You sure you want to hear the gossip?

Sometimes, not knowing something about your friends is simpler than knowing something you know you aren't supposed to know…

TL;DR: If you are gossiping, please handle information which change attitude towards others with care and maybe share them with consent of the listener. [1]

Some time ago, I was casually talking with my friend, let's call them Alex. For one reason or another, we got to gossip and I learnt a new, very private information about our mutual friend, Bay. [2] I knew Bay would not expect me to know or possibly even want me to know at that time, yet the new part of their identity would require me to behave differently around Bay in order not to hurt them. [3]

That turned my interactions with Bay into a bit of a minefield:

If I behaved according to what I learnt, I may easily overstep Bay's boundaries and invade their privacy, possibly quite badly. [4]
If I kept my old behaviour, I would feel like I am actively hurting Bay.
If I accidentally slipped my tongue in front of Bay and they notice, I still ending up invading their privacy as in point 1.
I am also prone to sharing the gossip, maybe accidentally. I would be to someone else what Alex was to me, and I certainly didn't want to cast this "curse" on anyone. [5]
If Bay subconsciously noticed I am behaving in line with their secret and in another interaction I wouldn't, they could feel invalidated (without an obvious reason why).

It sucks, it made talking to Bay needlessly stressful. Please don't do that.

So, to reiterate the message: Please gossip *safely* and *consensually* about stuff that is private in nature and would change attitudes towards people. For the queer stuff, this can be rephrased in layman's terms as please just don't out other people to people who do not explicitly want to know. [6]

(Again, maybe gossip safely anyway, but for the "regular" gossip you can usually hide what you know without feeling that bad.)

Final remarks

I wrote this post mainly to raise awareness and help learn from past mistakes. It is not meant to shame Alex for telling me, they might not have been aware and neither were I at the time.

Apart from the role as "me" in the story, I also were "Bay" a few times, luckily not with a too intimate part of my identity. And while I try not to be another "Alex", I cannot rule that completely out unfortunately.

This post has been a long time in my backlog (~6 months maybe), it is not a reaction to any recent gossip I have heard. (The points I make still hold ofc, but lately I only heard "the ordinary stuff" which I will probably just forget and not care about without harming anyone.)

Lastly, Bay eventually told me themself, so my life is peaceful again. I didn't ask if I am allowed to talk about that and with whom, so I err on the safe side and will not write here anything else :-)

[1]	I mean, gossiping is not nice to the mentioned person who doesn't usually consent, but it's not like I could prevent people from gossiping, so this post is not about that. Also, you can conceal your knowledge of "regular" gossip more easily than of gossip which changes your attitude.

[2]

I originally wanted to have the friends be Alice and Bob, but that might support the narative that "girls gossip", which is sexist and IME not accurate (more like "everyone gossips"). So I made my friends be of ambiguous gender and use they/them pronouns. Sorry, this might make the post a bit harder to read, but the stereotypes need to die :-)

[3]

I will not give any more information here. Don't try to guess, I am not telling. Bay is my friend and deserves privacy. (However, if you suspect that you might be the Bay of this story, by all means ask me whether you are. I don't want you to feel bad / insecure / unsure / … (And in fact, there may be multiple Bays…))

[4]

There are definitely parts of my identity I do not share much and would probably get upset at various people (and also paranoid) if I got outed. OTOH, the number of people who know my secrets is non-decreasing anyway, so I try to prepare that someone unexpected inevitably will overstep this boundary, possibly in a good faith. (If you want to try to act upon my secrets, I'd appreciate you asking beforehand to avoid weird reactions.)

[5]	Naturally, this gossip sharing can have various circumstances: Me (or Alex) being unaware that the listener (call them Cameron) doesn't know, slipping my tongue in a subtle way yet Cameron understanding the subtext, being drunk, … It might be difficult to keep the secret in all those situations.