Changing the world (and missing a beat)

We just got back from the Creating Change conference in Houston. I’ve mentioned this conference before. It’s the annual gathering of LGBTQ activists sponsored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (aka “The Task Force” or NGLTF). The Task Force is a genuinely progressive, grassroots national LGBTQ rights organization, and this conference is always correspondingly inspiring and uplifting. Weather-wise we were really lucky—we arrived in Houston just as they thawed out from the last freeze and left just before their next cold spell. “Cold” being a relative term—it was supposed to be in the mid-40s I think. We arrived to the bright white snow and icicles of Colorado’s own “cold” spell, all 10° of it.

            

But back to Houston … Creating Change is always a lively and energetic conference, in part because it brings together the single greatest concentration of LGBTQ youths I’ve ever experienced in one place. There are hordes of them moving around in little herds, crowding the lobby and the aisles, chatting in animated groups. They seem beside themselves with the sheer pleasure of being with scores of their queer peers at an event specifically dedicated to queer life and queer politics. It’s an environment where they can be totally, outrageously themselves—and that’s just what they do. Frankly, it makes me tired just watching them. I mean that in a good way.

Being immersed in all this youth presence is always one of my favorite parts of Change. It reminds me that there are plenty of folks behind us on the people mover, younger folks filling in the places as the old activists slow down and rotate off the end. Sure, the younger folks see the world differently. Sure, they won’t do the movement like we do/did—heck they’re already not doing it like we do/did. But that’s the point. They can do it differently because we did it at all. And they should do it differently because it’s not the same movement as it has been in the past. After all, the point is precisely Creating Change.

Here are two examples of that. First, the standard official welcome to the city was issued by Houston’s three-term lesbian mayor, Annise Parker, who campaigned from the start as an openly lesbian candidate. When I was these kids’ age, such a candidacy would have been unimaginable. But now, “out” politicians are almost commonplace—along with out news reporters, out sports figures, and out performers. A second hit of how the world has changed came in the form of the keynote speaker, Laverne Cox, the transwoman actor who plays a leading role as a transwoman prisoner in the currently fabulously popular Netflix series, “Orange is the New Black.” Both that role and an out transperson's playing it would have been unthinkable until recently, both because the very concept of transgender identity existed only in the most limited ways and because any portrayal of trans identity would likely have presented it as a disordered state. But now, with Laverne Cox as the most visible representative of perhaps the least represented of LGBTQ identities, LGBTQ roles and LGBTQ actors are common on screens large and small. The world is changing. And this particular corner of the world is changing really fast. So it’s both inevitable and right that these youths’ movement will be—already is—different from ours. Being at Change reminds me of that, every single year.

Many parts of the conference pointed to other sorts of changes in the movement. In a very heartening way, the movement seems to have matured enough that it (we) can begin to look beyond our own pain and our own needs. We can begin to participate in the broader agenda of progressive social change for a wide range of groups—an agenda of which the LGBTQ movement is a part, but only a part. Not all branches of the movement are doing this—at least not yet—but the folks at Change sure are. For instance, there’s growing emphasis in the program on issues like immigration, poverty, and reproductive rights. There’s more attention to sexism and racism inside as well as outside the movement, and more mention of the awful irony that LGBTQ people’s rights were expanded by the Supreme Court on the very day that the same Court rolled back the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action.

This shift strikes me as a rough parallel to individual development—similar to when individuals outgrow their adolescent preoccupation with themselves and their own individual lives and start to see the world through a broader perspective. Perhaps the LGBTQ movement is maturing beyond the more self-obsessed period of its own development. This conference meta-message left me encouraged by our collective movement forward and outward and reassured that the queer people mover is well populated with good-hearted and right-minded people of many ages.

But my sense of the conference is not without disappointment. In particular, I was sorry to witness—and to experience—in this apparent progressive oasis the same sorts of ageism I encounter elsewhere. I say it’s the same as elsewhere, but I actually wonder if this phenomenon at Change (and maybe in the queer movement more broadly) is aggravated by our focus on youth, which I find generally so laudable. The organizers of Change have clearly worked hard to welcome youth and to encourage their active involvement. This is excellent for so many reasons—queer youth have so few places where they can congregate en masse and feel genuinely “normal” instead of marginalized. Also, this movement is theirs, too—they will inherit the fruits of what happens now, so they should rightfully be involved in it. Besides, the extra emphasis is needed to overcome our long history of not including youth in LGBTQ activities or organizing—largely because of old myths and stereotypes (e.g., about adults “recruiting” or “initiating” youths) that made us fear we would be wrongly judged or that youth would be wrongly stigmatized. So it is wonderful that youth are so involved, so eagerly embraced, and so highlighted at the conference. Still, this intense focus may contribute to my sense that people who are not youth—especially those of us toward the other end of the age spectrum—are marginalized by the ageism that floats around in our culture, including in LGBTQ communities.

Whatever the source of this ageism, I was aware of it at Change. It showed up frequently in the clear sense that my comments were less noticed and less valued because of my age. In the failure of folks in elevators to greet me and banter with me in the way that they did with younger folks. In the scant programming around aging, most of which was about medical issues, the need for aging services, and similar topics that generally presented old LGBTQ lives as framed by nothing but decline, disability, and dependence. But it especially showed up, and glaringly, in the acceptance speech of a filmmaker who was given an award for “Gen Silent,” a movie about old queers—about “really old” LGBTQ people, he said, “like 60.” Throughout his talk, he referred to these LGBTQ elders as “they,” and he addressed the audience as the “we” who must take care of “them.” Now, if you’re young and don’t get why this feels bad, just imagine being talked about as if you weren’t present and as if your only role in others’ lives is as someone who needs their help. The fact that the “really old” age of 60 passed some of us by many years ago left me wondering about his assessment of our place in his world. However well intended, his comments felt invisibilizing, dismissive, and patronizing. I could almost feel the kindly pat on my graying head as he talked to others about me. And this from a man whose award was for a film about aging, a person whose perspective is presumably honored by the organizers.

Now, to be fair, this discomfort didn’t weigh heavy on me through most of the conference—it just cropped up occasionally and left me wincing. It’s not an awful problem. It’s just that the context of the generally clear intention to be inclusive at every possible level, I’d have hoped it wouldn’t happen here. I actually whimpered about this concern in my comments about Change last year, but I didn’t figure out a way to address it at this year’s conference. I would love to see something more positive, celebratory, and educational—not about elder care and dying, but about old LGBTQ folks’ engagement in the world and about our varied, complex lives. Creating Change will be in Denver next year. I would like by then to have identified some way to address this issue.

Meanwhile, one incidental but valuable outcome of the conference was a (slightly) more expansive view of Texas. It turns out that Houston actually has a very active LGBTQ community with numerous queer organizations and publications. A hint of their history was posted in the form of posters strung across a long wall of windows in the conference space (excuse the feeble picture—shooting directly into the Houston haze-covered sky):

Houston also has a creative/progressive bent that reminded me a bit of Boulder (OK, only a little bit), with a focus on environmental issues, community engagement, public art, etc. Just across from the hotel where we stayed is a community park called “Discovery Green,” where I walked around for a bit one day. The park, which is largely run by a non-profit, showcases public art (like the huge balloons suspended in trees shown below) and provides a whole bunch of free programming, including festivals, interactive art projects, music, yoga, recreational activities for kids, etc. During winter, a lot of the programming happens at the park’s ice rink. As you can see from the picture below, “ice” rink takes on a new meaning in Texas (check out the ice near the skater's feet). While we were there, they were having a weekend fund-raising fair complete with free music, food vendors, local artisans, face painting, and a swarm of people. As you can see, a few even went “ice” skating. 

Now, the strong LGBT community and the promise of sloppy ice and public art at Discovery Green weren’t sufficient to persuade me that Texas would be a great place to live. 

But they did remind me to notice what I might miss if I let my biases run the show.

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