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A Pride month rumination.
I've been spending time in a couple of internet spaces that are full of younger folks, I think mostly in their twenties-early thirties, with a hefty LGBTQ+ density to the population. It means, among other things, that I actually follow about a third of the Kids These Days slang terminology which is probably useful now that I'm middle-aged and all.
The thing that's a huge culture shock to me is how easily the Kids These Days use the word "gay". (Speaking here as someone in the late GenX cohort that also was around Kids These Days who used the word "gay" super-easily but Not Like That.) A video game character pops up in discussion and provokes a round of "I'm so gay" comments. A bit of roleplaying happens and someone says, complimenting the performance art, "That was very gay."
This word, "gay", has this connotation of liberatory emotionality now, rather different from the way Kids These Days used it when I was a Kid These Days, to mean "shoddy and uncool".
The last exam of my senior year of high school, when we were all freed to potentially never see each other again, one of my friends came up to me and said "I have something to tell you", and when I allowed as how he could, he said, "I'm gay. Is that okay?" I hugged him.
"I'm gay. Is that okay?"
It broke my heart. It still breaks my heart, though I know that he's doing just fine, working hard as a nurse, happily married. The kids our age, some of us made it through okay.
Homosexual sexual intercourse in all its forms was only legalized in the state where I went to high school several years after that: the process had begun in 1990 and concluded in 1999. (I looked it up last night, because someone had posted a decrim map color-coded by when on the tweeters.)
For he who grew up tall and proud
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud
Convinced our voices can't be heard
We just wanna scream it louder and louder and louder
- "Hammer to Fall", Queen
I didn't just grow up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, mind; I grew up in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. Which was, the whole time, something that was Out There, a source of fear that was situated primarily in the adult world. My experience of it was that yes, it was flavored with queerness, but it was primarily a tool in the hands of abstinence educators to convince us that being sexual beings was a death sentence. (A thing that worked so well on one of my friends that when she learned I was sexually active she had a bit of a meltdown about how that meant I was certainly going to die.)
And now they're talking about whether the mRNA vaccine tech can beat the thing. Blows my fucking mind, and I was never connected to the community trauma, coming to my own sideways sense of queerness as very much an adult.
And that's part of the background under which kids of my generation would sneer "That's so gay" to indicate that something was not up to social standards.
In the early oughts sometime Squid and I got into a ridiculous fucking argument on rasfc about whether or not that use of "That's so gay" was homophobic. One of the people there was very, very defensive about it, because her precious child could not possibly be doing the Bad Thing. (Never mind that it was obviously the Bad Thing.)
"That's just their generation's way of saying 'lame'," she said.
(Dear readers, I was more mobility impaired back then than I am now, and I wish you to consider for a moment the possibility that I wished I could reach through the internet and smack the living daylights out of someone with my fucking cane.)
We tried several times to get through that this association of badness, of low-quality, with queerness was exactly the problem, and got a whole lot of "but it doesn't mean that to them" as if that were, in fact, something that mattered in the slightest. It still blows my mind, because this was a writer, someone who ought to have understood word impact and, for that matter, worldbuilding.
If your worldbuilding uses the same word for a minority group and a shoddy product or disapproved behavior, that tells you something. And it's not a subtle fucking something, is it.
Anyway.
Every time I hear the kids these days proclaiming their gayness to the world - saying "I joined this server because it seemed chill and extremely gay" - talking about how that manifests for them, there's a little part of me that winces, and expects cruelty as the intent, and then has to breathe through it. Because the kids are all right, and they also don't remember the 90s, and some of that may be related.
It's not even that it's pride. It's seeing a cultural shift that makes it possible for there to be less shame.
It's ... neat, even if it does leave me rather convinced that the mermaids will not sing to me.
ETA: KJ is quite an artist these days and had drawn a cameo pair of dragons. "Oh hey," I said to her, "it looks like they're on the lesbian pride flag, did you notice?" She gives me a very patient look and says, "That's because they're lesbians, mama." I don't think I heard that word until I was notably older than she is.
I've been spending time in a couple of internet spaces that are full of younger folks, I think mostly in their twenties-early thirties, with a hefty LGBTQ+ density to the population. It means, among other things, that I actually follow about a third of the Kids These Days slang terminology which is probably useful now that I'm middle-aged and all.
The thing that's a huge culture shock to me is how easily the Kids These Days use the word "gay". (Speaking here as someone in the late GenX cohort that also was around Kids These Days who used the word "gay" super-easily but Not Like That.) A video game character pops up in discussion and provokes a round of "I'm so gay" comments. A bit of roleplaying happens and someone says, complimenting the performance art, "That was very gay."
This word, "gay", has this connotation of liberatory emotionality now, rather different from the way Kids These Days used it when I was a Kid These Days, to mean "shoddy and uncool".
The last exam of my senior year of high school, when we were all freed to potentially never see each other again, one of my friends came up to me and said "I have something to tell you", and when I allowed as how he could, he said, "I'm gay. Is that okay?" I hugged him.
"I'm gay. Is that okay?"
It broke my heart. It still breaks my heart, though I know that he's doing just fine, working hard as a nurse, happily married. The kids our age, some of us made it through okay.
Homosexual sexual intercourse in all its forms was only legalized in the state where I went to high school several years after that: the process had begun in 1990 and concluded in 1999. (I looked it up last night, because someone had posted a decrim map color-coded by when on the tweeters.)
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud
Convinced our voices can't be heard
We just wanna scream it louder and louder and louder
- "Hammer to Fall", Queen
I didn't just grow up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, mind; I grew up in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. Which was, the whole time, something that was Out There, a source of fear that was situated primarily in the adult world. My experience of it was that yes, it was flavored with queerness, but it was primarily a tool in the hands of abstinence educators to convince us that being sexual beings was a death sentence. (A thing that worked so well on one of my friends that when she learned I was sexually active she had a bit of a meltdown about how that meant I was certainly going to die.)
And now they're talking about whether the mRNA vaccine tech can beat the thing. Blows my fucking mind, and I was never connected to the community trauma, coming to my own sideways sense of queerness as very much an adult.
And that's part of the background under which kids of my generation would sneer "That's so gay" to indicate that something was not up to social standards.
In the early oughts sometime Squid and I got into a ridiculous fucking argument on rasfc about whether or not that use of "That's so gay" was homophobic. One of the people there was very, very defensive about it, because her precious child could not possibly be doing the Bad Thing. (Never mind that it was obviously the Bad Thing.)
"That's just their generation's way of saying 'lame'," she said.
(Dear readers, I was more mobility impaired back then than I am now, and I wish you to consider for a moment the possibility that I wished I could reach through the internet and smack the living daylights out of someone with my fucking cane.)
We tried several times to get through that this association of badness, of low-quality, with queerness was exactly the problem, and got a whole lot of "but it doesn't mean that to them" as if that were, in fact, something that mattered in the slightest. It still blows my mind, because this was a writer, someone who ought to have understood word impact and, for that matter, worldbuilding.
If your worldbuilding uses the same word for a minority group and a shoddy product or disapproved behavior, that tells you something. And it's not a subtle fucking something, is it.
Anyway.
Every time I hear the kids these days proclaiming their gayness to the world - saying "I joined this server because it seemed chill and extremely gay" - talking about how that manifests for them, there's a little part of me that winces, and expects cruelty as the intent, and then has to breathe through it. Because the kids are all right, and they also don't remember the 90s, and some of that may be related.
It's not even that it's pride. It's seeing a cultural shift that makes it possible for there to be less shame.
It's ... neat, even if it does leave me rather convinced that the mermaids will not sing to me.
ETA: KJ is quite an artist these days and had drawn a cameo pair of dragons. "Oh hey," I said to her, "it looks like they're on the lesbian pride flag, did you notice?" She gives me a very patient look and says, "That's because they're lesbians, mama." I don't think I heard that word until I was notably older than she is.
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Which is, you know, part of why it might be for the best that I didn't figure myself out at fifteen.
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It almost sounds like a return to the word's original pre-20th Century meaning?