Dear Rose, I have already written you about a similar matter to this one, but I find myself very vexed about something else and, while I am not sure how to properly employ your previous advice, you seem to be very knowledgeable and I am compelled to ask another question.
I mentioned previously that several people seem to be fond of accusing myself and my best friend of being homosexuals together, and that neither of us is a homosexual, and that our families would respond to our being homosexuals very badly. For the most part, the so-called "evidence" being used to incriminate us as homosexuals is highly circumstantial and comes from people who are utterly untrustworthy, in particular a certain girl who happens to be quite insane.
However, some of the people making accusations about us also happen to be our friends. One in particular has been leveling certain claims recently, more about my own sexual preferences than my best friend's (for the sake of clarification and avoiding a stilted style, let us call my best friend R.). This other friend, let us call him S., has been having certain... liaisons with a young woman (let us call her A.), and R. and I think that she could be detrimental to S.'s health. Every time I have expressed this sentiment to S., he informs me that I am terribly repressed and that A. will not bite him (which, judging from the marks on his neck, is a highly fallacious claim) and that she is perfectly lovely (which is a similarly egregious claim, given her utter inability to behave acceptably).
I digress. Back to my original point, whenever I express my concerns for S., especially about the tentacle beast that A. keeps as a pet and will no doubt release from underneath her skirt to consume my poor friend when the fancy strikes her, the conversation inevitably ends up redirected to my problems, which I have consistently claimed not to have and which are enumerated as repression, denial, and being "criminally uneducated about sex." Somehow, S. and A. also manage to accuse me of being homosexual.
I try not to listen to A., which is mostly difficult because she is rather loud and self-insistent, but S. is my friend and I feel bad when I attempt to ignore him. Despite my conviction that neither R. nor I is a homosexual, I have been considering S.'s claims and I am very worried that he may be right about me.
While I have never done anything of that nature with another male, I have never done anything with a young lady either and any such thoughts about ladies are rather absent of my mind. I can very easily admit that several girls are very beautiful -- two of my female friends, for example, are perfectly lovely, both physically and as people -- but I do not think about kissing them, let alone doing anything else with them. R. and I are, admittedly, rather close and I do not think that I could live -- or, at least, that I could not properly enjoy life -- without him. Even my female mentor, who is a very fine, very lovely, very strong, and otherwise highly desirable woman, fails to make me feel anything for her but awe, respect, and a desire for her to be proud of me.
More worrisome than the conundrum itself is how other people would deal with this news. S., I daresay, would hardly be surprised, and I know of several others who but my family only has one child, this being me. It is my duty to marry an acceptable female and produce heirs to my family's name and anything that could impede my ability to do so would surely find me disowned. An employee of my father who has had dalliances with other men (let us call this man P.) seems to think that it is completely acceptable for a young man in my position to be a homosexual, but it very much is not. It would break my poor, ailing mother's heart for me to be deficient or perverted in such a way, and I am quite sure that I would lose most of my friends.
What should I do?
Many thanks, Still Heckled in Hertfordshire, and Now Very Confused and Anxious As Well.