Roxane Gay from The Audacity

In Torrey Peter’s debut novel Detransition, Baby, Ames says, transfolk are a “lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain.” I was reminded that the queer community and the trans community especially, are communities without many elders. We are a community of people who often have to parent ourselves when we’re most scared, or fragile, or needful. And we also often have to parent ourselves simply to figure out how to be who we really are in a world that wants to deny us our right to live and love freely.

I came out when I was nineteen years old. It was the summer of 1993 and while cultural attitudes toward the gay community were changing, it was a slow shift, especially for a Haitian American girl from Omaha, Nebraska. This was around the time of Brandon Teena’s murder but before Matthew Shepard’s murder. And that may be a macabre way of thinking about it, but their deaths were and remain a reminder of the precarity of being part of the LGBTQ community in certain circumstances. My family was not thrilled with the news that I was a lesbian but they never turned their back on me, either so all thing considered, I was one of the lucky ones. I was not very worldly when it came to women. I didn’t really have anyone I could turn to. As an avid reader, I initially tried to piece together my identity, a clearer sense of how to be, from books. I was obsessed with Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts and the pulp fiction of Ann Bannon. Eventually, I would find my way to Audre Lorde. It was an awkward time.

https://audacity.substack.com/p/elders