Thanksgiving is almost upon us and I want you to have a serene holiday in which you feel love and give love. That can mean almost anything — but for some queer and trans folks that can mean not seeing one’s family of origin.
Here is your permission slip to avoid family that makes you feel less than, or where you have to pretend to be someone you are not. I went through years of familial dinners in which my family knew I was queer, but I had to pretend otherwise. My grandparents never knew I was gay and my parents resisted that reality for decades.
My mother-in-law hated that my wife was gay and blamed me for “making” her a lesbian, since I was her first love in high school. My wife and I were together for 23 years until her sudden death while undergoing cancer treatment. My mother-in-law, with whom I spoke several times a week for years and with whom I spent more than a dozen Thanksgivings at my wife’s brother’s house, never spoke to me again after my wife’s death. It’s as if I never existed nor the breadth of our long, if complicated, relationship existed.
I’ve been blessed that there are no MAGAs or Trump supporters in my family or my wife’s. Many of my friends are not so fortunate and will be spending the holiday with people who voted to annihilate their sons and daughters, sisters and brothers safety, health care and lives.
I wish I could get them all to stay home or create their own holiday sans people who claim to love them yet cast a ballot for a man dedicated to making their lives hell and ratcheting up dangerous levels of homophobia and transphobia.
We are acculturated by media and advertising and industry to believe that the only true holiday is one spent with family. But what if your family has put politics or religion over their love for you? Is that where you want to be spending your holiday time — feeling unwelcome for who you are?
I’ve hosted many “Friendsgiving” holidays throughout my adult life, inviting lesbians to my home to share in a stress-free and welcoming environment for a holiday that can invoke all the most painful of familial memories. Those holidays were delightful — full of laughter and conviviality and a true sense of what the holiday was meant to be: safety, belonging, inclusion, love. No discrimination, no pressure to conform, no harm to anyone. Just a peaceful celebration of togetherness in an environment that was intended solely to give thanks for our friendship and our survival in an unforgiving, homophobic, transphobic and often hateful world.
We need these support systems. In my early 20s, I went to my first lesbian potluck Thanksgiving with my then-partner. It was big and raucous and a little awkward as our exes had also been invited, but it was mostly fun and had none of the stresses of the dinners with my parents and grandparents. It felt like lesbian Thanksgiving and lesbian space and it was a whole different aura of breathing and being.
We need these opportunities to breathe, to exhale all the stress we may not even realize we carry with us as LGBTQ+ people. We need to feel we are part of, not apart from. I have friends who have been partnered for decades whose families of origin don’t acknowledge those relationships — they spend holidays separate from those partners to be with these families who have ignored the biggest part of their kids’ and siblings’ lives.
Why are so many of us still putting ourselves through this torture? Why are we buying into the false notion that rapprochement can be made with people who don’t love us quite enough to accept and embrace us as we are? Why are we pretending that the politics that have hate for us at their core are somehow irrelevant to a holiday meant to give thanks when it’s the people who should love us most and know us best who are espousing it?
It’s time to recreate your Thanksgiving holiday. It’s time to invite the people you love and who love you unconditionally to not just break bread and eat pie and over-indulge, but to feel free of the pressure to present as heteronormative or cisgender.
This doesn’t mean you stop loving your family of origin — it means stepping away from the toxic environment of familial holidays where your partner isn’t welcome, is barely acknowledged, or is invited reluctantly with warnings to avoid showing any affection. Or worse still, where you are expected to pretend you are someone you aren’t.
It’s time to spend our holiday as it was meant to be spent — in love and gratitude for all we have and all we have to give. That can be a Friendsgiving or it can be a group of you volunteering at a shelter or it can just be you and your beloved home in front of a YouTube fire having an intimate dinner for two.
If it’s too late to create this change this year, put it on your list of resolutions for 2025. You deserve love and light and freedom to be yourself throughout the holiday season. Do it. It will make your life richer, more honest and more real. And that will benefit you far beyond the holiday.