In a conversation with a community member about PFund’s origin, we reflected that we are both interested in learning more about how people stepped up to help each other when the AIDS crisis was at its most terrible. In particular, we mentioned wanting to learn more about how community members supported each other before organizations were established: with healthcare, money, information and so on. The community member, involved with PFund since the early days, remarked that those stories weren’t interesting, everyone already knew those things. Kate leaned across the table and said, “I don’t know those things. I was six years old then. This is my history and I want to know about it.”
Sitting in a staff conversation where three of us were reflecting on a local organization, on how it has changed over the years and what those changes mean. Susan kept referring to the vision and mission of the organization, telling stories of its early days and how those stories were really the heart of that organization. One of the staff members, sitting quietly during this storytelling, interrupted at one point to say, “For some of us, that history isn’t what’s real. What’s real is what we’ve experienced over the past three or four years. This is all we know so it’s what we respond to. Just because we weren’t around for the early days doesn’t mean our experience is invalid.”
One of PFund’s strengths is that its staff and Board run in age from 24 to 65. There are significant differences in the coming out experiences of our oldest and youngest members. Some things are better and some things are harder, depending on the moment we’re talking about. But what is key is this: each of us carries a critical piece of understanding PFund’s role as a community foundation in supporting community.
There is seventeen years in age between the two of us. When Kate was born, Susan was already finished with high school. Susan’s memory includes the ending of the Vietnam War, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the moment when Ronald Reagan was elected. Susan remembers walking down the streets in Bristol, England, having a conversation with a friend about this strange “gay disease” that was cropping up in the States. She remembers lesbian feminism and the March on Washington in 1987. One of Kate’s earliest political memories is the falling of the Berlin Wall when she was 8 years old. She came out as queer in the context of debates about trans exclusion at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival and read “This Bridge Called My Back” as a historical text, twenty years after it was published. The election of George W. Bush and the aftermath of 9/11 are what she remembers as the events that shaped her political coming-of-age.
The historical moment when we first begin to name our sexual orientation or our gender identity is key to how we understand ourselves. It’s the foundation we build from. And for a lot of us, it’s a fierce foundation. Naming yourself when everyone around you tells you that you are wrong or different is an act of personal reclamation. It’s an act of defiance. And it takes a significant amount of will to speak your truth into a large chorus that tells you there is something wrong with you. For this reason, when we do name ourselves, we tend to be very strongly marked by the moment we speak out. This is the moment of our story, our history, and it can often feel sacred.
This is why intergenerational work in the LGBT community can be so challenging, and yet so worthwhile. Words like “queer” hurt the ears of some of us and soothe the ears of others. Who we think about when we say “our community” varies based on when we came out and who was around us. It also affects what kind of work we feel still needs to happen in order for all LGBT people to live safe and celebrated lives.
As a community foundation, one of our greatest strengths is the differences in ages among our staff and Board. We can’t tell you how often it happens, that one of us will make a statement as though it were the truth, and someone else will say, well, that’s not quite the way I see it. This is a tremendous strength because it helps us remember that no single one of us has the whole story for what it means to be lesbian or gay, bisexual or transgender, or queer. PFund’s role is to keep listening, keep asking questions, and find the points in common. And along the way, to connect all of the dollars we can put together into a great big pot with the organizations and initiatives that are doing the work of making the world a better place for LGBT people, our families and friends.
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