He took it great, as I’d predicted, but I think we were both glad to have something in front of us that we could look at while we talked. The task of swinging on webs through Spider-Man’s pixelated streets absorbed enough of our attention that, looking at him with my peripheral vision, I could tell him this raw truth.

Men are good at relating to each other in this way. We get along well when there’s a project in front of us—when we’re side by side looking at some third thing. All of the classic “male bonding” activities are like this—when you’re hunting, or working on a car, or shooting free throws, you can look together at the deer, or the transmission, or the basket, and talk. The common objective gives you something to talk about, and not having to face each other means you don’t have to lay the full weight of your emotions on each other.

I suspect that’s why so many of my closest male friendships have evolved at least in part around gaming. My three best buddies in high school all played. As grunty teenagers to whom conversation didn’t come easy, we could spend hours on the Nintendo GameCube in my family’s back room. After my parents, they were among the first people I came out to, and boy was that scary: What if they thought I had a crush on one of them?

They didn’t. They were in fact models of maturity. It was my first time really being vulnerable with them, and they showed themselves to be the stand-up guys they have remained ever since.

After what felt to me like an explosive revelation, the routines of our friend group took on new significance. Wandering around town, going to action movies, calling one another gross names—the mere fact that we kept doing that stupid stuff showed me I was still their pal.

That’s another important feature of male friendship, I think: the unspokenness of it. Your bros show up for you without calling attention to it, and you never have to thank them. In fact, they’d probably prefer if you didn’t, otherwise things might get awkward. My high-school friends demonstrated their care for me in a thousand tiny ways, most of them involving swift and gruesome death at their digital hands.

That they didn’t go easy on me may be what I appreciated most. They schooled me at Halo and shot my head clean off in Gears of War. They continued to give me endless shit, too. Verbal abuse is another way to show affection indirectly, and we were ruthless because (though we would never have said it) we loved each other. Being gay was another thing for them to make fun of me about, the way I made fun of them for having acne or being short.

Our verbal roughhousing was egalitarian: One of us had obsessive-compulsive disorder; we made fun of him for how long he spent going back over every level to pick up all the ammo. One of us was a first-generation immigrant; we used to say that he couldn’t understand English when he got a game’s instructions wrong. And I know how this sounds, but I would have been devastated if I hadn’t gotten called faggot a couple of times. It was how I knew my friends weren’t going to treat me differently, and that meant everything was going to be okay.