According to his friends, Justin Blake, a 22 year old temp from Sacramento, is a normal guy except for one strange quirk. Everytime he brings up his friend Steve, a high school buddy, he feels the need to quickly add "he's not gay" immediately after saying that Steve lives in San Francisco.

"It's the strangest thing," says friend Keith Potter. "I mean, I think he's homophobic. Evidently, he doesn't want any of us to think that, heaven forbid, he has a friend that's gay."

When asked for comment, Justin said that he is not a homophobe. "I don't know why I do it, I guess. It's not something that I say on purpose, it just kind of comes out. I guess when I think of San Francisco, I think of gay people. It's the whole stereotype thing I'm definitely not homophobic, I have a lot of friends that are gay."

When asked how many friend Justin has that are gay, he appeared indecisive. "Well, for starters, there's um...Jimmy...we worked at McDonalds together...and um....there's....um....oh yeah! My good friend Kenny's brother's roommate is gay. He's come over a couple of times, and I definitely consider him a friend.

We spoke with Justin's "not gay" friend Steve by telephone, and he definitely added an interesting twist to the story. "Justin Blake? hmmm...oh, you're talking about that guy that sat next to me in Trig class. I wouldn't go so far as to call him a friend, maybe more of an acquaintance. He forwards me some annoying emails from time to time, you know the ones that I've already gotten about 20 times already."

Upon hearing of the reason that we were calling, Steve surprised us by saying, "Well the funny thing about that, is I actually am gay. I came out right after high school, before I moved to San Francisco. The reason I live here is because the best job offer I got out of school was at a company here. It's not like I was thinking 'man, since I'm gay, let me move where all the gay people are.'"

We called Keith back and told him what we had found out. "Wow, not if that's not ironic, I don't know what is. I don't think I'll tell Justin though, It would totally rock his world."

An interesting aside to the story is that 99% of the time Justin talks about "his friend from San Francisco, who's not gay" a listener immediately says "not that there's anything wrong with that," a line from the popular comedy series Seinfeld.