Winter Holidays Hurt LGBTQ People: You Can Help
By: James Finn
Tags: Mental Health, Equality, LGBTQ, Christmas, Religion

What do Christmas and the winter holidays mean to you?

Do you and your family honor traditions that bathe you in joy and light? I wrote the other day that one of my personal winter traditions is tuning in the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge on Christmas Eve. I love to join in spirit with millions of people who revel in a 500-year-old tradition broadcast globally almost every year since 1928.

I did NOT write that the tradition fills me with more despair than joy. But it does and I should have.

What do the Holidays mean to LGBTQ people?

Why does a gay atheist like me take joy in robed choristers singing Christian hymns? Christmas and and other winter holidays center around love, family, and warmth. But for marginalized people, the holidays often emphasize loneliness and rejection.

Raised Christian, surrounded as a boy by holiday imagery and ideals, Christmas has always vibrated inside my soul. I wrote the following paragraphs a few years ago, trying to explain to friends why an atheist like me would love Christmas.

Christmas is a cry of defiance

Christmas is an excuse to indulge our children, decorate our homes, eat wonderful food, and drink more alcohol than we might ordinarily allow ourselves. The smells! Christmas is cinnamon, nutmeg, and pine trees. Roasting meats and crackling fires. Christmas is an explosion of light and warmth during a season of darkness, cold, and ice. Christmas is a cry of defiance against eternal dark night and shortening days. Back, winter! Retreat! You may have us in your grip now, but we remember sun and warmth. We recreate it here with our festivals, knowing it must return in Spring, come what may. Winter days are short, but tonight we feast.

As a gay man, I defy more than JUST the sun’s retreat

Christmas is so much more than a festival of light and warmth; it’s a celebration of love. The Christmas fests I remember most fondly are those I once shared with my late husband Lenny. I remember them as paeans of joyous defiance.

Christmas became our favorite reason to invite a houseful of friends to join us around a groaning table. I’d cook for days, bread fresh from my oven, pasta extruded by hand, stewed cranberries, decadent goose, and briny caviar.

Author’s photo

We filled the apartment with music and candlelight. Our friends, our woe-begotten collection of misfit toys, filled it with love and laughter.

We invited people isolated or rejected by family. Religion didn’t phase us — me an atheist, Lenny an agnostic Jew. I remember one year I looked around and realized we had guests from every continent but Antarctica.

Our friends weren’t all LGBTQ. Hilda was a straight octogenarian who’d fled Vienna during the war. Blossom was our next door neighbor and Absolutely Fabulous co-conspirator.

But most of our guests were queer, because we understood exactly how much the holidays pain people excluded from them. Lenny and I were blessed. We’d created a family. We’d forged strong bonds with people we loved powerfully.

We came together for holidays and feasts because we understood how the EXPECTATION of family togetherness emphasizes absence for rejected people.

Lenny first put into words something I already felt in my bones: To those technically welcome at family tables, preparing a lonely holiday meal for one or two might be healthier than spending time beaten down by shaming judgment.

So, let’s come together instead!

Has anything changed for queer holidays?

Lenny’s and my last winter holiday feast lit our home up 21 years ago. The year after, he was too ill to tolerate a houseful of guests. The after that, he was gone. In the meantime, same-sex marriage has become legal and Hallmark Christmas movies feature ads (but not story lines) with gay couples. (And not without controversy.)

Now that our “gay ghettos” are shrinking and LGBTQ people are integrating into mainstream communities, serious questions pose themselves. Is coming together to create families as important as when Lenny and I threw bashes of defiant joy? Is LGBTQ acceptance real and permanent? Must we still rage against the dying of the light?

Joyful defiance means as much now as ever

Things have gotten better for lots of LGBTQ people, but how easily we forget that they aren’t better for all of us — not by a long shot. Plenty of rainbow-striped people live without community or family. I do. My own isolation never wounds me more than in December. Long gone are the days that I celebrated Christmas. Today, I dread it. I wish I could go to sleep and wake up at the end of January. Not because I hate Christmas, but because I love it.

Holidays are especially hard for older LGBTQ people like me, statistically less likely to have had biological children and families of our own. People living outside major urban areas may suffer the most.

We are all our ‘brother’s keeper’

I’m writing this story to remind my LGBTQ family in all our diverse, dispersed communities that holidays are hard for many of us, that reaching out like Lenny and I used to reach out is an act of selfless love and defiant joy.

The time to revel in defiance is now!

It’s time to remember our youth kicked out of their homes. To remember our elders, our lonely, our shunned. To seek them out. We aren’t likely to ask for your help, too embarrassed to admit loneliness and depression.

None of us has to be religious or commercially indulgent to raise a candle against the dying of the light, to light a bonfire of winter warmth and love. Maybe we even have a special responsibility, given that so many of us understand in our bones what alienation and stigmatization mean.

What can YOU do?

I no longer own that NYC apartment so suited to holiday parties and created family. I can’t go back in time to welcome rejected youth and elders to my hearth and home. All I can do is write about what used to be. What can YOU do? What can you do today?

How can can you rage against the dying of the light?