Ladies, gentlemen, variations thereof and none of the above, I come to you refreshed from a strange American ritual celebrating the decimation of native peoples and the national vice of gluttony. Thanksgiving is seen among my people as all of these things and more. It’s a week off of school. It’s passing out from a food coma. It’s giving thanks that Native Americans were the victims of mass genocide by white settlers, allowing the United States of America to be. But above all things, it’s time for the awkward and forced interaction between people who share little more than a few more gene sequences than the mean. Yes, Thanksgiving is family time. But many of us in the LGBT community don’t have family to speak of. How do we celebrate the holidays?
No matter what creed you profess or culture you espouse, it is likely that you will be celebrating some form of family oriented holiday in the next few months. Yes, our heterosexual American friends may have to endure Uncle Joe’s sudden expertise on the legitimacy of certain Hawaiian birth certificates, Auntie May’s fire-and-brimstone sermons on cohabitation, or Mother’s need for grandchildren. But the vast majority of us comrades have a very different, more pervasive set of problems. Some of us are not out to families, and must break bread and trade niceties with people who have and will spew homophobic nonsense. Some of us are out, and have to deal the outright hateful stares of people who are supposed to love us unconditionally. Some of us feel like our very presence divides our families into ferociously warring camps. And some of us, way more than you think, don’t even have a family to go home to.
I'm about to science up in this bitch: I have mentally simulated the decades and decades of awkward family holidays that come with my closeted status. I have added into my simulation the alternate histories should I come out, and assigned probabilities to the various projected outcomes.
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| Public school education, don't fail me now. |
And with the given quantities, including my position on the Kinsey Scale, my parents position on the We-Hate-Queers scale, my Confrontational Bitch Scale score, and my Too-Lazy-To-Want-To-Support-Self matrix, I have come to the conclusion that I will either come out to them in the most aggressively rainbow way possible and get stricken from the family tree a la Sirius Black or I will suck it up and continue to suffer in silence.
These variables are not things I can change. I can't erase five hundred years of social conditioning that told my family that sodomy is the most horrible offense to God imaginable. I can dump in their laps the many studies that prove otherwise, but my parents will still be convinced that homosexuals lust for the innocent flesh of children. I imagine most of you guys are in a similar position.
So you have a couple options on how to deal with hostiles on the holidays. I call them the "Arsonist-Puppetmaster", the "Come the Fuck Out Already", and the ol' "Cut Your Losses and Run".
"Arsonist-Puppetmaster" is by far my favorite, but only in the short term. This highly technical term brings to mind the image of a master puppeteer, who commands dull wooden beings to serve his or her bidding through the use of tiny, nearly invisible strings. Then this puppeteer gets bored with his or her manipulations, and promptly pours a liberal helping of gasoline onto the puppets and puppet theater, and slow-motion walks away from the fire like one cool motherfucker. I think the meaning of the metaphor should be obvious.
"Come the Fuck Out Already" is similarly self-evident.
"Cut Your Losses and Run" is the most nuanced of the options. It can be implemented after any of the above methods or, for the high-minded and non-confrontational among you, on its own. It means burning bridges and cutting ties. It's not only the scorched earth method, it's the salt-the-scorched-earth method. It means fleeing the clutches of your hostile family, never to return.
Now, in my culture at least, writing off family members is seen as the moral equivalent of Satanist puppy murder. No matter what, you are supposed to be loyal to your family. Well, I've seen too many bitter people, even heteros, cheated out of money or cheated upon or degraded by family members, and I think that if your family's love for you is going to be conditional, it's only fair that you return the favor. It's hardly unreasonable for you to demand that your parents love you no matter who you love.
And remember, there's a bigger Family of people like you, who are ready to love you.
Come as you are.
Happy holidays.
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