Now, I know that Rahne-ing on everyone's own personal Macy's Parade isn't exactly going to win me a ton of friends, especially since gay folks all over the Atlantic Northeast are finally getting married for Christmas. But even after the day comes where Heathers all over the world can kiss both mommies goodnight without losing any sleep, family estrangement will likely continue to plague us from Halloween to New Year's. Some of us simply won't have our domestic spheres reshaped by policy. Hell no, we won't go.

It has been common in recent years for LGBT folks to refer to fellow queers as "family." This has certainly offered many of us quite a lot of comfort in a culture that makes it plain that if you are without family, you're a loser. It's a fleeting comfort because people in close environments with urgent political concerns turn on each other. On good days, my experience of "family" lies somewhere between Gilligan's Island and 28 Days Later.

I've often thought that queer activist types ought to spend more time running their organizations Corleone style, where family is an open, welcoming and loving environment - especially on the day of your daughter's wedding. But you have to ask for favors carefully, and you have to earn the respect of your family before they start giving you work to do, but from that point forward, you're taken care of. And if you screw up, well - that's just not gonna happen now, is it? Because you'd never let the family down, would you? You wouldn't think that family is a casual relationship, right?

The notion of family, by definition, is exclusionary. It privileges some relationships above others, and so even if we are choosing our family, we are choosing to allow certain persons to become closer to us. We are choosing the people to whom we will make ourselves vulnerable, with whom we will be able to communicate about the most dangerous of topics without fear of betrayal, and on whom we can depend in times of both crisis and celebration.

In the collective LGBTIQ movement, we have developed these organizations with lugubrious acronyms in the name of "diversity," and this phenomenon has caused us to have extensive discussions about who belongs and who does not and by what names we shall call them and when enough is enough. In all these discussions, what has never been explicit to me is the glue that holds this family together.

Already, for instance, there is great polarization around this issue of gay marriage. Some folks fear that Ken & Ben's wedding means that they will simply retire to the suburbs with their his-n-his SUVs and take all the political momentum with them. Others seem to think that between gay marriage and Will & Grace, the movement has done all it needs to do, and they can trade in their jackets, flak for smoking.

But at the end of the day, even if we have taken refuge from the media and the marketing with our chosen families on those stormy winter nights, many of us still have the biological familes lurking somewhere in the background.

I think about these things a lot, since I am estranged from my family and all attempts to overcome this have been fraught with peril. I feel that it is important, especially during these times when the hegemonic cultural value of the family within US culture is at its full power, for us to talk about our less-than-model family structures, biological as well as chosen. It is important for the same reasons that it is important to recognize that Christmas is celebrated by a minority population of the world, no matter how rich and media-hungry they are.

There are endless media representations of dysfunctional holiday family relationships available. They are easy targets for jokes: take years of family silence around an issue, add alcohol and several dozen family members who stay away from each other all year, and you've got yourself a reality series no one can watch or escape. In my experience, this phenomenon is entirely reliant on people refusing to budge on one particular issue, refusing to progress, and refusing to understand each other. This seems to fly directly in the face of what I'd be expecting from family, so it's no wonder that I don't have a burning desire to build my own, much less to get married and perpetuate a gay version of the same old drunken song and dance.

My family, being Mormon, teetotals and that makes the whole holiday experience just a wee bit less challenging. Still, though, it's impossible for me to sit quietly and eat the vegetarian parts of the meal while prayers are offered to a Mormon god who would have his church fund the California Defense of Marriage Act, and who would refuse black men equal status within his church until 1978. Just like it's impossible for some folks to understand why anyone would change their sex to be a girl who sleeps with other girls. Moral outrage on all sides, and then we get to open presents.

The tension aside, I remain grateful to my family for bringing me into this world which has give me the opportunity to do the work I am doing, and I would love for them to be able to honor this, even though my political goals tend to clash directly with their church's political agenda. I would love for them to know that I have managed to find ways of throwing open the definition of "family" and welcoming some of the most amazing forces for positive change on this planet into that family. But I don't know how, exactly, to tell them.

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Rahne Alexander takes the spirit of Xmas to the mat every day this month at xantippe.com.