me days just to wrap my head round it, and even longer to accept that someone I knew was like that.

But once I had finally come to grips with it, I was determined not to let it influence my feelings for Christian or allow it to affect our relationship.

That was a year ago. He and I were close friends now. Not close on the same level as Erich and me, but of all my friends at school Christian was the one I felt I could relate to the most.

Though in the back of my mind I was always aware of what I’d found out about him, over time I had found it easier to ignore. So what if it was true? It’s nothing to do with me, I told myself.

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