Not rare with boomer LGBTQ+ people here in Sweden, I know several and had many around as neighbours etc. throughout my whole life. One of the people who checks your ID and stuff when you vote in my area is trans (mtf) and has been doing that for 30+ years and it’s nothing odd for the vast majority who meet her, I think she’s in her 80s now. Was always curious and liked her when I was a kid and went there with my parents. Still like her of course, and it’s always so nice to see her still doing that.
Well… And a lot of them just moved to locations that were safer for them so they are more concentrated in certain areas. People saying they’re no boomer lqbtq people haven’t been to San Francisco or key west apparently.
My parents: “People in our days were men or women, no in between.”
Also my parents: “Yeah, Joe Bloggs, the guy who’s worn womens clothes and accessories for 40 years.”
Pick a lane, do they not exist or have existed for decades?!
Yeah, one of my best friends is a boomer lesbian. Because of her, I know and know of a community of lgbt+ boomers here. Plus she has other friends she regularly talks with in other parts of the country.
She was one of the many that ran away from backwoods bible belt to San Francisco in time to be there for the Summer of Love.
I know it’s Key West and everything, but I just can’t imagine why an lgbtq+ person would ever choose to move to Florida.
Florida being a super conservative state is relatively new. I mean Obama won Florida in 08 and in 2012. It wasn’t until 2020 when Republicans really secured the state as fascist hell hole. Key West has been a “port in the storm” for gay people since the 1950’s.
Desantis was elected governor in 2018 I think.
I know Key West is known for that, but when your state government is actively, violently, hostile towards your existence, it doesn’t really matter if your local community is an oasis of tolerance.
Key West can’t protect you from the state government.
I mean, that’s kinda the same as saying a liberal state government can’t protect you from the federal government. Either way, vulnerable communities setting up self protection/mutual aid network is going to offer more protection than any state actor would.
It’s not usually the state that you have to really worry about. It’s usually the paramilitary group that do most of the violence, and you can definitely take steps to arm a community against those.
To a degree, legal weed still exists so the state isn’t totally powerless
Yeah it’s usually not, but these are not usual times are they? The state has a lot of power.
It always gives me a bit of pause to remember that the Pulse gay nightclub shooting during it’s Latino culture celebration was in Orlando, Florida.
“Confirmed Bachelor”
“Longtime Roommates”
Frrriiieeenndss
Montrose, down in Houston, is wall to wall Gay Boomers. Not a coincidence that Houston has been one of the friendliest cities for gay men to live straight back to the 1970s
for gay men to live straight
I would’ve thought that title would go to Salt Lake City or DC.
I always cringe when conservatives around my age say there were no trans kids back when they were in school, because I was just abused out of my school when I was outed as a trans man and had to be homeschooled instead. (I’m not talking about just bullying, the abuse culminated with three classmates raping me on school property before classes one morning.)
The other trans kid I knew of in my class was literally expelled once she came out. (Something the school blamed on me, since they claimed they had to kick her out after how classmates had reacted to me.)
So, I guess there are no trans kids in school with you if you attack them until they leave, or just throw them out.
Growing up, I heard so many from my parents generation saying things about having to work against your impulses. I heard so many express worry about denying attractions and fears of the same sex being attracted to them, worried about finding themselves in a situation after too much to drink…
To the point where I briefly wondered what was wrong with me, that I never felt these temptations. I even tried making out with a guy once just to see the reaction. It wasn’t for me, I just don’t have that attraction in me.
I realized VERY young that the gay/straight thing was a whole lot easier AND a whole lot more complicated than it had been sold.
Closeted religious people are like that.
I still think about the time a pastor talked about having to repress thoughts, like making love to another man.
And I just sat there going, “Uh I don’t think about that. Do you have that thought a lot, pastor?”
I am not attracted to men at all.
Thank you for sharing
I don’t like pineapple on pizza
Personal preference is all, dude, some people just dont get.
It was moderate.
But I did eat it.
You got that stake ready yet?
Ok
This boomer can confirm: The closet is walk-in with an ensuite, bar fridge, and a huge quantity of copium.
And the scars from the ones we lost to AIDS are old enough to forget about for a few days at a time.
Don’t forget how many simply refused to entertain reality in the first place. Every so often we still see someone telling on themselves, like “If he didn’t actually have sex with men, he’s not gay. If gay was just attraction we would all be gay.” They got pushed so far into the closet that they thought that was just how the world is.
I still think everyone’s actually bi and that cishet is actually a very small minority
My brother is from that era. I used to hangout with him and his friends when I was a kid and they were easily some of the nicest, smartest, most accepting people I knew. They’re a big reason for my radicalization into adulthood.
That whole friend circle has been decimated by AIDS. It’s really sad. He has a couple friends that made it through, but things will never be the same for him or the remaining friends.
Edit: thinking about this more, it makes me thankful to still have my brother around. On the non-selfish side, I’m sad he has to endure such loss and grief.
and on that note, everyone call your mom
A lot of it is denial as well. In the mental health realm, for example, I meet a lot of Boomers who show obvious signs of ADHD and/or Autism and they haven’t the slightest idea they have it.
If you ask one of them to get tested, they’ll just stubbornly refuse and insist there’s nothing different about them, even when you point out their symptoms to them. “A lot of people do this; doesn’t mean anything!” Yeah well a lot of people are neurodivergent. Something like 30% of the population has ADHD, for example.
Just because a lot of people have a mental health disorder, that doesn’t give you an excuse to just ignore it! You still need treatment and therapy.
Something like 30% of the population has ADHD, for example.
No, they don’t.
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41572-024-00495-0
Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) affect around 15% of children and adolescents globally
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8985496/
So all NDD’s — including ADHD — affect around ~15% of the population, but you’re claiming ADHD alone affects ~30% of the population?
^ps ^I’ve ^an ^excellent ^therapist
lol neither of the studies you quoted are researching the rates of ADHD, like at all. The one study is a narrative review and the other I couldn’t get into but on mobile.
This was literally just setting the stage for their hypothesis…
You would need to find a meta-analysis or systemic review of current research. The article you are quoting is just framing the paper around 15%.
In this narrative review we search the extant literature and discussed a brief overview of the aetiology and prevalence of NDEBID, enumerate common problems associated with current classification systems and provide recommendations for a more integrated approach to the nosology and clinical care of these related conditions.
Also, quoting a single study and framing your world view based on one study is absolutely not science, but have at it…
Whereas blatantly asserting that “at least 30% of the population have a specific neurodevelopmental disorder” doesn’t merit any sourcing or facts. Just pull ideas out of your head and slap them down, that’s how it works right?
A meta-analysis would be called for, you say? Did you even open the link, let alone the PDF
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01530-y.pdf
And they don’t need to research ADHD. Let’s say you clean the local MickeyD every night, every stall and shit until it’s spick and span. If someone stopped you right before you stepped out and locked the doors and told you “animal control, there’s an elephant in here”, you’d probably be pretty certain there was no elephant as despite not having thought about elephants or tried actively looking for any, you’d be sure it’s not in the see through little McD where it wouldn’t even fit.
Thus when you hear “there’s an elephant on the loose” in that context you laugh.
I’m not defining a narrative. I’m calling bullshit on his figures.
People do tend to get mad over the next part; I believe that a lot of people who more or less require or at least work well on those meds to, well, require them, but not necessarily because of some mythical poorly reasoned latebloooming ad hoc NDD, but our world just has gotten a whole faster.
Stimulants, if used responsibly — instead of taking them on the weekends and drinking two days straight — can be compared to a strong energy drinks. And in many cases a bump of speed would actually be healthier than a huge can of coke or a mocha latte.
Anyway, the point people get mad about is that they think I’m gonna question their diagnosis or advocate they shouldn’t get their meds, nah, that’s not what I’m about.
I’m just hoping this won’t follow the same pattern as Oxy. Completely different beasts when it comes to dangers, both physical and forming dependency.
Still, it’s pretty clear if you want to browse good sources. Just look at how often NDDs were diagnosed, how fast the recognition grew as our information grew and so did the prevalence of all neurodevelopmental disorders.
But then out of the group ADHD is an outlier and nothing explains why it’s diagnosis have grown so much — except legalised speed basically.
Also, quoting a single study and framing your world view based on one study is absolutely not science, but have at it…
I believe you shouldn’t hit kids hard (even rhetorically) or they’ll just get cranky and abandon the whole business.
So these actual studies aren’t studies, but the invisible yet to be named ones which show 30% having ADHD, now that is science. Yeah?
Ok Boomer
Oh, does science annoy you?
It’s that very pedantic, dismissive attitude of yours that I was literally just complaining about before you walked through the door. I love science and dislike people who use it to win an argument.
(Also fuck Will Ferrell. Dude isn’t funny. Stranger Than Fiction is his only good role cause it’s the only one where he doesn’t act like a fucking man child.)
It’s that very dismissive attitude of yours
\
“Ok, boomer”
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just sitting in front of your phone
Yes, am “sitting in fron of my phone.”
On a scale of 1-10, how annoyed are you that you can’t address the science I linked?
^I ^edited ^this ^comment ^and ^it ^took ^me ^less ^than ^a ^minute
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You still need treatment and therapy.
ADHD is not a mental health disorder and doesn’t require treatment. Treatment can be good for people who are having a difficult time with it, but it’s entirely optional.
ADHD is legally considered a disability in my country. It very much is a mental health disorder. I mean it literally hinders you from living your life to the fullest.
So is being gay in a bunch of countries. But of course everyone who doesn’t meet some arbitrary definition of “living life to the fullest” is sick and needs therapy.
ADHD is a psychosocial syndrome, meaning that it may be problematic depending on the social context. If the situation is such that it causes problems to the person, then it should be considered a disorder.
Definition of a disorder includes the fact that it’s a problem to the person experiencing it.
Dont forget the ones who internalized homophobia and became gay-persecuting Republicans with Grindr accounts.
Yes, just look at RNC conventions isn’t that like 50% boomers?
they crashed Grindr at Kirk’s funeral…
Every GOP event is also a Grindr event
AIDS is a huge one.
I met someone a little while ago who was fresh out of the closet and complaining how long they’d spent there.
Statistically, they’d be dead if they were out pre AIDS.
Any actual stats to back that up?
You can’t use statistics to evaluate what would have happened to an individual. Someone’s personal behavior matters more than what statistically ‘should’ have happened to them. It also depends on where they were located; while 10% of young gay men in the US as a whole died of AIDS, over 60% of young male deaths in San Francisco at the height of the crisis were due to AIDS.
Woah. 10% is insane. That’s ~5% of the entire population.
Perhaps I exaggerate, but this person was in a geographic region particularly hard-hit and turns out is really into some of the dangrous behaviour (adjusting filters as part of coming out is, evidently, difficult).
In 1990, AIDS caused 61% of all deaths of men aged 25-44 (born 1946-1965) in San Francisco, 35% in New York, 51% in Ft. Lauderdale, 32% in Boston, 33% in Washington, DC, 39% in Seattle, 34% in Dallas, 38% in Atlanta, 43% in Miami, and 25% in Portland, Oregon.
Also: https://academic.oup.com/gerontologist/article-abstract/52/2/255/613902
Is that:
A) The percentage of all deaths that were caused by AIDS? 1000 people in a group, 100 people died, 61 of those 100 were from AIDS.
Or
B) Percentage of total population that died because of AIDS? 1000 people in a group, 610 of them died because of AIDS.
A
Wow, 61% is crazy…
Yeah, we know anecdotally that it was horrific and that the government was indifferent at best, but I’d like to quantify it as well.
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“Being gay and trans is just a fad” says the generation that wiped out most of the queer population by ignoring a disease that literally killed most of their queer friends and family. And then made their living queer friends taboo because they like another person of the same sex
Most? I am highly skeptical of this claim. Iirc, lgbt people make up about 10% of the population. Depending on your interpretation, it could be far more, but let’s say 10%. “Most” of 10% would be 5%. Are you really claiming that AIDS killed a whole 5% of the population in the 80s? That would be… a lot
GP says queer friends and family. So assuming queer people have non-queer family members, that would be much more than 10%. Maybe 40% or more?
As an older gay guy, as you grow older, being gay stops being important. You just like guys, and the other guy like girls. That’s it.
And it’s actually kind of annoying how some people make that their entire personality. But when I left my mom’s house I even hanged porn pictures on my room, to tell everyone what I am and that I wouldn’t hide anymore. So I was the same.
But over time I realised that I should never have to hide, I didn’t have to keep showing either. I didn’t really want. I just did it because I was angry I had to hide.
My point is; we are here. Just not that visible.
Plus we didn’t have internet back then. Thank god. I wouldn’t want to see again the things I would have written.
Edit, I must also say that it’s because a lot of people fought for our rights. I couldn’t just be a guy who likes guys back then. It’s a luxury I love. I can say stuff like “my partner, he does this or that” and it never becomes “what, are you gay?” anymore. It’s just like a straight guy talking about his female partner most of the times, and that’s awesome. I can choose to make it my personality or not these days without having to hide.
Omar Little in The Wire was the first time I saw an amazing character who happened to be gay. It was so damn revolutionary to see, finally. It always annoyed me so much that gay was a personality type like goth or nerd or jock, in US media.
I’m glad you posted your perspective though, as I had never really considered it this way.
It always annoyed me so much that gay was a personality type like goth or nerd or jock, in US media.
Yeah. Same. The dream was to just be normal. That liking guys is the same as liking girls. You can be a femboy gay, or a macho yanktank straight, or the other way around. But it’s not anymore simply who you like that catches people attention.
You can simply be gay, and that is just one detail of your life. Not a whole fight anymore.
I’ve had quite a few gay friends over the years, partied, hung out and did everything you do with friends. I never understood the aversion to people based on who they prefer as a partner. It just seems so juvenile.
Part of me wonders how people that grew up during the 80s and 90s came to think that, it seemed like things were on the right track for acceptance till within say the last 10-15 years (though I may have missed a lot of indicators being straight). Now everything is so polarized and it really makes me sad not just for lost rights of my old friends but cause it’s like society is regressing in its ideals. Hate and bigotry never help things grow except for conflict and we need less of that.
I think it’s just internet impression.
Being gay is soooo much easier today. I would say we reached the utopia, because I don’t hide and yet my life doesn’t seem different than straight people.
The screaming ones one both sides, the “everyone must know I’m gay” and the “no one should be allowed to show they are gay” are the minority, but they sure are loud. And internet is their megaphone.
But that depends on the country of course. I’m sure gays in Saudi Arabia are not happy.
Me, imagining your mom walking into your childhood bedroom after you move out and finding the walls covered in gay porn
I’m a Gen Xer. There wasn’t a single gay or trans person in any of the schools I went to all the way through high school. That I knew of. I sometimes wonder who was and either kept it hidden or didn’t even know themselves because it wasn’t considered
an optiona possibility.I’m a millennial and grew up in the Seattle area. In my very big highschool (graduating class of i think it was almost a thousand people), there were like maybe 4 flamboyantly gay guys, all in drama/choir. And zero trans people.
It wasn’t even until nearly the end of my senior year that I even considered the possibility of myself being queer. I think if I had one or two more years in school, maybe to grades 13 and 14, I would have made different friends and learned a lot more about myself, sooner.
Same here. Not one person felt safe enough to come out at my high school. That first get together after starting college was incredible: the people who started queer relationships that first semester weren’t always happy (I mean, that’s fair given how bad dating can suck), but they were finally getting to live the way they should’ve had the freedom to their whole lives and it showed.
It’s stupid and funny how ready my classmates were to accept LGBTQ+ relationships, but only after graduation. If we’d just extracted our heads from our butts, we could’ve made the environment our friends needed to be more fully themselves while we had the time with them.
i mean, so many people faced a lot of shit for coming out in the 80s and 90s. it wasn’t until after a lot of people had come out and fought those battles for us that society in general became more accepting
Yeah, that’s what I’m sayin. We were their classmates. We the ones who made it hard by attacking and verbally abusing them and contributing to a culture where the word “queer” was a slur, not just a descriptor with 0 inherent right/wrongness to it. Then, what, graduation rolls around and a magic switch gets flipped and suddenly we’re not a bunch of dry-roasted shit on toast people? It was so fucking disrespectful, stupid, and just plain wasteful of the time we could’ve spent together with them feeling confident in living their regular lives. We missed out on some of the best parts of the people we called our friends because we didn’t build them a safe environment. There weren’t that many parents teaching their kids that people are just people regardless of what their bodies look like, who they’re attracted to, or how well their insides match their outsides. This is, objectively, some pretty basic, don’t-be-a-garbage-species shit. We’ve been learning and re-learning this lesson for generations in America between waves of immigration from different parts of the world, the personhood and rights of Black Americans, and the recognition/rights of sexual and gender minorities and it just feels like maybe we should dispense with the bullshit already. Learn the lesson one last time and move the fuck on. Don’t we have better things to do?
Children are psychopaths. And growing up and being a royal asshole to people, then becoming self aware and realizing how you’ve hurt… Basically your community that you’ve lived most of your life so far with, can be a pretty sobering experience.
I don’t know how old exactly you are, but when I was growing up, there was this absolutely stupid fad of calling anything you didn’t like “gay”. Like, oh, your pet bird died? Aww, that’s gay, I’m sorry for your loss. The umpire made a bad call again? They’re all so fucking gay.
It wasn’t even until recently that I realized how homophobic my brother has always been. I remember him talking about how his teachers had began punishing kids for saying stuff like that, for using gay wrong, and how he would retort by saying “no, i mean they’re gay like ‘has sex with men’.” Teenagers can be such little shits, ya know?
Surely you knew one or more guys who were overly excitable/dramatic or one or more girls who were like… the opposite of feminine? I knew them, I can think back now and see in my head the faces of the ones I would suspect, lol. I recently had one of them reach out to me through Facebook (I’m not on Facebook but my SO is) and sure enough, she has a wife now and I just thought “yep, that tracks.”
Yes, there are some I suspect may have been gay and/or trans in hindsight, but at the time it didn’t cross my mind. Transgender wasn’t even a word I’d be exposed to until decades later. It’s also important to note that I went to DoDDS schools (American schools overseas, in this case Germany, for the dependents of military servicemembers) for most of my school years, which would have made keeping such things hidden even more likely.
oh cool my grandpa was stationed at oberammergau when my dad was in elementary school. sometime in the 60s. you weren’t there around then, were you?
Option? More like reality, no? I don’t think sexuality and identity are options, do you?
I think they meant as a figure of speech.
Like when I was a kid, i remember reading one of my mom’s old college textbooks about human sexuality or something from the late 70s or early 80s. I remember specifically looking up sex and gender (there were no signs!), and the options laid out were stuff like transvestites and closed gay people and people who were mentally convinced they were trapped in the wrong body. Like men in dresses doing it to advertise to other men secretly behind their wives’ backs, or in private, masturbating to themselves. (We NOW know that books like these were actively part of the problem)
And I was just like, ewwww no, because there was ALREADY a super negative stigma to me that I didn’t ever want to be. Like I remember being on the school bus thinking that I wasn’t going to allow myself to be gay. “I can’t be gay. I can’t be gay. I’m not going to be gay.” I would tell myself, in the same fashion of wishing for something or sleeping with the picture of something under your pillow to make it be true.
It wasn’t until years later, after years of being accused and bullied and teased by ALL of my friends for being gay and into men (I wasn’t), and trying out all of the porn and thought experiments to try to figure out what was wrong with me (nothing was ever right, I slept with several people and it always felt meh and wrong. I thought I might be into men, but no that felt off too), that it hit me. Nothing ever felt right until I thought of myself and was seen as a woman. Then, suddenly, sex felt (in my head, before action) appealing, socializing felt appealing, and living felt appealing. It was like a pressurized case of my entire life’s memories and possibilities was unlocked and everything started streaming out. I was seeing signs, interactions, reasons, explanations, loss, potentials… I cried for days, not knowing exactly what to do, and held this information to myself for years, and one or two of my closest, accepting friends for a few more years, and didn’t tell anybody I grew up with at all, because they were part of the source of the walls I was living in and the problem. A lot of those people, I even considered family at the time.
And now, in my 30s and rapidly approaching 40, I’m trying to cope with the loss of my teens and twenties, and, at least for a brief time, was really proud of younger generations for making it better for each other, so that people wouldn’t lose out on some of the most important times of their lives that your 20s are so important for. I do mean sex, drugs, self discovery, travel, meeting people, partying, falling in love, learning, being confident, growing. Because doing all that in your 30s is possible, but we all know the new stigma of the trans woman dressing like a slut in her 30s and it being “cringe”. That’s a shitty stigma, it’s just more of the same ignorance and attempts at oppression, just later in life. She’s trying out things that she didn’t get to when she was an actual teenager. Her hormones are on blast, let her be fucking happy and discover herself. At least she has the courage to, unlike the little shits who say everything is cringe.
I am still finding myself. I’m still exploring options. I’m exploring realities. But it’s hard. Politics, loss of family and friends and possibilities and career options and confidence, and it’s all at a strange and hostile time in history. Yes things could be worse, but they could also be better, too. I shouldn’t have to worry about going outside or what I say or think or do or who I love. Nobody should have to worry about who they are.
Nobody.
Fist bump for “mother’s outdated psych textbooks”! Mine were about what I guess we’d call now atypical and neurodivergent child development. Lots of use of the R word. 😬
Also, I’m glad you figured yourself out, or are on the path to it (it’s a journey and I’m not sure how to know when it’s done). From experience: life is more comfortable when you’re not trying to fit yourself into a box of the wrong shape, even if politics makes it wicked scary, at least you’re not fighting your own brain as much.
As someone slightly older than you: don’t forget your stretches and exercises. Sunscreen is your friend. (All that’s supposed to be reassuring and friendly)
Yeah, “option” isn’t the best word here - “possibility” might be better.
[not the person you replied to]No worries. Especially with some is the less well-known identities, if you don’t know it exists you can’t know it’s an option to identify with it.
For me, being asexual was a possibility and identifying as asexual was an option, neither of which I was aware of in high school.
What I’m trying to say is words are hard.
