Older Queer Voices
February 24, 2018 3:41 PM   Subscribe

Sassafras Lowery wrote at Older Queer Voices
We Know How To Do This - “If you don’t remember a time when your government hated you, those of us who do will help you learn how to survive it.”

More Older Queer Voices

C.W. Emerson: The Impossible Time

Cheryl Clarke: Five Poems

Merrill Mushroom: The Gay Kids And The Johns Committee
posted by the man of twists and turns (23 comments total) 35 users marked this as a favorite
 
If anyone wants to talk about coming out in the early 90s while the AIDS crisis was raging but you were living in a more remote corner of the country but also you were very involved with your church up until That One Day and when you were on your own... I'm down.
posted by hippybear at 5:45 PM on February 24, 2018 [18 favorites]


I was an out bisexual in the early to mid 80s. I was friends with gay porn actors like a fellow named John Duffy. I was working with a young lady who was doing research with Blue Boy magazine. The people I knew then were on the cutting edge of research for what was known, at the time, as the gay disease. A few of us knew that something really fucked up was going around. But this was the time of amyl nitrate, coke and bath houses. So nobody cared.

Well, a few of us cared. Very few.
posted by Splunge at 5:55 PM on February 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


Preach, sister.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:56 PM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


I used to do a radio book discussion show in a college town, and the college had an alum donor who showered the school's LGBTQ student group with buckets of money, so even though this college was in the middle of nowhere, it brought in the most amazing people as speakers for national coming out week and almost all of them had published books, so I usually got to interview them for my little radio show. I got to interview John Waters, Adrienne Rich, Kate Borstein, and many others. But my favorite by far was Quentin Crisp. He was delightful, and funny, and sweet, and very nervous even though this was probably the least consequential interview he ever did. And I even loved his wispy lavender hair, neatly coifed into his trademark do.

What struck me about him was how happy he was, and not so much over his late-life success as about the change he had witnessed. He told stories about the violence he experienced as a young gay man, but he also watched a blossoming of tolerance, a tolerance he never could have imagined. He watched AIDS devastate the gay community, but he also witnessed it inspire the gay community to fight for their rights and recognition to an extent he never thought would be possible. He was so charming and absolutely luminescent. It was a conversation I'll cherish for the rest of my life.

John Waters was also a delight, but something of an encourageable flirt. He was as delightful as Quentin, but in spite of Mr. Crisp's diminutive size, John didn't have anywhere near the gravity, at least not then. I'll bet he does now.
posted by Stanczyk at 6:17 PM on February 24, 2018 [29 favorites]


If anyone is curious I was the guy in the picture laying on the floor in the picture for the article in Blue Boy about health food not helping the disease. I was surrounded by crappy vegetables. With my tongue hanging out. The floor and the shitty veggies were Bruce's. The photo was by our friend Cheryl.
posted by Splunge at 6:17 PM on February 24, 2018 [11 favorites]


The great tragedy of lbgtqi Generations x and y is the premature loss of their elders.
posted by brujita at 6:42 PM on February 24, 2018 [10 favorites]


Cheryl Clarke's poems were my favorite of those you listed. I've never been a big fan of Sassafras, nothing I can really put my finger on, there's just something about hir writing that irks me.
posted by FirstMateKate at 6:47 PM on February 24, 2018


I think there's a significant divide right now between queer people who are over about 30 & people younger than that in terms of the sort of climate we grew up in. (As a 34-year-old, when I was a teenager the gay representation in the mainstream media was Ellen...who came out and then lost her sitcom because of it.) So in that sense, yes, Sassafras is the older generation.
posted by needs more cowbell at 10:18 PM on February 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


Even in the UK my friends (mid twenties) who have become teachers see a totally different, and much better world for LGBTQ kids than the one we had when we were twelve. The divide is so strong, my fiancée's older brother is from the older generation, and her younger brother is from the new one. My baby sister has nonbinary friends. It's no big deal to them.

I believe in the UK this weirdly coincides with the end of section 28 in schools.
posted by Braeburn at 12:21 AM on February 25, 2018


I'm 32 and I get really annoyed at young people getting grumpy at things like J. K. Rowling not making Dumbledore explicitly queer in the books, as though she perfectly could have and didn't want to. No she couldn't! Even when the last of the books came out in 2007 or so, it still was a little dicey to have explicitly out LGBTQ characters in any sort of pop media, especially children's media. I didn't really notice a shift till closer to the 2010s.

I did an interview with a known sexuality & culture luminary who was at the forefront of the AIDS crisis who talked about how young people are forgetting how to protect themselves from AIDS because "oh well it's not that big of a deal" and the numbers are rising again as a result. I distinctly remember AIDS being a guaranteed death sentence as a child - and sure, I grew up in Malaysia, which is still a billion years behind when it comes to any sort of LGBTQ awareness. But even there I've seen a huge, swift shift in how willing the mainstream world are willing to support LGBTQ people - for instance, at least one of the mainstream newspapers writes about trans people in a pretty favourable light, and there's a public outpouring of support for a particular trans rights group there to the point that this group managed to successfully challenge the Syariah court a few times. Things are achanging really really fast.
posted by divabat at 2:02 AM on February 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


(hell I just emailed our local Girl Guides org about volunteering and asked if there was a way I could volunteer with an LGBTQ-heavy group. They were pretty pleased with the request and said they'd talk to their diversity people about it. That kind of request would have been unthinkable when I was a Girl Guide about 15 years ago.)
posted by divabat at 2:05 AM on February 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


I'm feeling compelled to link this previous thread, because it is literally older gay voices:
posted by hippybear at 2:18 AM on February 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


Hey hippybear, I’m always down to listen and learn about your experiences.

(You’ve helped calibrate my head on other threads in the past, your words and comments have sent me on google searches and IRL quests to learn “where we came from” and I want to thank you.)
posted by Annika Cicada at 6:08 AM on February 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


46 here. There were authors writing LGBTQ-inclusive YA and Middle-Grade novels in the 1990s. I have to say that I agree with the same criticisms of Rowling, since her treatment of Dumbledore was the same status quo we'd seen in a century of literature before, and is the same used to justify blockbuster cinema erasing LGBTQ characters today. It's not something we should be making excuses for. When I was 15 and reading McCaffery (among others), ambiguity just helped feed denial.

But this next generation is generally going to be awesome.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 8:29 AM on February 25, 2018


None of that LGBTQ-affirming media reached Malaysia. Harry Potter did. And I think people really don't understand how big of a difference that is.
posted by divabat at 2:26 PM on February 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


Deathly Hallows was 2007 BTW.

Obviously I can't speak about how media is imported or exported into other countries. But there is kind of a thing right now of creators being LGBTQ-affirming in secondary media and interviews, while producing multi-million-dollar franchise work that isn't. Rowling isn't the only or the most interesting example of this, in spite of supporting it for this year's movie.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 2:42 PM on February 25, 2018


I'm happy that young bi people today can be spoiled for choice in some genres, as opposed to what I went through of either trying to decode nearly indecipherable subtext, or just straight up surfing for pornographic fiction on usenet.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 2:49 PM on February 25, 2018


Younger LGBTQ folks forgetting (or never learning) our history is one of the themes in The Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman. Highly recommended.
posted by book 'em dano at 3:33 PM on February 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


wow. fuck. wow.

I always felt so hurt and offended by my mother expressing concern about my queerness, especially when I was a young teen (I was born in 1990, for context) -- concern that the world would be dangerous for me. it felt at the time like an excuse for some sort of homophobia/transphobia on her part. like she just plain didn't want a queer kid and was using the danger to justify her feelings.

the Merrill Mushroom piece completely shattered that perception when I read it last night, and it shattered me. my mother was born in 1954. she was born into the world of raids and arrests and beatings. and I always half-knew that being gay, being trans, being any kind of queer had become radically safer in her lifetime, but fuck. I didn't know.

I didn't know what she wanted to protect me from.

thank you, the man of twists and turns.
posted by cabbage raccoon at 5:46 PM on February 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


I'm 42 and have been seen as a community elder since I was in my early 30s, because so many people older than me are dead. I've wondered if coming of age during the plague years s part of what spurs my interest in dystopian fiction, end of the world scenarios.

I love Sassafras Lowrey's writing, and have some contact with her online (she's very nice). I like her piece here, but the issue I have with it is that to my eye our government has never stopped hating us and neither has our society. Every gain we make is opposed both before with screaming about how we're all pedophiles seeking special rights, and after with lawsuits asking to overturn or to grant exemptions so that we can't go about our daily business, which is not to detract from the dangers of bashers, parents who throw us away, schools who turn a blind eye to the harassment and violence we still face. Most of the big gains we've made are conservative gains, like marriage and military service, and even with those we can come home from our honeymoons or our deployments and find that people can refuse to rent to us, can fire us without cause.

If our government didn't hate us, we'd be included in history class and sex ed as a default. Teachers would be out of the closet, so many more of us would too. Maybe we'd even get to be in more mainstream books and movies, instead of shit like Disney gay-coding villains and then denying it, or various queerbaiting. Even in the upcoming Fantastic Beasts sequel we won't see the relationship between Dumbledore and Grindelwald, a relationship that defines both their interaction and a huge moment in wizarding history because people like us can't be on screen even when cutting us out guts the story.

I was at a zinefest in the last five years, sitting next to another politically active lesbian who was maybe 10-15 years younger than me and doing a big feminist zine, and she told me how surprised she had been to learn - recently - that prior queer activism had been focused heavily on AIDS. Someone who was that plugged in still didn't know, because our history is erased so quickly, because so many of the people who should be seen as elders now are gone.

I am here for any and all of your stories, my queer family. We are here together, we have made it this far, and I love you.
posted by bile and syntax at 7:05 PM on February 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


As an aside one of the big things that bugs me about JK Rowling is that she seems to be really invested in getting credit for diversity she didn't actually bother writing.
posted by bile and syntax at 7:06 PM on February 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


sitting next to another politically active lesbian who was maybe 10-15 years younger than me and doing a big feminist zine, and she told me how surprised she had been to learn - recently - that prior queer activism had been focused heavily on AIDS

It's the lesbians who cared for and saved the lives of (and the legacies of) so many gay men in the 80s and 90s...

That's a literal fact. The lesbians were the caretakers during the AIDS crisis. Don't ever forget this.
posted by hippybear at 7:17 PM on February 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


I know. I was a little too young to be one of them myself, but I do know and I was surprised that she didn't.

What really struck me was how quickly our history was erased that she wouldn't know either of those things - either the history of activism, or what we did to support our brothers.

And now I'm crying in my breakfast.
posted by bile and syntax at 4:54 AM on February 26, 2018 [4 favorites]


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