Source: Pew Research, Seattle Times, St. Petersburg Times, Times (London)
A big majority of Americans think there is a “generation gap” – a higher percentage now than at any time since the tumultuous late 60s when Hair was a shocking first-run Broadway show rather than a quaint revival, and the nation’s campuses and streets were being shaken with clashes over Vietnam, civil rights, and women’s liberation, and – oh yes – when a rag-tag group at a New York gay bar faced off with the cops and pushed back after a police raid on their turf.
The flood of Stonewall retrospectives printed in the past week hint that if a question about “generation gap” were asked of LGBT people, the results would be even more lopsided than they were in Pew’s random sample, reflecting a deep difference in shared history.
In what the the pollsters call “perhaps the single most intriguing finding” in a major survey of generational differences released today by Pew Research, 79% of the survey respondents think there is a “generation gap”.
Pew’s researchers didn’t try to define the term for their survey but point out that in a 1969 Gallup Poll, 74% of respondents said there was a generation gap, with the phrase defined in the survey question as “a major difference in the point of view of younger people and older people today.” When the same question was asked a decade later, in 1979, by CBS and the New York Times, just 60% perceived a generation gap.
Pew’s researchers don’t say anything about LGBT issues in their new survey. But the generation gap that respondents to the Pew survey perceive appears to be is even more striking to the LGBT folks who have reflected on the significance of the Stonewall anniversary in the last week.
Several of the Stonewall retrospectives printed last week (all written before Pew released its results) highlighted a gap among LGBT generations so deep that it would be more accurate to call it a chasm.
Survey finds generation gap; Stonewall retrospectives reveal LGBT generation chasm [contd.]
Pew asked respondents to explain what they understood by the term and found that the most respondents of all ages said there are differences in morality, values, and work ethic. Relatively few cited differences in political outlook or in uses of technology, according to Pew.
Press accounts have already started the process and will continue to slice and remix Pew’s results in various ways during the next week,
But the flood of Stonewall retrospectives printed in the past week hint that if a question about “generation gap” were asked of LGBT people, the results would be even more lopsided than they were in Pew’s random sample. And most of the Stonewall anniversary stories are very clear about what the term “generation gap” would mean to LGBT people: It reflects a deep difference in shared history.
LGBT people who came of age before and soon after 1969 – before the cascade of changes of which Stonewall was both a spark and a symptom – recall in often deeply personal ways, a time of repression, when even asking for “rights” or respect was unheard of. “By contrast,” writes Seattle Times reporter Lornet Turnbull in one of those Stonewall retrospectives, “some gays and lesbians in their 20s and 30s are not shy about demanding theirs; they are restless and impatient with the pace of change.”
Turnbull continues:
They came of age when many of the battles had been fought; their straight peers stand with them in large numbers in support of gay rights.
They have public role models and have witnessed the shift in how they are portrayed in the media — from caricatures to "rich portrayals of gays living with healthy self-esteem," said Josh Friedes, advocacy director of Equal Rights Washington.
"They have a healthy self-esteem, which many in my generation didn't have," said Friedes, in his mid-40s. "They want full equality, and they are furious they don't have it."
A column from Sunday’s Times of London highlights the chasm of what might be called a Stonewall-generation gap. In a reflection on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion written for the Times (London), activist Matthew Parris writes that he sees a significant generation gap between the gay men growing up today and the gay men like himself who are “now of a certain age”:
New freedoms bring security, pride, even swagger. They bring a certain care-less hedonism, and that’s not all bad. There’s more unworried fun in store for a young gay man today than ever there was for me when I was 18. Much has been gained. But something has been lost too, and I have memories from those haunted, nervous, repressed days that I will never regret….
[S]ome of the heart has gone out of what really was, once, a community. We were oppressed then by what seemed like all the world. Now we are in danger of oppressing ourselves: with shallow conformism and gay stereotypes of our own creation.
Unlike a new generation of the out-and-proud, I can remember the 1970s and 1980s. I remember the fear: fear of exposure, fear of disgrace, fear of dismissal, fear of losing friends and family, and the physical fear of assault in circumstances you’d never dare report to the police. Fear of being kicked out of the Foreign Office, where I’d just started; and of not getting into Parliament, when I chose that path, because of whispers.
Two stories printed by newspapers on opposite corners of the US over the weekend as Stonewall anniversary retrospectives highlight the Stonewall-generation gap – something not even hinted at by the Pew results:
On Saturday, Seattle Times published the report by Turnbull that was headed, “Gay rights mean different things to different generations of community”. The subhead is: “Forty years after New York's Stonewall Riots launched the gay-rights movement, older gays and younger ones share much the same agenda of equality. But their needs within the movement are also divergent.”
Turnbull talked to a couple from Tacoma, John McCluskey and Rudy Henry, who met over 50 years ago and have lived together ever since.
McCluskey told Turnbull about the same sort of personal history that Parris describes:
“When I was 18 and 19, I didn’t think much of having any rights; I assumed I’d go through this life having to look over my shoulders,” said the 72-year-old McCluskey, a retired accountant. “So many of us used to think we had no rights, that we didn't deserve to have any.”
The couple knew lived a shadow life similar to what Parris describes, even though their own circumstances were far different than his:
Even in gay-friendly San Francisco where they first lived together, they found it necessary to hide their relationship from prospective landlords, and on job applications they would sometimes lie about their marital status to avoid raising suspicion.
Also on Saturday, St. Petersburg Times published an account by Alexandra Zayas of life in a retirement home for gay and lesbian patrons headed, “Stonewall Inn riots lead to tranquil retirement for gays in Palmetto's Palms of Manasota”.
Jeanne Brossart reflected on the changes that have occurred since that raid on the Stonewall four decades ago. She lived in New York at the time and explained the days to Zayas:
The bars were dark and dank, with boards on the windows and eye slits on the doors. Once inside, the 34-year-old nurse knew the protocol. If the lights blink, clear the dance floor. Sit down. Act straight.
"Nobody ever thought of fighting back," Brossart remembers. Until the hot early morning of June 28, when a swelling crowd of angry patrons at the Stonewall Inn finally revolted, hurling pennies, then beer cans, then bricks, parking meters, and Molotov cocktails.
Brossart knew the moment was important.
Zayas points out that one aspect of that important moment that Brossart would never have guessed at in her 30s was that the rebellion at Stonewall and the reaction to it would help make possible the retirement home she lives in now with her partner and 60 other lesbians and gay men.
It’s not something she would have considered important (much less possible) then, but it’s also something that few in the post-Stonewall generations would consider important today.
In the Seattle Times, Turnbull writes:
While older gays and younger ones share much the same agenda of equality, their needs within the movement are also divergent.
Young people, who have at times referred to their own post-gay movement, seek the protections of marriage equality as they form relationships and start families, while gays of their grandparents’ generation are more concerned about issues of aging — like survivor benefits and long-term care.
The divide is not as stark as Turnbull paints it in that paragraph. After all, some of the activists at the forefront of the marriage equality movement are from that “grandparents’ generation”, but the larger point is valid nonetheless.
Parris in London Times points out that attitudes are often different among members of different generations, but the articles in both of the US Times papers point out that needs are also different.
In St. Peterburg Times, Zayas writes:
Ed Kobee and Al Usack lived through the worst of it — the failed marriages, the fear of losing their government jobs. Now they were together and ready to retire.
They traveled from Washington, DC, to a community in Florida with a big, beautiful clubhouse and sat alone at a table of eight. A nearby table of women took notice. One approached the men, to investigate.
Quickly, the questions got personal. She asked if they were married. They said no, but that they were partners.
She turned around and hollered, “Hey girls, they’re single!”
The following morning, they signed up for a home at another community — the Palms [a lesbian/gay retirement community].
Now 74 and 79, everyone knows them as the couple that throws big birthday bashes every year and entertains side-by-side in their living room, in matching arm-chairs.
“Our relationship truly is a marriage,” Kobee said. “A lot of straight people can’t comprehend.”
The problem that Kobee and Usack ran into at that first retirement home is one that many gay men and lesbians face when looking for such a place, according to Friedes, a gen-X activist from Equal Rights Washington.
He explained to Turnbull, that most aging gay men and lesbians can’t find (or can’t afford) the kind of home that Kobee and Usack live in:
Friedes said not enough is being done to see to the long-term care of gays as they age. There are few nursing homes specifically for gays or that are gay-friendly.
Some, as they grow older, are even forced back into the closet because a home-health-care worker may not be sensitive to their needs, Friedes said, or because other nursing-home residents “are still homophobic. They find themselves in their final years in a community that is not accepting of who you are.”
Like Kobee in St. Petersburg, the Tacoma couple that Turnbull talked to for her Seattle Times article, John McCluskey and Rudy Henry, told her that they’re comfortable with their long relationship even if they can’t legally call it a “marriage”.
McCluskey and Henry said it helps that gays are freer about coming out. Henry's father died before Henry came out even to himself, and he never talked to his mother about his homosexuality — even after he introduced her to McCluskey.
“It’s amazing what happens when people realize they know someone who's gay, they have a family member who is gay,” McCluskey said. “People realize we won't steal their kids.”
Still, among gays themselves there is a sometimes painful generational disconnect when it comes to marriage equality. While older gays would be happy if gays achieved marriage, it may come too late for some of them….
For Henry, 74, who suffered a stroke a few years ago, marriage to the love of his life would be great, but “it's not really a burning desire for me.
“I’ve lived so long without it,” he said. “I understand the benefit of it. But what's far more important is to gain equality for everyone.”
And there’s a point at which McCluskey would probably differ with what Parris has to say about a common history in his London Times column. McCluskey sees common cause with the hopes and dreams of another generation, even if he doesn’t share their sense of urgency. Parris, on the other hand, seems to be sitting in his rocking chair clucking at the young’n’s with their “strutting self-regard, a materialistic consumerism, a vanity and a f***-off selfishness that I do not like.”
Source: Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality | Pew Social & Demographic Trends
Gay rights mean different things to different generations of community | Seattle Times
Stonewall Inn riots lead to tranquil retirement for gays in Palmetto's Palms of Manasota | St. Petersburg Times
The Stonewall riots: what have we learnt 40 years on? | Times (London)