Some of our best friends are straight ...

One of the things I love about LIFE if that if well-lived, you just keep learning stuff till the day you die. New experiences. New understandings.

Let me tell you about my father.

He came from a small town, and when he was college age, he went to visit a friend he’d grown up with. Well, the friend had two male roommates, one of whom was extremely flamboyant. That’s how he found out his friend was gay. This was in the late 1940s. My father was so shaken by this, he beat a hasty retreat. For years – no, decades – he was convinced that gays “recruit” young men. No arguments would sway him.

Round about his 60’s, three things happened: he got to know my brother’s law partner, whom he highly respected, and who is gay. He began reading those articles that said you’re born gay. And then, after retirement, he and my Mom were adopted by their new next-door neighbors, “The Boys,” a middle-aged gay couple.

He’s 80 years old, and if his knees could handle it, my dad would now be marching for gay rights, especially gay marriage.

This Thanksgiving, my parents will be going to dinner at The Boys’ house. There will be a total of 8 people – my parents, The Boys, another gay couple whom my parents are fond of, and a transgender lesbian couple.

My mother has raised an eyebrow over the years at her “Let Your Freak Flag Fly” kids and our friends, so it was with great pleasure that I asked her, with as serious a tone as I could muster, “Do you have any straight friends?”

She thought about it for a moment. Last Sunday, they hosted another couple for brunch. The nice lesbian couple from down the street.

“Well, not really,” she said. “We really should get ourselves to that little UU church congregation in town so we can meet some people like us.”

Yeah. No chance they’d meet anyone LGBT in a UU church.