This was around the time of Brandon Teena’s murder but before Matthew Shepard’s murder. It was the summer of 1993 and while cultural attitudes toward the gay community were changing, it was a slow shift, especially for a Haitian American girl from Omaha, Nebraska. I came out when I was nineteen years old.
And we also often have to parent ourselves simply to figure out how to be who we really are in a world that wants to deny us our right to live and love freely. We are a community of people who often have to parent ourselves when we’re most scared, or fragile, or needful. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain.” I was reminded that the queer community and the trans community especially, are communities without many elders. In Torrey Peter’s debut novel Detransition, Baby, Ames says, transfolk are a “lost generation.
