I’ve had a long friendships with other schizophrenics in the past. We did a lot of normal things like going out to clubs or bars, going out to eat. Sitting on the front porch sipping some beers, going to AA events, shooting pool etc. These friends were way nicer than any non-schizophrenic friends I’ve had including my closets friends in high school.
But I didn’t see them as primarily “schizophrenics”. 85-90% of the time I saw them as people first and then maybe 10% as people with schizophrenia second. To me, they were perfectly normal people who happen to have a few symptoms of a disease. We sometimes conversed about incidents in hospitals or past times in he past when we were really symptomatic, but that was not what we talked about most.