it is tho… 👀

No, no it’s not

There are real dangers in the youth-ifying of queerness. Gays do not stop needing community and support and medical attention once they hit 30, and shaming people for participation in queer spaces past their 20’s directly serves to isolate and deprive them. Nor is this just a sort of ephemeral “cultural” phenomenon: you see it in institutional age limit policies, for gender healthcare or shelters or suicide/crisis hotlines.

People talk about the problem of young gays not having guidance from their elders, but I’m frankly more worried about the elders getting cut out themselves. And if you plan on remaining gay and alive into middle age you should be worrying too

It’s annoying to see stuff recently like “Older generations just didn’t have the resources necessary to explore gender.” which is just… ignorant. There’s more exploration of gender going on in a Poison or Human League album cover than your whole Queer Studies department. The terminology used by older people was cutting edge when they were using it, just like the current terminology will be outdated (maybe even problematic!) in 20 years.

The youth centric ideas on queerness are especially dangerous because of how few of us survived thanks to the Reagan administration.

Oh there’s no queer elders in your community? That’s because they all were dying from an incurable disease in the 1980s.

The ones we have left are survivors.

Even the gays who are only just now reaching middle age still had to deal with the horrible anti-gay legislation of the Bush administration and the spike in queer suicides during those years.

(I was a teenager then and not out yet but I remember how awful it was.)

Many of you were infants when all of this was going on.

Yes, we have come a long, long way in a very short amount of time.

But the only reason we got here at all was from the hard work of the generations before.

And there are still millions of us who did not live long enough to see it.

You cannot take what we have now for granted. And especially not at the expense of the people who made it happen.

So many of the folks who ardently wanted to see all of us die off during the AIDs epidemic, and worked towards ensuring that happened, are still alive! Still working towards our destruction.

It’s also an extremely US-centric idea for that exact reason, like yes obviously AIDS was dreadful everywhere but the Reagan administration very much wasn’t.

That’s well worth remembering in this thread especially since the Human League were explicitly brought up considering they, along with Depeche Mode, Soft Cell and the other gender-experimental British new wave bands, were doing what they did very publicly right when Thatcher’s disgusting Section 28 was being implemented, which made it illegal for teachers to discuss queer concepts at all in any way other than explicit condemnation, which was only repealed in 2003.