Our Elders, Ourselves: Your Stories!
"Every facet of her everyday life was and is a vision to me"
First off, I want to thank everyone who responded to my post in February soliciting your stories about intergenerational queer connections! They were truly wonderful to read, and I simply love chit-chatting with you all. I was intending to put to this post together quite some time ago now! Life is a bit crazy at the moment - we have some big moves in the works with the bar, and I’ve also recently started two different part-time service industry jobs. Also I had a dissertation deadline lol. TLDR; I’ve been busy.
Anyway, I’m excited to share this with you now! Here are some very sweet stories from you, my very sweet readers. Enjoy!
MaryGrace wrote about a dear friend from Quaker meeting. I love how tenderly MaryGrace describes their friendship:
My friend, Wendy, is 50 years my senior. We met 7 years ago when I started attending our Quaker meeting, where Wendy’s been a member for decades. I had just moved to Boston to live in Quaker intentional community and we were paired up for a spiritual mentorship program. Wendy was set to be my nurturer – providing guidance, a listening ear, serving as a role model of spirituality and daily practice. So I (obviously) lost my mind when I learned she was also a lesbian and an iconic feminist activist. I had been out for 5 years, but I didn’t have deep relationships with any queer elders.
We started by going on monthly walks. Looping slowly around the paths near her home, talking about my life and my angst, we built a friendship that has remained spiritually nurturing but transformed beyond “nurturer/nurturee.” Our mutually nurturing relationship has seen me through law school, Wendy through publishing a book, both of us through loss and grief. We’ve connected over our values in practice – as I shared about my work, Wendy shared stories from the early days of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and her ongoing activism.
Every facet of her everyday life was and is a vision to me: living in cooperative housing in a loving marriage with her partner and sweet elderly dog, being active in movement spaces, engaging deeply with the spiritual and logistical work of our Quaker meeting, moving through the world with peace, truth, and love. To see those reflections of her identity and values in Wendy’s daily life was a reassurance of my own future.
I knew, intellectually, that it would be impactful to build intergenerational queer connection. I didn’t know how restorative it would be to share these experiences with a friend in such a different life stage but with such a similar heart. After growing up Catholic, I didn’t know how much it would mean to receive spiritual nourishment and pastoral care from an elder I see and trust so deeply. I’m so grateful to be fully seen, known, and loved by Wendy.
Monky Brewster wrote about an older friend who they met at a Buddhist monastery. I’m sorry, but have you had your birth chart read at Friendly’s by a Buddhist lesbian veteran? Monky wrote:
One thing that was immediately clear upon seeing my queer elder for the first time was that she was worthy of respect. Dignified, poised, and self possessed, she sat in her special chair at the back of our shared Buddhist shrine room and spoke her question loudly and with clear intelligence. She was an impressive figure in a sensible pants and cardigan set. My Tibetan teacher took her very seriously, if playfully, as was his way. Their dialogue stood out against a backdrop of other more confused and obsequious queries. I would see and hear them banter many times on my own path from DC butch dyke punk to Buddhist non-binary monastic and teacher, each of their perspectives informing me in its own way.
I haven’t seen my queer elder since probably 2016, when I entered an extended retreat during which she passed away. My memories are more vibes than details. Over the course of various lunches, butterlamp-making sessions, and causal foyer conversations, I learned her basic biography: b. 1926 an Armenian-American, she was Korean War veteran who earned a PhD in economics from UC Berkeley funded by the G.I. bill. She became an advisor to the Kennedy administration and lived in DC for many years. Since I lived there when we first met, she was sure to share her experiences and opinions on the place in her forthright manner. I’ll never forget her saying how unimpressed she was that just anybody could be gay these days. Before, you had to be smart and savvy! You had to read between the lines, figure out who was gay and where the underground gatherings were. Now it’s just all out in the open, anyone with an internet connection can find out and show up. I think her personality and standards shine through here. As you may imagine, I never quite felt I was living up.
The memory that most stands out is our trip to Friendly’s to read my astrological chart. This was something she learned in her Gurdjieff years, and she offered all the monastics a reading and lunch if they were interested, famously requiring others to sign a disclaimer that they wouldn’t be upset at the life altering news they may learn. She read natal charts only, no transits. She “had 26 astrology books on her shelf and none of them dealt in transits.” We ordered entree platters and began. I thankfully impressed her with my primarily air and fire sign chart. Water signs are too wishy-washy. Earth signs too easily overcome by the sense pleasures. This describes my parents to a tea. One thing I’ve never heard before or since is she read the timeline of my life starting at the rising and going around clockwise (yes, from the 12th house to the first) and since I have a large cluster of planets halfway around, she said my middle age would be the busiest time. I’m middle aged now (b.1979, no I’m not telling this gaggle of gays reading my birthdate and time! You gotta wine and dine me for that!), and I am finding this to be very prophetic. At one point, speaking about her 75 year old partner, she (then 90) leaned over and nearly winked as she said, “I love to rob the cradle.” I nearly spit out my drink. But I didn’t laugh, out of respect.
Speaking of respect, the tensest cross generational interaction came around my given name. Though in my case it’s not quite a dead name, I still don’t share it readily in contexts where I use a chosen name. This really upset her, she didn’t have the context to understand my stubbornness. I held my ground anyway, much to her consternation.
I don’t really know how to conclude this short essay. Though I wouldn’t say we were close, this relationship is something I cherish and has affected me deeply. I am extremely grateful for it.
Michelle shared this incredible essay about the multiple roles that intergenerational connections have played in her life. I was really moved by this story, and it’s a true testament to the concept of chosen family:
One of my best friends was adopted as an adult by an older lesbian, Rosemary. She is her 80s now, but I first met her in 2008 when I met Branden. Branden is trans, and my partner at the time was beginning to transition. We were set up on a blind friend date with Branden and his now-wife so that he and my ex could meet; but Branden and I wound up hitting it off and became very close.
Branden has been through a lot in his life, and when he first came out as a lesbian before coming out as trans, through the power of the queer network, Rosemary and her wife Janet took him in, gave him a place to stay, etc. That relationship turned into one of true chosen family, and they all extended that generosity to me and my kid. That is the thrust of this story, but it requires some background first.
I grew up in rural Maine and was a first-generation college student. I wound up getting pregnant at 19 with my son, Ezra, while I was working and trying to put myself through school at the University of Southern Maine, Lewiston-Auburn college. I was completely in the closet and extremely depressed. The summer before my last year of classes, a visiting professor named Andrea Newlyn blew into town and taught a summer course on “Women’s 19th-Century Sentimental Novels.” I was excited about the class but did not know that this would change the course of my life entirely. Andrea and I wound up having an affair, and I left my son’s dad, moved back to Columbus, Ohio with her when her visiting gig was up, and finally came out.
Because the family court system was what it was in Lewiston, Maine in 2003, I attempted to get full residential custody of my then 3-year-old so he could come with me to Ohio. Homophobia being what it is, I was denied the right to move with him. Bereft and borderline suicidal, I left Ezra with his dad and moved to Ohio, pretty certain that I would maybe take my life there but definitely end it if I had to stay.That story, and my relationship with Andrea, who was 17 years older than me (she’s since passed away) is for another time and place. The TLDR of it is that I moved back to Maine, restored joint residential custody of my son, and met Branden. I also went back to school for an MA at USM’s Portland campus.
The professors in that program made it clear to me that I should apply to PhD programs and continue my journey into academia. I had literally no idea what I was doing, really- I was terrified that I would get in and need to leave Ezra with his dad again, but also terrified not to keep pursuing this thing that was so completely outside the realm of what anyone in my family had ever done. I applied to schools entirely in New England—Yale, Harvard, Brown, BU, BC, and UMass Amherst—and waited. When the acceptances rolled in I had to make a difficult choice. Though Harvard was closer to Portland than Yale was, I wound up in New Haven because the stipend went a lot further here than in Cambridge.
Once again I packed up my life and moved. By this point Ezra was almost 10. Branden and his wife Christina helped us all pack up our lives in Portland and move to New Haven. Ezra came with us for the summer, then went back to his dad’s in Portland for the school year.
Throughout the entirety of my years in a PhD program at Yale, I drove back and forth to Maine every other weekend to have time with Ezra and had him all vacations and summers. This was nonnegotiable to me; I had lived his toddler years in another state completely heartbroken and I was intent on doing at least what any father without custody would do and be celebrated for, even if the double standard for mothers meant I would forever be considered a monster for leaving my kid not once, but twice. Obviously, I felt extremely alienated from the generally younger and completely childless people in PhD programs at Yale- while having kids and going to grad school is hardly uncommon, in PhD programs in the ivies it most certainly is not the norm. I made amazing friends here, but I had to get creative about research trips and carving out time to be both a mother and in a rigorous doctoral program.
For actual years, Branden and Christina would let me and Ezra crash at their house in Maine on the weekends. It was quicker for me to go to Maine on the weekends and stay there than it was to try to pick Ezra up and bring him back and forth to New Haven. But to do that, I needed a place to stay. Branden provided that. He fed us, he sheltered us, he gave us a place to be a mom and a kid. We became real family, beyond anything my biological brother would have imagined doing for us. Branden is Ezra’s uncle, he is my brother.
During the summers, when longer stays were required, Rosemary and Janet put Ezra and I up in the in-law apartment over their garage. They lived in an old tavern in Wells, Maine, dating from the 1600s. They had a pool! Ezra and I would get up early every morning and drive into Portland, where he did several summers at kayaking camp while I studied and wrote on the eastern promenade or in coffee shops. We would head back to Wells, and he would swim in the pool. The in-law apartment didn’t have a full kitchen, so I spent summers cooking on a grill on a little back deck, overlooking the woods. It was incredible, and life-giving, and the fact that these people who were lesbians and older and had absolutely no reason to do what they did except because they understood how necessary it was for me to have space to be a mom—I am tearing up right now thinking about it. They loved my kid and they loved me, Rosemary especially.
Rosemary is a spitfire. She is infectiously enthusiastic about life. She is kind, and a lot in the very best ways. She and Janet sold the old tavern when it became too much to handle and moved into a new build; a couple of years ago, Janet sadly passed away. Rosemary is not done living though. At 80, she put herself back out into the universe, and met a woman named Brynna who lives close to me here in Connecticut. My wife, Kate, and I hang with them regularly—they are getting married!!!! They drive back and forth between CT and ME like it is no big! Rosemary seemed super nervous at first that people wouldn’t accept that she had fallen in love again after so many years of marriage to Janet, but she is an absolute inspiration to me. She just never stops living and no one is going to tell her how to do it. In terms of lesbian elders, there is no one like her, no one. I feel honored and privileged to be a part of her circle.
Cassandra wrote about a beautiful friendship with a former high school teacher:
I'm old Gen Z, and one of the most important relationships I have with older queer people has been with an English teacher I had in high school. I'm still in touch with him to this day! We often go on walks around the city. We’ve always been close, but the nature of our relationship changed once I came out; it felt like things shifted a little. What’s interesting is that even though it’s clearly an important part of his identity, I know little about how being gay shaped the contours of his life: perhaps also due to personality, he is guarded about what he experienced in the 80s as well as his past relationships. The stories I know are not mine to share—so I won’t go into them here—but it’s of course been striking to me how much more difficult it was for him to come out and be out. Intellectually, and having read stories of older and elderly gay people come out, this is obvious to me; an intergenerational friendship such as this forces me to confront how much and how little has changed. Since I’m going on to do doctoral work in the field he once taught me in, it’s animated my interest in how to meaningfully account for the histories that seem past but nevertheless feel very present.
It's been incredibly meaningful to have this mentorship and friendship even though I was in his class nearly 10 years ago: I don't have many other friendships with older gay people, and spending time with my former teacher means that I can better understand the history of gay rights in this country in a rich and personal way. I think it has been easy to maintain our relationship in that he understands what the coming out process is like, he was incredibly happy and supportive of me when I did, and he brings a lot of perspective that I might not get from friends my age. The generational gaps are obvious, however: for him, "queer" is not a word that he would really ever use, nor does he particularly like its more recent rebranding. He has a great deal of respect for lesbians and the work they did for the gay rights movement, whereas in some conversations I’ve had younger people question my identification with the term. What matters to me is that we get to spend time together talking about our interests, and I think our relationship—wonderful before—has gotten even more fulfilling, personal, and important, especially now that he's witnessing me go on to do more work in his discipline. Our relationship makes me wish we had more gay elders: either those who could be or might be out, or those who might have lived. Especially now that trans rights are under attack all over the country, strong intergenerational friendships—and relationships generally—are vital to building strong communities and coalitions to protect each other.
Finally, Vanessa Friedman (current editor at Hey Alma and former editor at Autostraddle!) gave me permission to share an excerpt from an essay she wrote about her time living on rural queer land in Oregon. The full essay is here, and you should definitely go read it! I’ll share this excerpt from the beginning of the essay here:
I spent the summer of 2014 sleeping by myself in a small two-person tent under a tall tree in Southern Oregon. I kept my clothes, stained orange from the red clay dirt of the land, strewn around the tent like phantom bodies. Maybe I hoped the fabric would fill the holes in my heart after a dramatic friend breakup had left me feeling like the loneliest girl in the world.
I stopped shaving my legs; I stopped washing my hair. I learned how to use a chainsaw; I learned how to use a diva cup. I helped plaster a cob structure; I helped paint the house. I cared for the chickens; I cared for the garden. I celebrated solstice with a fire, I celebrated a full moon with a tarot spread. I got way too stoned one night while baking marijuana cakes and didn’t speak for almost three days. I developed no fewer than three crushes on butches over the age of 60. I didn’t talk to anyone from my old life. I wondered if I was losing my mind.
We hosted a garden party one afternoon and I complained to a room full of older women about seeing my ex-girlfriend and my ex-best friend posting photos together on Instagram.
That’s not new, one of my older butch crushes told me. I used to avoid certain parties after a breakup because I knew my ex would be there with a new date.
I didn’t even have to go to a party, I complained. It’s right there on my phone!
Yeah, she said. You’re carrying it around in your pocket now. But that’s your fault! Stop checking.
I pouted; it was all I could do not to cry. When will this feeling go away? I asked.
She laughed. Probably never, she told me. Dyke drama is forever.
Thanks to MaryGrace, Monky, Michelle, Cassandra, and Vanessa for sharing these stories - I hope you all enjoyed reading them as much as I did! Next week we’ll be sharing some exciting bar news for paid subs! xo!