On this day in queerstory: a waiting game

December 23 sits in a strange, suspended place on the calendar. It’s the day when the world slows down, institutions begin to close, and decisions are quietly pushed into the future. In queer history, this date has come to symbolize something deeply familiar across cultures and borders: waiting. Not the gentle kind, but the enforced, bureaucratic waiting that shapes queer lives everywhere.

Globally, LGBTQ+ people are disproportionately told to wait. Wait for laws to change. Wait for social attitudes to soften. Wait for healthcare approvals, asylum decisions, name changes, or the right moment to exist openly. December 23 captures this experience perfectly—close enough to change to feel its possibility, but far enough away to remain stuck in uncertainty.

Across Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia, late-December delays have carried real consequences. Queer asylum seekers have watched their cases stall as offices close, leaving them in legal limbo. Trans people seeking gender recognition or medical care have faced months-long pauses triggered by nothing more than a holiday calendar. For queer families navigating adoption, custody, or partnership recognition, “we’ll deal with it next year” has often meant prolonged vulnerability.

These delays are rarely framed as discrimination. They are described as administrative, procedural, neutral. But queer history shows that time is never distributed equally. When systems delay decisions affecting LGBTQ+ lives, they effectively demand endurance from people who are already carrying disproportionate risk. Waiting becomes a form of governance.

The global AIDS crisis made the politics of delay painfully clear. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, governments postponed research, funding, and public acknowledgment while queer communities buried their dead. That legacy still haunts December 23. It stands as a reminder that delay can be deadly—and that urgency is often denied precisely to those who need it most.

Culturally, December 23 can be a day of sharp contrast. While many societies prepare for family-centered celebrations, queer people around the world navigate estrangement, secrecy, or conditional acceptance. For those living in countries where queerness remains criminalized, the pressure to perform normalcy intensifies. For others, the day marks another negotiation with families who may tolerate queerness only in silence.

In response, queer communities have long learned to reclaim time itself. Globally, December 23 has become a moment for alternative rituals: chosen-family dinners, mutual aid distributions, online gatherings that cross time zones and borders. These practices are not just social—they are historical. They demonstrate how queer people refuse to let institutional delay dictate the shape of their lives.

Activism, too, has adapted. Queer organizers worldwide have learned that end-of-year silence is strategic—and so is resistance. Emergency campaigns, last-minute legal challenges, and public statements often intensify precisely because institutions assume attention has drifted. History shows that many gains were secured not in moments of celebration, but in these overlooked days.

December 23 also invites reflection on queer time itself. Queer lives often unfold out of sync with dominant timelines of marriage, reproduction, and inheritance. Instead, they are shaped by survival, reinvention, and chosen milestones. This different relationship to time is not a deficit—it is a form of knowledge born of necessity.

On this day in queer history, December 23 doesn’t offer a clean victory or a comforting resolution. It offers recognition. Recognition that waiting has been imposed unequally, that delay has been weaponized, and that queer people have learned to live fully even when the world insists on “almost.”