enoughtohold:

ace-angel:

“ew i can’t believe people in their mid 30s are calling themselves ~q*eer elders~ ajdshgahdf” wow it’s almost like. something happened 25 to 35 years ago. that vastly reduced how many queer people there were. and our age demographics are still skewed low because of it. huh.

hey um. i don’t know how to tell you this but the deaths of so many gay/bi men and trans women (primarily) from AIDS are not an excuse to pretend that older lgbtq people don’t exist. they very much do.

for one thing, AIDS did not affect the whole community equally, so there are plenty of older lesbians, for example. and the fact that there should be more older gay men today doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot still around. many of them are now facing the new challenges of aging with HIV, and they need and deserve our attention and support. but instead many of us younger people would rather imagine that they’re all long dead and crown ourselves Oldest and Wisest so we can win arguments on the internet.

if you don’t know any actually old, or even middle-aged, lgbtq people, then maybe this all seems abstract to you. but a dear friend of mine is 79 years old. others are in their 50s and 60s. and i cannot begin to imagine telling them that really i’m an elder, that really all the knowledge and experience of their generations can be summed up by a bunch of 30-somethings, because after all hey, a lot of their friends are dead. and they might as well be too. this is not respect.

to be clear, i am not saying any of this in the service of any tumblr “discourse.” this is bigger than that. though i notice that this blog doesn’t mention HIV, and only mentions AIDS in the context of said discourse. even though HIV/AIDS is still a crisis both globally and in the U.S., with black men who have sex with men hit especially hard to this day.

if we’re going to invoke the suffering of the older generations of lgbtq people resulting from AIDS, we owe them, at the very least, two things. first, to respect them enough to acknowledge that they’re still here, and listen to them, not presume to speak for them. and second, to educate ourselves, stop talking about HIV and AIDS like they’re ancient history, and take up the fight, so that one day AIDS can be history.