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Ready or Not – Here Come Those Family Holidays

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I have a good friend who dreads the holiday season, saying: “The holidays are upon my a##.” But it’s here anyway with all those upcoming expectations of Norman-Rockwell-print warm, loving, accepting images of Thanksgivings, Hanukkahs, and Christmas celebrations where families gather together to try to recreate them. They’re usually laden with consumer goods that buy perfect gatherings along with national myths to “explain” why we’re supposed to be joyful about it all. Yet, the reality is that many are “celebrating” with depression and disappointment. Even suicide rates increase this time of year. I wonder how many people actually experience the joy they expect, rather than find these to be anniversaries of exhausting, dysfunctional family pasts. It’s no wonder that streaming movies such as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation , Home for the Holiday, or even the Home Alone series now constitute holiday traditions. Maybe most of us long for pasts that today’s nostalgia has us believin
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“Out” or Not, On Coming Out Day You’re Okay

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There are a lot of days of remembrance throughout the year for people who identify with letters in LGBTQI+++. And that seems to be how it should be, for in the midst of that larger demographic there are subgroups who we don’t want to get lost in the crowd and who need to be recognized and valued. On that list of dates is LGBTQ History Month every October as distinct from Pride Month in June. Founded in 1994 by a Missouri high-school teacher to highlight the role models and contributions of LGBTGQI+ people in, well, history, it’s since been adopted worldwide. October was chosen to coincide with National Coming Out Day on October 11 th , the anniversary of the Second March on Washington for LGBTQ rights in 1987. That day was founded to celebrate positively the “coming out” of LGBTQ people publicly and rooted in the then feminist and gay liberation movements’ well-known affirmation that “the personal is political.”   I wish people could come out of their closets on this or any day becaus
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Our Lives and Loved Ones Are on the Line Now

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What are you up to this election season? Are you paying any attention? Are you working for your favorite candidates? Are you planning to vote and maybe even bring someone with you to the polls? Or have you given up on politics? Have you fallen for right-wing mind-game attempts to suppress your vote by convincing you to embrace ideas such as: “They’re all the same.” “They’re all crooked.” “My vote doesn’t matter.”   If any of those things were true, political action committees wouldn’t be spending millions to get you to stay home from the polls. They’re investing in the idea that your vote really matters. In each current election we hear it's “the most important in our lifetime.” But of all targeted groups, LGBTQI+ people should be struck by the fact that the stark contrast of the sides in this one brings real, life-determining, relationship-determining, consequences.   There are groups of people who occupy and benefit from such a privileged position in life, whether it’s heterosexu
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Yes, It's Still Called Bigotry

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If there’s anything that’s really traditional, even a part of many historically “traditional family values,” it’s prejudices and the accompanying bigotry.   Of course, bigots are really, really offended when someone points out their bigotry. And their hope is that by showing how offended they are, liberal guilt and the accompanying navel-gazing will kick in and get the critic to feel bad so they don’t have to. They take that response as proof that they’re right. People are told that it’s not nice to call someone names, and so we don’t, no matter how openly bigoted they are. And women in our culture have been taught that it’s more appropriate to be nice than honest anyway.   The famous psychologist/minster/writer John Bradshaw spoke of the personally destructive forces of the “Price of Nice,” and Angelina Castagno collected together a group of scholars in an edited volume entitled The Price of Nice: How Good Intentions Maintain Educational Inequity to explain h ow being “nice” in scho
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We’re All Freer Today Thanks to Our Lesbian Sisters

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When those rich, white males turned the Declaration of Independence’s “All men are created equal” into the original U.S. Constitution, they took “men” quite literally. Their constitution made landed, white men equal. They denied the vote to everyone else. “Taxation without representation” ended – for them. Freedom in its fullest form was limited to them. When we immortalize these founding fathers, let’s be realistic: they didn’t include most of us in the American dream. It took “radical” and “disruptive” people who were willing to give blood, sweat, and tears to change that constitutional discrimination so that freedom would be something legal regardless of gender, race, skin color, or sexual orientation. We white males, even if we’re gay, might hate to admit that we’ve had historical privileges others haven’t. Change to all this came about often because women, often those who today would identify as lesbians, forced that change upon us against the odds. There were courageous, subversi
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