I’m a married man – would it be wrong to start a gay relationship with a friend from my university days? BEL MOONEY answers our reader’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ dilemma

Dear Bel,

My friend and I were university students together sharing a room and soon became firm friends.

After a night out drinking, we returned to our room and ended up in bed together. We stayed together for the three years of our course and occasionally had sex, even though we both had girlfriends.

Fast forward 15 years and Edward lives with his wife and three children in the South West of England. I live with my wife and three children in the North East, and we haven’t seen each other since we left university.

Recently Edward said he wants to meet. He suggests we get together to watch an international rugby match, which would mean an overnight stay. He says it would be a chance to ‘relive the good times’.

I haven’t had a gay experience since university but I am actually very keen to ‘relive the good times’. Would it be wrong if I did start a gay relationship with him? It is not something I feel I could discuss with my wife – or even mention to her.

PETER

When I read your letter, I remembered the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger.

It told the story of two men, both handsome young ranch hands, who had no idea they were gay until a night of drinking while camping on Brokeback Mountain. 

They both marry good-looking women but can’t lose the memories of those nights of passion, which they end up repeating years later.

Is that even a bit like you and your friend? To me, the obvious answer is ‘only so far’.

Your account of the sexual relationship-of-convenience with your friend is intriguing. You were both quite happy to discover your bisexuality and continue having secret sex ‘from time to time’ but having girlfriends, too. And why not?

I suspect more people have felt attraction to the same sex than would admit it. When people (especially men) are virulently hostile to homosexuality, I sometimes wonder how they might behave if they found themselves on Brokeback Mountain.

What’s most interesting about your story is that once your university days were over so was your friendship. It didn’t mean enough to meet up even once.

So, 15 years later Edward wants to ‘relive the good times’ even though he has never suggested it before. What’s going on? Perhaps his marriage is in trouble. Perhaps he’s tried letting his gay side out already and that re-awakened memories of nights with you. Who knows?

The colossal difference between your experience and my invocation of Brokeback Mountain is that the movie wasn’t a tale of opportunistic sex but a love story. That was both its beauty and its tragedy. The characters couldn’t give each other up even if they wanted to.

But you haven’t seen Edward for 15 years because neither of you wanted to. So if you do meet up, it will be impossible to recapture those days of student sex.

‘Good times’ can’t be relived because time has passed and people change. Of course, it might be fine – but my gut tells me it’s more likely you’d find it a severe disappointment. Does that matter? Since you are consenting adults, one reply is ‘No’.

On the other hand, you are both married men with three children each – so that’s where the ‘Yes’ comes in.

If you meet up with the unspoken expectation of sex, you will be deceiving your wives just as much as if you were each meeting another woman with illicit sex in mind. Lying by omission is still lying. You could find it impossible to keep secret – and a guilty blurt could potentially change lives for the worse.

You ask me whether it would be ‘wrong’ to start a gay relationship with Edward. I think what would be wrong would be to deceive your partners and potentially put your marriages in jeopardy. It would also be jolly inconvenient, considering you live at opposite ends of the country.

Harking back to an irresponsible past and trying to recapture it is a fool’s game. Far wiser, and better, to think of the future – especially the potential consequences of action.

Dear Bel,

I lie awake at night worrying about the world my children are growing up in. This isn’t vague anxiety – it’s a deep fear that something fundamental has shifted. I actually drafted this before the latest conflict in Iran broke out but it’s been on the cards, hasn’t it?

Wherever you look in the world there is hatred, conflict and killing. Every day brings news of political instability and rapid technological change that is both breathtaking and terrifying. 

Wars feel closer, while political debate becomes coarser every day. The rise of ­Artificial Intelligence (AI) leaves me wondering what kind of jobs or purpose my children will have.

I try not to show this anxiety, even though it seems to haunt me day and night. My children are 13 and 11 and I want them to feel safe and hopeful. But privately, I wonder if optimism is naive.

We teach them that if they try their best, work hard and treat people with kindness they will have good lives. We tell them the world is their oyster and want to believe it – but the future feels more and more uncertain. 

I’m old enough to remember being told by my ­liberal parents that progress is inevitable and each generation will be better off.

People my age (mid-40s) grew up learning to be tolerant and believe in equality, peace and love. It was the way to live. But such beliefs no longer feel solid.

Instead, I worry we’re raising children to become adults in a world we barely understand, let alone know how to prepare them for. I have no way of dealing with a future ruled by AI.

I get so worried. Can you advise me how to manage this fear while celebrating the joy that is my ­children, their cousins and friends.

When they talk about their dream adult lives I feel so scared for them that the careers and lives they talk about just won’t exist when they’re my age.

I’m normally a positive person but the weight of responsibility of giving them the best future feels overwhelming.

I doubt you can give me any advice but right now I feel ­desperate for some.

KATE

It is vital that I am honest within this column and so I’ll confess, hand on heart, how hard I find it to answer you with any useful advice – simply because I have the same fears.

Though you are a different generation, I can echo every single thing you have written, only substituting grandchildren for children. And you can be sure that millions of people reading this, of all generations and both sexes, will be nodding their heads as they read of your anxieties.

This morning a guy came to sort out a small problem with our TV. He was young, long-haired, charming and told me he loves Bob Dylan’s angry song Masters Of War – written around 1962-63 in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was a worried, peacenik teen and the world felt on the brink of a nuclear war. He said: ‘The protest song feels just as relevant now.’

Yes, I said, and it’s been relevant to humankind since before recorded time, because ­people (especially men) will always attack each other because they’re greedy for land, for money, for power, for weapons and for each other’s spouses. Everything.

There’s nothing new in what we are seeing on today’s television news – and that’s why I am so jaded and tired.

How to combat that? By clinging to the very beliefs you mention.

They are not negated by what is going on, no more than they were when I joined CND, or when my granddad was wounded, first in ­Flanders during the First World War and then at Dunkirk in the Second.

No, not negated, just severely challenged – as they always have been. Dylan sang of the ‘fear to bring children into the world’ – and yet people still do. The human race stumbles on, in spite of all the evil.

I’m not being all Pollyanna about this. I loathe the short-sighted narcissism and stupidity of our politicians, the lies they tell, the lack of common sense, their willingness to metaphorically ‘take the knee’ to all kinds of fashionable beliefs as well as to the conviction that they are right and compromise isn’t necessary – and that goes for the whole Blob establishment, too.

I watch the world in thrall to AI and feel repelled and terrified. But I’ll stop there, or else I’ll need to go lie down in a dark room and beg for somebody please to give me advice.

The individual fight is against despair. We can do that – and we must. My only advice is simple: be mindful and live in the present. It means focusing hard on what you can affect, since there’s so much you can’t.

So – the children’s homework, the way they clean their teeth, their sadness over friends or test marks, their pleasure in a new K-pop track, taking them out bowling when you really don’t want to, saying ‘No’ when necessary, saying ‘Yes’ with joy, and meaning both…

That’s living each day as the fresh miracle it really truly is.

It’s all you can do. And it’s all I can do. Although I also pray.

And finally… The strength of love and laughter 

What a week. I went to London (which happens much less these days) for a party to celebrate six years of the brilliant Free Speech Union, which does such essential work to combat attacks on our individual freedoms. Look it up and join!

The good conversations were heartening; it’s always a treat to be among kindred spirits.

An especially good chat was with the utterly civilised, intelligent former MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is such a loss to the House of Commons. Such charming brilliance is in short supply there at the moment. Bring him back… please.

‘The Mogg’ and I couldn’t come from more different backgrounds. So what?

Right after that my husband and I headed for Crosby, north Liverpool, to spend some time with my lovely northern family.

I’ve lived in the South since the age of 14, but know where my roots are and rejoice that my spirit was shaped by the nippy wind off the River Mersey. Talking to my close cousin Gina about our shared past meant so much – and I swear that the spirits of our beloved dead were in the room with us, sharing the warmth of those ordinary memories.

What rocked my week was the news that a very, very dear friend has inoperable cancer. I’ve known him for decades, his wife is my best friend and we’ve had so many good times, so many wonderful festivities at birthdays and Christmases, that our lives have all been, to an important degree, shaped by the friendship.

We drove to visit them after Liverpool and sat at their kitchen table to talk. What next? Planning what’s possible in as much time as is left for us to do so, in the knowledge that everything ends – but oh, the echoes of laughter and strength of love are endless.