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The Blessings of Queer Friends
What the rainbow holds for this old man
Of all that gives me hope in this benighted world, few stars outshine the generations poised to take the burden of replacing mine. As an aging hippie, I rejoice to see the pendulum swing back toward the idealism of my youth and to watch impatient teens and twenty-somethings roll their eyes at clueless boomers.
Even when I’m one of those clueless boomers. Especially when I’m one of them. Because I’m sick and tired of being one of them.
And of all the ways my many young friends — both online and IRL — educate me every day, the sweetest may be how they’re teaching me how much I had missed regarding human sexuality and gender. The rainbow is an apt analogy for how much I was blind to in my black-and-white, binary understanding.
There’s color everywhere
My cis-het sensibilities still filter my perceptions. It can’t be helped, any more than I can completely root out all the racial prejudice that fouled the air I breathed growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But the more my world was swelled by non-White friends, the easier it got to challenge those assumptions and discover nuanced personalities instead of categories. So even though the bias never goes away entirely, most of us today know we’d be infinitely poorer…
