Long time friendship ended after friend got creepy at a Con
This is going to be a long story about something that happened to me in the summer of 2023.
Jen (mid 30s TF), Ginny(early 30s TF) and I (late 40s TF), all from Colorado, were going to be sharing a room at GenCon with my friend Steve (M early 50s) who lives in Wisconsin but I met in Colorado and I've been gaming with since 1996 or 97 in a weekly gaming group that includes my brother. I had come out as fully trans in 2020, this is important-ish to the story. We had a hotel room with a King size bed and a pull out mattress in the couch. The idea being that the women would get the bed and Steve would use the pullout mattress. I was at Steve's 2nd wedding and figured it would be a little awkward for him but it was worth it to split the room cost 4 ways.
Wednesday night Steve picked us up from the airport as he drove to Indianapolis for the Con. Then we went to dinner before we collected our badges from Will Call. At dinner I paid for Jen and myself since Jen paid for something else for me earlier that day, and Steve offered to pay for himself and Ginny "to make it easier for the waitress to split the bill" . I know Steve is married so I thought nothing of it.
Thursday Jen and I left in the morning to check out the dealer's hall and see what kinds of games we could demo. The hotel was about .7 miles from the convention center and the convention center itself is huge talking up about 2 square blocks of space between the state capitol and the football stadium. So we got a lot of walking in. We expected Ginny to join us, but she fell back asleep and slept for another 6 hours then woke up not knowing how to get to the convention. We went back to the hotel around 4 with the expectation that we would rest and collect Ginny and go back to the con. But our 30 minute nap turned into an almost 2 hour nap. Ginny had been drinking since she woke up because we went to Kroger and she got an 18 pack of beer. Well Steve invited her to go with him to a local brewery to try the official beer of Gencon which was a Honey Mead, so they left us sleeping with the idea that they would catch up with us for dinner later.
Jen and I woke up, and decided we didn't want to walk anywhere so we ordered pizza, grabbed a game I had bought and went down to the hotel lobby to play the game on a table big enough, where we met 2 other Gencon people who played with us while we waited for our pizza.
Since we were playing we didn't notice Steve and Ginny coming back from the brewery. After our game was over and our pizza was getting cold we went back to the room. When I opened the door the last thing I expected to see was Steve quickly climbing off of Ginny who was no longer wearing pants.
Ginny took a call from her brother in the bathroom while I had a talk with Steve, who felt he owed me an explanation. He said that him and his wife are technically separated and only live together because of finances. Which at the time I believed because I hadn't been reading reddit stories about cheaters using that excuse back then. I also had thought that Steve was very vanilla, but he had just never talked about his sex life before. He told me he had boyfriends when he was younger until his parents found out. Which is something I didn't need to know as to me Ginny is an attractive young woman and finding her hot wouldn't require him to be bi.
Steve said that they were going to spend the weekend together and then see where it went after that and that he really liked her and wanted her since he first saw her.
I was dumbfounded but they seemed happy, even if Steve was using couple words a little quick like calling her "my dear", "sweetheart" and such, which made me a little uncomfortable.
Friday Ginny and Steve asked for us to leave without them so they could have the room to themselves. We met up with them at the con in the early afternoon. It wasn't until Ginny got me alone when Steve went to go do something that she asked me "What the hell did I agree to last night?"
Ginny said that she was way drunker than Steve led me to believe because while she only had 3 drinks at the brewery, she had already been drinking beers in the hotel for a couple of hours prior to them leaving. And she was drunk enough to mirror his interest in her and agree to see where things might go when she was really just seeing that a guy liked her, and that him being my friend made her trust him because she trusts my judgement. But she wasn't looking for a relationship at all and that he was coming on way too strong.
That night we all went to a Bar-cade together but when Ginny's local friend Django showed up, who is taller, broader, younger and more charming than Steve, he got jealous and Ginny took the opportunity to tell Steve that it wasn't going to work out. Steve had a couple of drinks, and I tried to talk to him about it but he left and I don't know where he went.
Saturday, Steve was acting really closed off, I couldn't talk to him without him wanting to ask about Ginny. If he wasn't a friend I would have called him a creepy stalker type. But I thought I knew him. Steve left before we did for the Con as he had some events he was signed up for. We girls end up going to the Con for a bit then head back to the hotel to get ready for dinner. Steve is there and he's acting like someone just stole his puppy. He gets Ginny to talk to him alone in the hall (which set off all sorts of red flags with Jen and Ginny, as it felt like he was trying to separate her from support, I was in the shower at this point) she tells him all sorts of things about why she's not interested in a relationship and tries to get him to back off, but Steve isn't accepting that there's not a chance. But he leaves in a huff and the 3 of us go and have a nice dinner at a spinning restaurant at the top of a nearby hotel.
We come back to the hotel after dinner to get ready for the Dr Who themed event at a club that Ginny knows about through Django. While Ginny was going to Kroger for some smokes and ice cream, Steve comes back with Jen and I in various states of undress and tells us "I don't care, I'm not attracted to either of you. I'm just attracted to Ginny. He asks where she is and then leaves before she gets back. She avoided him in the lobby and then we go to the club for a few hours and when we get back he's asleep or pretending to be asleep.
Sunday we get up and again Steve leaves before us. Ginny, Jen and I go to the con together and we hit up the dealer's room, have lunch at the stadium and then back to the dealer's hall until it closes at 4pm. Then we wander a little more before we decide to go back to the hotel and play some games I had bought. Steve is in his bed watching movies so we just grab some leftovers from the fridge and head downstairs to play games in the game room this time instead of the lobby. We play games for a few hours and then Jen and Ginny go outside to smoke while I go back to the hotel room. Steve seems like he finally accepts that Ginny just isn't that into him but he talks to me and tells me that he wanted to do Gencon with me because he wanted to reconnect with me as he feels I've changed since my transition (something my brother called hilariously tautological) and he doesn't know me. Then blamed me for not reconnecting with him by choosing to spend time with Jen instead of him. Keep in mind we had never spent a lot of time doing things together at previous GenCons I've gone to with him before my transition. And he never invited me to do anything this time. But somehow he's trying to make it my fault that his attempt to reconnect with me failed so now he's going to quit our almost 30 year gaming group.
I'm floored as I expected to get back to normal and try to forget about the Steve I saw at the Con this weekend because that's not the Steve I've known for years. But now he's telling me that he can't game with me without wanting to ask about how Ginny is doing and that another member of our group hates him(he didn't) and he hates Jen and he doesn't like that she joined our group. And again trying to make it sound like this con was his last ditch attempt to reconnect with me and that somehow it's my fault he tried to fuck my friend and then got all creepy when it didn't work out.
I was crying and yelling at him and he just lay there all stoic and stuck to his version of events that it was my fault. I'm crying that I've lost a long time friend over something so stupid and go for a walk where Jen and Ginny find me. They try to console me but I don't take the end of relationships well. Ginny distracts me when she finds out she booked the wrong flight home and needed to change her ticket and Jen disappears saying she has to take care of something.
Jen went and confronted Steve, telling him that he's being creepy, that he's made one of her friends cry and the other extremally uncomfortable and then demanded that he either let her buy him out of his last night in the hotel or give us back our money so that we can find another hotel room because she said we were not sleeping in the same room as him that night.
I don't know all the details of what she said but she saw me crying, and already didn't like how Steve tried to take advantage of a very drunk Ginny and then be all manipulative in trying to get her to agree to things she wasn't comfortable with. So Jen was filled with righteous fury (yes she is a fiery redhead) when she confronted him. She's taller than him and she said she used her boy voice on him. He changed the room name to my name and then grabbed his bags and left. I don't know if he got another room or if he just got in his car and drove home to Wisconsin, but he didn't come back and I haven't spoken with him since.
After he left and we returned to the room Jen was showering and Ginny was worried that Steve kept his key and that he could still get in. So I showed her the swing lock that could be used from inside to keep the door from opening more than a couple of inches and demonstrated how the door stops when you try to open it with the lock in place. Unfortunately, the door noises and thumping of me pulling the door against the lock made Jen think Steve had come back and she ran out of the shower to fight him. No she didn't get dressed first, she was ready to throw hands in the buff.
Ginny spent a lot of time on Sunday apologizing to me that she let it go as far as it did. But neither of us could have predicted that Steve would act that way. If you had asked me before this trip what the dangers of Steve sharing a room with us might be, I would have said he might make an offensive comment, not out of hate but of ignorance. But I never, ever would have expected him to crush on Ginny so hard that he lost his fucking mind.
Monday we flew home and I found that Steve had already removed himself from all Discord groups we shared. maybe he removed his whole Discord account, I have no idea. So he self exiled himself from our gaming group.
What I didn't think of until later is Steve has a stepdaughter from his first marriage that would be about Gwen's age. And the funny thing is I ran into her at a Pride festival in Colorado Springs a couple of years later, and I was able to go over the story with her. She wasn't surprised, she didn't get along with Steve ever since he cheated on her mom with the woman who would become his 2nd wife. Which I never knew about, even though we were gaming friends when all that went down. She said she still knew people on Steve's side of the family, so his attempt at infidelity would be known by the people who matter.
I got over the sadness after a week or so, I was mourning the friendship I thought I had, but learned that Steve wasn't the friend I thought he was or even the person I thought I knew for half my life. I gave him the benefit of so many doubts that weekend. I don't blame Ginny for anything that happened. It was Steve being creepy and then socially awkward and possessive of her in a way that made me increasingly uncomfortable around him. My brother reached out to him for his side of the story. And while he wouldn't tell me what Steve said, he did say that Steve sounded unhinged and it's a good thing he lives half the country away from Ginny and that he didn't know where she lived. He also said that Steve said a bunch of stuff about me that he knew wasn't true because my brother trusts my word over someone who is clearly losing it.
I learned a lot that weekend about the people I went with. I learned that Steve is creepy around women, something I didn't notice before I realized who I was. I learned that Jen is very protective of her friends and you make them cry at your own peril. And I learned that Ginny has horrible taste in hookups.
Next GenCon I attend will be a ladies only hotel room.
Consequences: after being creepy toward a woman young enough to be his daughter, Steve lost an entire friend group, and gets word of his cheating out to his family and current wife.
Edit: Forgot to mention that these names are pseudonyms. As per the subreddit's rules. And I had accidentally had a few instances where I forgot to use the pseudonym.