being a lonely gay/? male aspie and finding (girl)friends?

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Do any other male aspies who are questioning their sexuality or know they are gay for sure, have a hard time find girls to become friends with? Do you find that you feel lonely most of the time and wish that you had a real social life. Are you more interested in seeking the social companionship of girls rather than guys because of a realiztion that you might have more in common and be more compatible? I feel this way alot. I'm not really comfortable hanging out with guys because we're "different" and probably wouldn't be interested in the same activity. I find I envy girls aot. I'm jealous of the relationship other "non-straight" guys have with girls and wish I could experience it myself.

I'm not gay but I can tell you that several female friends of mine have gay guy friends, and often speak of hanging out with them. Girls seem to love hanging out with gay guys. The pressure is off (so to speak) and there's no sexual tension so they can treat them the same as girlfriends.

You may have a hard time getting close to people in general due to your aspieness.

I really don't have many close friends to begin with. I may have more effeminate characteristics, but I'm hardly flamboyant; so even if I did have a lot of female friends, it wouldn't exactly be Will and Grace.

Being Aspie and being lonely is not an unusual circumstance. We have a whole forum dedicated to the challenges of meeting people and making friends.

Being gay and being lonely is also not an unusual circumstance.

Being gay and being Aspie presents a whole new level of challenge. Not only are you presented with challenges around meeting people, but many of the supports that you can use are predicated on the heterosexual model. (Guys hang around with guys, but are interested in dating women. Women hang around with women but are interested in dating guys...)

If you will permit me to speak ad personam and wander into my own experiences for a bit, maybe that will be some help.

As a teenager I self-identified as gay very early (about 12 or 13) and was never in any doubt about my sexuality. I might not have been happy about it, but it was abundantly clear that this was how I was built and this was the way that things would be.

I am also an Aspie, though I was not diagnosed (indeed, when I was a teenager, such a diagnosis did not exist). I was very alienated from my peer group, and I assumed that it was my sexuality that was the cause of that alienation. With the clarity of hindsight, I know that not to be the case.

But it was not until I got into university and began to get a bit of a grip on my social skills that I was able to develop a small circle of friends. Typically what drew us together was our commonality of interests. Whether it was music, theatre, games, it was always the common link that provided not only the basis of the friendship, but also the means by which to form the friendship in the first place, and the link to new friends, too.

All of which is to say that rather than focussing on finding friends, my (limited) success in this area has come from focussing on doing the things that I enjoy, and forming relationships with the people who share those activities with me. (Whether gay, straight, male, female or otherwise).

[editorial note: this is why we need this GLBT forum here!]

I'm kinda surprised that a gay male would have a hard time having women friends. Most of the gay guys I've known had mostly women friends. I'm not exactly gay myself but some think I am because I have some gay characteristics. The vast majority of my online friends have been women but they only think of me as one of their girlfriends instead of as a potential boy-friend

I'm amazed that as an aspie that you figure out you were gay that early even with the lack of the internet. When I was 17, I really didn't understand what being gay meant which would have been 12 or 13 years after you were 12 or 13.

Really? I'm about the same age as you and I did. I don't remember how I discovered it, but I remember reading encyclopedias and watching movies with gay themes and identifying with that. I also had crushes on certain male celebrities.

Anyway, I've had more male friends than female friends in my life. (Nevermind the fact that I drove them all off.) I tend to feel pretty comfortable around geeky types, and they seem to generally be more accepting of different lifestyles. I am sort of uncomfortable with those women who like gay guys, because I feel like they only like me for that and not for me.

Well, I grew up in a large, cosmopolitan city (Montréal) and I was very well aware of what images were in my mind when I discovered the physical side of my adolescent sexuality. The sums were pretty easy after that.

I realized I was gay when I was 14, but I was very stubborn about taking it seriously, and I eventually became depressed. Then, when I was 16, I tried to change my attitude extremely quickly (I had almost no friends and therefore nothing to lose), but then I had anxiety problems from not admitting my emotions. Then I lost an opportunity to have a boyfriend with Asperger's,