There was a gay community, which always surprises people who have strange ideas about the Midwest and who actually lives in the “flyover” states. My earliest queer years were spent in the Cornhusker State. Eventually, I would find my way to Audre Lorde. I was obsessed with Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts and the pulp fiction of Ann Bannon.
As an avid reader, I initially tried to piece together my identity, a clearer sense of how to be, from books. I didn’t really have anyone I could turn to. I was not very worldly when it came to women. My family was not thrilled with the news that I was a lesbian but they never turned their back on me, either so all thing considered, I was one of the lucky ones. And that may be a macabre way of thinking about it, but their deaths were and remain a reminder of the precarity of being part of the LGBTQ community in certain circumstances. This was around the time of Brandon Teena’s murder but before Matthew Shepard’s murder. It was the summer of 1993 and while cultural attitudes toward the gay community were changing, it was a slow shift, especially for a Haitian American girl from Omaha, Nebraska.
I came out when I was nineteen years old. And we also often have to parent ourselves simply to figure out how to be who we really are in a world that wants to deny us our right to live and love freely.
We are a community of people who often have to parent ourselves when we’re most scared, or fragile, or needful. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain.” I was reminded that the queer community and the trans community especially, are communities without many elders. In Torrey Peter’s debut novel Detransition, Baby, Ames says, transfolk are a “lost generation.