The Gay Roots of (Ugh) Friendsgiving

AIDS and Queer separatism in the 1980s gave birth to alt-Thanksgiving.

“There was an uproar in the IRS offices here over canceling an upcoming Thanksgiving office party potluck,” the artist Edward Gallagher told a reporter, “when the straights said they wouldn’t share food prepared by gay employees.” 

This was in 1984, mid-November. Gallagher had built a piece of street art in the plaza outside the Federal Building in San Francisco: four open coffins, each stuffed with a mannequin—a businessman, a housewife, a little kid, a cliché gay—all linked by transfusion tubes connected to blood bags in hospital IV hangers: a protest of Reagan’s policy of silence and neglect and slashing health agency budgets; that AIDS was righteous retribution from a vengeful God, not a public health crisis.

The Vigil on Thanksgiving 1985: Activists chained themselves to a San Francisco federal building to protest US AIDS policy. [Rink, Bay Area Reporter]

Gallagher stood by to study the reactions of passersby, and this is how he heard about the canceled potluck. Many who walked around Gallagher’s installation were unmoved. “Most say it’s a gay disease and a gay problem and the gays should solve it themselves,” Gallagher said. 

Thanksgiving would be subject to a similar calculus. There would be 4,251 known deaths from AIDS in the U.S. that year (surely a gross undercount that hints at the neglect—in eight years in the White House, President Reagan would preside over more than 89,000 reported deaths). Nancy Reagan inadvertently took a sip of water from her homosexual hair stylist’s glass and summoned the White House physician to ask with alarm if maybe now she had it.

Thanksgiving 1984 saw the first dedicated dinner free of charge for people with AIDS and HIV and their friends and partners in San Francisco. A year later, the event drew 500 people to a performance space in the Mission. The SF AIDS Foundation supplied some of the food, the rest was potluck style from attendees who were able to cook. Volunteers offered rides, helped some of the fragile guests to the party.

Mainstream opinion held that gays were spreading the disease everywhere that November: let the promiscuous animals spread their gay sweat and saliva over their gay turkey and gay yams; spread the deadly droplets and miasma of doom around their own kind.

And so (cue the magic wand glissando harp), Queer Thanksgiving was born. In the early 2000s it would morph into Friendsgiving, a word I do not like (a glib, cloying word). And this rebirth, if you will, would erase the history of political urgency around Queer Thanksgiving. Long after the ‘80s came to an end this indie holiday, this alt-Thanksgiving, would be rehabbed like some Chip ’n' Joanna family fixer into bland and sunny open-concept lifestyle content: as Friendsgiving.

Thanksgiving has always had a tradition of the unattached from home—so-called holiday orphans, people unable to make it back to blood family because of distance: students, soldiers, workers, but Friendsgiving became this different thing, a conscious staying away.

I like Eric Kim’s story in the New York Times describing LGBTQ expressions of Friendsgiving, especially a quote from Queer chef Tony Ortiz: “So many of us aren’t able to build strong connections with our families because of our Queerness. It makes me think about the strength of my bonds with my chosen family, how much deeper that connection is because of our shared identity. It can feel deeper than blood.”

Elane, who is one of my oldest friends, has scarred memories of holidays at home, which she left when she was 16.

“The first Friendsgiving I can think of under that (sort of) name,” she tells me in an email, “would have been one with my then-fiancee Jules, in San Francisco, in a Victorian / Edwardian / etc. house that belonged to neither of us. I'm sure I would get the guest list wrong (because I am terrible about that stuff, having been taught to forget not to remember) but I do know that Jules (wine rep and poet) was there…more lesbians were there, and [the chef] Traci Des Jardins was there. Both Jules and I were cooks—loved cooking, loved all the sensual and giving aspects of it—and we had agreed/volunteered to manage it. 

Please know: I don't remember us as having done the whole thing, but it's hard to remember when attraction and food and hosting are involved.”

Remembering is key, though.

---

The roots of Queer Thanksgiving stretch deep, deeper than 1984, when the IRS employee potluck was scrapped. By at least 1971, two years after Stonewall, the gay civil rights org Society for Individual Rights was putting on annual Thanksgiving dinners in San Francisco, free and, at a time when Queer bars were segregated, open to everybody. These dinners offered clear messages of Queer freedom—in place, or maybe next to, flickers of nostalgia about Thanksgivings at grandma’s house in the bad old days of the deep closet, the conviction that we are Queer family. That instead of celebrating some mythic patriarchal past, Thanksgiving could mark collective hope for a future of liberation.

Since 1978, when Dan White assassinated Queer Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone at City Hall just days after the holiday, Thanksgiving was a time of Queer rebellion in San Francisco. Each year on November 27, hundreds marched down Market Street to protest police violence and the lack of legal protections for Queers. In 1983 protestors highlighted another injustice: the lack of federal AIDS policy in Washington. In late October 1985, a pair of AIDS protestors chained themselves to the front doors of a federal office building. They called it the Vigil—a spontaneous action demanding a level of basic humanity from the White House, Congress, and the judiciary, i.e. ending their toxic hatred of Queers (granting access to experimental AIDS drugs, committing money for research, prosecuting discrimination against people with AIDS….). It was doomed to fail, of course, Still, other protestors joined them, and on Thanksgiving, supporters delivered a potluck to activists bundled in coats and blankets. They ate stuffing, green bean casserole, yams, and pie from paper plates balanced on their laps.

Gay bars also put out spreads for Queer Thanksgiving—the Gangway, S.F. Eagle, and all the silly, dumb, and charming bartender wink lines: You fixin to get stuffed and basted tonight darlin?…the wet Jockey shorts contests and go-go boys and drag…pecan pie and poppers and things with lush promise and maybe even the power to black out the growing-up traumas in Davenport or Dinuba and a killing accumulation of day-to-days lived in the closet…the Dykesgiving potlucks, or—to rinse the bitterness of colonialism and patriarchy and animal exploitation clean out of the holiday, Harvest gatherings, where acorn squash baked with mounds of chestnut stuffing were totems of the womb; of the cosmic cycle of fertility and Womyn power.

James Oseland, one-time editor-in-chief of Saveur magazine, former judge on Top Chef Masters, and author of the World Food series, was a Queer presence in the early SF punk scene. James was a student at the SF Art Institute in the early ‘80s, and a friend there got a grant to make a documentary about the performance art scene in the East Village. They spent three weeks shooting in New York in November-December of ’82, as James recalls, a lot of it centered on the Pyramid Club, which was like some cultural incubator for punk and drag and art, the place where RuPaul, Lypsinka, and Lady Bunny got famous downtown; where Nirvana played its first NY shows; where Keith Haring hung out. Anyway, they were shooting there, and in artists’ studios, basically a bunch of shitty squats. “Lo and behold,” James says, our being in New York was coinciding with Thanksgiving, and I’ve never been a great Thanksgiving fan—the foods of that holiday hold zero sentimental value for me—but I do appreciate the idea of a meal that we have once a year either as a literal blood family or with people we understand to be our families.

“Anyway, I heard about this gathering, in someone’s big old storefront loft on Avenue C, maybe, this big, big space, and it was a potluck. There were maybe 35 to 55 people there, basically all vying for the Nina Hagen costume award. But what was so touching to me—even to this day—was the sincerity of the endeavor, and the natural-born instinct of these people to gather together and carry on this tradition that’s inside people everywhere to connect over a meal. I was really struck by how delightfully uncynical it was. Like Norman Rockwell in the East Village of the 1980s.”

My own hazy memories of alt-Thanksgiving (let’s call it ’85), drifting down to Marc’s flat on Haight Street after our own dinner, walking up to this sprawling potluck in the later stages of dissipation, dozens of people kicked back, splayed, me ransacking scattered bottles of wine to piece together a glass as the needle drops again on “This Charming Man”…shaggy, brown-stained joints still circulating, powders being snorted from a table somewhere on the periphery, and Oh my god you have to taste Margo’s pumpkin mousse cake would you ever in a million years guess it was tofu, and it’s warm and sweating on the table in the absolutely wrecked kitchen, sliced up, fingered, picked at, and of course it’s fucking delicious and of course I’d guess it was tofu…Why pamper life’s complexity / when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?…and then piling into somebody’s car to zig through empty streets to the Stud, packed and quivering with the DJ’s take on Madonna’s “Holiday”—sonically embroidered, appliquéd, and quilted—and it feels like the home we always hoped to find, or try to make if we had to.

A home in that zone of exclusion, exile, and belonging—of need and the end of need—where alt-Thanksgiving lives, forever and everywhere. It’s where every alt-holiday lives. #