DON KILHEFNER | LGBTQ Youth — A Report, a Rant, a Suggestion

I attended the 30th Anniversary version of the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s “Models of Pride” youth conference at Los Angeles City College on Saturday, October 22nd. Over 600 LGBTQ young people under the age of 24 attended the event which was well-organized, welcoming, and wide-ranging in the opportunities the day provided to our young.

A Blessing on Jay Fisher, a Gay Youth Pioneer

Walking across the LACC campus on a beautiful, sunshiny day, I sat down at one point in the Quad and said silently a little blessing on Jay Fisher.

In 1971, Jay, at 16, fled his hostile hetero supremacist home in West Los Angeles and found his way to the Gay Community Services Center’s (now called L.A. LGBT Center) first residential Liberation House on North Edgemont (just south of Sunset) in East Hollywood.

He was bright, articulate and had a great sense of humor. We, collectively, counseled Jay and enrolled him for his senior year at Hollywood High School from which he graduated with a scholarship to UCLA where he lived thereafter in a campus dormitory.

Jay was the first convenor/facilitator of the Center’s Friday evening, peer-organized “Gay Youth Group” where perhaps 10-12 young men and women would show up in the Center’s Community Room. That “Gay Youth Group” was the seed that evolved into the Models of Pride today with 600+ participants. It’s where the gay and lesbian community began tending to its queer ducklings in L.A. and what beautiful, gifted queer ducks they turned out to be. Jay, wherever you are, thank you.

LGBTQ YOUTH: A Report

The workshop I facilitated that day—“Birth of a Gay Revolution: Learn Where Your Freedom Came From”—started out with a rare showing of Ken Robinson’s 1970 “Some of Your Best Friends,” the first Gay Liberation documentary film (shown flawlessly by Nick Cuccia and Corbin Clarke)—a powerful historic document about early the early Gay Liberation movement, filmed largely in Los Angeles. It held their rapt attention, saying that they had never seen before radical gay and lesbian militants in direct action.

There were 12 young people in the room, ranging from 9th grade to 12th grade. They were intelligent, articulate, and politically- and societally-aware.

After the film, we had 40 minutes to talk with each other. I started off by saying something like, “In the film you saw and heard how my generation was oppressed and how we fought back, creating a clearing in the forest of hetero supremacy where LGBTQ people could finally breath. My sixteen ears are open. I want to learn how your LGBTQ generation is oppressed today.” And the words poured forth, opening my eyes and my heart.

I used the last seven minutes of the workshop presenting the haiku-version of my call to their generation’s opportunity to revision LGBTQ identity, discarding a stale sexual orientation/assimilation model laid on us by hetero supremacists and replace it with a more truthful gay-centered, essentialist/social contribution model. Surprisingly and refreshingly, the young sat there nodding their heads like they already knew.

At the workshop the young participants kept referring to the necessity for “grassroots organizing”—soul music to me. My sixteen ears, trained to listen deeply, also picked up in their voices a certain level of heaviness. It’s as if they knew what struggle they will be called-upon to fight shortly. As every succeeding generation of LGBTQ people has enlarged that clearing in the hetero supremacist forest, there has always been powerful pushback, and our young are sensing it. There is a heavy responsibility awaiting them.

Since that Saturday, I have thought often about James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling in which he writes about how young people begin to sense early the fate that lies ahead of them.

LGBTQ Youth: A Rant

I need to strongly urge LGBTQ adults and old people to think twice before saying to LGBTQ youth, in somewhat mindless herd-talk, something like, “Oh, LGBTQ young people have it so easy today and so much is available to you. There is support everywhere. My generation really had to struggle being labeled sick, arrested by police, fired from jobs. Your generation has it so easy.”

First, that’s both true and not true. Second, it’s condescending, hurtful, and trivializing to young LGBTQ people’s day-to-day reality of their oppression. It’s different from 1969 oppression, but the hate and violence directed against LGBTQ youth today is still hurtful and dehumanizing oppression, and in the case of Tampa, Colorado Springs, and elsewhere, deadly, delivered in massacre form. Soon, hard won legal advances for LGBTQ people over the past half-century could easily be taken away.

A young gay man told me recently that when he came out at his high school in Los Angeles, almost every week when classes passed in the hallway, someone would stick chewing gum in his hair. Finally, as an act of survival and resistance, he shaved his head.

I suggest that a critical point to be remembered is that by 1969 the physical, psychological, religious, cultural, and state genocide against gay and lesbian people was so systemic and institutionalized that our oppressors in 1969 could not conceive that a young handful of fags and dykes would have the radical self-acceptance and political moxie to openly and militantly fight back. Suddenly, in 1969, a window of opportunity appeared and gay and lesbian liberationists clawed their way through it. Our oppressors were not prepared for Gay Liberation. Part of our success was that we surprised them, our audacity caught them off guard.

That’s not the case today. The most aware of LGBTQ young people, at some level, are awake to, and adults and elders should be also, that they are facing a highly-organized, abundantly-financed, determined, focused, extreme right-wing adversary with six votes on the Supreme Court. “Eternal vigilance,” Martin Luther King, Jr., warned us all.

As this thing evolves, show respect and support for the LGBTQ young.

LGBTQ YOUTH: A Suggestion

One of the delights of the “Models of Pride” conference was bumping into Lee Wind, who, as a young man, I dialogued with about gay reality and consciousness 25 years ago. Lee was presenting a workshop that Saturday based on his recent book, beautifully written and designed for young LGBTQ people, titled No Way, They Were Gay?

(Photo of the book cover)

If you are looking for the perfect gift for a LGBTQ youth, this is it. The book is an important contribution to our collective LGBTQ culture. Buy a few extra and gift your local town library and college library. Have a few copies available at all times and hand the book out pro bono communitatis to every LGBTQ youth you encounter.

I sat and read it in one-sitting, reading through the eyes of 16-year-old Donnie Kilhefner, amazed.

Don Kilhefner, Ph.D., is a pioneer Gay Liberationist and gay community organizer for over a half-century in Los Angeles and nationally. Don co-founded (with Morris Kight) the LA LGBT Center, the world’s largest, and (with Harry Hay) the Radical Faeries, and international, gay-centered consciousness movement. He is also a Jungian psychologist in Hollywood.