I was in a casual conversation with some Gay elders reminiscing. It is what the old do.
It had begun when one of the oldest sitting at the bar turned from watching the dance floor back to his drink on the bar and simply stated that at our age we get to see what we had wished was part of our youth, worked so the future youth would have what we wanted, with success coming when we were too old to enjoy the fruits of our labor.
We were familiar with the new bar scene that had Heterosexual couples welcomed into the bars that came about as safe spaces from the attacks by their parents and grandparents, and this irony was softened somewhat by the expressed hope that they have respect of place and understood the history of the place and not assume the bar opened because someone had the idea for one and not the Community needing one.
Terminology came up as one of us had recently heard a term used for a gender variant that was a new term for something old, and he was a little embarrassed that someone had pointed out at the time that he needed to learn about his community if he did not want to be an obstruction to its betterment. However, he was knowledgeable of his Community, both local and wider as in his youth he and friends traveled much, lived in and experienced multiple communities, fighting for rights in each, and had simply asked the person using this new-to-him term what it meant. He had been in full support of that gender identity and had many friends over the years who fit into it, and continue to, but even as he was attempting to adopt all the new terms, he was not aware of the new term for what he was very informed about. The meaning of new term, although having the same meaning but just recently adopted as the now preferred term did not change the nature of that to which it applied, nor did the name change erase knowledge.
When you are in your seventies and eighties there is always the possibility that a term you knew for most of your life, at least the fifty or sixty years of it you spent as an adult, might slip out in conversation.
During my first year of teaching in Oklahoma City, I was slowly getting used to where I was as Oklahoma was proving to be unlike any place I had ever been. I was also living in a place for the first time where Jim Crow was built into a state constitution and most adults by the time I had gotten there had been raised on one side or the other of it.
A grandfather who had been raising his grandson had asked for a meeting with myself and the principal. He was in his late sixties, early seventies in the mid-1990s, so he had grown up with Jim Crow and in middle age tried as best his Oklahoma Baptist heart would let him to accept the new ways of integration throughout society. He dressed like someone who worked the land and had the Oklahoma twang that many locals deny they have. His grandson enjoyed school but there was this one “colored boy” who was picking on him. He didn’t want the “colored boy” punished, but hoped there was some way we could work to end it without his grandson facing retaliation.
At his first use of “colored boy” I had immediately glanced over at the principal, a dignified Black woman, who did not react in any manner, and after the meeting which ended with a positive plan, and with the grandfather out of the office, I asked the principal if she found his use of “colored boy” to be offensive.
A native Oklahoman, she reminded me that I was new there and there is history. The fact that a man his age used that term showed he had made an effort to change with the times in spite of his years living in the previous, and she would rather that term at this point in his growth than the one he could have used without any, the one she had grown up with.
Updated vocabulary does not erase the past for those who lived it.
I had just recounted how in Oklahoma City we had begun our student advocacy in 1997 using the term “Sexual Minority Youth” because we older Gays saw us go from simply Gay to GLBT and then all the subsequent additions, and knew from that there had to be as yet unnamed gender variants that will need to be included. We did not begin the advocacy with a restrictive term but one that not only included the known but could be broadened to include the, as yet, unknown.
At a community meeting I was berated by a young person who claimed I was failing in my advocacy that he did not seem to realize was voluntary, on my own time, and not a job so there were limitations. I had not included his identity in my remarks. When he declared it, I needed further clarification and found it was a new term replacing an old one which was automatically included in the blanket term that made sure it was not a limited Gay and Lesbian thing.
Because the original term, though blanket, was vague, members of the school district’s eventual Diversity in Education Committee needed specifics, So meetings often became lessons on what the known gender variants at the time were.
We eventually got “Sexual Orientation” and “Gender Identity” into school district policies, and, by suggesting that the words “or for any other reason, real or perceived” be included in the prohibitions of bullying, harassment, and discrimination, attempted to cover everybody, known and as yet unknown far beyond gender and Our Community.
A lament was expressed that in the old days we fought for the Community, known and unknown, without regard to the differences the present generation tries to divide the community into so that instead of unity we now have labels. We used to just go to bars and gatherings, interacting with whoever was there without requiring a resume or preferred vocabulary list. We did not like everyone we ran into, but that dislike was based on how a person presented themselves and how they acted. When you felt safe, community, and self everything followed. Resumes and preference lists were not needed before conversations would begin.
“Wanna dance?” would be answered with a yes or no, not a lecture or need for a defense or an explanation of intent.
One person among us, referring to the meaning of the original pride flag, pointed out that, while the new one was supposed to be more inclusive than ethereal concepts like Life, Healing, Nature, and Art applicable to everyone in the Community, the new one left out Native Americans, Asian, and Pacific Islanders as the only colors identifying minorities are Black and Brown, neither of which is representative of these people.
The major topic as we sipped our drinks, if one has to be chosen, was that in the old days we were fighting for community and that included members unknown even to ourselves.
Considering where we are today as opposed to where we were, many Gay elders are proud of their work and wish some who are now gone could see where their spark led to even if they are only remembered by the dwindling numbers who knew them.
Collective sighs from the few elders nursing their drinks in a Gay bar like Veterans at the VFW.
There were some younger people nearby, the oldest being, at best, perhaps some thirty years younger than the youngest of the old guys, who upon hearing one of us say that when we had fought for the Community back in the early days, we had fought for everyone in whatever battle we were involved in, minority rights, labor rights, and Gay rights, there had been no “except you” in our experiences, rather than give us our moment and without knowing our pasts, angrily informed us that not everybody felt helped and hearing people say that they helped everyone makes some feel like they are a no one because they aren’t included in “everyone”.
Doing the math, these people had not been alive back then only having come on the scene in the last twenty-five years at most, so, unless they could be labelled savants they cannot speak authoritatively about a past that was not theirs. They assumed to speak for those of whom they had no knowledge.
Again, an attempt was made through semantics to lesson the accomplishments of others and insulting to those with documented proof that they had done just that with it being up to the person to utilize the help provided. An attempt at victim-hood where it is totally irrelevant, apparently because, rather than accept the attempt was made, we should reject it all in favor of some purity requirement.
All or nothing.
You did not have me personally in mind, so you have failed us all.
Despite there being an ethnic mix in this group of elders in a heavily immigrant populated town, we were told that being White Gay men, our privilege spared us from reality of the past so that while we may want to be seen as having been equally oppressed and in the fight, we actually had it easy in the past compared to others and really weren’t.
We then had all our attitudes, the ones they told us had been ours in our youth, and their affects on our actions going back before they were born laid out before us with explanations why they were wrong and had produced nothing. They were correct. These would have been detrimental if we had actually adhered to them and truly were ineffective as we did not hold those attitudes and so they had no influence. Although we may have fought for everyone from Stonewall on, they informed us that the only true motivation of the Gay white male activists was not to be there for everyone, but to control progress to insure the dominance of the patriarchy making us guilty of collaborative oppression.
You’re welcome.
I came to the moment of acceptance of self and allowing myself to be who I was regardless of the opinions and well intentioned bad advice and let myself be myself just as AIDS hit big time. Although spared myself, I did live those years with people who weren’t. In 1985 a San Francisco newspaper printed a ten page Sunday supplement including the pictures and names of seven hundred men who had died in that city. That was one city.
Because of union membership, regardless of race, I got insurance. Whether or not it would help in the case of HIV/AIDS was uncertain, though. In some cases insurance helped if you could get it, and there were still enough impediments for minorities to get basic coverage. Because some were more likely to have insurance in some form, those who had it went to their doctors and faced whatever happened, and it was too often uninformed, but there were also those for whom going to a doctor meant the emergency room. The majority of pictures may be of white men whose circumstances brought recognition, but it was not a privilege to die ignored because of a politically useful virus.
Regardless what controlled the availability of photos it was not privilege to be included. All you got was your picture in a newspaper that you would never see while others would learn of your private life posthumously when you could not control the gossip, while some made good on bets they had made about your orientation.
This, having been seen, was an ever present consideration for all affected as equality and equity were major components of what was fought for in the fight against AIDS and its attendant bigotry.
I am aware of a Gay White Male who, realizing a privilege of another kind, used it for the sake of others.
This individual was not a native of the state in which he was living. He spent the first forty-five years of his life in various other places, the present location only being the latest. Therefore, his presence there had no footprint and there were no family or friends whose reputations he must protect even as he protected his reputation from their judgment of him. If this were not the best place for him to be, there was nothing, no emotional connection that would prevent moving on. He had nothing to lose. At one point because he would not stay in the closet, his employer attempted to appear solicitous and supportive when he suggested this person should be mindful of how his openness could negatively affect his family by having them forced to deal with the attitudes of neighbors, not a consideration for people living in a more forward thinking state half a continent way.
This bestowed a form of privilege, and with the loss of any power that the veiled threat was assumed to have, he was able to attain rights for others that he would never get to use because he was an adult and the rights were for minors that he would never meet.
He used his privilege to benefit people with whom he had at one time been a fellow traveler, students, and those yet to be born. Should he have ignored his privilege to the detriment of others or be assigned a malicious motive by people in the future.
While being praised for what he accomplished, he must now be discounted and/or erased for a more warm and fuzzy substitute?
Is it “privilege” to simply benefit from his work without having to contribute to the effort?
Privilege includes using what others supply for one’s own benefit without cost because it is simply yours now.
And, when one of us objected to the Label du Jour, Queer, and how we ceded control of the word by releasing it for public use outside the community in any way the person wants to use it, spit it, snarl it, give a knowing look with laughing eyes while seriously (wink, wink) using it, he was told, as we had been in the past, others had decided that he would be called that now, and to object was to obstruct.
We got one final history lesson that included criticism of Gay, white males in the past who, the lecturers claimed, had refused to accept the, as yet at the time, undiscovered science that began a concentrated study of gender and all its manifestations. This deliberate ignoring of the undiscovered and actively excluding people because in 2024 we have decided that people in 1969 not using words and identities that would not be recognized until decades later was a willful act of control and all subsequent progress was limited and controlled because we did not use the words yet to be invented nor recognize gender variants that were not known and unnamed at the time even by those to whom they would eventually apply.
We failed because we had not applied 2024 knowledge to the past when in the past and we cling to actual history which sees beyond the glitz and glitter to the blood on the dance floor below the mirrored disco ball and know it was not a party.
And we do not accept the rewritten history as we lived the truth, and “truth is absolute”.
The night ended on that note and did not improve as, on the walk through the parking lot from the bar in which back in the day our evaluators could not purchase a drink because of sexual orientation and/or gender identity not age as it had been when we were their ages and as they left to get to another popular family oriented chain restaurant to meet other friends to have a few wedding anniversary drinks for Mark and Stefan, one old duffer pointed out that we can never take back the wins the kids in the bar apparently do not think we should share in nor get back the time taken up in the fight that resulted in a form of exclusion based on looking for failures and ignoring or reassigning the successes to others while letting us know that while benefiting from the successes they have rewritten history making my peers the enemy after the fact when I known the person telling me that can present their gender anyway they so choose because some of them couldn’t and changed that.
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