Reply #9: Of course there's a generation gap ... [View All]

It's only been in the last few years that discussion of gay issues entered public discourse. (Well, an argument can be made that it's been in the public spotlight for several decades ... but I tend to view that as "blips" in public awareness that got discussed simply because it carried a tittilation factor for heterosexuals.)

Before the current generation, previous generations were left to define and invent themselves to a large extent. Each generation was pretty much ignorant of the ones that came before because we seldom made the history books. So unless you really dug to discover your history, it was like the LGBT community was born anew with each generation.

For instance, most people view "outing" as a recent invention when, in fact, it was a few German newspapers who published the names of closeted gay men who were close to the Kaiser who first used outing as a political weapon. Likewise, we think of the Stonewall riots as the "birth" of the gay movement because not that many of us heard of the Mattacine Society in the '50s, or the first U.S. gay rights group that formed in the '20s in Chicago, or the homosexual emancipation movement that started in Germany under Magnus Hirschfeld and others.

Because our collective history is only now being studied and told, so many of the generations before this one have no regard for the generations before because they are unaware that the struggle for gay rights runs much deeper than they suspect.

Add to that the fact that LGBTs are not born in clusters, but are pretty much randomly distributed throughout the population, and you don't have the early ties to the "community." Lacking history and role models, we often invent ourselves as much as we invent our community in each generation.

So that fact that there's a generation gap in the LGBT community doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is that the gap isn't even wider.