This is my apologia, offered for informational purposes and not for discussion especially as it delineates the parameters for acceptable discourse.

In a number blogs I have lamented the deplorable lack of facts related to past historical events in favor of easy to accept mythical treatment of them for agendas and self-esteem purposes, individual or group, that often erases the real history with the real people being substituted with characters that, while based in reality, erase or at least divert attention away from the real people.

I went around the country twice in two years to find that even as the older members of the Gay Community (my preferred label) know what the community had been like in the past and appreciate even the slightest progress that had been made even if it lacked fireworks, Rainbows, lollipops, and unicorns to make it legitimate, we are often told what it was like and, sadly, this has resulted in the dilution of people’s experience and the value of the prize won.

I found that not only had my personal history now been reduced to having been helpful so that a school district “embraced” diversity, including GLBT students in policies, when there had been a twelve year fight and a lot of harm done to people by the district.

This not only erases the history, but it denies the future members of the community their true history, but also the knowledge that we had exercised powers and won, and could again if necessary.

Many people I spoke with found that when they attempted to correct a mistake in some young person’s retelling of the past, they have been advised to do more reading so the older person would learn what the younger knew.

I had this told to me when, listening to a young person explain to me who I was, having never met but only heard or read about me and what role I played in a past event, I corrected a common misconception and was informed that if I wanted to know about this person and event, I would need to do a lot of reading to get up to speed.

So I have arrived at a decision.

I was born in 1950, meaning I have been around going on 75 years, and of those years I fought for Labor, Teacher, Minority, and Gay rights for forty-plus years of them. I lived all the post Stonewall years, post Upper Room, Post Silver Lake, survived the attempted genocide in the 1980s. In my forty-plus years of on the pavement activism I met and worked with real people, some famous still, some replaced because they lacked glitter.

From now on, if I am in conversation with younger people, by which I mean anyone born after 1990 (I chose that cut-off point as, judging by my experience with the changing world of my students, seeing the changes during what by that year was 18 years teaching in various places and grade levels, and saw how by the time the people born that year came of age, student interest in the world around themselves became insular as what they learned they learned only if it was okay with their peers and all they seemed aware of was the bubble in which they lived while growing more and more confident in telling people outside their own bubble what all that space was about) I will be asking with the first mistake, if corrected but defended, the year a person was born, subtract that from 1950, and then point out how many years I was already on this earth dealing with things those years before they were born but am still around living more history with them until I die.

I was at some Community gathering being run by young members of the it to educate us on our needs. When AIDS came up, the general consensus expressed by the speakers was that the suffering in those days must have been horrible and we have no idea today what it must have been like. The audience nodded their heads in solemn agreement while the elders in the back of the room could have told them what it was like as to us it was more than imaginable.

A person born in 1990 only appeared on the scene after I had lived the forty years prior. We can discuss current events as we are living in these times together, but the other person can only repeat what is heard or learned from suspect sources and must listen to, not correct, people who lived the history.

I just have no time to argue with people who define the times decades before they were born and before they attained what used to be called then “age of reason”, about seven years old, and then decide to judge us according to their created rubric and not the reality of the elders.

So, at the minimum: 1950-1990=40.

Anyone born after 1990 increases the gap between the beginning of the past I lived added to the times I will be living until me demise. am living.

To this end, do not define past events, people, and decades according to 2024 knowledge and standards and then condemn those from the past for creating the situation they had to survive, and I mean the real situations not the modern interpretations.

Do not attempt to correct people who lived history with the phrase, “But, I heard.”

Our history is rich, we do not need to modify or embellish it.

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