Lost Generations

A Personal Manifesto of Queer Resistance and Rebuilding

There is a weight to understanding history. When you know, when you really see what the world did — still does — to people like you, it’s a heavy burden. The pain is hard to describe but it’s an ache, a longing for things to be different than they were. Better. You want to, as Walter Benjamin put it, “stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed”. But you can’t, and the future’s rushing towards you like a hurricane. And you can’t move out of the way in time.

Benjamin describes the past as a pile of rubble, and it looks like that at first. But it’s much more than that. It’s alive. In us. Within us. And we see its traces in the world when we know, as well. We carry it. Hence the weight. But that understanding helps you sense patterns. You get to noticing when history starts to rhyme, and it helps you avoid repeating the worst of it entirely. When you’re part of an oppressed group fighting for liberation, like queer people, bearing that weight becomes necessary to survival.

You have to remember, or you won’t know when the people who hurt you are about to again. Understanding our history is survival for queer people. Which is why schools don’t teach it.

But I remember. I know. Because of where I went to school, and what was done to me there. Because I had to learn. And it wasn’t anything they meant to teach.

The Lessons of History

I had no friends as a child. No one to help me. Everyone hated and hurt me, grievously and constantly, for being palpably — in a way they couldn’t put their finger on to start with — different to them. From about age 6 to 16, any group of kids I was ever around reacted to my presence with violence and ostracization. So I learned exactly how cruel humanity could be very early on. I was tortured by every other child and authority figure around me. And I had most of a decade at boarding school to get a good education in the finer points of suffering.

I was alone, friendless, and everyone around me hated me. Told me to hang my head in shame (literally, I got told that by the “other” boys). My response? Straightening my back and holding it higher. For all the horrible things they said, I knew in my bones they were wrong. I knew it was the world and the systems other people had built in it that were. Not me.

Nowadays, whenever I run into anyone I was in those places with, they instantly start apologizing. It was so bad my bullies still remember a decade and a half later, and they apparently still feel awful for what they did. I was the focus of that vile, ancient system’s abuse wherever I went, because it functions by forcing you to hide who you are, and fit in the box they made to rule an empire that no longer exists. And I could not hide who I was for a second. It is meant to kill people like me. And it tried, for a solid ten years. Yet I survived. Because I had that flotsam to cling to. Stories of people who’d been through hell too, and come out the other side. Or learned how to get others through if they didn’t.

It’s funny, The One Queer Kid Who Couldn’t Hide, and was the focus of every other boy’s homophobia, had been a kind of institution at that specific school (and many others like it) for a century or more. There’s a play. A movie. It’s a Thing to the point that, jointly, Colin Firth and Rupert Everett’s very first film is set at a combination of my old school and Eton, but the play? The play is my old school. We read it in class and the teacher actively told us that was why we were reading it. Trust the English public school system to turn a play written to protest its abuses into a way to perpetuate them, eh?

I don’t think they teach it anymore, though. And if they do it isn’t anywhere near as relevant. Because the year after I left, 20 people came out. It was 2007 and Facebook was still in its infancy, but I have chatlogs. One of only two kids there who hadn’t hurt me too badly (which, we have since established he had a crush) contacted me to tell me, and…it felt like thank me. Or let me know what I’d done by being stubbornly myself in spite of all they’d done to try to “fix” me at my parents’ behest. It doesn’t feel quite real, honestly. Even now I have trouble believing there won’t be anyone like me ever again. But there won’t, not quite, not from that place. I broke that system on my bloodied back. And it permanently scarred me. I will never be the person I could have been if I hadn’t been put through that. But I’m still alive, and that horrible prison of a school is at least a little less hellish if you’re queer.

So when I say that understanding the past helped me survive and fight back, I want you to understand my full meaning. I could not have made it through a decade of that Hell without that weight. Because it made me impossible to move when I decided to take a stand. I could not have stood firm as I did without knowing that they were hurting me for no good reason, like they had generations of people before me. I picked up every single story I could that had anything to do with our darkest moments — AIDS, the Holocaust and centuries of oppression before that — and I clutched them to my chest like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to splintered planks in a storm. I needed to. I would not be here, writing this, if I hadn’t.

It may be painful to know, to truly understand what the world can do to people like you for simply existing in a way it doesn’t deem acceptable. But when you’re trapped in a system that is actively trying to erase you — kill you, personally, just for being yourself — you need an education in how to survive. I got one, and I have had cause to use it since.

It is a lot to bear alone. I will have to carry it the rest of my life; not just what was done to me but what helped me survive it. Now, half a lifetime later, I am both married and trying to build something for myself. A family. One I chose. But I still have this weight, and it seems as if no one wants to help carry it. No one younger than me wants to learn about it. Or they haven’t until now. Lately, talking about AIDS in the shadow of another pandemic, it has felt different. And I think I know why.

Those hard-fought lessons in survival are more relevant to both queers and other marginalized groups than ever. And we can see the effects of our failure to pass them on starting to rear their heads too. Those who want us dead are turning our younger brethren’s enforced ignorance against us and them alike. The worst thing is, they think they’re righteous. There are so many younger queer people who are convinced abuse is justice and fitting in is freedom from fear rather than an acceptance that it should command every aspect of your life. It breaks my heart to see.

But. COVID and four years of abject, collective suffering under fascism helped us recall the fear of even darker days. And it turns out the lessons of liberation we learned from fighting tooth and nail for our lives back then apply to everyone. If we remember them. Should we somehow manage to recall who we were before we lost a generation in light of what has happened since, we can help free all who suffer and starve in silence. Every single child that’s beaten by someone who says “it’s for your own good”. We can, we must, say never again. We do not need fixing. None of us were broken in the first place, despite the lies we were taught as children. But with that knowledge we can fix a world that is.

The weight of history is critical to that. This burden I have carried most of my life, because I needed it to survive — and it was heavy, and it cut me when I reached for it to adjust it on my back, but I knew it was mine and ours as well — must be yours in turn. Because it is there for you, too, whether you want it to be or not. You can sense it even if you don’t know what it is. Turn your head, catch a glimpse, and it overwhelms you. Touch on it, lightly, and you can chart an ocean of tears.

We have to look at history, and understand our own past. For in those boxes where we keep our darkest moments there is also hope. It’s the last thing that flies out, but it will keep you alive. I know, because as a child I suffered terribly, and understanding that helped me survive. It can help you, too. It will give you weight enough to take a stand.

It’s raw and it hurts to even glance at but it’s the way we survive as ourselves. We need to do this, and we will not cower. We don’t give up any of ourselves to them. Not our real selves. We don’t break. We had to hide away for a very long time. But I didn’t break in the dark. I’m out now. More of us are than ever. And they cannot force any of us back no matter how hard they try.

They do not have the right to demand we hide! No one ever did.

A Future Worth Loving For

Queer people don’t have many elders. Most of an entire generation died in an act of genocide we have yet to come to terms with, or even really talk about. Those who came after are lost in our turn. Because the best of us, the ones who knew how to live, died. Some who survived AIDS lost every single one of their friends. The only other time I can think of in history that happened is the First World War, and after that war they were lost as well. But I believe we have found a way we can do better. A future worth fighting for.

We must force them to accept us — all of us, not just the ones who look and act and sound like them — as who we are in ourselves. I don’t want, say, my Black or Neurodivergent friends masking their true selves any more than I want my queer brethren having to hide. No one should ever be afraid to be different again. Radical acceptance of oneself and others is not optional. It’s how we find true freedom from the systems built to hurt us and others so we do what we’re told. So we must refuse, and break them to pieces so they don’t hurt anyone again.

When they cry “think of the children” we will answer, “Shame kills, pride saves lives; you are murderers; and you do not have the right to demand we hide” and we will rip their systems down. We will accomplish this with grace and style and savage joy in the fact that we do so by simply being who we are, loudly and without compromise.

We cannot build a better future, or a real life for ourselves, if we are afraid and asking for permission. The ones who took our freedom from us when we were too young to know what it was will never give it back. You can never be yourself on their terms. They will not let you. We must insist on our own. And we have to do so for and with everyone else who’s ever had to hide their true selves, everyone the people who hate us oppress in their turn. That is what we can do for the world, and we must. Even if it hates us for it. Because we don’t have a choice. It’s the only way anyone gets to truly live.

We must act to ensure this future. Together, and with the greatest force of cunning and tactical skill matched with strategic brilliance — because at our best, working in unity, we are capable of that — we set out to free us all. If we work together? We are going to rip this broken world that kills children for being themselves apart and make something beautiful and true and free in its place.

I’m not sure I’ll ever see it, but it is a cathedral I will write the world into poetry to build.

The plaque on the side of Utopia shall say, “For the family we never got to meet, and all of us who never got a chance at one.”