It's weird how especially for people in my age group1 the threshold of "queer history" begins during our childhoods because
- lotta people died of AIDS, skewing the balance away from "living memory" and towards "history"
- general cultural prudishness around gay stuff + lack of media visibility meant a lot of political stuff was considered "unsuitable for children" and hidden from us
-
I'm thirty-one and a half for anyone curious
yeah there's this whole age curve thing. we (just Irenes) only know a very small number of queer people older than ourselves, almost everyone is younger.
it's a bit startling to hear somebody more than ten years younger than us say the same thing, not gonna lie
I am most of a decade older than OP, and while growing up I knew absolutely no one who was queer, older or younger; I was out of high school when I met my first others. I didn't get even a hint of my own self for a good five years after that. The information was hidden away, the AIDS pandemic was played as, at best, a moral judgement if mentioned at all. I still directly know almost no queers older than I am, and that's because of the deliberate purge that society enabled and abetted.
the AIDS pandemic didn't kill all, or even most, of the older queers in the US. They still exist!
What it did do is destroy community organizations and ties. Ties that have been broken for so long that it's hard to find queer history outside of having a queer bookstore in your city.
But do not confuse the lack of being able to find older queers with them not being around.
I'm 32, but I've known people a decade older than me
...who weren't in kindergarten yet during the crisis? You're looking at the wrong generation. I've got fifteen years on you and it's my generation affected by the elder loss, not yours. Yours is mostly affected by mine not learning how to proactively organize and be mentors. Like, you're right that it was loss of community ties, but that's not a separate phenomenon. That is the fallout of the crisis.
"It was only 25% at most" but it wasn't evenly distributed. The most networked were the most at risk. Folk in rural areas got hit a lot less, but that was already the worst place to find community and mentorship. Urban queer communities, where the generational knowledge and a lot of the people most motivated to share it were both concentrated, got hit hardest; and the fact that this was all before the internet meant that since a lot of people were only connected to those hubs through one or two others due to physical distance, there was no backup option (which magnified the effect on rural youth too, because the loss of one frequent visitor could sever entire towns). And while this is speculation because I was too young and rural to see the immediate aftermath firsthand: I'd bet that even if the direct AIDS death numbers are lower, secondary death to collapsing social networks and plain old grief took a major toll too. And, as you mentioned, people just dropping out because it was all too fucking much.
So like... yeah, you're right that it isn't the direct problem for most people under 40. But it was a devastating loss for GenX, and that has had ongoing consequences. You have a full crop of elders, but we were all far less equipped to actually serve in that role than we should have been. Younger Z and alpha might finally have the full benefit of the 30+ cohorts gradually figuring it back out, but are unfortunately also far more likely to have "over 25 DNI" in their carrds; agreed that broader cultural shifts have also been a huge problem at that end.
