Happy Thanksgiving from Bent Alaska to you and your family — no matter what your family looks like.

There’s going to be a lot of gays and lesbians with families sitting around the table, and it’s important at the end of the day that people realize that family is family — whether it’s gays and lesbians with children, like Kris and Sandy, or whether it’s opposite sex couples with kids. A family is a family and that’s the foundation and this is a day of Thanksgiving that we celebrate that.

That’s what Jeff Zarrillo had to say. Zarillo and his partner Paul Katami are plaintiffs in the nationally-watched Prop 8 trial and appeared with co-plaintiffs Perry and Sandy Stier in a video from the American Foundation for Equal Rights discussing the importance of family and this Thanksgiving holiday.  I really like the video, and what they all said in it… but something was missing in it for me, too.

Because family goes even deeper than that, I think.  Not all of us have kids, not all of us are involved in relationships whether legally recognized or not.  And many of us in the LGBTQ community have wide experience losing part or all of our families-of-origin to lack of acceptance of who we are — and so have learned to create families of our own choosing within our wider networks of friends.

Today, I’ll be having Thanksgiving dinner with my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew; my own kid, who is my ex-partner’s 23-year-old nephew who came to live with us when he was 9 and still lives with me even though we’ve never been biologically or legally related; his girlfriend; and one of my best friends, also a lesbian, who lives alone. We’ll expect among us to talk on the phone at some point of the day with my niece in New York City, my other brother in Montana, my sister who recently moved to Kansas, my sister-in-law’s mother and sister, other family members and friends, and my ex-partner, a transgender man currently living in Portland, who while we are no longer “partners” is still very much my family.

Whether gay, bisexual, or straight, whether cisgender or transgender, whether our ties to one another are legally recognized or not: we are all family.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family — no matter what your family looks like.

May you all have much to be thankful for.  Most of all: that you have one another.

Oh yes… and here’s that video I mentioned: