Sometime between 2017 and late 2019 the term “Boomer” went from being a descriptive about the generation in which you were born to being an epithet.
Simultaneously, “Millennial” and “Gen Xer“ also became hurled as insults.
This illustrates the divides in the generation war very clearly. The generation war isn’t new. It has been going on for a very long time.
As a Boomer, I recall thinking my parents, grandparents, and all elders were too old to understand much of anything. Due to cultural constraints I didn’t vocally call out my elders as is done today.
As a Boomer I mostly muttered under my breath, generally kept my opinion to myself and then after weighing the risk of being caught… Did my own thing anyway.
I’m old enough to remember watching the Fall of Saigon, and Richard Nixon famously resigning the Presidency. That forever tainted the Office of the President and “Proved” that the children of the 1960s and 1970s had been absolutely correct in their mistrust of anyone over 30.
16 Years later we entered Desert Storm and have been involved in some military action or other in the Middle East ever since.
But in the time between, there were many other events.
The fall of the Berlin wall, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the fall of the Shah of Iran and an absolutely astonishing level of technological innovation.
As a gay man, there were other things in this period. I came of age, dated, and slept with a variety of women and ultimately discovered love and happiness in the arms of another man.
I was a “Deviant” at the time. “Going to Hell” as the religious folks loved to tell us, Often, Loudly, and with great hostility.
Politicians liked to marginalize Gay people (We were all One people at the time) LGBT folks were ALL painted as deviants and it wasn’t uncommon for Queers to be institutionalized.
We could be arrested and jailed under sodomy laws that were common in almost every state. We could lose our jobs, homes, and families easily after being convicted. The worst thing someone could call you was Fag, or Dyke. The merest suspicion could literally cost you everything. Slight proof could even cost you your freedom and damn you to a drug induced existence punctuated by electro-shock therapy signed off on by your family.
After all you weren’t right in the head. You might be a danger to yourself. You practiced the love that dare not speak its name. Putting you in an asylum was best for everyone. Especially your family, since you were an embarrassment and they were doing the right thing trying to get you “Help”.
It must be noted: Young LGBT people today face some of the same issues. It’s not uncommon for young people to be kicked out of their homes by their parents for simply being gay. In some states, jobs and housing can still be lost or denied if it becomes common knowledge that a person is LGBT
There has been progress.
The flash point that sparked that progress, catapulting the LGBT community into the public eye, may have been Stonewall. But gay people marched in Selma with Dr Martin Luther King, as did Jews and Christians of all stripes.
Gay people, as we came to find out, had always been around and it wasn’t as abnormal as puritanical America would like to have believed.
In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s I thought I wasn’t “right” even though I knew I wanted to have sex with men. Then I thought I had only a binary choice. I had to be either this or that I couldn’t exist being both.
I was wrong, and it took a long time to realize that I could be both and be comfortable doing so. In that way too, the younger generations have a better world. I suspect there are a lot of mostly “straight” men and women who are breathing a bit easier too.
All this came to mind today after witnessing an exchange on Twitter where a younger person (37 by their own admission) was fighting with an older person and said that us older folks didn’t know what it was to shed blood for the “Gay” fight. Later this person said something to the effect that Us older folks were responsible for the HIV epidemic, I’m paraphrasing but couldn’t help but respond.
To set the record straight: It was our generation(s) that wore out suits going to funerals of our friends. It was our generation(s) that was responsible for the adoption of safer sex practices within the LGBT community. It was organizations like ACT-UP and our participation in them, that forced changes which accelerated research and quicker release of drug therapies that significantly extended the lives of infected people. Not to mention how many people depend on those advances today.
It was our generation(s) that started the major push for equality for LGBT people.
We suffered the disappointment of Bill Clinton caving in to the religious right and back burnering his promises of equal rights and the institution of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
We did these things at a time when it was still acceptable for Gay men to be “Fag-Bashed” or Egged around the only safe spaces we had (Gay Bars).
Everywhere else we were targets and often ignored victims. The police had little or no desire to prosecute someone who beat up a little faggot cocksucker. In rare cases they’d offer the faggot cocksucker a ride home, for a blowjob. Yeah, that happened too.
Still we rose up and pressed for change and fought for every inch of the rights the younger generation now enjoys.
We were not necessarily heroic. We were mostly selfish, narcissistic, and stupid. But more than those things, we were pissed off.
We were pissed because so much of the society was willing to “write us off”. We were “Defective”, an un-necessary and undesirable element in the society. We were getting God’s just wrath, and so what if faggots and drug addicts were dying in alleyways, or our homes, or in quarantine wards in hospitals. It was common to conflate LGBT people with IV drug addicts. After all, “They want to die anyway right?”
There were even people on the left and right who were saying LGBT people should be rounded up and sent to camps where they could butt fuck each other to death.
Many of us learned a deep unyielding fear. Fear of being found out, fear of being punished, fear of sex, fear of life.
Fear like that leaves a mark, and while I and others of my generation smile and support the young, we also long to have had the freedoms that the young now enjoy.
We can’t truly embrace those freedoms, because we incorporated that deep fear into the core of our being. We have no choice, but we’ll gladly look on from the sidelines and take some comfort in the knowledge that we, for our part helped make society accept the LGBT community. We take pleasure and pride in helping to make a place where the youngsters can fearlessly dance and play.
That’s the job of the elder generations. The job of parents is to make the world better for their children. For the Gay elders it was our job too, even if only by proxy.
None of this is to imply that there aren’t still battles to be fought and won. None of this is meant to imply that the battles the young are fighting are any less important or to minimize their achievements. We, and those before us, laid the foundations, it’s up to each subsequent generation to build beauty on those foundations.
And yes, we made mistakes. So will the younger generations.
To say that our generation was responsible for the HIV/AIDS epidemic is beyond wrong and patently unfair.
When HIV/AIDS got to major population centers, it was all but unknown. In the ‘60s & ‘70s there was no STD that couldn’t be cured with penicillin. How were we to know?
Yes, the epidemic occurred on our watch. For at least 2 to 4 years we didn’t know what was killing us. We called it the Gay Cancer. I sit here today HIV- and alive because a friend who was in the medical profession told me;
“We don’t know what it is. We don’t know what we’re looking for. We’re pretty sure it’s not bacterial. We know it’s attacking the immune system. We don’t know what the transmission method is. In my opinion this is sexually transmitted because some recent data indicates the spread is following the same models as syphilis and gonorrhea. So, my sexy little lamb, use a barrier. Don’t let a guy cum in your ass or mouth, no wet kissing. It won’t be as much fun or as free and easy as sex has been; but maybe, just maybe, you’ll not be infected.”
Mike, God rest your soul. I wish you’d taken your own advice, you handsome loveable furball.
A year later, condoms were on the counters in bars. Guys were reminding each other to play safe. The doormen of some bars were checking to make sure guys had condoms when they left the bar together and reminding those guys to use them.
Home grown advertising was in every gay bar coast to coast. And yet, there were straight couples having unprotected sex and many of those men had secret male lovers or dependencies on shared needles and the drugs they contained. To some extent the “Straight” community ignored the problem until they started to die too.
It wasn’t that the LGBT community wasn’t warning them. They chose to ignore those warnings because they apparently believed that they were “blessed by God,” and invincible.
The LGBT community of the time knew all too well that there were “Straight” men who, like today, want to have a bit more variety than simple missionary sex.
At the time, it was common for a straight man to preserve his professional and community standing by spending a few hours in a bath house with his legs in the air rather than to admit he went both ways. Straight men wouldn’t even confide in their doctors this fact, and insisted they got AIDS from a toilet seat.
Once straight people started dying, the government got interested. The religious right pumped up their power using LGBT and prostitute deaths to lump both groups together implying that sinners die, the righteous live, and mobilized an honestly damaging conservative movement that ACT-UP fought valiantly against.
An interesting side effect was that many straight men now sought out gay men for blow jobs because their “Righteous” wives wouldn’t perform that function in the bedroom. There’s probably no data to indicate if this had any effect on transmission rates.
What I can say from personal experience is that a straight man would often “Sell” having a gay man blow him by assuring the gay man that he was clean by virtue of his being straight. “Oh, I only have vaginal sex, it’s only that my wife won’t blow me, so you can swallow. Really, it’ll be fine.”
Then there were the friends who were so very sick. They became pariahs. Folks afraid to touch them. As the disease progressed, they began to look like photos I’d seen of prisoners in Auschwitz. Grey, emaciated, skeletal. In the right light, sometimes you could still catch a glimpse of the person they were. Their eyes told the tale of the battle they were losing.
I lost count of how many times I was asked, “If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” That’s when I knew they were at the end, and I probably wouldn’t see that person again. I’d always answer them, having chosen my path out of life were I to get sick.
My friends knew that I would answer. I wouldn’t give them platitudes or false hope. They knew I’d have analyzed the problem and come to several possible solutions, each solution weighted by factors such as opportunity, availability, probability of success, and practicality. After the discussion, I’d kiss them, & hug them, often for the last time.
To the young man who said to us elders, we boomers, that we hadn’t bled for the cause…
Here are my wounds. Here is my blood. Here are the shreds of my soul.
In all this though, I am not a victim. I am a survivor! All those who are not with me here today physically, are remembered and loved. I live on, and live well because that is what they would wish for, and expect of me. I’ll see them again. They’ve got a bar tab running and a glass with my name on it.
I say this sincerely young man. May you never have to endure losses such as I have endured.
In my time, there was Interferon, then the first of the cocktails, then second and third generation drugs to keep HIV at bay. Each one extending the lifespan of those infected and leading to a greater understanding of HIV and other viruses. But all of these drugs came at a price to the user’s overall health. Some became toxic over time. Others simply stopped working.
Now we have PREP.
But not a cure.
Still, it’s progress.
This same young man implied that Boomers were also responsible for increasing HIV rates.
In point of fact HIV infection rates were dropping. But they’ve now seen an uptick because the disease has become fashionably manageable.
I’ve been present in several public situations where beautiful twenty something young men were asking to be fucked unprotected by HIV+ men.
Their reasoning in making this absurd and insane request was that they wanted to be able to have unprotected sex without fear of HIV since they’d already be positive. Then they could get on a cocktail and have as much unsafe sex as they wanted to. They said literally, “We just don’t want to have to worry about it.” At which point, why bother to purposely get infected? It’ll happen in due course if you play unsafely.
The most recent occasion went like this: Upon hearing their request, this was at a cocktail party not an orgy… I wondered if they were going to be able to leave without being skinned alive (metaphorically) by the elder men in the room. These youngsters didn’t even grasp their error. They had no clue why suddenly the elders in the room were visibly angry. The elders were comprised of about half who were HIV+ and half who were HIV-.
One of the elder men who is HIV+ took these two youngsters aside and began explaining to them why this was such a bad idea. He explained side effects, drug interactions, and just how careful he had to be with diet and exercise. He explained that it was expensive. In his case insurance didn’t fully cover the drugs he used and that he’d give anything to live a “normal” life. The younger men would not be dissuaded and were finally asked to leave.
I have no idea if they found someone to grant their wishes. I hope they didn’t.
So again, to the young man stating that increasing HIV rates are the responsibility of “Boomers” I call bullshit.
The increase is to be laid squarely at your generation’s feet, all wrapped up with a pretty sparkly bow.
In other words son, own your shit! After all you’ve demanded nothing less of my generation.
ACTUP, an organization that appeared during the AIDS crisis wasn’t as violent and there were literally thousands of people dying in hospitals around the nation. (I Know… I was there.)
Let me tell you, those were ugly, lonely deaths. ACTUP had plenty of reason to scream, riot, and raise hell.
During the AIDS crisis there wasn’t any separation between black, white, hispanic, or asian gay men.
My Mother and I were even accosted by members of Westboro, going up the steps to a concert hall where one of the Gay Mens Choruses were performing.
We enjoyed the concert.