The Christmas Lesbian

I've got a few relatives who, for various reasons, can't explicitly know that I'm gay. This usually isn't much of a problem because we see each other rarely at best. I've got my own thing going on two states away from them, and since they don't use Facebook, ne'er the twain do meet. It's a fairly common arrangement: they have the class not to try to set me up with nice Italian boys, and I have the class not to mount the dinner table like Edmund Hilary taking the summit of Everest, screaming "I AM A MIGHTY, MIGHTY BULLDYKE AND I HAVE SEX WITH WOMEN" and stabbing the pot roast with a labrys.

Which would be awkward because I'm coupled up now and my life is really very mundane. Our greatest daily excitement is the question of the relative healthiness of eggs over bagels. There's no way I could do justice to the initial screaming and stabbing of the pot roast. In this type of situation, the last thing you want is to be a disappointment.

Then, of course, having broken the rules of our gentlepeoples' agreement, I would expect to be forcibly tied to a chair in a neat local cafe as a nice Italian dentist sits across the table, white-knuckling his coffee mug and desperately wishing to be anywhere else. But frankly, a lot of my really engaged relatives are too busy to really follow through on this anymore, and I'd hate to go through the whole charade just to determine that we are all in exactly the same positions as before, except all now possessed of uncomfortable knowledge about one another.

Additionally, most of my relatives simply do not care at the moment. However, were they to be dragged into a gross family drama surrounding the gay, their resentment would be magnificent to behold.

So I remain mum. (Mostly.) It's not that bad. But I must admit one thing: it grated my cheese somewhat when one relative, a very sweet person whom I respect a lot and who presumably knows what's up, and who is undoubtably struggling to keep the peace and say the right thing to their touchy dyke relation, referred to my lovely girlfriend as my "roommate."

Alas! My aching heart. How could I have communicated my irrational distress? Of all the words my beloved relative could possibly have chosen to describe my relationship, this was the only one that could have so efficiently reduced it to a by-product of the prevailing socioeconomic situation, yet at the time, there was no way to address this. I writhed. My relative writhed. Everyone was unhappy.

This must never happen again. I shall educate the world.

These are some alternate word choices that I would have found acceptable under the circumstances:

Friend
Lady friend
Special friend
Very special friend

Advanced options include, but are not limited to:

Hetero life partner
Totally straight helpmeet
Platonic paramour
Highly involved cat co-parent
Ironic wife

All of those, I would like to stress, are extra credit.

Perhaps this attention to a very minor detail seems silly when you consider what LGBTs of previous generations went through at family gatherings. That's because it actually is silly. (I have found that most things that really matter to people are silly.) But, luckily, two days out, I'm beginning to see the funny side of being the Christmas lesbian. Like Santa, I bring gifts, gorge myself on cookies, and escape before anyone knows what happened. Like Krampus, I terrify everyone with the possibility that I will be offended.

Really, I have the most fun.

But next year, my family meets my beguiling girlfriend. Frankly, as a woman whose chosen profession is to be nice to people, she's much better equipped to handle a Christmas lesbian situation than I, the aggressive and occasionally paranoid writer-librarian, have ever been. Depending on circumstances, it's possible that she will end up having even more fun than I do. Stay tuned, friends.