The view from the other side

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the annual Creating Change conference put on by the National LGBTQ Task Force, in my opinion, the grassroots heart of the queer rights movement. At the conference and since, I’ve thought a lot about how rapidly and how dramatically the movement is changing. I’ve also been reflecting on what it’s like to be more an appreciative observer than an active participant in the energetic directions I watched unfold there. And this train of thought, in turn, reminds me of my recent intention (largely successful) to look differently on the expansive life behind me from the perspective of the foreshortened one ahead.

In case that sounds a bit morbid, let me elaborate. Hopefully, with succinct clarity.

Lately, partly because of some persistent orthopedic problems, I’ve found myself slipping easily into regret for all the things I know I can’t do any more—and fantasizing, in an admittedly neurotic way, about all the things I fear I won’t be able to do any more. I’m enough of a psychologist to know that this sort of preoccupation isn’t going to help much of anything. So, I’ve been trying—with greater or lesser success—to transform my regret into gratitude. As I’m reminded of things I can’t do, I try to focus my thoughts and feelings on the pleasure I’ve gleaned from all the years I could do those things. This seems so simple as to be trite—but it has actually helped a lot. I have spent many happy moments recalling past adventures with great pleasure—an experience that would be nice enough if it happened against a neutral background, and it’s really wonderful happening against the alternative of moping regret.

So, I’ve been thinking about this reframing as I’ve pondered my response to the conference. First, let me tell you a bit about Creating Change. During the conference, some very engaged, very vocal, very dedicated folks basically claimed the conference stage and the attention of about 4000 people in the name of causes about which they were passionate. The first such event happened during the opening gathering, when a large group of trans activists spoke for about half an hour about the need for the movement to recognize the dire plight of trans people, especially trans women, especially trans women of color, who are being murdered at a terrifying rate and largely outside public awareness. Or even the awareness, they pointed out, of people in this progressive wing of the LGBTQ movement. The next morning, another large group—this time people from Ferguson, joined by other people of color—similarly claimed the stage and our collective attention for a large chunk of time, this time with a plea for the movement to pay more attention to the plight of people of color, especially (but not solely) queer people of color.

In each case, the conference organizers granted them time and space, uncontested. In fact, subsequent speakers, including the mistress of ceremonies (comedian Kate Clinton) and the ED of the Task Force, thanked them for demanding our attention. (As an aside, can I tell you how great it is to be affiliated with an organization that so totally walks its talk, that actually wants to be held accountable, that wants to grow with the movement?) But the protests were only one part of Change. There were also workshops on all manner of topics from intersex identity through inclusionary language and strategies for responding to anti-LGBTQ rhetoric to the role of faith in queer lives and of queer people in communities of faith. And then there were the colorful, performative gatherings in the lobby, the excited greetings and comfortable chatter among folks who likely can rarely be so open about their identities and their preferred manners of being in the world.

In all of these—and, in fact, throughout the conference—the buzzing energy of young LGBTQ people was rich and commanding. For one thing, they simply have more energy! Heck, their masqueerade ball was just starting about the time I crashed for the night. But beyond that, they are so alive with the enthusiasm of being relatively new to the movement, of being in a place where they could be fully themselves, whatever that means, surrounded by people who will accept that. A place where their voices were actually being heard. I, on the other hand, was aware that I wasn’t part of that energy—much as I respect and delight in it. My days of being at the leading edge, the surf in front of the wave, are (comfortably) behind me. This is partly because of changing priorities, movement fatigue, the physical realities of my particular aging trajectory, and likely a bunch of personal peculiarities. But it’s also because I’m simply not that wave. I’ve never been and will never be a queer youth coming of age in 2015, an era of same-sex marriage and growing emphasis on trans issues, diversity, and intersectionality. That experience—the experience they’re having that is constructing the movement and their place in it—is not an experience I’ve had. For me to presume that my particular take on the meaning of the movement should somehow shape its direction now, in a moment so startling new, would be, well, bizarre.

That's not to say that old people like me (and the many others who were there … although definitely not as many as the young people who were there) have nothing to offer. That, too, would be a misrepresentation of the vibrancy and depth and texture of this movement. But it is to say that this time is youth’s turn, youth’s wave, not ours. They are the ones who will live out their lives in this shape-shifting movement and in this world so ambivalent toward their realities. So, instead of bemoaning how the movement has “passed me by,” I choose to take pleasure in their joy in this moment and mine in recalling my time in the heart of the movement—and that includes lots of years of feeling like my cohort was hot stuff. Moments as a queer lay person and a queer professional when I felt like what I was doing would matter, big time. Now, other folks get to have that feeling—and they can do it partly because we did, when it was our turn.

None of this is to say that I can’t be actively involved, still productive in moving LGBTQ equality forward—just as I can continue to have life adventures, if in a different way. Heck, I contribute to a weekly radio show on these issues, I occasionally do professional writing about them, and in my daily life, I still talk and write about these topics at the drop of a hat. But the edgy stuff I saw at the conference—including the protests, but also the creative self-presentation, the linguistic complexity, the comfortable ease with things that still feel awkward to me, all of that—is theirs, not mine. And I’m fine with that.

For me, part of taking pleasure in my life is recognizing that the struggles of old age—or any other age, for that matter—come with a flip side. I’m not talking here about the silver lining school of aging. I don’t mean (only) that growing old has its merits and its particular strengths, although I do think that’s true. Instead, I mean that even the flat-out losses of aging can be signals for joy, cues to recall and celebrate the things that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in my life. I would never have noticed that I can’t backpack for days in desert canyons any more or travel hundreds of miles through the mountains by bike if I’d never done it. And I would never notice that the queer movement has wonderful new, sparkling treasures to reveal if I hadn’t been involved enough to be at this conference and notice the remarkable changes we’re now witnessing. Considered this way, recalling those now-past experiences isn't sad; instead, it lets me smile through them again, gives them another spin in my mind, invites another spark of joy. It's like a bonus ride. 

Sometimes I think the view from this side is so expansive because it lets me see the other side, my younger years, with such heightened clarity and gratitude. A fringe benefit of watching the movement grow, right on past me, bearing the mark of its generations of forebearers. Knowing I've been there, too. 

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Double-edged ageism

It is the hour of the pearl – the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.

                                                                                                        John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

I've written here more than once about my encounters with ageism. Anyone who's old enough (which I happily am) and vigilant to the assorted forms of anti-old bias in our culture can likely identify daily moments when you're reminded that your age matters, and not in a good way. So the other day, when I heard a young man, a college student, use the word "ageism," I thought at first that he was especially astute and was talking about my experience. But he wasn’t. He was talking about his. He was talking about our cultural bias against youth, especially adolescence. His comment reminded me that ageism cuts two ways, trims off both ends of our lifespan. We dismiss and diminish the lives both of youth and of old people. Only that prime-time period between about 25 and about 55 (or is it 45?) counts as actual Life. All the years before that are just preparation for the age of importance, just time spent in the wings, practicing your lines. All the years after that are just slowing down, letting go, telling tired stories, shuffling off stage.

His remark got me thinking about the connection between these two kids of ageism, the one I've written about before and the one I've ignored until now—in this blog, anyhow. I actually know both kinds of bias well—the bias against old age because I now encounter it regularly, and the one against youth because I taught about it for a few decades. (I also used to face it, though that’s so far in the dim past that I sort of dismiss it as unimportant now. Not uncommon, I think. More about that in a minute.) 

In my own "prime-time years," I was teaching at Metro, which, in my early days, was full of adult students. So my goal was to get these grown-up folks to recall their own adolescence and to balance the standard, largely negative cultural view of adolescents with a more benevolent perspective—one that recognizes what adolescents are up against and that holds a degree of empathy and a great deal of respect for kids. To get them to recall their own experience of this frightening, clunky process of trying to figure out how to do life—which is no small task, especially when you have to do it with virtually no guidelines about how to get from childhood to adulthood. 

One of my perennial rants in those days pointed to how ageist our society is in our view of teens. We joke about how much easier it would be to freeze-dry them for a decade. We roll our eyes and sneer at their overblown performances when they're with their peers. We sigh or moan when they arrive en masse at the restaurant or park or shopping mall where we're trying to have a "normal" day. We occasionally invite their participation in “our” world ... and then dismiss their ideas as naïve, disregard their questions, and trivialize their attempts to engage. I used to read my classes a piece written by an 18-year-old describing his sense of his place in the world. It said, roughly, "There is nothing I can do that couldn't be done just as well by a million other people—older people, younger people, smarter people, dumber people. There's nothing I can do that anyone cares about." That's a pretty empty place to be, a pretty invisible, ignored, diminished place. He was describing the experience of someone who has been devalued so much by others that he believes it.

So back to the college student I mentioned earlier: Once I got what he meant by “ageism,” I understood what he was talking about. I could imagine how wonderfully validating it must have felt when he attended a conference where he experienced none of this ageism. What really caught my attention, though, was that he was talking about Creating Change, the very conference where I recently encountered (and wrote here about) ageism of another sort—anti-old rather than anti-youth ageism.

That bit of irony got me thinking about how these two forms of ageism differ—or not. A few things came to mind.

Anti-young ageism	Anti-old ageism	... and my cranky comments
With time, they'll be tomorrow’s leaders	They did so much; we all stand on their shoulders	How about valuing who we are right now
There, there. You’ll understand when you're older	Here, honey. Let me do that for you.	Being patronized feels bad at any age
Minimum wage because you’re too young for a real job	Minimum wage because you’re too old for a real job	The rich get richer. Besides, everyone will say how “cute” we are in that little striped hat or bright blue vest.
Your opinions don’t count because you don’t have any experience	Your opinions don’t count because your experience is out of date	Now there's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You're too old to act that way!	You're too old to act that way!	Obviously, there is a "right" age to act "that way" ... and it's not young or old.
How would you know? You've never been there.	How would you know? You were there so long ago.	Unless you're in the prime-time years, you don't know squat.
She's great—so much older than her years.	He's great—so much younger than his years	If you're young or old, age-appropriate behavior is not worthy of approval.
I'm a better judge of what's best for you than you are.	I'm a better judge of what's best for you than you are.	No comment.
But you look so much older!	But you look so much younger!	Why would anyone say this unless being/looking older (if you're young) or younger (if you're old) would be an improvement over who you actually are.
Student discounts	Senior discounts	Nice financially, but they do not make up for the dismissal of our lives or pay off the debt of years.

I could keep going, but this is enough to point out the core of ageism that joins my experiences with this young man's. The message is pretty clear: There's a narrow span of favored years that count as genuine living. And unless you're in those privileged years, you'll be reminded regularly that you're not. Which means you are, in some fundamental way, inferior. For youth, the only way out is to grow up and join the golden people. For old folks, there is no path back to that noble status.

Now, the interesting thing about this particular form of bias is that we all—all of us, at least, who survive adolescence and live to old age—have been or will be in every single one of these groups. So it's a particularly complicated type of bias. Everyone who reaches adulthood knows on a personal level what it's like to be the target of anti-youth ageism. Yet virtually every one of us learned youth-ageism well enough that, consciously or not, we direct the same bias toward the youth who come along behind us. We may try to justify it by making them different from us, less worthy ("When I was a child, I would never have ..."). But our parents' generation said such things about us, too, and it's as ageist now as it was then. And then, even as we look back with disapproval at the younger people behind us, we also look forward with equal disapproval (or, perhaps worse, pity) at the generations ahead of us. Even though we all stood in the place of the teens, and stand—or will stand, perhaps sooner than we liked to admit—in the place of old people.

How do we do this? What sort of denial makes young and old people worthy of such misunderstanding and such poor treatment when they were and/or will be us? On one level, the answer seems simple. It's unintentional, non-conscious. And that's likely true, at least most of the time. So, now we get to make it conscious and work on changing it, right? But it's not as simple as that, it seems. We've all been so totally immersed in this generational script that we live it out without particularly thinking about it. We deny our experiences as youth because we have moved beyond that—in fact, we elevate our own worthiness by accepting the idea that the earlier years were useless, except as preparation. And from the position of the privileged years, it's easy to assume that old age is miserable because everything that seems to have value in the culture belongs to these middle, these glory years—physical beauty (by our cultural standards), productivity (ditto), a young but mature body and the freedom to use it as we see fit, economic resources (at least for some of us), and the knowledge that we are "it" in this culture. So we treat folks in the groups outside our magic circle as unworthy.

Of course, this is nonsense. Youth lead real, complex and interesting lives now. Their lives matter today, not just in the future. Constructing who they are and who they will be is not trivial work. Old people lead real, complex and interesting lives now. Whether or not they "contribute" in the narrow way we may typically evaluate contribution, they are full human beings: they love, fear, hope, give, need, share, long, sing, wonder, hurt.

Given that we all get to occupy all these positions—unless, that is, we slide off the people mover prematurely—it seems like it might prove enlightening for any of us to slip into the shoes of our young selves at 20 and our old selves at 80. From this personal perspective, we might be able to spot the many forms of ageism that we all practice every day—practices we would hate having aimed at us.

To be honest, I've never before given much thought to the connections between old-ageism and youth- ageism. But now that I have, I think I'll start my personal consciousness-raising process by regularly clarifying whose experience I'm talking about when I say "ageism." I've been using it as if it applied only to me. Doing that ignores the fact that ageism affects young people too. The man who was so delighted at the absence of anti-youth ageism at Creating Change deserves his joy over that as much as I would if I experienced an absence of old-ageism.

This also means that my earlier critiques of Creating Change as failing to address ageism need to be qualified. The conference hasn't done enough to address old-ageism. It has worked really hard—and apparently successfully—on youth-ageism. And the resultant expansiveness and energy of youth involvement is one of my favorite parts of Creating Change. I've said that before, but I missed what the delighted presence of youth said about ageism in this broader sense.

So, thanks to this man's unintended challenge, I leave this unexpected exploration of the meaning of ageism with a much enriched understanding. 

It's a nice example of the absurdity of dismissing the experience of anyone, any age.

  

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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Ageism Take 2

Last week (was it really that long ago?), I talked about an encounter with ageism at a conference on multiculturalism. That particular experience felt especially awful coming as it did in a setting where the appreciation of difference was explicitly the topic of the conference. Granted, the presentation that troubled me was conducted by white, mid-life academics. But they might have called on their experience as women to notice that talking about people without including those people in the conversation might feel yucky. Heaven knows women have had plenty of those experiences (recall “Women’s bodies have a way of shutting down during legitimate rape,” spoken by a man who presumed to know).

Anyhow, this past weekend, I had another such experience. Again, it was in a context where I would hope it wouldn’t happen: the annual “Creating Change” conference sponsored by the (to my mind) premier LGBT rights organization, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF, a.k.a. The Task Force). In my happiest fantasies, LGBTQ people would be so sensitized to oppression that they would never participate in it themselves. Especially folks attending this conference, the most politically active, politically sensitized, broadly progressive conference I know. But there it was. Subtle, mostly, but recognizable—at least from my hypervigilant perspective. The sort of ageism that made me ask myself, “Wait, was that ageist or not? Am I being too sensitive? Where’s my sense of humor?” All of which must sound familiar to feminists, queer folks, people of color, working class people, people with disabilities … all of us who find ourselves questioning whether mistreatment is “real” or “imagined.”

It’s not the first time in my life I’ve had these experiences, the daily barrage of what psychologists call “micro-aggressions.” I first became aware of them during my feminist awakening, then got re-acquainted as I sorted through my sexual orientation and then engaged the world as an out lesbian. I’ve also learned about them through the stories of people in other oppressed groups. But I still expect (or maybe I simply hope) that these micro-aggressions won’t happen when I hang out with the very folks who have been the targets of so many of them. Somehow, I expect them to recognize bias when it happens, to challenge it in others and refuse to engage in it themselves. And that was my expectation of folks at Creating Change.

Unfortunately, few of us are as skilled in this sensitivity toward others as we wish others were toward us—I’m certainly not. For instance, although I try not to say or do things that are racist, classist, adultist, etc., I sometimes find myself saying or doing those things anyway. Heck, I even say or do sexist and homophobic things sometimes. I’m actually happy when I catch myself doing this—enjoying what a friend calls “another god damn learning experience.” For one thing, I’m happy to realize that I was at least conscious enough to catch it (or to “get it” if it’s pointed out to me). Besides, it’s a reminder of how deep this stuff goes and how hard it is to root it all out. When I remember that, I can be more understanding of other folks’ “slips.”

So, bummed as I was about encountering ageism at Change, as we call it, upon reflection, here’s what I realized. One of the great joys of Change is that it is full of youth and their exhausting, limitless energy. That makes for noisy nights in the hotel, but it also infuses the conference with this buzz of possibility and a sense of wonderful forward momentum. When I’m at Change, I don’t worry at all about the future of this movement.

At the same time that I love this youth-drenched energy, I realize that the movement and Change itself increasingly belong to generations that have had little contact with old people and little opportunity (much less encouragement or requirement) to think about ageism. So, the perspective that they bring to this conference is shaped almost entirely by this culture’s pervasive ageism. By the stereotypes and biases that float around in the air, the images we've all  taken in during our lives—and that most of us only begin to really, deeply challenge when they apply to us. These gut-level, ingrained beliefs and attitudes are usually not spoken out loud. Often, they’re so widely accepted and unquestioned that we don’t even know we have them. Psychologists call them “implicit attitudes” exactly because they’re not explicit. We could even call them unconscious.

So, folks working in this area (like, as a random example, my partner) point out that people can’t change these attitudes until they become aware of them and actively work on changing them. Despite our best intentions, these things are so well learned, so … implicit … that unless we take active steps to recognize and change them, we’re basically stuck repeating them. For me, this means that if I really want ageism at Change to change (what a convenient double meaning!), I have to do something about it. These young folks who are flooding into the movement haven’t had any means of learning about this issue. They likely have no idea what ageism is, much less what it looks like in everyday practice—and even less awareness that they are practicing it, big time. It’s not only youth, of course. I heard plenty of ageism from grown-ups (even old ones), too. So, if I want these well-intentioned, generally progressive folks to look at their ageism, I need to try to give them some information that will help them do that.

You can see where  this is going. I guess my task is to develop some sort of program for Change next year that will address ageism. Not that I can single-handedly rescue the movement—or even Change—from ageism. But doing something on this order will serve at last two purposes. First, it may begin a conversation that will help some segment of my fellow Change-rs to notice, think about, and work to change their ageism. That would be way cool. Second, it will help me take some control over my own response to this issue. After a couple of these encounters, I was on the verge of deciding not to go back to Change. That would be a huge loss for me. Doing something positive about my discomfort would be so much better.

I told my partner earlier today that sometimes blogging gets me in trouble (which she reframed  as “holds me accountable”). Last week, it made me commit to writing to the lead panelist from the earlier conference (which I have now done). This week, it leads me to commit to developing a program for next year’s Change conference. 

My response this week is the same as last: thanks for the nudge. Stay tuned ...

Creating Change!

I just got back from the annual Creating Change conference sponsored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (aka The Task Force or NGLTF). 

The Task Force is a vibrant, totally progressive organization that works on a real grassroots level in communities to (you guessed it) create change, especially around LGBTQ issues. This conference brings together LGBTQ folks and allies from around the country (and some from other countries) to focus on these issues.

“Change,” as we have come to call it, is always such a treat. The place pulses with folks’ excitement about this work. There are always lots of youth, and their enthusiasm and energy pervade everything that happens. They also make me very excited about the future of this movement. 

And “the movement” as used here means far more than LGBTQ rights. NGLTF has a broad-based, truly progressive agenda. So "the movement" includes the rights of women, of people of color, of poor people, of immigrants, of those with disabilities, of those outside the religious mainstream, and of all the other groups that are so easily left out of political discussions. 

Just being there is uplifting.

Besides, there are always these moments of surprise or insight that add to the fun. Here are a few from this weekend:

·        Our first evening there, in one of the social gathering areas (which buzz in a way I’ve never experienced at any other conference), I saw three young men in military uniforms. I stopped in my tracks and tried not to stare as I realized that this is the first time ever that members of the military could attend this conference openly. It’s the first time ever that the rest of us could see our brothers and sisters in uniform casually interacting with their civilian peers.

Never doubt that elections matter. And don’t doubt that Obama’s presence in the White House has changed the world in important ways.

·        "Change" always has gender-neutral restrooms, where people of all genders share the space. Conference newbies are sometimes surprised by this, but folks settle into a comfortable routine about it pretty quickly. So, one day, I was in a gender-neutral restroom that usually serves as a men’s room. The stalls were full, so I was waiting my turn. A man walked in just as a stall opened up, and he went directly past me and into the stall. My first thought was that he was being rude. But then I realized that he’s probably not used to encountering waiting lines in restrooms. So he didn’t recognize me as a “line,” but maybe thought I was just waiting for someone else.

Or, maybe he was rude. But in this context, I was quick to give him the benefit of the doubt. Instead of being cranky, I stopped to wonder what his experience might have been and what I could learn from this. Now that’s good energy!

·        I went to several sessions on upcoming elections about LGBTQ rights. In a fascinating twist, at least one of these elections (in Maine) will be an election about marriage equality initiated by the pro-LGBTQ side. Instead of fighting off initiatives designed to limit equality, this one will be an election on behalf of marriage equality. Word among folks who know these things is that it just might pass. Other states have their sights set on doing a similar thing soon. This is an empowering shift whether or not we “win” these elections. The fact that we have reached a point where we can take the initiative instead of just responding to attacks is huge!

Having survived Amendment 2 in Colorado and then thrived in its wake, I can see what an amazing change this is. Then, we were barely hanging onto our sense that we were worthwhile human beings. Now, we have the wherewithal to expect—not wait for, not beg for, not hope for, but expect—that we will eventually have equal rights. That’s a change that’s fun to see in its creation!

This shift comes to us courtesy of years of work by pro-LGBTQ activists, like the work on display at “Change.” With now dozens of elections under our collective belt, we have gained important ground. For one thing, public opinion has shifted increasingly toward support for equal rights. For another, grassroots activists have managed to gather a ton of information that they can use to craft campaign messages and campaign strategies. It won’t be perfect. But it will be a lot kinder to LGBTQ folks and their allies than the whole circus was a couple of decades ago, before we knew so much, before so much change.

I came back, as always, energized and enthused about what’s happening and what’s ahead. Also sleep deprived. Totally worth it.