Somebody at the barbecue, three beers deep into telling everybody how the world works, says there weren’t this many gay and trans people when he was young. He says it like it’s a mystery he’s solved. Like it’s something in the water. Like it’s TikTok or groomers hiding behind library shelves. He looks at the teenagers with their flags and their pronouns and he mutters about trends. Social contagion. Recruitment.
He’s wrong. It’s not a mystery. It’s a massacre he’s pretending didn’t happen.
There aren’t more of us now. There are just more of us alive. The boomer generation of LGBTQ+ people didn’t fail to appear. They were removed. Systematically. Virally. Economically. The only reason the crowd looks young today is because the old ones died in windowless rooms while the government treated their obituaries as bookkeeping errors and their treatment as a commodity.
The first bulletin dropped June 5, 1981. Five men in Los Angeles with a pneumonia nobody recognized. By the time Reagan bothered to say the word AIDS in public, forty-five thousand Americans were already dead. They called it GRID at first. Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. As if the virus checked your bedroom before it ate your lungs. The President’s press secretary laughed about it in the briefing room. The president stayed silent for four years while the bodies stacked up in makeshift wards and families changed the locks on their own sons’ apartments.
But the virus didn’t do it alone. And the government didn’t just watch. They held the door, and the pharmaceutical companies walked through it.
Burroughs Wellcome released AZT in 1987 and charged ten thousand dollars a year for it. Ten thousand dollars in 1987 money. For pills that barely worked. The sick had to choose between bankruptcy and death, and usually they got both. Private insurers dropped coverage the second a diagnosis hit the file. For-profit hospitals turned dying men away because administrators worried about the bottom line. The optics. Their own squeamishness. The treatment was a commodity, and the commodity was priced out of reach for the exact population that needed it. They didn’t just neglect the plague. They monetized the dying. They sold the rope and called it a lifeline. And they cashed the checks while the bodies cooled.
And when the virus wasn’t enough, there were fists.
Charlie Howard was thrown off a bridge in Bangor, Maine in 1984. He was twenty-three. He drowned. His killers were teenagers. They walked.
Matthew Shepard was tied to a fence in Wyoming in 1998 and beaten until his skull caved in. A cyclist found him. Thought he was a scarecrow.
Somebody torched the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans in 1973. Thirty-two people burned. The newspapers treated it as a joke, if they covered it at all. No one was ever charged. The cops didn’t investigate. The hospitals didn’t treat. The families claimed the bodies and threw their clothes in trash bags on the curb.
And the suicides didn’t make the news. The closeted men who married women and drank themselves to sleep for thirty years. The lesbians who entered asylums. The trans women who jumped because the world told them every day they were a mistake that needed correcting. We didn’t count them. We didn’t want the data because the data would mean admitting we drove them to it. There are no plaques for the quiet deaths in suburban garages. The obituaries called them accidents. The truth was buried with the bodies because the truth was queer, and queer was worse than dead.
So when you look at the Pride parade and say there weren’t this many of us back then, you’re right. There weren’t this many of us living. The ones who should be elders now are ash. They’re unnamed headstones. They’re silence at Thanksgiving tables where a seat stays empty because someone decided death was better than “dishonor”.
The kids aren’t new. The survival is. Culture doesn’t manufacture queerness. It simply stopped murdering us quite as efficiently. The virus got drugs. The bashings got cameras. The suicides got hotlines that don’t hang up. The closet got a door that actually opens. We didn’t spring into existence because the schools started talking about us. We existed all along. We just died faster.
You didn’t see us because we were buried. You didn’t see us because we were murdered. You didn’t see us because we killed ourselves to spare you the embarrassment of having to know us. You didn’t see us because the system decided we were worth more dead than alive, and then had the audacity to charge us for the privilege.
There aren’t as many boomer queers because you fucking killed them.
The government watched. The corporations profited. The neighbors nodded. And now you have the gall to ask why the parade looks so young.
The parade looks young because it’s a funeral procession for the generation that should be leading it. Every rainbow flag is half celebration and half elegy. We are dancing on graves that never should have been dug.
It’s not trendy. Nobody is recruiting. We didn’t vanish. We were exterminated. And the fact that you think we just appeared means the extermination worked better than anyone could have hoped. The guy at the barbecue doesn’t see the ghosts because he’s standing on their graves. He’s complaining about the view from a cemetery he helped fill. He looks at the young faces in the crowd and asks where the old ones are. The old ones are under his feet. And he’s had three beers too many to hear them.
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