The NC Policy Watch Critical Conversations Forum on August 7th featured Chris Brook, Legal Director of the ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation, Jen Jones, Director of Communications and Outreach at Equality North Carolina, and Shawn Long, one of the plaintiffs in one of the court challenges to the North Carolina discrimination amendment One.

As the year comes to a close, and I’m looking back I’m also looking forward to a new year and a new opportunity for renewal. Christmas was always a family time, and I miss those connections, but their memories still warm me when I’m alone. Now I celebrate holidays with friends who sustain me through out the year. As I look back at the friendships I’ve had, I realize how much they have meant to me in enriching my life and accepting me when much of society rejected me.

I think it’s too easy to drift into sentimentality when thinking about friendship because it isn’t always wonderful. Friends can make demands on our time and expect more than we’re willing to give. We can argue and have disagreements with friends, but we always make up. If we don’t, and the friendship ends then it is a great loss for both of us.

The Triangle Gay Men’s Chorus had a limp little skit as part of their recent Christmas concert about a queen who is left alone on Christmas Day and looks back on all of the relationships that didn’t work out. The tag line apparently was that it didn’t matter because he was Jewish anyway. I never got the point of the story or how it tied in with the Christian carols they sang. I guess it was supposed to be funny, but it fell flat.

But it fit the stereotype of what most people think gay life is like — a series of sexual adventures that end in emptiness and loneliness in a bar grousing about the holidays. But that cliché ignores the many happy couples, and the numbers keep growing. Gays and lesbians are having families now, and not just children from former straight marriages. The heart of the issue is the definition of what constitutes a family, and is it limited only to blood relatives. But I drift from the point of how gays spend their holidays, including Christmas.