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.

To comment on this post, click on "No comments" (or "2 comments" etc.) below. Comments from "anonymous" welcome.

May Day!

Yesterday was May 1, a celebratory day for a variety of reasons in many countries around the world. So, it should come as no particular surprise that yesterday was a certifiably remarkable day here as well. I’m not talking here about the international labor movement, Maypoles, or rituals of pagan origin (well, maybe that last one, sort of). I’m actually talking about an amazing day of celebrations signaling the stunning progress of LGBTQ rights.

First, as many of you know, yesterday was the day when civil unions became legal in Colorado. The event featured parties of all sorts around the state, with some—like Boulder’s—beginning Monday evening, well before the magical midnight moment and extending on into the bleary-eyed hours of May 1. Although my partner and I didn’t get “unionized” (or, as someone said, “civilized”), we went anyway to witness this momentous beginning, as did scores of other folks who weren’t entering into unions. Out Boulder, who coordinated the party, managed to turn a gaggle of people gathered into a functionally bland room into a joyful community festival—lots of cake decorated with rainbow flags, lots of munchies, lots of excited chatter, lots of roses, lots of dancing to tunes set up by a local DJ. And lots of people. Couples, of course, and also whole families, groups of friends, whole “wedding” parties who came to celebrate this moment in the lives of folks they love. All in this big, beige room in the county clerk’s office building.

I didn’t get to actually see anyone go through the interview and sign the document registering their relationship as “real” before the law. But a friend who did said it gave her goose bumps. I believe it. When same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts, where we were living at the time, I blogged from the courthouse in Northampton and had the same experience. The officials performing these administrative formalities were anything but perfunctory as they welcomed each couple. In fact, they were so happy, so gentle and respectful toward the couples who came in that it brought tears to my eyes. That moment is hard to describe, the moment when you get to be present as relationships that have been largely invisible and totally discounted, sometimes for decades, are finally acknowledged as authentic in the eyes of the state.

After welcoming May 1 at this midnight gala, I then spent a piece of the afternoon at a middle school assembly—which, perhaps surprisingly (it was middle school, after all), continued the same theme. Here’s the story: A few years ago, the librarian at Manhattan Middle School decided she needed to be more active as an ally to LGBT folks—especially LGBTQ kids. So she devised some strategies to get LGBT-themed books to kids without their needing to check them out (and thereby reveal what might be seen as forbidden curiosity). Gradually, she also began to do other things—speaking gigs, working with Boulder Valley Safe Schools Coalition, and founding an allies club. That club, which started as a small group of kids, now has over 100 members.

For the past two years, the club has organized a diversity assembly focusing on LGBT issues. This year, the theme was taken from Gandhi: “Be the change.” The assembly included brief, one-sentence testimonials from several club members (“I’m an ally because …”), music from two local LGBTQ-affiliated choruses, and a rap performance by the allies club based on a video about Gandhi. The event wrapped up with lots of incredible food and chat time with the performers, some of the kids, some school personnel, and audience members, who included the superintendent of the Boulder Valley School District, several school board members and staff, and assorted community activists.

Afterward, driving home, I was thinking about the day and the pace of change it represented. I grew up before Stonewall—which is to say, before the contemporary LGBTQ-rights movement was even launched. I hid out for decades out of fear, some of it realistic and some goblin-generated. Then things began to change—slowly, it seemed, frustratingly slowly. Yet now, here I am, living in a world where same-sex couples are granted the legal rights and responsibilities of marriage and where middle school kids (that’s middle school kids!) take visible, active, and vociferous stands on behalf of LGBTQ rights. And they do it with the active support of allies who include librarians, teachers, and school superintendents. All within my adult lifetime. Not, it turns out, so slow at all. And I get to witness all of this, all on one lovely day in May.

Out Boulder’s ED said it so well in her comments at the civil unions celebration: There’s still a long way to go, a lot of work to be done. Much more than just full marriage rights. There’s work to be done on trans* issues, work on divisions within our own community, work on the lingering (and recently increasing) incidence of HIV/AIDS, work on poverty and poor health care, on bullying, on immigration rights and parenting rights, on lingering discrimination in employment and housing, on the high rates of smoking and alcohol abuse in our communities. There’s plenty left to do. But this May Day, it was time to dance with a DJ, rap with Gandhi, and eat cake with rainbow icing.

As I write this, I find myself regretting that I don’t have any pictures of these great events to share with you. So to make up for it, let me share some photos of yesterday’s other big event: our May Day snowstorm! 

Here's the view outside my bedroom window this morning

        

         

followed by scenes in my yard and bunny prints outside the coffee shop window .

      

         

                              

Snow in April—even tons of snow—was a bit unusual, but still tolerable. But May? Boulder got a foot of snow on Wednesday, obliterating the former 6-inch record for the date.

I figure it was Nature’s way of celebrating May Day and all the glorious joy it held.

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 ...

George and Diego: an allegory

Recently, I wrote about the death of a tortoise named Lonesome George. George was over 100 years old and was the very last of his species, one of several threatened tortoise species on the Galapagos Islands. George represented a cautionary tale: humans are capable of pushing species to the brink of extinction—and they are capable of recognizing that they have to change their ways if species are to survive.

In George’s case, people realized this too late. George spent his last years at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos, where folks tried to encourage him to breed so that his genes could be saved. But to no avail. George died without leaving any offspring. With him died the species of tortoise native to Pinta Island.

But at the same research facility, another story—one with a very different outcome—is playing out. A relative of George, a tortoise from Española Island named Diego, also represents a species that was close to extinction (Chelonoidis hoodensis, for those who are curious). But in this case, Diego and his mates have produced a multitude of offspring.

Diego chows down

Diego, who is also over 100 years old, had originally been shipped to a zoo in the US, but was returned to the Galapagos in 1975 as part of an effort to protect and re-establish the Galapagos’ unique organisms. There, he and the few other remaining members of his particular species were given space of their own and an opportunity to reproduce. Which they did, big time. In all, somewhere close to 1800 offspring of this group have been born at the research station and returned to Española. The species is now well established as a wild population on Española.

Reading about Diego, I realized that in my preoccupation with George’s sad story, I hadn’t even considered that there are also success stories (and there are many) in the Galapagos. It’s not that I had dismissed Diego—I hadn’t even wondered if there was a Diego. Of course, George’s story has a certain dramatic appeal. Tragic stories help programs like the research station gather media attention, funding, and public interest. Remember it was George, hero of the sad story, who was selected to be the logo for the research center, not Diego.

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, this sounded very familiar … paying attention to horror stories, honoring tragic figures, and missing success stories. Then I got what it was.

Several years ago, my partner and I did a research project with LGBT youth in Salt Lake City. Among the many things we learned from that project was a lesson reminiscent of George and Diego. It has to do with a similar preoccupation with horror and tragedy—only this time, in the lives of some LGBT youth—and a parallel disregard for the positive, happy, empowered lives that many LGBT youths lead.

The familiarity itching in the back of my mind as I thought about Diego was this tunnel vision thing: Just as I focused my attention on George and never considered Diego, we focus our collective attention on the misery of LGBT youth and never consider the possibilities for joy in LGBT life.

Please note: I am not saying that the risk and the mistreatment don’t exist or should be ignored. They, like George’s really unfortunate experience, must of course command our attention and our change efforts. But at the same time, how unfortunate it is that we grant so little attention to the Diegos in the Galapagos story—and to the wonderfully resilient LGBT people, adults and youth alike, who make happy, satisfied, productive … and even ordinary lives for themselves.

Think about it: If we only heard George’s story, we would be left believing that all Galapagos tortoises are doomed. It is only by knowing about—and celebrating—Diego’s story that we get a full picture of the future of these historic creatures. They are the victims of mistreatment and they are amazingly successful in their persistent survival. We need to keep that in mind about LGBT folks—especially youth—too. We/they are at risk for mistreatment and they are inspiringly resilient, courageous, and empowered … and flawed, frightened, ordinary, just like other folks are.

Think about what our tunnel vision, our preoccupation with misery can say to LGBT youths about their lives, their hopes for the future. If queer youths only hear one side of this story, their view of the possibilities for their lives can only be impoverished.

I think we’ll do queer youth a valuable service if we teach them about Diego’s story so that they don’t think George’s story is the only future they can expect. And I mean that figuratively as well as literally. This is an allegory, after all.