Orphan Culture

On the lack of elders in queer culture and its implications

Queer people aren't normally born into families of other queer people, so the way that for example the culture of racialised people can pass down intergenerationally, this doesn't happen for queer people. The advice for surviving as queer doesn't pass down to queer kids the way that advice for surviving white supremacy passes from racialised parents to racialised kids or advice for surviving patriarchy passes from mothers to daughters. The way that elders in racialised communities can guide the resolution of conflicts or harmful patterns or older women can advise younger women, we don't have that. We have an orphan culture.

Immediately we will say that this is what queer elders are for, and this is true, but it isn't the same. We aren't raised in families with any kind of consistent framework for what it means to be us, in fact we're often raised by families that try to actively stop us from being ourselves. There will never be as many elders (who are actively engaging responsibly in their roles as community elders) as younger queers and even if there were they can't be in those younger queers' lives in the way that a parent ideally is from birth.

I'm not saying this to undersell the value of found family, or the ways that found family relationships can be robust and long lasting and bigger than interpersonal turbulence the way family is supposed to be. If anything, I want to stress how important the role of queer elders is, because in a lot of smaller queer communities elders just don't exist. A queer elder isn't just a queer person who has been around a while, they're someone who chooses to take responsibility for the younger people around them by sharing the lessons they've learned and providing the benefits of greater life experience to others.

In smaller queer communities, older queers may choose not to act as elders because if they did they would be seen as responsible for everyone. There has to be a critical mass of older queers before all of them feel safe to engage with community as queer elders. I was outlining this to a friend in Seattle, talking about how barren of elder queers most UK queer communities are, and she said "oh yeah I live down the road from an LGBT retirement community. I know a bunch of queers in their 40s and 50s." In more queer friendly areas of the US, communities aren't just bigger: they contain more of our collective gathered knowledge and history.

In some places the orphan culture is more pronounced, and in some places it is partly remedied by the presence of elders. For many queers, we either learn the lessons about the patterns that shape our communities by reading about them in books and online, or we learn about them the hard way - by repeating them.

My dad had a brain tumour that was diagnosed when I was less than a year old. The effects of the tumour and the surgery to remove it completely transformed him as a person. Growing up I got to know about who he had been through stories that people told me. I identified ways that I was similar to him not by seeing him being like me, but from those stories. Seeing social media dissections of transmisogyny, advice columns from queer authors, endless discourses about mental health in queer communities, I feel the same way I felt learning stories about my dad before he was sick.

I think young queer people cling to queer people of note they see in the public sphere in that same way. It isn't an adequate substitute for a parent who can teach you about who you are, but it's often all we have. Even if those publicly visible queers aren't focussed on queer politics, even if they don't give the kind of support that elders provide to communities, even if they have no experience to draw from and no advice to give, they will inevitably be looked up to by a tonne of young queer strangers, because we're all orphans trying to raise ourselves and each other at the same time.

Older queers stepping into the elder role in a limited capacity is one part of the solution to this I think - people who feel wary of engaging with the community too directly but pass on knowledge where they can. I'm so impossibly grateful for older queers in my life who've stepped up to be there for me when I've needed them, even when their advice hasn't saved me from the endless repetitions of the queer community's intricate trauma dance.

I learned a bunch from an older trans woman directly early in my transition. She was consciously taking on that role, and I often think about her teaching me about a huge range of things - the ins and outs of the medical segregation of trans people in the UK, DIY HRT, the disposability of trans women, the nuances of femmeness, how insidiously some recreational drugs can fuck up the lives of trans people specifically, so much about how queer community works and also why so much of that knowledge would be rejected if it was presented in a post or a video, because it's not the kind of stuff that can just go out as a PSA.

I think I've had some of that personally challenged for me reading Kai Cheng Thom's writing. She explains community dynamics very accessibly. Like, trying to say that harm often gets overstated in queer communities is something that lots of people would immediate balk at and reject, but when she explained in I Hope We Choose Love that queer people are used to having their feelings invalidated and ignored and so we lack a language we find meaningful for conflict and hurt feelings and fall back on a language of harm instead, that's fucking huge. Kai Cheng Thom's writing about the queer community is well written and vital.

Good writing is another helpful response, but we have to be cautious of the idolisation that comes with it. It's incredible when people choose to step into that elder role publicly, it's like the sunscreen song says

Be careful whose advice you buy, But be patient with those who supply it.

It is heartening to see organised structure in communities too, because while no org will ever be perfect, structureless queer community can often be a machine that turns drugs and breakups and tonnes of trauma into tonnes more trauma, ruined lives, overdoses and suicides.

For example, harm reduction centres organised by and for queer people both around recreational drug use and DIY HRT are such an exciting thing to see emerge whenever they appear because their existence means so much for the longevity of the community itself.