(Editor's note: Every year, the Rev. Irene Monroe submits this piece for Thanksgiving, because it captures, in her humble opinion, the best way she can express her outrage of the genocide of Native Americans that is summarily glossed over with a national celebration and an annual holiday of its occupiers.)

As I prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday, I am reminded of the autumnal harvest time's spiritual significance. As a time of connectedness, I pause to acknowledge what I have to be thankful for. But I also reflect on the holiday as a time of remembrance - historical and familial.

Gays on television today is nothing new.

And we can thank Ellen DeGeneres’s watershed moment in April 1997 when she came out on her sitcom "Ellen."

Today’s openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) television personalities are Neil Patrick Harris, Jane Lynch, Rachel Maddow, and Rosie O’Donnell, to name just a few.

And these personalities have helped pave the way in terms of our acceptance in society and in terms of our civil rights issues.

Halloween is America’s gay holiday.

In the words of the lesbian poet and scholar Judy Grahn, Halloween is "the great gay holiday."

And this weekend of lavish costumed theatricality will attract everyone, but especially lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) revelers.

In a supposedly post-racial society one would think that the n-word was buried and long gone with it troubled eras of race relations in this country.

But as American novelist William Faulkner wrote in "Requiem For A Nun," his 1951 novel, "The past is never dead. It’s not even past."

As we all try to move from America’s ugly racial past, there are still rock solid vestiges of it.

At the entrance of a secluded 1,072-acre property in the West Texas town of Paint Creek is a rock painted in block letters with the word "N*****head."