Homo for the Holidays

By Joan Opyr, 12-10-06

I have friends in Texas, a lesbian couple who have been together for twenty years. They consider themselves married, and so do I. So their marriage isn’t legal. So it isn’t recognized by the Lone Star State. So what? They’re more married in the true sense of that word than my heterosexual parents were, or, for that matter, my grandparents, most of my aunts and uncles, and the majority of my love ‘em and leave ‘em cousins.

And yet this holiday season they’ll join countless gay and lesbian in the annual sham: burying the length and depth of their relationship beneath a pile of nuclear family manure. They will pretend, for the sake of delicate parental and sibling sensibilities, that they’re just a couple of spinsters who share a home for the sake of . . . what? Convenience? Frugality? The health and well being of half a dozen cats?

The culprit in this case is a much-loved evangelical brother. He’s a conservative Republican and he voted for George W. Bush, but he’s not a bad man. He’s a good man. He’s also a good brother, and that’s what makes this all so terrible. He loves his sister, but his love is conditional. It’s founded on a lie that no one believes -- that she’s straight.

If she wants to spend time with her brother at the holidays -- and also spend time with her partner -- then they’ll have to pretend that they’re just good friends. This is like asking a boat to pretend it’s a car. Sooner or later, the wheels will fall off. It’s the small gestures that give a long-term couple away. A determined homophobe can ignore the joint checking account and the joint mortgage. He can’t ignore the nicknames, the sharing of sweaters and socks, and the countless demonstrations of an intimate knowledge of one another’s likes and dislikes. Your brother might have no idea that cruciferous vegetables give you gas, but your partner will stop you from eating the broccoli. She’ll take the dish right out of your hands and say, “Honey, you know you can’t eat that. You’ll be up all night.”

This will be followed by dead silence. A moment or two will pass, and someone will say, “How about those Cowboys?” Someone else will speculate about the weather. A small child will offer a lengthy and terrifying exposition about how Yellowstone National Park is sitting on top of a supervolcano, and when that supervolcano blows, it’ll take out Wyoming, Utah, and half of Idaho. The lesbian couple will wish for it to blow that very minute, taking out the entire holiday supper table, broccoli, brother and all.

When you’ve been a couple for two decades, your family knows. Your dad knows. Your mom knows. You grandma and grandpa, your Uncle Bob the Catholic priest, and your brother all know. A lifetime of gayness is the second worst-kept secret in the world. The first is the truth about Santa Claus. Your brother ruined that for you when you were six, but you’re not allowed to return the favor by telling him that you and your "roommate" do not sleep in the same bed because she’s afraid of the dark and you can’t afford your own futon. You sleep in the same bed because you’re a couple, and that’s what couples do.

You can’t tell your brother you’re gay because he doesn’t want to hear what he already knows. If you told him the truth -- if you brought it all out into the open -- your brother might have to think about it, and thinking is not acceptable at this time of year. People have expectations for the holidays, not thoughts. They drink too much, they eat too much, and they watch It’s a Wonderful Life. If they had to think, they might become depressed. They might track down Elmo and Patsy and make them stop playing that damned Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer song. This year, grandma might get run over by a BMW, especially since she was the one who made the damned broccoli. Who wants to eat broccoli on a festive occasion? No one. It’s a kind of sacrilege.

The sacred imagination is an ancient thing. An archaeologist in Botswana recently uncovered evidence that seventy thousand years ago, the Sanpeople worshipped a snake god. The archaeologist, Professor Sheila Coulson from the University of Oslo, found a stone, six meters long by two meters tall, in the shape of a python in a cave in the Tsodilo Hills. Buried in a pit beneath the snake’s mouth were more than 13,000 artifacts, mostly red spearheads that had been trekked to the site from hundreds of miles away and burned in some kind of ritual.

On these ritual occasions, did Mr. and Mrs. Snakeworshipper expect their daughter Patience and her girlfriend Sarah to pretend that they only shared a hut back in Pythonburg to save on wattle and daub? Probably not. Homophobia is a comparatively recent phenomenon. We know that in the animal kingdom, mammals, birds, fish and reptiles often engage in same-sex relations. Ten percent of rams have no interest in mating with ewes. They prefer to consort with their fellow rams. Male penguin couples have raised borrowed eggs; same-sex swan couples have mated for life. So much for the homosexuality is against nature and the barnyard argument. Birds do it. Bees do it. Sheep, dolphins, and giraffes do it. Why are human beings expected to pretend that we don’t?

Gays and lesbians understand devotion, self-sacrifice, and compromise. Every holiday, too many of us get a painful reminder of what it means to do something you don’t want to do because you love your mother or your father or your brother more than you love your own comfort. And our partners who are obliged to go along with this painful charade? They understand The Gift of the Magi. We might not cut our hair to buy our partner a pocket watch, but too often we’re expected to cut off our nose to spite our face. [End of article]