Brock Thompson

Let me just start with a question. How many friends outside of your generation do you have? I mean honest-to-god friends. In my friend group, as large and fungible as that can be in the District and in the age of social media, it’s sort of me and a few other Gen Xers, and then just loads of Millennials. They do look to me to pass down some knowledge, but it’s mainly to do with the ins and outs of mortgages and things like that. 

But is it me? Or are gays just really, really terrible at having intergenerational friends? It’s striking. I’ve recently developed a friendship with — let’s call him — Bill. He’s almost 80. Maybe it’s the historian in me, but I just love the stories. But more on that later. For now, to ask another question, just why are gays bad at having friends removed from their respective generations? 

On social media this week I posted an obituary from a Houston paper dating from 1978. It was obviously from a gay man. You can tell from the coded language, “long time resident of this city despite stays on the West Coast.” And if that didn’t give it away, it ended with this rather heartbreaking language, “his parents requested that his friends not attend the memorial services!” Bill told me these sorts of obituaries — terribly vague but also cruelly pointed — were quite common in the dark days of AIDS. And this is succinctly why I think gays are so bad at having intergenerational friends, we’ve simply lost an entire generation of elders. And what was exactly lost with that generation is far more than can be enumerated in this column. 

Back to Bill’s stories for a second. There is a real value in oral histories, the telling and passing down of shared experiences make our culture certainly more valuable and rich, at the very least far more interesting. And again, this is nothing new, as cultures across the globe seek to capture personal stories and first-hand viewpoints of history unfolding. But it’s not just the story itself that’s important. It’s also the perspective and opinions. These remain nuanced between generations. Again, that’s really not saying anything new. But these varied opinions and outlooks, if not shared and debated risk isolating gay men into rigid and unchanging views crafted in echo chambers. 

Also, gays place a large premium on youth. And this, again, is nothing new, nor particularly gay. We just like what we like. But as Bill told me, he’s rather annoyed that any interest he expresses in a younger man is automatically filed under lecherous behavior. Let me just deal with this right here: We all, no matter the age, display to varying degrees lecherous behavior. Just get us a little dehydrated, a little tipsy, and throw us on the sand of Poodle Beach and watch the unwanted flirting unfold. So. But still we have to do better than mistaking anyone displaying interested in us as a simple sexual advance. That seems rather juvenile.  

With contact between our generations low, we are in danger of passing down a culture to future queer Americans that might seem a little lopsided and even a bit, well, shallow. But what’s to be done? I’ve commented in past columns on how we’re failing older LGBTQ Americans, especially in the District. To remedy this, we should use what I call the Chicago model and what is being done at the Center on Halsted, the city’s LGBTQ community center. The Center offers numerous programs geared to the city’s LGBTQ senior population. But one that sticks out is a sort of a buddy program, pairing seniors, even those in care facilities, with younger friends. This would certainly help us here in the District better care for our LGBTQ seniors, and would also of course help with the bridging of our considerable generational divide. So perhaps we could reproduce this here in the District. 

For now, I’ll continue to buddy up and enjoy my time with Bill. 

So, what did you get up to on your summer vacation? I myself did the usual gay hot spots along with many of my fellow queer Washingtonians — Rehoboth Beach for a few weekends here and there, Provincetown, Mass. All in all, a pretty gay little summer. 

Just as our summers were wrapping up, Vice President Mike Pence was wrapping up his own rainbow tour of Europe, including stops in Ireland, where he dined with the country’s gay prime minister and his husband. Later, on to London, where Pence got all dreamy-eyed sitting across from Boris Johnson, gushing over both him and Brexit generally. The trip overall was no big deal, really. Most people seemed to ignore him, or, as the case with Iceland’s first family, straight up gay troll him. They famously wore rainbow bracelets in photos with the Vice President when he visited Reykjavik. Wherever he went, no one really seemed to want him there. The Irish Times didn’t dance around anything, calling the whole thing nothing but a real shit show.

Whatever you call the visit, you can’t call it, or Pence for that matter, anti-gay. That would be terribly unfair, according to Trump White House chief gay Judd Deere. That’s what he told us via his Twitter account anyway. That if you still think Pence is anti-gay, like everyone on the planet does, just remember he had lunch with gay people. True Kellyanne Conway-esque logic there. Sort of like saying, “Yes, your uncle is a complete anti-gay bigot. But may I remind you he really enjoyed Robin Williams’ performance in ‘The Birdcage?’ So, don’t you feel a bit foolish now?”

But who is Judd Deere exactly? Like me, he’s gay, and he’s from Arkansas. And he’s stepped up to the press plate at the White House following the departure of fellow Arkansan Sarah Huckabee Sanders. This column isn’t really about how anti-gay this administration is, or how Deere is wrong to enable and promote it. That’s all pretty obvious. But how, as gays, do we treat queer quislings like Deere? What do you do with this administration’s useful gay idiots? Some have argued that if you see Judd Deere out in a gay bar, you should tell him he isn’t welcome. And I have to say, this strategy is pretty damn tempting. This of course would involve some effort on my part — committing Deere’s face to memory, actively scanning bars for him, approaching him, unwelcoming him there. It’s a lot. But still, would it be fair for Deere to enjoy our gay spaces when he touts policies that fly in the face of everything these spaces represent — safety, security, free expression, and inclusivity.

There’s all of that, and now that summer is behind us, things could really come to a head this fall, as the Supreme Court is set to hear three cases of interest to us. The question, succinctly, is whether or not we can be fired for being gay. Trump’s Justice Department says yes, we can, submitting a briefing arguing so at the end of August. The cases are set to be heard this October. Aren’t you tired of having your basic rights argued over? Deere has made his thoughts clear on all of this. Calling the Equality Act passed by the House earlier this year full of “poison pills.”  The Equality Act would include workplace protections (safety and security) for LGBT Americans. 

I know what some of you might be thinking. There are gays of every stripe, be more tolerant, blah, blah, blah. This gay Republican thing would’ve been cool, say, in 1995, when all Republicans hated us, and so did about half the Democrats. But now, in 2019, the lines are pretty well drawn. So I’m fairly intolerant of gay Republicans like Deere. So perhaps in Rehoboth or Provincetown, or around our town, maybe I’ll get the chance to tell him one day. 

Brock Thompson is a D.C.-based writer. He contributes regularly to the Blade.