Tom Palmer, a gay libertarian, was walking to dinner with a co-worker in 1982 when he was told by a group of passing homophobes that he would be killed and nobody would ever find his body. Walking slowly away, and then running, Palmer was pursued by the gang for about a hundred feet until he turned to face them with the handgun his mother had given him. His aggressors retreated when they saw the gun, and Palmer was safe—the gun may very well have saved his life. Today, Palmer, now a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, is fighting to tear down Washington DC’s prohibition against carrying handguns.
Palmer isn’t the only gay pro-gun libertarian activist out there. In fact, there are thousands of LGBT individuals who are skeptical of the government and love shooting things—or are at least prepared to do so in self-defense. I wasn’t aware of this subculture until I attended LibertyFest NYC—initially, I was taken aback when Marcel Fontaine, a speaker at the convention and creator of the “LGBT for Gun Rights” Facebook page told me that the “more guns, less crime” argument often referenced by opponents of gun control can apply to hate crimes, too. “Armed gays don’t get bashed” is how they often put it.
