In his newest installment in the “Dispatches from Left Field” column on TNG, Matt looks at the significance of family values in the context of holidays, American culture, and recent political events. Matt is a graduate student at the University of Maryland and also blogs at tracktwentynine.blogspot.com.

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving and a safe Black Friday. I intended to write on this topic last week, but decided to use last week’s column to respond to issues about the gayborhood.

Families have always been an important part of the American mindset. Since the founding of this nation, the family unit has been dominant across the land. And while the family has undergone changes over the past 232 years, we still think mainly of family on the most American of holidays, Thanksgiving.

Originally started as a harvest festival and celebration of deliverance in the New World, the holiday has morphed into a kickoff for the Christmas shopping season and orgy of gridiron rivalries (way to go Yellow Jackets!). But it’s still a time for being with family and friends, still a time for eating traditional delicacies, and still a time of remembering those things that we are thankful for.

However, I imagine that for many gays, Thanksgiving does not come without some trepidation. The first Thanksgiving after I came out was fraught with tension, and I curtailed my trip home. While my relationship with my parents has improved since then, I’m sure that for many the tension is real and continuing.

For those of us who are out in our families, there can be awkward questions and disapproving looks, but for those among us who haven’t yet come out to our families the pressure can very well be overwhelming.

There are some in America who rail against the “Gay Agenda” and rally support for family values. These groups have taken up arms against the gay community in fighting the culture wars. Since the mid-1970s, their movement has gained steam and ours has not always been able to answer their volleys effectively.

They charge that we are out to destroy the American family, but they hold fast to an outdated concept of the family. Indeed, it seems that it is their goal to destroy all but what they consider to be an appropriate family unit. For their attacks have succeeded in slowing the tide of acceptance for the gay community, and in that, they have also succeeded in keeping many gays silent.

But we too are family members, and by hindering understanding, social conservatives, like those who fought to pass Proposition 8, are damaging our familial relationships. The fear and hatred that their movement abides for the gay community not only drives wedges between parents and children, sisters and brothers, and between friends, it also condemns many to a life spent in the proverbial closet.

While the battle for gay rights has often been fought over legislation, there have also been many casualties. One of the most notorious of these was the assassination of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk. He was the first openly gay man to win public office in the United States, doing so in 1977. The following year he was assassinated in City Hall by a fellow supervisor. In a prophetic statement, he recorded a tape to be played in the event of his assassination, saying “If a bullet should go through my head, let that bullet go through every closet door.”

I don’t know if Milk understood the stakes in his fight for gay rights, but his statement suggests that he did know that there were those who would try and silence him. He also knew that the only way to triumph was to defeat silence. Less than three weeks before his assassination, he made a speech in which he declared:

“Every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends, if indeed they are your friends. You must tell your neighbors. You must tell the people you work with. You must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize we are indeed their children, we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo, will be destroyed once and for all.”

I believe that public opinion in the United States is beginning to swing our way. Gay marriage is only a matter of time, but that is little consolation. In the words of William Gladstone, “Justice delayed, is justice denied.” But if our victory is not yet complete, it’s because we have allowed ourselves to be silenced by those family-destroying “family values” voters.

I think it is time that we in the gay community changed tacks. We can no longer wait for our rights to be granted. Even if the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, that is no excuse to be silent.

This Thanksgiving, we have much to despair over, but we also have much for which to be thankful. Proposition 8 may have passed, but it didn’t pass by much—and if polls are any indication, the same tide that swept in discrimination in California also swept in a President likely to build bonds between the gay and straight communities. It also seems to have catalyzed the gay community into action once more.

But most importantly, we should be thankful for our families. For despite what those on the right say, the American family is a diverse, many-faceted organism as varied in composition as the people of this great nation. But the gay movement cannot allow us to be silenced anymore—not in the public arena and certainly not in our own families.

There’s a new film out about Supervisor Milk this Thanksgiving. And while I’ve yet to have an opportunity to see it, I think the message that can be gleaned from Milk’s life is that a minority can be oppressed for only as long as it is silent. The healing begins when we raise our voices. Happy Thanksgiving.