 Via tumblr: (Original post on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/C0U4FnMJmn0/ ) There were no image descriptions on the tumblr post I took the time to add them. 26 comments
 I'd like to add: From my experience, queerness was never that rare. I finished high school in 1988. We were 120 in my class. By the time, we finished, around 4 had come out as gay. From the ones, I haven't lost contact with, I know of 7 more, who came out, plus 1 as bi. Add to that a total of 4 trans persons, gives 13% queers, and these are only the ones, I know of. Not representative, of course, but with a sample size large enough to be not completely meaningless. I was 5 years behind you and concluded sexuality is a bell curve well before graduation. I figure 80% are bi and 10% each way are functionally monopolar in sexual attraction. 30 years later i haven't come across anything pointing in a different direction. Getting them all at war with their sexuality is a great control mechanism. Every now and then a religious person tries to suppress a stronger need, but they tend to die after 40 days without food, same as atheists :) @mina @futurebird Agreed. Even in my high school in a small southern town in the ‘90s, I knew several openly gay kids, an openly gay teacher, and a transgender girl. And that’s just the people who were out in a fairly hostile environment.  @mina Wait, what? Four had come out as gay, while still in high school, in 1988?! I graduated high school in 1983, and I now know at least six from our class who are queer (including me), but NONE had come out in high school. It would have been inconceivable. But that was in a semi-rural U.S. high school where more than half of graduates didn’t go to higher education. Where was your school located? I went to high school in West-Berlin (slightly posh neighbourhood). Whilst, there was certainly some of it around, open homophobia was not well received. @mina I see. I’m sure teens there were more progressive and less fearful than in the provincial area I grew up in. But then I went to college and suddenly it was fine to be openly queer. (Well, it was fine to be gay or bi, anyway. People seemed more skeptical of what they used to call “transsexuals.” I didn’t come out as trans till I was almost fifty!) @Rachel_Thorn I graduated in 1985, and there were 100 people in my class (rural, Northeast). Nobody had come out at that time, but several did later, as well as people I knew in the classes ahead and behind us. I came out as bi in college. One of my college friends realized she was trans back in 1988 and it was so obviously right for her. It's just a fact of life that there are queer people, but of course people have to turn it into some kind of problem. Exhausting. @mina Yup. At least ten percent of my high school class of 1980 came out in the years since graduating, and those are just the ones I know about. Queerness was never rare. That said, back then I also know plenty of cishet people who were absolutely oblivious to it all around them. A guy at college once said, “there aren’t any gay people at this school” and I just looked around the room mentally counting plenty of them.  @mina @futurebird Class of '96, 352 in the graduating class. Only two of us (neither of us out). @mina @futurebird Only reason I knew about the other guy has a statute of limitations. Statistically there were probably at least three other folks.  @futurebird - thank you for doing that. I saw the second piece once, and it was a feeling. You could tell ages by how slowly people moved away. Kids? Joy and gone. 20ish? A glance. 40? A long pause.  @futurebird I lost so many friends. Probably being an artist and just a generally excepting person, my percentage of gay friends was higher than normal, but that didn’t make each loss any less heartbreaking.💔  @futurebird This is beautiful, but so unbearably sad... Lives cut far too short, but a small piece of their memory is still with us.  @futurebird I think about the candy pile a lot. I don't want to forget our history, but it's also just so, so depressing.  @futurebird also the good old rural area wisdom: 'we have no gay people here'. then they go beat up someone who failed their gender proving pissing match and oh look at that: no one in their right mind won't come out there. they'll just move the hell away and live in a city instead. like me. @aamurusko79 @futurebird Conservative Muslim men in my town insist there are no gay people in their families & moreover it's impossible to be gay & Muslim. Yet a friend who teaches middle school here has queer kids in his classes. None of them are out. Not to their families, maybe not even to their friends. If queerness is shameful & must always be hidden, of course nobody's queer. @liferstate Or worse, you get beaten up or even killed for being queer. it's easy for the leaders then say there's no queer people when everyone queer knows not to come out. I've been personally intrigued by the queer sub cultures of various ages and places. friends of dorothy being one good example. |
Gregory's Server
@futurebird
Thank you.
This helps me remember the anger and disgust. That part of it was everyday people who shunned their children and were still socially accepted.
It is strange to me that the AIDS Pandemic is passing from living history to document history.
I'm among those caring for a friend with Parkinson's. He's one of two Boomer-age gay men I know still alive.