Navigating Holidays and Hometowns as an LGBTQ+ Person

The emphasis the holiday season places on “going home” and spending time with family can be particularly hard for LGBTQ+ folks. After all, many queer and trans people have complicated relationships with the places we grew up and the families we grew up within.

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Though our hometowns may have been places where we experienced love, support, and play, they also were likely places where we first encountered anti-queerness and other forms of harmful oppression and traumas that our younger selves had to endure. The places that were the backdrops to our childhood and adolescence (i.e. homes, schools, parks, places of gathering, etc.) were often the places we felt most different, most othered, and most uncomfortable.

This is why the holiday season’s emphasis on returning home and spending time with families of origin can be difficult for so many LGBTQ+ people, and why it places us in complicated situations.

Some of us will be asked to attend a holiday gathering in a place our younger selves struggled to feel OK in or to share space with people who have harmed us. Some of us will not be returning to our hometowns or spending time with family of origin, but feel an ache for this need to remain distant. Some of us may be closeted to people we anticipate having to be around and are anxious about how this will go.

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Whichever our situation, this time of year can be challenging.

A nuanced layer within this challenge that can often be overlooked is how for so many LGBTQ+ people, this time of year evokes the emotional debris of our younger selves; it evokes the wounds our younger selves accrued from growing up in a world that made us feel like we didn’t belong. The pain, the anxiety, the depression, the fear. Perhaps even the desire to hide or run away.

There is, however, opportunity here—to not only get through the holidays but also to offer further healing to our younger LGBTQ+ selves. We can do so by answering this question: How can I take care of myself and my younger LGBTQ+ self this season?

There are two avenues that may help us answer this question: 1) exploring what boundaries feel important to enact this season, and 2) exploring what kind of emotional care our younger LGBTQ+ selves might need.

1. Exploring what boundaries we may need during the holidays.

What physical and/or emotional boundaries might we need to set in place to give us the space, safety, and comfort we need? Are there certain events we are open to attending but others we are not? Are there certain people we are OK with seeing and others we are not? What content about our lives do we feel a desire to share and what content do we want to keep private? Do we need limits on how much time we spend at certain events or situations? How might we find ways to set, hold, and honor whatever boundaries we need even if other people don’t want us to?

What if we can give ourselves full permission to set whatever boundaries we need?

2. Exploring what kind of emotional care we can offer to our younger LGBTQ+ selves this season.

We all hold the wounds of our younger selves. Integral in the healing within LGBTQ+ adults’ second adolescence is creating space to actively address these wounds. To navigate through the holiday season in a way that offers help and healing to our younger selves, it can be beneficial to explore what emotional needs of theirs might need acknowledgment or tending to:

• Might they need empathy and validation regarding their experience? (i.e. “Gosh, I know it’s scary for you to go back to that place—growing up, you felt so uncomfortable there.")
• Might they need us to stand up for them? (i.e., “It was not okay for that place and those people to make you feel so wrong and afraid.”)
• Might they need us to grieve with them for perhaps not having the experience of growing up they wished they had? (i.e. “It’s sad we don’t have an easy relationship with where we grew up/our family.”)
• Or, might they need to know they are safe and OK now, and perhaps are even able to feel that way in their hometown?

Whatever it is, may all of us LGBTQ+ people find space to do what we (and our younger selves) need to feel safe, comfortable, and sturdy this holiday season.