Evenduringour officially designated month of celebration, queer people are grappling with anti-trans laws in the South and essentially every form of homophobia you can name. The Human Rights Campaign recently declared a state of emergency in the U.S. for LGBTQ+ people. So, yes, parades and parties are great and theyll get us through the month, but what about the reality that many of us are trying to figure out how to survive and thrive in our daily lives?
I decided to seek out wisdom from our collective queer daddies aka the Old Gays on how to build sustainable queer joy.
Robert Reeves, Mick Peterson, Bill Lyons and Jessay Martin, known on social media as the Old Gays , are four queer elders living their best lives. They reside together in a gorgeous home in Palm Springs, California, and make inspiring content full of singing, dancing and drag.
It sounds idyllic, right? It really is, they assure me. But their lives havent always been this sweet. I wish they knew what we went through, Martin says of younger queer people.
The Old Gays recently appeared on No Straight Answers a YouTube game show presented by Visible, a digital wireless service owned by Verizon where they were pitted against a team of young queer people in a battle to see who knew the most queer history. No spoilers here, but all the Old Gays agree that one of the first steps to happiness is knowing queer history.
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