#was this an excuse to talk about cheerleader gerard again?

[yourmortalenemy]

So I’ve been having some Thoughts ™ about why there is so much hype for middle aged queer people rep on the internet right now (or at least that I’ve seen being part of the ofmd + mcr fandoms)

[Warning: I will make some reference to homophobia, transphobia, mental health issues and HIV/AIDS in this post. It will be brief and not particularly graphic but if that’s likely to affect you, maybe give this one a miss]

Bear with me, in order to make the point I want to make I will have to get into some personal history (but hopefully in a way that is still relevant). When I was younger and I first started to realise I was queer I distinctly remember my family telling me that it was a phase I would get over or that I was just following a trend and soon I’d get bored and be ‘normal’ again. I think a lot of other queer people were told this by friends/family growing up too and it really does get to you. Even though I knew it wasn’t true part of me always doubted (and honestly still doubts) whether they might be right and one day I might just wake up cishet and then I’ll have to go back on so many of the things I’ve said. Not feeling able to trust your own lived experiences really fucks a person up, personally it made me feel unstable and pretty hopeless. I think there is still a belief that queerness is a trend or a fad and that with maturity comes ‘normalcy’ if that makes sense? 

I think another contributing factor is the fact that the HIV/AIDS pandemic. While I am fully aware that HIV/AIDS is an ongoing issue, It’s also fair to say that there were millions of  AIDS-related deaths in the 80s and 90s, the majority of those who died were queer men. Due to that pandemic a huge portion of a generation of queer people were lost. And we didn’t just lose them, we lost everything they could have contributed to the world. And the queer people who weren’t lost had their voices supressed so much that hardly anyone could hear what they had to say. We lost quite a lot of people who would have been role models for us. 

And obviously there’s so many other things that contribute to the erasure of queer people and our  lives that would take me fucking millennia to properly get into.

But essentially, I think for these reasons, it’s very hard for young queer people to see a future for ourselves. I think that’s why it means so much to us to see older queer people just living out their queer lives. 

For me, seeing Gerard Way at 45 years old standing on stage wearing a dress has such a profound impact on me because it’s a kind of self-expression I was always implicitly told there was no place for in adult life. When I watch shows like Our Flag Means Death with two queer main characters who are 40+ falling in love it means so much more to me that these coming of age dramas centred around 16 year olds coming out because what they show me is that it is absolutely possible for me to keep being myself, for the rest of my life. I remember a time when it was impossible for me to have any hope or goals for the future because I believed I had no future. 

But seeing these queer adults express themselves serves as a reminder that not only is there a future for me, and all of the queer people out there, but that we have a place in the world. Our queerness is not a fad, we are not going to just ‘grow out of it’, being nonbinary was not invented by social media in the early 2010s. Queer people (whether that be in terms of sexuality or gender) have always been around and we always fucking will be. This world is ours as much as it is anyone else’s and we are going to live here.