Episode 7

About

Experience the multi-generational perspectives of four queer male-bodied individuals from different “Eras” of life. Each guest shares their journey through coming out and navigating shame as they explore the shifting societal attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community over the last 50 years. This powerful narrative highlights changes in culture, challenges, triumphs, and the ongoing fight for rights and recognition.

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*Please note that this episode contains sensitive behavioral health topics such as suicide and substance use. If you are experiencing a behavioral health crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling 988 or visiting www.988lifeline.org.

**This podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered health advice. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice.

Transcript

Chris:
The Inspired Insights podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered health advice. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice.

Soren:
Please note that this podcast may contain discussions on sensitive topics such as mental illness, suicide, and substance use. If you are experiencing a behavior health crisis or need support, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling 988 or visiting www.988lifeline.org Welcome to the Inspired Insights podcast.

Chris:
I’m Chris McLaughlin.

Soren:
I’m Soren Peterson.

Chris:
We are not in the studio right now. Something a little different and new for us.

Soren:
At Chris’s lovely abode.

Chris:
And we’ve got some guests, so I want to take a few minutes and introduce our guests and then we’re going to get started with some conversations. So to my right, I have Paul Berube. Welcome, Paul.

Paul:
Thank you.

Chris:
Tell us about Paul.

Paul:
Well, I work in finance. I think that’s my day job most of the time. But that other than doing that and spending time trying to figure out how to live my best life in every aspect of that, that’s pretty much what I do most of my day is finding the joy in the moments in between.

Chris:
Oh, Soren and I love conversations about joy. I love it

Paul:
And full of it.

Chris:
We love it. And to my left, my friend and mentor, Frank Brooks.

Frank:
And thank you so much for having me here. Thanks for being here. It’s wonderful to be here.

I am a social worker and I’m retired from paid work right now, but I continue on with volunteer, community volunteer activities. And right now, my project is I just joined the board of the Maine Council on Aging.

Chris:
Awesome.

Frank:
And so that’s my major project this year in retirement. So-called retirement. Yeah.

Chris:
You’re not retiring very well. No. I worry about that for myself, too, to be quite honest.

It’s you. Frank, you are a superstar in the social work world and here in the state of Maine. And I’m so thankful that you are spending your morning with us today.

Frank:
Well, thank you. And I don’t know about superstar, but I feel so grateful to have found social work as a profession way back in my undergraduate program. And it’s been an incredible experience, life experience.

Chris:
Well, you are a rock star. I can tell you that.

So for today’s episode, Soren and I had thought it would be really interesting to bring different perspectives, different voices and different ways of looking at things into the conversation. And we started thinking about this idea of generations. And one of the themes of the Inspired Insights podcast is bridging generations to bring conversation out to kind of model the importance of listening and honoring youth voice and recognizing there are some older lived experiences that also are still really relevant.

And what Soren and I have also found and talked about is that in the queer community, there’s such a stigma around age. And there’s such a stigma around youth and beauty and body. And at what age do we as queer individuals of older ages kind of be expected to wander off into the sunset and make room for new generations?

And Soren and I both believe that there is so much value in bringing all voices together and learning from the different generations that as a young person, there’s so much I learned from Soren every single time we sit down and chat. And so just being open and receptive to those different voices and those different perspectives. So we thought it’d be really cool to bring four different generations together and just chat and see what comes from the conversation.

Soren:
Yeah, I totally agree. I think there’s so much value that we can yield from increasing our demographic size as far as perspective. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone’s perspective and then gone away from it with nothing.

And I’m super excited for the opportunity to have some older and younger gentlemen on the podcast. So as y’all may know, we do something called Inspired Insights for the week, which is just basically a tidbit of knowledge, something that we learned, maybe a little bit of wisdom to start off the podcast. Of late, I’ve been reading a lot on late antiquity.

Chris:
And this does not surprise me at all.

Soren:
I’ve yielded an insight that I think is super important and still holds true today. And that is how easily instability translates to hate, especially in late antiquity. There was a lot of instability and especially with the Christian persecutions of Decius during the crisis of the third century.

Diocletian’s Christian persecutions, Nero’s Christian persecutions after the Great Fire in 64. In all of these examples, we see a tenuous time resulting directly in the people in power suppressing and abusing minorities in order to create a fall man, a scapegoat. For the less than ideal geopolitical conditions that were happening in the Mediterranean during that time.

Chris:
Just some light reading on your school break.

Soren:
Right before bed. Well, I was just reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But we see that today, the global economy is a little weaker than it has been in the past.

We’re seeing more political instability and less trust in our systems in the United States. And as a result, that instability is directly translating into fear, which we know how easily fear converts to hate. And I think it’s something very pertinent to keep in mind.

How the situations around us can affect the population’s mindset, thusly resulting in more hateful policy. Yeah.

Chris:
And you and I have talked in the past about how fear is a tactic that folks sometimes use to create fear. It’s a very deliberate act as well. Light reading from Soren Peterson.

Bright. Inspired insight of the week.

Frank:
Well, it’s deepened. I have a deepened insight that across the lifespan, all groups are affected by ageism. Yeah.

And that it’s just not older people who are affected by ageism, but younger folks, too, who are often discounted. And what perspectives are minimized or not paid attention to. So, of course, I’ve been working on at the MCOA, Maine Council on Aging, is to eliminate ageism by 2032.

So part of my inspired inspiration now will be to make sure that we’re talking about ageism across the generations.

Chris:
Right. Not just one particular generation, but that exists everywhere.

Frank:
Yes. And I’m so grateful for this conversation because it’s intergenerational.

Chris:
Yeah.

Paul:
Yeah.

Frank:
Yeah. Paul, inspired insight.

Paul:
I actually was having this conversation this week.

I had, I went on a walk with my best friend and we were just chatting through the day and what had happened. And I, somebody had made a decision and that we were talking about it and I could not wrap my head around how they got to where they were going. And we were just volleyballing that back and forth with each other.

And finally, I said to him, I think people can make whatever decision they want. What they’re not free of is the consequence of that choice. And that is kind of stuck with me all week.

And I think that we do that every day, whether it’s a good decision that we make and the consequence helps us or helps other people, or we choose to bring ourselves or other people down and the ripple effect of whatever that’s going to be. I guess that’s really brought insight to me this week.

Chris:
Yeah.

Awesome. Awesome. My inspired insight, I think maybe has a little bit of play actually on maybe all of yours.

But I was thinking about stuff going on in the world around us and thinking about politics and elections. And I was thinking about how easily folks take something from our past or even maybe a mistake that we made and how it’s twisted and used to create a completely different narrative, which then might force us to play all defense. And so I’ve been thinking about what is my responsibility or ownership of somebody’s misperceptions about me?

Am I responsible that somebody has taken a different approach of how they view me, a misperception about me? Is that my responsibility? And I feel this weight come off my shoulders when I realize, no, that’s not my responsibility.

That’s not my job. If I have done, I think to your point, Paul, if I have done something deliberately to hurt somebody or to do something malicious, then yeah, there are consequences that are probably going to ripple back towards me. But if somebody is waiting for me to screw up so they can use that against me, that’s not on me.

And that says more about that person than it does me. So a little bit of fear, hate, stigma, stereotype, and consequence in action and behavior.

Paul:
I do think that a lot of people, to speak to that, they hear different things about you without actually knowing you. And a lot of times the story they’ve made up about you is not actually who you are. And it’s not your responsibility to go back and fix that.

Whatever somebody else thinks, says, or does about you is their business. It has nothing to do with you.

Chris:

Yeah

Soren and I talk a lot about how criticism impacts us. And Soren has some really incredible views on what we can learn from hate and what we can take from somebody spewing terrible things. Whereas my style is a little bit like, la, la, la, la, la, I’m not going to care what I tune it out.

Soren:
Which I think is likely far more productive emotionally, depending on whether or not you can really separate yourself from the emotional impact of criticism and analyze and dissect it more effectively. But I would say that that’s a fairly advanced technique.

Chris:
It’s hard.

Soren:
Yeah, it’s difficult. But actually, I have a question about ageism in the queer community. Do you feel like, for everybody around here, because I’m sort of in the vibrant period of my life, the pinnacle, as it were.

But do you feel like you’ve sort of been ostracized by the queer community as you grow older? Or your experience of it has just transitioned and you’ve found a older queer culture? Great question.

Do you think you’ve been ejected or is it more just a transition in the way that you interact with other queer folks?

Frank:
That’s a great question. For me, I’ve been very fortunate because I’ve been interested in the whole field of anti-ageism for a long time. And I had social work mentors in my undergraduate and graduate work that were gerontological social workers.

They study aging. And so I was in on that from early on. And not all social workers get that in their training.

It’s much better now. So I was fortunate. So I started to scope out what was going on in the queer community with regard to ageism.

And was able to figure out how was I going to take care of myself and parts of my community that I care about. And provide social opportunities, intergenerational opportunities as much as possible. That’s really challenging because we’ve been also separated by age.

And so for me the answer is to counter the ageism that’s there. I wouldn’t think of going to a gay bar or probably a youth oriented queer event unless I knew there would be a lot of age diversity. Because I have felt invisible in some ways.

But I also have to say that for me in the kind of white cisgender gay male scene. Where that sexual commoditization and all of those things can be so prevalent in the bar scene. And the party scene which I’m not really that up on anymore.

That was hard to take oneself out of because it was my people in a certain way. So to break away from that and forge ahead with a different kind of social life and social structure was hard. Because I wanted to belong.

After I came out in the late 70s I wanted to belong and I thought I had found my way. But there were a lot of things there in that kind of gay male subculture that were not helpful. And so I stay connected through organizations that support older queer people.

And I do everything I can to try to support those groups. But I feel like I’m fortunate. So part of my work is to advertise that and get people more involved.

Because people are very isolated and living by themselves and not plugged into those groups.

Chris:
Yeah, that idea of invisibility resonates with me a lot. I feel like as somebody approaching my 50s, I feel like in gay culture I’m an old guy now. Even though I feel like from a lifestyle perspective we still like to do stuff and go out there.

But I don’t necessarily know that I feel like I fit in with the younger crowd as much as I at one point thought I did. That idea of invisibility is really one that I’ve experienced as well.

Soren:
Do you still desire to fit in with the younger crowd? Is that something that you aspire to?

Chris:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. Yeah, you know, Sorin knows this about, well, probably the three of you know about me. I identify as a very proud Swifty.

And so I think about the Taylor Swift stuff. So when my husband and I went to see the Heiress tour last summer in person, we were some of the older folks in that crowd. When we went to the movie theater to see the movie, we were absolutely some of the oldest people in that theater.

So I definitely associate with things that probably have a younger crowd. And there’s also an older Swifty community out there as well that I feel like I can have a foot in both places. But Sorin, for your question, like Frank said, I don’t have any interest in hanging out at any bar, let alone a gay bar.

I don’t have any interest in being part of that scene. Because to your point, Frank, when I was doing those things, there are elements of that scene that aren’t helpful or aren’t healthy. And I see myself as one who needs to keep myself away from that stuff.

I don’t know that that is something I care to do now. What about you, Paul?

Paul:
I’m right in between the two of these. What I know for sure is that everybody wants to feel seen, heard, and that they matter. I’m moving towards 40, and I’m at the point where I can start to feel the shift between young 20 and what that looks like in a bar and in a club and on a beach, to what it looks like as you approach 40 and as you start to actually fade back into the background.

So I spend my time here, which is very rural, but then I also have a camp right in the center of Agunquit, which is like the gay mecca. And the thing about Agunquit is there is such an age variety there. So around me I have 12 neighbors that all of us are gay.

We’re all in a big circle. And some of them are retiring and buying houses in Agunquit and Palm Springs. And that is because they’re looking for a sense of community and a sense of connection.

I still like to go out. I still like to go to the bar. I don’t like how it makes me feel sometimes when I’m there.

But I’m scared to feel that invisibility because it changes the identity of who you are inside. And unless you’re grounded to who you are by the time you get there, you can take a horrible path.

Chris:
Yeah. And I love your point around, as humans, we all have a need to feel seen and feel a sense of community, feel a sense of belonging. So what about you, Sorin, as you’re hearing the three of us kind of talk about the decades ahead?

Soren:
Well, OK. I would say I’m still in my early youth. I don’t think I’ve reached the, well, I know I haven’t reached the, like, I would say heart of queer culture, which is to some extent like the early 20s bar scene and such.

I’m still in my youth, and I would say my social group is fairly isolated relative to perhaps some of the other social situations that queer men find themselves in the early years of their life. But I wouldn’t say that I feel like ostracized, but I am not really a part of a large overarching queer community. And that’s simply because there’s just not as many queer youth in the area.

Like, I go to a relatively small school in a quite rural area, and I’m, as far as I’m aware, the only, like, fully gay senior. It’s not that I’m necessarily desirous of speeding up my high school career and joining a larger queer community, but I think that it will be really fun and exciting because I’ve never had the opportunity to interact with something of that scale.

Chris:
And something you and I have talked about off and on over the last season was the differences of when I was in school and deeply closeted and your current experience. And there are, that term queer encompasses a whole lot of identities. And so you have some friends at school who identify under that umbrella term of queer.

There was not one, not one out person, regardless of whether you’re talking sexual orientation or gender identity, not one out person, publicly out person for my entire three years of middle school, four years of high school. So you’ve heard me say to you, like, I am just so there’s a sense of awe and wonder and envy when I think about your experience. And so I’m sitting here, though, Inspired Insight light bulb over my head to hear you say, despite having this umbrella community of other youth, other high school students that might identify as queer, you’re the only male bodied out gay person.

Soren:
In my grade, as far as I’m aware of.

Chris:
So that’s like, because we use that term queer, I think so loosely now, which I think for maybe three of the four of us at this fire. It used to be a fire pit. Fire table chat.

This language, right? This idea of how communities change and language changes. And it becomes a chicken and egg thing for me, too.

As the community, as the language changes, does the community then follow suit?

Soren:
Yeah, I think as we’ve developed more nomenclature to describe different facets of queerness, I think there’s certainly been more cultural speciation among queer communities in high school, in my high school. And I think because there’s less persecution and criticism, it has resulted in less of a tight knit in group of queer people because we don’t have to sit there and band together and defend ourselves anymore. Although there is still a fair amount of bullying.

It’s no longer like a life or death thing where we feel that it’s necessary to really be in a tight packed group and support each other. So it’s less of like a tight knit queer community at my school. And instead, just there’s a number of queer individuals that go to my high school.

Paul:
What’s interesting about that as I was listening to you talk, I’ve been out of high school for a minute, like a minute. I just had my 20th high school reunion, which I didn’t go to. I thought, why would you?

But I was out in high school, but as you were talking, I was thinking about this. I don’t really have a coming out story. I’ve never actually come out.

My mother is gay and my father is gay. So my existence was just my existence. So in high school, there were, I could probably count on one hand, the amount of queer people that existed either on whatever side of that spectrum they were on.

But I kind of feel the same way where at the time queer was a bad word and it was used to hurt you, not to define who you are. But it’s amazing to see how in high school, you thought about safety and walking home alone and changing in the locker room and what that looked like to just now watching a generation that can just live authentically who they are without the consequence of that.

Chris:
It’s wonderful.

What about you, Frank?

Did you come out in school?

Frank:
No, no, no, no. Fag, queer, all those pejoratives. All I wanted to do was stay away from that and keep away from that and not be labeled that.

Even though I was gay, I was a gay boy and everybody knew it. I was the last one to know when I came out in 78. But high school, junior high and high school were nightmarish.

And I smoked a lot of pot, drank a lot of beer, did everything to escape that and try to conform and fit in at a terrible price. And so when I came out in 78, I was liberated. And it was a good time in the sense that there was a nascent queer civil rights movement and things were happening.

But the same year that I came out, Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated in San Francisco. So there was all this violence right there, too. And that went on.

And then in the early 80s, of course, HIV AIDS, which affected all of us.

Paul:
What was that like, though? It was another nightmare.

Frank:
It was horrifying.

Paul:
Because I can imagine that that would place a spotlight on you, whether or not, you know, you had it or whatever. But I just I was horrible when I was younger, very young because I was born in the middle of the 80s. But my mother’s partner at the time had a brother who was living with us and he had AIDS and I didn’t understand what it was at the time.

But I’m fortunate in the fact in my generation that when I was growing up, it was not as it wasn’t something that you dealt with like you would if you had come up in the 80s and 90s.

Frank:
And Portland, I came out in Portland and Portland was not an epicenter of the epidemic, but it was the epicenter in Maine. And so I lost many friends to HIV, AIDS, and people who I knew. The only good thing that came out of that was activism, and organizing, and filling all the gaps that were there, because the government and state and even local officials would do nothing.

So we had to do it. And also at the same time, the Maine Lesbian Gay Political Alliance was formed in 84-85 after the murder of Charlie Howard here in Bangor. And so the movement started coalescing in Maine, and that was exciting and good and was a counterweight to the nightmare of HIV, AIDS.

The other thing I wanted to say was, for most of us, I think the emotional response to all of this persecution and mistreatment was shame. And so how do you deal with shame? I mean, as human beings, shame is one of the most difficult emotions to deal with.

And so people will do a lot to avoid shame. And there are lots of great sociological research studies done on the lengths that people will go to reduce shame, like passing and covering and trying to reduce the effects of the stigmatized identity that is so shameful. And I was thinking of gay male culture, not all queer culture, but, you know, not associating with men who behaved in feminine identifying ways, you know, and stratifying that way, all of those things.

I think that’s changed. I really do. I’ve seen progress, because I think shame has been reduced about being queer, somewhat.

Chris:
Actually, the shame from a judgment from others.

Frank:
Yeah, projected onto the individual.

That’s one of the most powerful ways that minorities are separated from the majority culture.

Paul:
You’ve raised such a good point, though, about that. So if you step inside, and my perspective is obviously from a gay man’s perspective. But once you get into the gay community, it’s not like we’re all friends and we’re all hugging each other.

There are so many subsets of the gay community. And then we’re mean to each other in so many ways. Then it’s about how old are you?

What do you look like? What do you drive? How much money do you have?

What do you do for work? Who are you connected to? And all of those things put you in different categories of gay men and what you have access to and who you have access to, what parties you’re invited to, who your friends are.

So I think that for a long time, it was a fight out and it was a fight in.

Soren:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris:
I also, in my social work world, in clinical work, shame is always in that treatment space. It’s always present. And I do reflect often about, I did not, as Soren has heard me talk about, I did not come out until formally to my family.

Everyone knows now until 99, a year almost to the date after Matt Shepard’s death in Wyoming, had a very similar impact on me that his murder plays very heavily in my coming out story. And at almost 50 years old, though, living the first 25 years of my life, like coming up to my 50th year, half of my life was closeted. And so as confident as I sometimes feel coming into my 50th year, that shame stuff catches me when I least expect it.

And as even producing this podcast and part of what Soren and I often have to do is go back and listen to episodes and relisten to episodes. I have heard both of us say, I hate how I sound. I hate listening to my own voice.

And for me, 95% of that is, I sound gay. 5% of that is, I’m a pretentious knucklehead sometimes. But 95% of that is, am I sounding too gay?

That is like false shame.

Soren:
Actually, I think what’s super interesting now is, yes, we’ve seen a lot of shame reduction in the public space. But obviously, I’m still in high school, and I was recently in middle school. And I think that those are two of the most shame-driven cultures that one can witness in modern America.

I would say likely that and the other. And what I’ve noticed is that, yes, a lot of early high school and middle school, essentially, it’s a social stratification through shame, and it creates social adherence and coherence through shame. But now, as I’m about to enter my senior year and junior year, I noticed a marked shift in the way that the school’s population views themselves and how they interact with the school body.

People don’t care about popularity, at least of what I’ve seen anecdotally, as much as they used to. And there’s less hierarchy to the social setting in high school. And I think that that allows for kids to express themselves far more openly, whereas previously, that was not really an opportunity presented, or at least without backlash.

And even in middle school, and still now, I do feel like a lot of the times I’m like, wow, I’m acting far too gay right now. And a lot of the outfits I’ll wear, I’ll be like, I’m not fitting in with a group. And in a lot of the social situations that I find myself in, I am interacting with a lot of just straight men that are just regular straight men.

And in those situations, I definitely tone down my personality a lot. I dress and act in different ways. And I remember in middle school, I used to, over one of the summers, I was only hanging out with these two other boys.

And I would cry about how I’m not like them at all, because they were two straight, jocular men, and I’m me. And although we’ve made a lot of progress, shame, I feel like, is a lot of very internal experience, and self-driven.

Chris:
And we’ve talked about this concept of how we sometimes dull our own shine in order to not bring attention to fit in. Sometimes we are our own worst critics, or we’re our first bullies. That voice in our head that tells us, knock it off.

Can’t you just walk like a normal teenage boy? Can’t you just dress like a normal teen? Why can’t you throw a football?

Those voices. And I think to your point, Soren, for many of us, especially many of us in the LGBTQ plus community, our formative middle school and high school years continue to shape us in not so great ways decades later. Everything about, like you said, middle school and high school can be rooted in shame.

And I still, again, at almost 50 years old, I’m walking into a public restroom, walking into a locker room. All of that feeling comes back the minute that door opens and closes. And we have to work at it every single day.

We’re works in progress, right? Another theme of our podcast, we are all works in progress. And as confident as I know the four of us present professionally, that stuff is in the back of our head all the time.

Frank:
And I think for me, very important. I think the most important thing for me is to make sure that I realize that that shame was projected onto me. That none of the things that come up as triggers or those indicators of internal shame, like being hesitant to do something because of that, like you say, go into a locker room or be with straight identified men comfortably.

That was, it was projected onto me from a very young age. As soon as I became, way before middle school, as soon as I became aware that I was different, no one helped me struggle with that. We were on our own, or at least I was.

Yeah, no, 100%. And other gay boys. And the only way we could identify, because I connected with several gay boys in schools, but we didn’t talk about it.

We did certain things together, but not others. I was in a theater group with one, but with my straight friends, I didn’t talk about that. Yeah, that’s right.

And so we were trying to manage, I was trying to manage all of this shamed identity all on my own. It’s really amazing. I mean, that brings a lot of resilience into it too, to survive, to survive something like that.

And the other thing I want to say about the shame is that the, being connected to the community that I choose is shame reducing, you know, and just where I can be myself. And I, we have to create that ourselves. You know, we really do.

So, but we’re on our own, and that’s not fair.

Chris:
Right, it’s not fair. Adam, you talked about this too, sorry, Frank, we’ve talked about this too, about how the humans we are today, for many of us, our scars, whether physical or emotional, have made us who we are. And as the four of us sitting around the fire table chatting, and knowing, you know, I think I have the privilege of knowing each of you individually better than you all know each other collectively, your skills, your reputations, your accomplishments, your decency as humans is perhaps also due in part to the bullshit that we all went through.

That because of that bullshit, that we are the incredible humans that we all are today.

Frank:
Well, that’s why I found my home in social work. 100%. The morals and values and principles of social work practice, and also working with folks who have been marginalized.

Chris:
Yeah, that’s right.

And helping them find their voice.

Frank:
I have never been a bully, and I feel fortunate because not everybody who’s been bullied has that path. Right.

Because I think what you were describing, Paul, about how people get categorized and then get judged and bullied because of those differences, that sometimes people who were bullied do bully. And I’m grateful for that. It doesn’t mean I can’t be judgmental, but it comes with the territory it’s at.

And I’m grateful for that gift, wherever it came from.

Soren:
I actually wanted to talk a little bit more about the in-group pressure that the queer community presents, and some of the difficulties of being immersed in gay culture, right? And the social pressure that that puts on you, and judgment from other queer people. Because I think that we see a lot of minorities, instead of pushing outward, they push inward and put more pressure on their own in-group to succeed and fit in.

That’s right. Or better model what they think that the people within the in-group should be. So I haven’t had a lot of that stress simply as a result of not interacting with a ton of other queer youth.

But I have had friends who, especially older friends, interacting with more college queer culture. There’s a lot of pressure to fit into a certain body type, and a lot of judgment around appearance, sexual promiscuity, and a number of things such as that. So I was curious to hear you guys’ experience on if you’ve experienced pressure from other queer members of the community.

And what difficulties you face around that. And I think that that was a really good point, Paul. I really, I really liked that.

Chris:
So I’ll answer that because I can answer that really quickly. I think part of my journey, and part of that shame that was put on me, that I still, to this day, work to push back or put into a different place. I didn’t, even when I, certainly not in school days, but even when I publicly came out in the late 90s, I chose to not associate a whole lot with other members of the LGBTQ plus community.

I still rejected that. And some of that rejection was that pressure. I didn’t even feel like I always fit there either.

And so I have just been aware of the ageism within our community, of some of the stereotypes, some of the stratification that you’re talking about. Was I this? Was I that?

And all of these subcultures within gay male culture. And never felt like I fit in there either. So it’s probably because of some of that pressure, whether external or internal, I pushed that community away.

And it wasn’t until I got into my thirties that I started embracing my LGBTQ plus friends. That’s where it starts to get good. Yeah, it did.

That started to get really good in my thirties. And I met my husband in my thirties and developed our life together in my thirties. And so, yeah, I think that was where my shine really started to burst through.

Frank:
And you know, there are lots of different coming out models, you know, stage models and all of that stuff. But part of one that I find interesting is that the models I find interesting are that process that you’re describing, that you come to terms with your own sexual identity or sexual orientation, gender identity, and then you make forays outside yourself into the communities. And then at the end you embrace it.

And what a process that is. But I was thinking about how at every stage we have to reduce that shame and move forward. And it’s really tough, again, on your own.

On your own. And then you get the community support later when you’ve plugged in, you know, and people will affirm you. Like this conversation right today is very affirming and interesting.

And I know I’ll bring a lot from it. But until that happens, you know, we’re on our own. I keep going back to that.

And which is really, when you think about the systems that we operate in, it’s a very effective technique to keep people isolated by themselves, not organized, and feeling not just badly about oneself, but also badly about others who are like you. That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.

It’s a very effective strategy. And I was trying to think about hierarchies, too, you know. And oh, you know, we as human beings, we have to fight against not putting things into hierarchies.

But we also live in a capitalist society that is very stratified by income. Look at how all the different ways income stratifies us. 100%.

Yeah. We’re all headed to higher education and advanced degrees and all of those things. Um, that’s all good.

And it’s all wonderful for our development, but it also stratifies us.

Soren:
Something that I’d like to loop back to is advocacy. When you were talking about sort of the flashpoints in the early queer liberation movement that resulted in organization and members of the community coming together, it was all very poignant, negative events that resulted directly in change. How can we make it so the movement is not reactive, but instead continuous?

Frank:
I think that’s a great point. But I want to point out that there are a lot of very proactive things that are happening because of that foundation that was placed because of that reactivity. We’ll always have to be reactive, I think, after the fact, because of acts of violence.

Yeah, as long as there’s- What’s going on with the anti-trans legislation across the country. It’s absurd.

Soren:
I understand the utility of attacking such a small and already marginalized group. But I would say the trans community is small enough that it has functionally no major bearing on anything.

Chris:
It’s all money.

Soren:
Literally just-

Frank:
We were lesbian, gay, bi, queer folks were attacked in the exact same way. Yeah.

Chris:
30, 40 years- If I just alluded to the next group of people- Well, you saw this across your career, right?

Frank:
Yeah.

Chris:
In the 80s, it was AIDS and the stigma around promiscuous gay men. In the 90s, it was leading into some of the marriage stuff. Then all through the 2000s, you were on the front lines here in the state of Maine around marriage equality.

Now, the big money donors, the talking points against trans youth, and whether it’s sports, use of restrooms, healthcare, that conversation drives big dollar donors- To that party who chooses to use those talking points.

Frank:
And the trans community was vulnerable. Yep. That has an interesting history, the whole LGBT addition of transgender to LGB politics.

And they were vulnerable, we weren’t ready for that, right? And they are paying the price for that. 100%.

But the other thing, one quick thing I want to say is that, talk about invisibility, where are women and lesbians and people of color in this conversation? Those folks are all marginalized and stratified within our communities too. Right.

But you can always follow the money, but trans folks were much more vulnerable, especially trans youth.

Chris:
Yeah, easy target.

Frank:
Yes, because you say they’re a smaller minority than folks who are identified in other ways, that’s for sure.

But look at trans youth, their parents had to try to come in, some of them supportive, some of them not supportive, to try to advocate for their children to get medical care. That’s where this anti-trans movement started, was with healthcare and medical care.

Paul:
You know, I think I talked to you about this one day too, but what is, to think about the infighting between all the different groups internally, there is a segment of the LGB community that wants the T removed. Yeah. Yeah.

And that is shocking to me, if you come for one, you come for all, but that is just another subset of what I was talking about, where once you get into the community, it goes by body type, it goes by activity, it goes by what you do and how you do it. And I think that the shame comes in, not only externally there from people projecting it to us, but then us projecting it to each other on the inside out. And I think that it just rolls.

And then what I thought was interesting about shame, I read a lot of Brene Brown. I try to stay in the arena, not always the easiest thing to do. But what is interesting about the shame is, you know, I talked about earlier, one of the things that I worried about when I was in high school is going into the locker room and changing.

And then I was at the gym and I walked into the locker room and it just like hits you like a wave, but you don’t see it coming. And then you have to like process back through something that you didn’t think about for a decade. That’s right.

Soren:
I don’t really go in the locker room.

Frank:
We were forced into it. I was forced into it. I don’t know about you two, but we didn’t have any choice.

And you were forced through this agony of having to try to be part of something that you wanted nothing to do with.

Chris:
It was horrible. It was horrible.

Frank:
Yeah. And, and there was nothing wrong with us.

Chris:
Right. Again, that is the punchline for us today. And it kind of was inadvertently thinking about one of the inspired insights I shared that other people’s perception of us is about them, not us.

And there was nothing wrong with us.

Frank:
No. Yeah.

Chris:
No. Friends, I could sit here all day and continue this conversation. And I know we’re at a point where we need to wrap up.

So I want to do maybe some final thoughts, final points. Paul, I’m going to put you on the spot to go first.

Paul:
Right. Okay. I think that the conversation today, I mean, enlightened, obviously, because there’s four generations of people here, but I think the message that I’m going to walk away with and be more cognizant of is that we’re all in it together, regardless of how we try to pull each other down or pull each other apart.

We’re only going to succeed if we all do it together. That’s right.

Chris:
Frank, final point, final thought.

Frank:
I agree with Paul that we’re all in this together. We always have been.

And it’s so wonderful to come together and be part of this because we are. This is doing it together. So I really appreciate that.

And we can’t leave out the political, social, cultural, economic factors that we’ve got to touch on, but where we could do an hour on those.

Chris:
Well, I got you both on speed dial.

Final point, final thought.

Soren:
Yeah, I think to echo these two lovely gentlemen’s point, let’s not throw people off the life raft so it stays afloat. Let’s expand it.

Yeah. I’m so pleased that we had the opportunity to bring you guys on because I think it did diversify our perspectives. And I really enjoyed hearing what you guys had to say.

So I would just like to thank you, too.

Chris:
Yeah. And that’s my final thought. That’s what I’m taking away.

In addition to what you all said is gratitude. This conversation has been inspiring and enlightening. And I just feel so thankful that you both got up super early on a good morning to share your time with Sorin and I.

And who knows, this might be a to be continued. So thank you all. This has been an episode of the Inspired Insights Podcast.

I’ve been Christopher Nolan.

Soren:
I’ve been Sorin Peterson.

Chris:
We’ll see you next time for another episode.

Soren:
Thanks so much. Bye.

Thank you. The Inspired Insights Podcast has been brought to you by Inspired Consulting Group LLC. Edited and produced by Amanda Seidel and Derek Harter.

Marketing support for the Inspired Insights Podcast by Elizabeth Kaden. Music by Derek Harter. Please visit www.inspiredcg.com to learn more. Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.