I joked a few minutes ago about how in internet discourse anyone over 25 is a “queer elder” but come to think of it most of these young discoursers don’t even believe such a concept exists. Gay men who watched their entire friends groups perish to AIDS are “privileged cis gays,” older trans women who use dated terminology to describe their own experiences are problematic, elders are just a conservative old guard to rebel against, and anyone over thirty who speaks to you at all must be a predator. The first time I heard the phrase “okay groomer” online, it wasn’t coming from self identified conservatives but from tiktok teens reacting against leather at Pride. You guys are ignorant and uncultured and proud of it!
Nobody hates you because you’re young. They hate you because you’re ignorant and annoying. Hope this helps.
Speaking as a “queer elder” (don’t really feel like one but shit if we’re joking about anyone older than 25 being one might as well roll with it). To my young queers (and my young LGBT+ folks who don’t use queer).
You are not getting pushback from the older segment of the queer community because you are young.
It’s because you came into the spaces we built for you and instantly tried to kick us out.
It’s because we opened the doors for you and you walked in and demanded that everyone you don’t like leave. You demanded that the kinksters, the crossdressers, the freaks and the weirdos, the non-binary trans folks, the people with conflicting identity labels, the people who apparently don’t enjoy their smut “the right way” leave.
It’s because you have thrown yourself into queer spaces with all the fucking audacity of a straight white woman raging at a rainbow flag in a grocery store, wailing about how it’s not appropriate for children.
It’s because you apparently think that you have some right to tell us, and other queer people your age, HOW to be queer.
It’s because a SCARY number of you think that using the word queer is bad in the first place.
It’s because so many of you have come here drowning in radfem rhetoric, and your response to being corrected is to scream “pedo!” At any queer peer who disagrees with your puritanical approach to kink and fantasy.
It’s because so many of you think that being LGBT+ means you can’t possibly hold onto the conservative values you grew up with, and when you’re called on it you attack anyone and everyone in your way.
Us queer elders aren’t hating on you because you’re young. It’s because you have come into the space we built- a space that we built on from what OUR queer elders built. Which was built on what THEIR queer elders built. And so on, all held up by a foundation of fucking blood of the queers who did not fucking survive, who we lost before I was born, and continue to be lost.
If we seem hostile to you and the ideology you bring? It’s because us elders know a threat when we see it. And the shit I see SO MANY of you young queers saying IS a threat. No different than the threats we’ve faced before. Except this time. It’s coming from inside the fucking house- and we won’t tolerate that.
