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.
A lot of people just want to live their lives once it get normal. Even more are squeezed by capitalism so they can't easily write things down.
Even more are pushed away by a community that doesn't see their value, because their language has not kept up with what the Endless September has decided is now a problem, without giving them time to catch up. I have no idea how bad it is outside the english-speaking internet and a few cities, though.
The AIDS crisis did not kill the majority of the community. In the US, it took at most a 25%, but that's a very high upper bound. The lower bound is around 10%. This isn't to ignore their deaths, but, the rest? They're still here -- we just aren't entitled to them being mentors.
The ones who try are often driven away by people who, five years later, are using the same terminology they were yelling about because they have more perspective now.
I'm not judging the OP or anyone in thread when I say this, but: every year there's threads about how the AIDS crisis swept away all our mentors and that's why millenials/genz are a "lost generation" where it wasn't passed on. And someone comes and corrects them. And then it just happens again, because people aren't thinking to look, they're going off what people have said.
But a lot of that is the jump to the internet, some of that is culture, and a lot of that is that the loudest people on the internet are the newest ones to enter a space. And a lot of it is that, well, it's exhausting to write about these things. Especially when even less people are going to pay you for it these days. Even the queer history's pirated.
I'm 32, but I've known people a decade older than me, and most of them drift away after people failed to heed their warnings about cycles they observed, for like the 30th time in a row. It's hard to fight against the current, especially when you're right but it's from experience, not something you can link to.
the other thing that destroyed community? the act of talking about things on a subway or coffee shop inviting violence. the act of saying the wrong thing outing someone. You still see it with trans people -- afraid of being 'clocked' by fellow trans people because it would make the cis people upset.
let them be upset. building the links is important.
