There are no guardrails on the people mover

I’ve written before about this image I have of life as a people mover, a moving sidewalk of sorts. We all get on at birth and ride along until our turn comes to rotate off the end. I find this image helpful because it reminds me that there are people coming along behind my cohort, folks who are now in the early stages of finding their place in the world, folks who are at the peak of their adult lives, and folks slowly moving along in various ways toward the step-off moment. It puts my life in perspective as part of an ongoing flow that includes, but isn’t centered on, me. But this simple image misses an important reality: not everyone travels smoothly to the end of the ride. There are no guardrails on the people mover. People can—and some do—slip off along the way.

Recently, I’ve been reminded of this truth by a series of illnesses and deaths among people I know, mostly people around my age. I’m also reminded of it when I hear stories of people who die much younger than I am of illnesses, accidents, homicide, suicides. People frequently step off the people mover not at the end, but sideways, because there are no guardrails.

I’m tempted to wrap all such endings in language like “they died too soon.” And for those who know and love these people (and usually for the people who pass), that seems self-evidently true. From our pained, grieving perspective, it is unquestionably too soon. Still, from the perspective of life’s inevitable trajectory, indifferent as that may be to our feelings, no time is correct or wrong. The end can come at any time.

It can happen to any of us, any day, expected or not.

It seems that as we age, my friends and I are more and more aware of this uncertain certainty, more prone to acknowledging it. “It could be any of us,” we say. Tomorrow. Today. “You never know.” That’s always been true, of course. From its beginning, life’s continuation was always uncertain. But with age, the increasing proximity of life’s inevitable end surely makes us more keenly aware of its tentative, contingent quality. And then periods like this happen, and the message seems to be everywhere.

On one level, these recent, personal reminders of the absent guardrails serve as alerts, insisting that I not take living for granted, that I appreciate each day I have here, because those days are numbered. For all of us. And we don’t know what the number is.

And on another level, it strikes me that what we’re wrestling with, what we’re trying to get a handle on is so much more poignant. It’s the fact that, to mix metaphors, our image of life as a continuous path leading off into some obscure sunset is flawed. The banks on either side of the path may be steep and unstable, and it is really, actually, painfully, inescapably true that none of us knows when we might slide off. Truly grasping this reality is a tough task, at least for me. I only sometimes “get it.” Usually, I just mutter the right things about “any of us, any day” without fully grasping the fragility of my position on this planet. It’s a protective thing, I’m sure. But sometimes, when these experiences with illness and death pile up—which they increasingly do as we age—I feel the futility of the defense.

At those moments, I really need to talk to someone else who genuinely gets it. Sometimes I need to cry at the loss and the fear and the stark reality of it. And then I need to look around my life and be grateful for another day—or another moment—to cherish my time here. To appreciate the ride while I’m still on it.

I suppose to some folks, this may sound morbid. Some might even worry about my state of mind. But it’s not, and you needn’t. For me, at least, occasional existential encounters of this sort are part of aging, part of taking stock of where life has brought me and what life in this place looks like. On another day, soon, I’ll be marveling at the sky or the wind or the amazing artistry of a local chorus or the vibrancy of queer youth.

Life’s like that—it’s complicated. 

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Aging toward bucketless happiness

Sometime between the decline of pre-industrial drudgery and the rise of contemporary leisure, mainstream America (i.e., middle-class, white, educated, especially city-dwelling folks) came to expect happiness as an automatic benefit of being alive. We tweaked the language of the Constitution's promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to insist on the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the possession of happiness. Preferably all the time. This expectation was probably helped along by the “do your thing” and “self-fulfillment” movements of the late 20^th century, but whatever its source, it is now a fixture of our cultural psyche: We are convinced that we deserve to be happy, and we expect life to make good on the promise. Of course, even at its best, happiness is intermittent. I don’t know anyone who feels especially happy during a bout of the flu or a traffic stop or a fight with a loved one. But in general, in the broad picture, the drive to be happy is pretty compelling.

To live by this narrative, we need to set about doing things that will make us happy, so we spend a lot of energy trying to figure out what that might be. Some folks look for it in relationships, some in mind-altering substances; some hope to find it in wealth and possessions, some in service to others, some in power, some in religious practice; some turn to self-help books, some create bucket lists. Some keep looking for a recipe, a Google map to Happiness.

Now as it turns out, psychologists and assorted other social scientists have been exploring the question of happiness—what it is and how people find it—for some time now. In fact, volumes have been written about it. Probably the most interesting thing I’ve learned from the research on the topic is this: happiness comes not from having stuff but from having experiences.

You're probably wondering just what kind of experiences bring happiness. Well, it happens that I came across this article the other day that asks just that question. The answer this article offers reframed my thinking about happiness and how we experience it—especially as we age. It helped to clarify why the notion of a “bucket list” just doesn’t work for me (a topic I discussed here before).

Here are the questions these authors posed:

What types of experiences should individuals pursue to extract the greatest enjoyment from life:

The extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime experiences that people tell others about and often commemorate in photographs on their (actual or virtual) walls?

Or the simple, ordinary experiences that make up the fabric of people's daily lives?

And here's what they found:

It turns out that “extraordinary experiences”—the “collectible” experiences, the stuff of photo spreads and favorite stories—are associated with happiness only for younger people, who perceive their futures as open and unbounded. It seems that these experiences help to forge people’s sense of who they are in the world. Accumulating extraordinary experiences is part of defining yourself, creating an experiential (vs. an occupational) résumé. Of course, what counts as “extraordinary” depends on the individual. It could be traveling around the world in a hot air balloon or winning the local bowling tournament, bearing a child or completing a pilgrimage to a holy shrine. What makes it extraordinary isn’t so much its magnitude or singularity as its role as a core theme for stories about yourself, its role in defining who you are as a person. For younger people, happiness might look like this: “I'm loving this process of creating my life. The future looks wide open and I want to experience it all.”

As people grow older, though, as their sense of who they are becomes clearer and more grounded, they are likely to gain their greatest happiness not through these extraordinary experiences but through deep satisfaction with the everyday events of their lives. Instead of collectible experiences, older people find happiness in the flow of every day. It's these daily experiences that are self-defining now, experiences that express the life we've forged over the years. And it's these experiences that bring happiness. For older people, happiness might look like this: "My life has been rich with experiences, and I'm happy with where they've brought me. I love the life I've created.” 

At this point , I expect some folks are thinking something like this: “Wait a minute! We don’t have to stop creating our lives. We don’t even have to stop defining ourselves (at least in part) by extraordinary experiences. We can keep having those, too.” I agree. But it makes sense to me that the balance between these two equally happiness-inducing types of experience shifts with age. The reality—like it or not—is that as we age, the time available for forging a dramatically new and adventurous life declines, along with the physical ability and money to sustain such efforts. But the important point is that this does not mean the demise of happiness. On the contrary, although we may well have found happiness in extraordinary experiences during the course of our lives, the very good news is that happiness does not decline even in the absence of those "collectible" experiences. On the contrary, a whole new realm of happy experience opens, one that we would not have had the wherewithal to craft or the perspective to appreciate in our younger years.

So I have begun to consider this (another) gift of age: the ability to take great pleasure in the lives we have created without feeling driven to collect extraordinary experiences.

Of course, that ability is in itself extraordinary.

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Sochi's missing ring

So, everyone probably knows that the Olympics have started, happening this year in the Russian city of Sochi. Probably even folks who are completely indifferent to such things know about this installment of the games, given that they were drenched in news coverage long before the opening ceremony. There are so many geo-political stories around these games and their location.

There’s the story of Vladimir Putin’s personal interest in the spectacle and the prestige that he hopes will hang off the next two weeks’ happenings. Then there’s the story of the regional chaos in this part of Russia, where civil war has raged on and off since the USSR came apart in the early 90s. And there’s the story of the threats of terrorist attacks by anti-Western militants and recent suicide bombings in several locations around Russia. Then there’s the story of the lavish sporting venues that will show up in the international media—and the unfinished, shoddily built hotels that won’t. And the usual stories of poor people displaced and exorbitant amounts spent in the midst of a new economic downturn in Russia. And then there’s the story that seems to have gotten the most coverage: the gay story.

In case you haven’t been following this story, during the run-up to the Olympics—although not explicitly linked to that event—Russia announced a multi-faceted anti-gay law ostensibly intended only to protect children from gay “propaganda.” Leaving aside for the moment the (patently false) implication that LGBTQ identity is in any way a threat to children, in truth, this law has had far wider consequences than that framing suggests. For instance, it not only prohibits adoption by LGBT people in Russia, it has also raised concerns that LGBTQ parents might lose their own children. The law has also resulted in arrests and harassment for peaceful demonstrations on behalf of gay rights, and anti-LGBTQ assaults have increased dramatically, some witnessed by police offers who stood by or even participated. It’s the worst memories and the worst fears of Western gays come to life in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

To return to Sochi, there has been a great international outcry over this law, and it has come to a focus around the Olympics. Some have urged a boycott of the Olympics. Many have worried that LGBTQ athletes and spectators—and their families and supporters—would risk their safety and perhaps their freedom by attending the Games. Progressive groups around the globe demonstrated their support for LGBTQ rights in ways great and small. In Berlin, for instance, on the first day of the Olympics, gay activists lit a “rainbow flame” that will burn throughout the Games in support of Russia's LGBTQ community. 

And in what seemed to me an excellent move, the Obama administration decided that no top-level administration official would be sent to the Olympics, as would usually be the case. Instead, Obama sent a delegation that included “out” gay athletes—a move so perfect that it even inspired one formerly closeted athlete/delegate to come out.

So, all of that is background to this tale:

During the opening ceremony Friday night, a huge lighted display of the five intertwined Olympic rings failed to come off as planned, leaving one ring unlit. Here’s a picture of the actual scene at Sochi Friday night.

  

This instantly struck me as perfectly fitting. The Olympic rings are supposed to symbolize community, union, the coming together of the five continents (I know; there are seven continents) in the name of sport. So the failure of one of the rings to “participate” in that union just seemed to me quintessentially right: for so many reasons, this Olympics is characterized by divisiveness and exclusion rather than unity—the repression of dissidents, the militaristic rule over peoples seeking independence, the hostile, even violent exclusion of LGBTQ folks.  

  

So, this morning, I turned on my computer and saw this: 

The “glitch” had already become a t-shirt. Now, some part of the creation of this t-shirt may have been crass nationalism—let’s make fun of another country’s mistakes because we’re so cool. But I was struck by something else: the perfect symbolism of this otherwise inconsequential mistake. The missing ring that would have made the symbol whole.

Russian television, which, in another missing-ring move, is essentially state-run, didn’t show the glitch. So Russians didn’t know about the mistake—instead, they saw rehearsal footage with all five rings intact and intertwined. The Russian government was not interested in general in having anything but a perfect show for the Olympics. To be certain that everyone was kept in line, across the land, a bunch of gay rights protesters, regionalists demonstrating against a history of genocide in Sochi, and everyday political protesters were arrested even as the Olympics were getting underway. 

Part of what has fascinated me about this whole story, though, is precisely the prominence that the gay story has achieved, given the many stories that have been floating around. The mainstream media have featured countless stories about this topic. One of the most interesting discussions I encountered was a New York Times article about Russia’s “culture wars.” This piece couches the whole gay issue (and other current actions as well) in terms of Russia’s retreat to an imagined glorious past—a sort of extreme form of our own conservative movement. Framed in this way, the anti-LGBTQ law and many other events in Russia today actually make sense—an awful sort of sense, but sense. It also explains why the Russians appear to have been so open to the anti-gay propaganda of certain American activists—folks who have largely lost their impact in this country (although they had plenty in their day.)

Even commercial interests got involved. Several sponsors of the US Olympics Committee—beginning with AT&T and then expanding to Chobani (Greek yogurt) and DeVrey University (home to many Olympians)—issued statements condemning Russia’s anti-gay law. Perhaps most striking, Chevrolet aired two ads during the opening ceremonies that included gay couples (you can watch them here—be sure to listen to the really nice narrative that goes with the pictures).

The media participation hasn’t been confined to mainstream media. Many of you likely saw Google’s “doodle” at the beginning of the Olympics. It looked like this:

It’s about the Olympics, sure. But the color-coding isn’t coincidental: red–orange–yellow–green–blue–purple … precisely the color scheme of the LGBTQ rainbow flag.

And taking it another step, in the words of another New York Times writer, social media have “served as a prism” for this issue, reflecting and refracting the Sochi-gay connection in a variety of ways.

  

For instance, a British company that encourages innovation through social media invited folks to create an ad that could be used by Olympics sponsors in support of equal rights for LGBTQ people. Here’s my favorite: 

And maybe best of all, the official United Nations Twitter account shared a quotation from United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who was pictured wearing rainbow-fingered gloves (which some sources insist are not a statement about LGBTQ rights).

“Many professional athletes, gay and straight, are speaking out against prejudice. We must all raise our voices against attacks on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex people,” Ban said in a statement to the Olympic Organizing Committee. “We must oppose the arrests, imprisonments and discriminatory restrictions they face.”

And as a final touch, I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was pure coincidence when Attorney General Eric Holder selected the morning after the opening ceremony to announce further extensions of Federal rights to same-sex couples. Take that, Putin!

So what does all this mean in the larger scheme of things? For one thing, it seems to me yet another indication that the LGBTQ movement in Western countries is on a trajectory of amazing, rapid progress. This is not to say that there isn’t still much to be done, and it’s not to say that all is well for all of us. Our well-being still depends hugely on accidents of geography, family, income, race/ethnicity, family and faith community acceptance—on too many variables. But things are definitely looking up. In some strange and sudden way, we have largely ceased being pariahs and have become human beings—even likeable ones. That’s a nice feeling. On the other hand, I worry that we are serving as the current mascot minority, the downtrodden folks whom everyone loves to love—but in that role, we may also be serving as a distraction from the persistent oppression of other groups.  

There’s more to say about this, of course. I’ve said some of it before and will likely say more later on. For now, though, I just want to make note of fact that the awful anti-gay laws that bring us this clever t-shirt and colorful Google doodle today will still remain to haunt LGBTQ folks living in Russia when the Olympic spotlight fades.

I wonder… will the media still care? Will we?

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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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