"This Made Me Smile..."

This reminds me of my stag night before I got married...

It's actually a sad funny story... The night before my marriage to my husband, my straight, white best friend and work colleague told me he was going to take me out for a "gay stag night," and it was going to be just he and I. He said he was going to prove to me that he wasn't homophobic at all. So we went out for a nice steak dinner and then he said we were going to a gay club he'd found that advertised stripers and exotic dancers. Now this was a big deal, because he knew that I was (and still are) a big stick in the mud.  I had never been to any gay venues in my entire life, no clubs, no bars, not even a gay pride event.  So all that week, he'd geeked me up about my stag night and the fun we were going to have.  So after dinner, he drove us to this club, but when we got there, it was closed for remodeling, and that's the funny part..  We just went back home to my house, we had a couple of beers, he went home and then bright and early the next day he stood beside me as my best man at my wedding.  And to this day, I've never been in a gay bar or club.

The sad part of this story is not that I didn't get to see any spectacles on my stag night, but that this fellow who was at the time one of my closest friends, and in-fact, the first person outside my family who I came out to and who became a dear friend whose own wife lovingly referred to me as his "work husband" is no longer my friend... Back in 2015, he fell under the spell of Trumpism and became quite the "white nationalist" and a bit homophobic too. I remember patiently listening to all kinds of regurgitated hate speech and vitriol come out of my dear friend's mouth, always forgiving it while trying to persuade him of the truth. I tried to wait out this strange turn of events in our relationship in hopes that he'd come to his senses, but it never happened. After a while, we stopped visiting each other, then he stopped answering my calls and ignored my texts.  It then became hard to read his posts on FB, so I just stopped visiting FB altogether. Now, it's been at least 5 or 6 years since I've heard from him.  Strangely, one of the most prominent memories I have of him outside of that "stag night" was when he called me a few days before Trump's inauguration from outside the gates of Mar-a-Largo, telling me how proud he was to be so close to Trump.

I still love you, Mark