Coming Out

Erin mentioned that someone who's LGBT has a second coming out when they reveal they're a gun owner.  (I can't find where she said it or there'd be a finely crafted link here).

I had (note that past tense) a whole passel of gay friends because a lot of my gamer buddies were gay.

Because I was straight the gaming was the overlap on the Venn diagram.

Being a flaming liberal was another overlap.  But outside the overlap I was also reading history and debating my positions with people like FuzzyGeff.  Geff too, was a flaming liberal when I first encountered him.  He was ahead of me on the reading and understanding the philosophy; but I got there; eventually.

Where I stopped being a flaming liberal was when I joined the Army.  Seeing East Berlin.  Seeing what it took to be a US Serviceman and get into Poland to see Auschwitz first hand, not to mention a couple of other camps still preserved.

It takes the shine off of Communism right quick.  Seeing where the history happened made me make the connection that Communism, Fascism and National Socialism were all different flavors of the same shit.  Once you see that the fucking nazis are left-wingers, the shine of flaming liberalism tarnishes too.

When I came back from the Army, I got back into gaming and my friends were mostly right where I'd left them.

I discovered that while I wasn't a flaming liberal anymore, I was also not much of a conservative.  I didn't care how many babies were aborted and I didn't care what consenting adults did with their genitals, even if those genitals matched.  I didn't care what imaginary friend people supplicated themselves to, as long as they didn't demand I did as well.

I am not a good conservative, but my conservative leanings didn't affect my friendships.

Until I bought a gun.

They seemed to put on a game face and attempt to wait out this new phase in their friend.  But I discovered that being a gunowner is something of a lifestyle change.  A change that was too large for my gay friends to accept because it came with criticizing politicians who were anti-gun and pro-gay.

They didn't want to hear that all that history, philosophy and politics I'd been reading lead me to wonder why THEY didn't own guns themselves, being a vulnerable minority and all.

I stopped getting calls to come hang out.  Games were rescheduled for when I'd be busy.

Pretty soon I didn't have many gay friends at all.  And my loss is teeny compared to the scope that a gay person would endure.  I lost some of my friends, not almost everyone I knew.