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Nov 22, 2022

10 Reasons Why Thanksgiving is the Gayest Holiday

If you're not from the U.S. you might not be familiar with Thanksgiving, a holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November (it's also celebrated on different dates in Canada, Liberia, and Grenada).

It's my favorite holiday.  And the gayest:

1. It's in November, so it's cold outside, and dark at night like it's supposed to be.  No one is forcing you to go out and "enjoy the outdoors."

2. There are no tv commercials depicting heterosexual couples giving each other gifts or watching in rapt joy as their children unwrap gifts.

3. There's no religious significance, so you won't feel guilty if you accidentally say "Happy Thanksgiving!" to someone who is Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Wiccan, or atheist.  Although sometimes vegans will lecture you.


4. Gay men spend many extra hours at the gym in anticipation of over-indulging on Thanksgiving.  As a result, at Thanksgiving they're more buffed than at any other time of the year.

5. Everyone gets to demonstrate their culinary skill.

6. You only get Thursday and maybe Friday off work, so there's no time to take a plane ride 2000 miles to the place you grew up.  Thus, "home" is no longer in the past, it's the place you are today, and "family" is what you make of it.

This Advocate cover shows Howard Cruse's character Wendel being served Thanksgiving dinner in bed.  But why is the kid wearing a mask?  Is he the famous Thanksgiving character, Zorro?

7. If you do go home to visit extended family, Thanksgiving dinner is the traditional time for making Big Announcements, like "Guess what?  I'm gay."

8. Most of the bars, clubs, and bathhouses have special Thanksgiving Day events, so you don't have to waste all Thanksgiving afternoon watching football.





9. The origin story, about 17th century Pilgrims and Indians coming together to share a meal, is an imperialist myth, masking a history of conquest and genocide.  But it does lend itself to some interesting ideas for homoerotic revisions (picture from Crow821 on deviantart.com).

10. Gay people have a lot to be thankful for.  They grew up in a culture where they told, over and over, that "discovering the opposite sex" was inevitable and universal, that no gay people existed except for grotesque monsters.  And they survived.


10 comments:

  1. Lovely reasons, haha! :) Happy Thanksgiving, btw ^_^

    - Hot guys

    ReplyDelete
  2. 2. Yeah, but Christmas begins in August now, so...

    3. Though American Indian nationalists will lecture you. So will white liberals. And people like Linda Sarsour when they go Columbusing. (It's far less malignant than its namesake, but Columbusing is still a Bad Thing.)

    6 Okay, what was Reagan's gay sex scandal, besides deliberately acting like AIDS didn't exist? (An aside: I can't be the only one who finds the Orange Demon's latest whatever is, yes, deplorable, but not "not the GOP as we know them" or some variant thereof. It's pretty much been like this since Nixon for criminality and Reagan for extremism.)

    9 More proof Miyazaki (or at least a troll having fun captioning gifs of Miyazaki speaking) was right: Anime was a mistake. (To be fair, 99% of internets art is proof anime was a mistake.) Also, why is the Indian lighter? And a blonde?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't think are really supposed to represent 17th century Native Americans and Pilgrims

      Delete
  3. Did you ever see the very funny first gay Thanksgiving sketch on SNL?

    ReplyDelete
  4. I don't think I've seen any episodes of SNL since sometime in the 1990s.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I saw more of a Robin off that Advocate cover. Just the colors and the domino. Zorro-adjacent (to the point that we all know what Zorro means in DC Comics, they even used Zorro: The Gay Blade in Joker.) but not Zorro.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I never really considered Thanksgiving a gay holiday, but then I saw a couple of facebook posts of two of my friends. Glenn Scarpelli riding a caterpillar and singing in the 57th Macy's Thanksgiving Parade from 1983. And Eric Ulloa riding a pink flamingo and playing the trumpet in the Macy's Parade. You guys win. The phrase "Happy Thanksgiving" should probably be changed to "Gay Grateful Day!"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I know Glenn Scarpelli from "One Day at a Time," but I haven't heard of Eric Ulloa.

      Delete
    2. I remember when Glen Scarpelli was in the Macy's Parade. I was only 9 years old, but I had such a crush on him back then. The hair & lips on that guy just did it for me.👍🏽💯🤗

      Delete
  7. And the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade which can be gayer than pride.

    ReplyDelete

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