young queers hate anyone that isn't young.
i wish it was more complex than that. it's always couched in some other argument of course, about how times have changed or how old people are inherently more conservative or how "outdated" language is "offensive", rich out of touch boomers etc, but it's just a distraction. new young people enter the queer community and want it all to be fresh and new and sexy, they want to be the trailblazers, the first generation really pushing back, the first true radicals. after all, if the previous generations had done it right, they'd have defeated bigotry and oppression, right? so they must have been fighting wrong. they must have been bad queers - sorry, bad LGBTQIA+'s. so they should shut up and let us kids fix it.!
of course there will be black and white photos of "elders" and a sort of performed reverence for "history" and us "always being here", but only as history, never as contemporaries, as members of our continuous community that we should actively listen to. the voices of those that came before are only revered once they're dead and they can't argue back at teenagers wildly misreading and rewriting their lives... or maybe even worse, the fresh queers might discover their revolutionary new praxis system has actually been done before!!
the excuse i hate most though?
"we lost a whole generation to AIDS"
i am so fucking sick of hearing this, absolutely sick to my stomach of it. because we didn't! i am not at all going to minimise how horrific the aids catastrophe was to our community or how many it killed, because i have heard first hand stories of people that lived through it, who lost friends and families to it.
but that's the point. they lived through it. many queers did! depending on where you are, most queers did!
we have a living, continuous, unbroken line of queers spanning back all of living memory who we could truly embrace as elders of a community, to care for and learn from, so that we don't have to stumble through alone, but we don't. a "queer elder" is someone like me apparently, 35. i keep having people in their early 20's tell me how thankful they are for my "wisdom", like bitch, there are 60-80 year old queers out there, ready to tell their stories! they will know a fuckton more than me, and all of it is still relevant!
when i was in my 20's, and i was lucky enough to learn from some of them at the rare events where they were welcomed; 50yo's setting up casual evenings for anyone and everyone to come and talk and share stories and learn from each other. i had a therapist once that was a grumpy old dyke that came out in the 70's, and while we often had friction in our opinions on mental health strategies, her experience was invaluable for me untangling a lot of internalized hatred and self loathing. it broke my heart one day when she just straight up said "people would rather pretend we'd all died from aids though, than have to listen to what we've got to say".
but even in the decade since then, it's got worse and worse.
everyone i know my age who once had an active and thriving social network in the queer community has withdrawn into isolation. we live in small pockets with few friends. there's no space left for us. all ages events and gatherings are organised for the fresh and young, and they complain if we're there - we being anyone who dares to be a little wrinkly and saggy. any event that has a minimum age, 30+, 40+, 50+ etc, get flooded with hate for being "exclusionary", or "hoarding resources" like community is a 4X game. teenagers complain about "creepy old predators" having picnics at midsumma carnival. people in their 60's are told to go kill themselves for daring to use the same language they did 40 years ago - ironically right in the middle of the aids crisis that supposed cost us all our elders. horizontal ageist violence in the queer community is some of the nastiest emotional vitriol i've seen, and i've been hate crimed (:(:
so we withdraw into eternal loneliness, looking for scraps, being told our names and flags and core identities are as hurtful as the weapons of the oppressors. told we should either ovverhaul our entire experience of being queer to fit in with what's acceptable in this 3-year cycle of new identities and symbols, or stfu and go away.
but there's this pervasive fear and hopelessness you see among young queers, talking about how high our suicide rates are, talking about losing a whole generation to aids; because when we're made invisible, what are the youth supposed to think other than that we've got an expiry date, and they won't live past 29?
the elders are here and they need love and support too, or the cycle will just repeat, and those fresh sexy young queers will also grow up and be discarded, again and again.
and i'm so, so tired of it.
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