It all started with my childhood table. The table that held my childhood - from the hours of calculus homework to make up spread across it when getting ready for high school dances to the countless birthday cakes wished upon. The table now lives in my dad’s house and while visiting this winter break I learned that table had also been my father’s childhood table.
Out came the photo album, the stories, and memories. I caught glimpses of a family community that seems to have slipped slowly into the ocean. I now live next to an entirely different ocean creating a new chosen family community. A community and family that my dad does not understand and would even deny the rights and existence of my trans spouse.
These two oceans seemed to pull me apart with a tidal force. The faces from the photos were my history, my DNA, but how did they relate to me today? Would they love me, would they accept me? Was I the only one?
Then from the stories, a new history emerged.
“They died of AIDS.”
“He became a woman.”
I have two relatives that died of AIDS. I have a trans relative that is likely still alive.
What would it have been like to have grown up with an awareness of this history? What would it be like to sit at my childhood table with my now 71 year old queer relative?
I imagine the potential of that moment across the years and how I yearn to ask them how they have dealt with these threads of family and identity, of past and future, and how they have lived when those threads are fraying.
But the truth is a dark angry ocean that has swallowed answers to both my own history and to the advice I seek today. I take to the sky, returning to my new home and my chosen family where the upper branches are also bare of older generations.
How might I build an intergenerational family?
How might WE build an intergenerational family?
I am designing opportunities for intergenerational queer connection.
There is a lack of opportunities to form intergenerational relationships in the general public; however, this gap is intensified in the LGBTQ+ community where family ties may not provide such relationships organically. This thesis examines this phenomenon by questioning how queer knowledge is shared between generations [in NYC] and asking how that affects queer community, identities, and rights.
While this thesis is personal, it speaks to common experiences within the queer community, and even more broadly to a society wide divide between generations.
It is rare that young people sorting through their identity have a role model in their family who identifies as LGBTQ+, and even if their family is accepting when it comes to learning about queer ancestors Grandma likely falls a little short or perhaps even fought against their rights. Through this queers tend to find a new chosen family, supplementing or replacing a genetic family.
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The thing about Chosen Family, the thing that I think makes it so strong, is that we all share the essence of what it means to be gay. In a literal sense that means we identify somewhere along the sexual and/or gender identity scale that isn’t heterosexual or cis-gendered. While we all have different experiences, and in general I’ve had a very privileged experience of what that means, we all understand what it means to realize you’re “different,” to come out, to fear harassment, to fight for and celebrate our rights. But more than that it means to reject the stereotypes of a heteronormative world, to honor the whole of each other, and lean into just being us.
But chosen family tends to be mostly siblings and cousins, rarely extending up to parents or grandparents or down to children, confined to ones own generation. How might we build an intergenerational family?
WE LOST A GENERATION. A QUEER GENERATION.
What queer experiences, unite, divide, or intersect generations? How can queer generations be remapped and redefined?
The queer community, and in particular the gay community, lost a generation to AIDS.
The loss of this generation is significant to the knowledge and history that becomes known.
YOUTH & SUPPORT
While my project to date has not focused specifically on youth, there is research showing how adults can have positive impacts on the mental health of queer youth. The study concludes that, “LGBTQ youth who report having at least one accepting adult were 40% less likely to report a suicide attempt in the past year.” While there are more and more supporting adults, there is also continued discrimination resulting in mental health disparities in LGBTQ youth (youth defined as 13-24). Particularly in the current political climate, increased visibility and open communication and relationships with older members of the LGBTQ+ community is needed.
It’s On Our Minds (& in the media)
Queer community and connections has become present in the popular culture, through gradual moves towards increased representation in the media. Recent examples include The Inheritance and The L Word. The Inheritance, a Broadway play, examines a gay male chosen family in NYC a generation after the AIDS epidemic and points poignantly to the question of what the current generation owes to its elders. The return of The L word: Generation Q, brings back a show highlighting a lesbian chosen family in LA, and in this reboot intertwines past characters with a new generation.
I spent most of last semester investigating a number of precedents that serve to connect members of the queer community across generation divides. Precedents fit into categories such as meal sharing, shareable art, storytelling, and skill sharing.
I’ve come to view these precedents as existing within the institutional realm. These are programs generally hosted by an organization, from formal to grassroots levels, as an event to bring people together. Below are highlights and links to some of these types of precedents.
From my research I have found that for these types of events and programs there generally needs to be some sort of shared interest in order to draw in and create a base understanding among participants. Taking this insight I am working with DOROT, an intergenerational nonprofit, to put together a screening of Paris is Burning, followed by a panel discussing the changes in the ballroom scene.
BUT! All institutions are a collection of individuals!
"Happy to be part of it, and standing at an admiring distance were the younger people. Also hanging out, talking, flirting, happy, excited, but the two worlds were not mixing. Before me I saw two distinctly different experiences, separated by the gulf of action fueled by suffering on one hand, and the threat of pacifying assimilation on the other. When the ACT UPers were in their twenties, they were dying. And the replacements for the dead, these young, were on the road to normalcy. The young had the choice to live quietly because of the bold fury of the old. In the rare cases when the old have done the right thing, this is as it should be. And somehow, the presence of the young showed that they understood this, that someone had done something right and yet these ones were curious, attracted, intrigued by the potential of living for more than LGBT domesticity as their fate. Maybe they too would like to change the world. They had never been that profoundly oppressed. And yet, they wanted to relate." - Gentrification of the Mind
Along this theme, I have shifted to zoom both in and out to the individual level connection.
While zooming in to focus on the particulars that compose of an interaction between people, it is also a zooming out from the institutional level. All institutional interactions are subject to the same rules of an interaction between two individuals.
At this new scale:
HMW design (the conditions for) meaningful interactions between people from different generations within the queer community?
I see two aspects within this question.
First, how do people meet? Is it through an institution or through other means? What are the other means and how could they be designed?
Second, how to equip people to have a connection, particularly if the subject could touch on personal trauma? Are there specific questions to ask, artifacts to ease the interaction, methods of communicating that would more likely lead to a meaningful and lasting connection?
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I’m just digging into these questions and am excited to see where they lead me.
(hint: my presentation will focus here!)
Barriers between generations?
They exist!
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There are a number of potential barriers to encouraging intergenerational connections within the queer community and they vary depending on specific sexual or gender identifies. These include: younger generations generally have a more diverse understanding and acceptable of gender identity, assumptions and stereotypes that intergenerational relationships will be sexual, and differences in transgender transition experiences.
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<-- also just plain ageism
Some other questions around method, format, and my role in all of this….
(hint: my presentation will also focus here!)
Speaking of form...what's this site all about?
When I was thinking about this asset I couldn’t wrap my head around it being a static thing. As a queer thesis focused on communication I’ve tried to queer the ways in which I compile and share my work. To date this has been through a zine format, but for this I decided to play with a more digital element to work within the short time frame that would also fit with the puzzle pieces of my thesis I have put together here.
What you just read/experienced above is my attempt to play with form while also communicating the critical WHY of my thesis, my goals, a highlight of most relevant research to date, and a teaser of where I am going and the questions I am grappling with. This website serves the purpose of an asset for seminar, but also as a thinking tool as I transition in modes of approach in the thesis that can be shared or preserved as an artifact of what this thesis is.