Last summer I received a message online from Hannah, a young woman living in Portland, Oregon. She would be coming to Washington, DC to spend the fall semester working in Congress and wanted to know if I would be willing to meet up with her for an upcoming Pokémon GO Community Day. I readily agreed because, as many have found, spending Community Day with a group is a fantastic way to spend time with old friends and make new ones.

I contacted James and Eric, two other DC players I know from our online community, and we arranged to meet up by the Smithsonian National Zoo on a drizzly Saturday afternoon. That day was the unofficial beginning of “Hannah and her Three Gay Dads.” Once or twice a month we would use Pokémon GO as our excuse to get together, sometimes only in our group of four, sometimes with guests. It expanded beyond just Pokémon GO—we would meet up for lunch or dinner, have a coffee run as tradition, and spend hours catching Pokémon at the Jefferson, FDR, and MLK memorials.

I have loved playing Pokémon games in all their myriad forms for decades. I am fortunate enough to spend every week discussing the latest Pokémon news (and cracking poor jokes) with my friends Steve and Greg on the It’s Super Effective podcast. Through the podcast I have learned about the various communities that grow around the Pokémon games, and have had the opportunity to share my love of the games with many people. Besides our mix of co-hosts from diverse backgrounds, including the current gay co-hosts, we are constantly in touch with a fan community that includes lesbians, bisexuals, demi-girls and demi-boys (people who feel they are partially but not fully female or male), and others who are questioning and learning about their own identities.

Why do so many of us who fall outside the gender and orientation norms gravitate to Pokémon? There is tremendous diversity in both the variety of formats with which you can engage with Pokémon (anime, video games, card game, manga) and within the stories told within the games. With 809 Pokémon to choose from, it would be difficult not to find one with some personal appeal (my current “all time” favorite is Volcarona).

The huge initial popularity of Pokémon GO made evident the long-standing love that many of us had for the game. When Pokémon GO first launched in 2016, its impact was evident: especially in urban areas, people were spending time outdoors again. Because of the design of the game around Pokéstops, you could tell which of your neighbors were playing and, surprisingly, people wanted to talk about it. The common interest in Pokémon became the foundation for adventuring in your neighborhood streets with the common goal of catching them all. Many aspects of the games appealed even to those who had never played a Pokémon game before—accessibility on mobile devices, the ability to combine it with other activities, and the biggest appeal of them all: collecting!