Thus is the defining characteristic of gay millennials: we straddle the pre-Glee and post-Glee worlds. We went to high school when faggot wasn’t even considered an F-word, when being a lesbian meant boys just didn’t want you, when being nonbinary wasn’t even a remote option. We grew up without queer characters in our cartoons or Nickelodeon or Disney or TGIF sitcoms. We were raised in homophobia, came of age as the world changed around us, and are raising children in an age where it’s never been easier to be same-sex parents. We’re both lucky and jealous. As the state of gay evolved culturally and politically, we were old enough to see it and process it and not take it for granted–old enough to know what the world was like without it. Despite the success of Drag Race, the existence of lesbian Christmas rom-coms, and openly transgender Oscar nominees, we haven’t moved on from the trauma of growing up in a culture that hates us. We don’t move on from trauma, really. We can’t really leave it in the past. It becomes a part of us, and we move forward with it.
For LGBTQ+ milennials, our pride is couched in painful memories of a culture repulsed and frightened by queerness. That makes us skittish. It makes us loud. It makes us fear that all this progress, all this tolerance […] can vanish as quickly as it all appeared.
The 2000s Made Me Gay, Grace Perry
Coming from a reference group where everyone’s first queer movie was either Rocky Horror or Brokeback Mountain, it’s fascinating to talk (in person!) to gay teenagers who grew up with Korra and Stephen Universe and She-Ra.
my main thing is when i see posts like “i’m not sure if i’m a lesbian or trans or nonbinary or whatever and i’m already 16, what the hell” because dear LORD wee one it is FINE, when i was 16, and i am Not That Old and raised in a pretty accepting environment, i was really only super aware of one of those concepts as an actual option, with transness being a vague sort of thing on the horizon of my knowledge but not really in the context of transmasculinity, and the idea that you could just be neither being right out. and i considered gayness to be not really an option because at that point in my life the only real connection i had felt with that community was that half the kids in my school called me a dyke. one of my friends was trans, and their main expression of that was school-mandated spirit week crossdressing days because they couldn’t have dreamed of getting away with it any other time. to see kids feel like they’re late bloomers because they haven’t settled on agender or genderfluid before they’re out of high school- it’s positive, but a massive culture shock
