Our Elders, Ourselves

Once again, I am soliciting your gay-ass stories <3

My friend Agnes told me that when she was in art school, she made a painting that depicted a framed picture of Judy Garland hung on a nondescript wall. She told her mentor, a lesbian painter, that she imagined this image taking place in the basement of a queeny older gay guy. Her teacher gently admonished her. “Those men are real,” she said. “They don’t just exist in your imagination. And a lot of them are lonely. If you’re going to make paintings about them, you should also go befriend them.” I think about that story a lot.

As you may know, I am currently in the midst of writing a dissertation about trans participation, transphobia, and efforts to resist transphobia in 1970s lesbian feminist communities. I am also embarking on an unpaid side hustle recording oral history interviews with dykes who were in the Boston lesbian feminist scene in the 1970s and 80s. Basically, in the last year I’ve spoken to what feels to me like an astronomical number of lesbians in their seventies and eighties.

The other week I traveled to California to interview a trans lesbian who will feature in my dissertation. She wrote a few articles in the 1970s that get cited by people who write about 1970s transfeminist stuff (a niche field, but it exists). None of them, so far as I’ve seen, have interviewed her. I flew across the country to talk to her. She was small and frail and wearing a beautiful purple trench coat when she came downstairs to let her in. Her apartment was dim. She thanked me many times for coming to speak with her. Her health clearly wasn’t so good. We talked for an hour and a half, and by the end she seemed fatigued, so we wrapped it up. Before I left, we took a picture together, and I asked if I could do anything to help her. She had me inspect the non-slip mat in her bathtub to make sure it was stuck on well. She showed me an enormous stuffed dog that she sleeps in bed with. I asked if I could hug her and we hugged for a long moment, our bodies touching only lightly. I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m crying while I write this; I wondered if she was lonely. I wished I could do more for her. Being with her had touched me so deeply.

As I’ve written about here a bit, intergenerational connection is something that so many queers profess a desire for, and yet it can feel so elusive. So much can be difficult to translate across generational lines. Sometimes it takes work to understand one another! Nevertheless, many of us are out here creating friendships, mentorships, work and organizing relationships, family bonds, and, yes, hot age gap relationships with queers both older and younger. I’d love to create a little roundup of some of your stories of intergenerational connection with other queers! For our purposes, let’s say that “intergenerational” means at least a fifteen-year age difference. Where and how have you connected with queers of older or younger generations? What’s felt meaningful and/or challenging and/or easy about those relationships? What have you learned from them? I know my audience here is probably largely millennials, but Gen X and Boomer dykes, I’d love to hear from you both about your bonds with older or younger queers! If you’re interested in writing something, reply to this email with a few sentences about the connection you would write about and then I’ll gather up a few (hopefully diverse) stories and solicit a longer (think a couple paragraphs) piece from each of those writers. I can’t wait to hear from you!