December 13, 2024 • 54 mins
Experience the multi-generational perspectives of four queer male-bodied individuals from different "Eras" of life. Each guest shares their journey through coming out and navigating shame as they explore the shifting societal attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community over the last 50 years. This powerful narrative highlights changes in culture, challenges, triumphs, and the ongoing fight for rights and recognition.
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inspiredinsights@inspiredcg.com
*This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered health advice. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice.
**Please note that this episode contains sensitive behavioral health topics such as suicide and substance use. If you are experiencing a behavioral health crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling 988 or visiting www.988lifeline.org.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
The Inspired Insights podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should
(00:04):
not be considered health advice.
This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice.
Please note that this podcast may contain discussions on sensitive topics such as mental
illness, suicide, and substance use.
If you are experiencing a behavioral health crisis or need support, please contact the
9-8-8 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling 9-8-8 or visiting www.988lifeline.org.
(00:52):
Welcome to the Inspired Insights podcast.
I'm Chris McLaughlin.
I'm Sorin Peterson.
We are not in the studio right now.
Something a little different and new for us.
At Chris's lovely abode.
And we've got some guests, so I want to take a few minutes and introduce our guests.
And then we're going to get started with some conversation.
So to my right, I have Paul Berube.
(01:14):
Welcome Paul.
Thank you.
Tell us about Paul.
Well, I work in finance.
I think that's my day job most of the time.
But that other than doing that and spending time trying to figure out how to live my best
life in every aspect of that, that's pretty much what I do most of my day is finding the
(01:34):
joy in the moments in between.
Oh, Sorin and I love conversations about joy.
I love it.
And full of it.
We love it.
And to my left, my friend and mentor, Frank Brooks.
And thank you so much for having me here.
Thanks for being here.
I'm so happy to be here.
I am a social worker and I'm retired from paid work right now, but I continue on with
(01:57):
volunteer, community volunteer activities.
And right now, my project is I just joined the board of the Maine Council on Aging.
Awesome.
And so that's my major project this year in retirement.
So-called retirement.
(02:18):
Yeah, you're not retiring very well.
No.
And I worry about that for myself too, to be quite honest.
It's you.
Frank, you are a superstar in the social work world and here in the state of Maine.
And I'm so thankful that you are spending your morning with us today.
Well, thank you.
And I don't know about superstar, but I feel so grateful to have found social work as a
(02:42):
profession way back in my undergraduate program and it's been an incredible experience, life
experience.
Well, you are a rock star.
I can tell you that.
So for today's episode, Sorin and I had thought it would be really interesting to bring different
(03:03):
perspectives, different voices and different ways of looking at things into the conversation.
And we started thinking about this idea of generations.
And one of the themes of the Inspired Insights podcast is bridging generations to bring conversation
out to kind of model the importance of listening and honoring youth voice and recognizing there
(03:30):
are some older lived experiences that also are still really relevant.
And what Sorin and I have also found and talked about is that in the queer community, there's
such a stigma around age and there's such a stigma around youth and...
Totally beauty and body.
(03:51):
Yeah, beauty and body.
And at what age do we as queer individuals of older ages kind of be expected to wander
off into the sunset and make room for new generations?
And Sorin and I both believe that there is so much value in bringing all voices together
(04:13):
and learning from the different generations that as a young person, there's so much I
learned from Sorin every single time we sit down and chat.
And so just being open and receptive to those different voices and those different perspectives.
So we thought it'd be really cool to bring four different generations together and just
(04:35):
chat and see what comes from the conversation.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I think there's so much value that we can yield from increasing our demographic size
as far as perspective.
I don't think I've ever heard someone's perspective and then gone away from it with nothing.
(04:58):
And I'm super excited for the opportunity to have some older and younger gentlemen on
the podcast.
So as y'all may know, we do something called Inspired Insights for the Week, which is just
basically a tidbit of knowledge, something that we learned maybe, a little bit of wisdom
(05:19):
to start off the podcast.
Of late, I've been reading a lot on late antiquity.
This does not surprise me at all.
I've yielded an insight that I think is super important and still holds true today.
(05:41):
And that is how easily instability translates to hate.
Especially in late antiquity, there was a lot of instability, especially with the Christian
persecutions of Deccius during the crisis of the third century, Diocletian's Christian
persecutions, Nero's Christian persecutions after the great fire in 64.
(06:09):
In all of these examples, we see a tenuous time resulting directly in the people in power
suppressing and abusing minorities in order to create a fall man, a scapegoat for the
(06:30):
less than ideal geopolitical conditions that were happening in the Mediterranean during
that time.
I was reading on your school break.
River for bed.
Well, I was just reading Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
But we see that today, the global economy is a little weaker than it has been in the
past.
(06:51):
We're seeing more political instability and less trust in our systems in the United States.
And as a result, that instability is directly translating into fear, which we know how easily
fear converts to hate.
And I think it's something very pertinent to keep in mind how the situations around us
(07:15):
can affect the population's mindset, thusly resulting in more hateful policy and such.
And you and I have talked in the past about how fear is a tactic that folks sometimes
use to create fear.
It's a very deliberate act as well.
(07:36):
Light reading from Soren Peterson.
Bright.
Inspired insight of the week.
Well, it's deepened.
I have a deepened insight that across the lifespan, all groups are affected by ageism.
And that it's just not older people who are affected by ageism, but younger folks too,
(08:00):
who are often discounted and what, perspectives are minimized or not paid attention to.
So of course, I've been working on at the MCOA, main council on ageism is to eliminate
ageism by 2032.
So part of my inspired inspiration now will be to make sure that we're talking about ageism
(08:27):
across the generations.
Right.
And not just one particular generation, but that it insists everywhere.
Yes.
And I'm so grateful for this conversation because it's intergenerational.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Paul, inspired insight.
I actually was having this conversation this week.
I went on a walk with my best friend and we were just chatting through the day and what
(08:51):
had happened.
Somebody had made a decision that we were talking about it and I could not wrap my head
around how they got to where they were going.
And we were just volleyballing that back and forth with each other.
And finally I said to him, I think people can make whatever decision they want.
What they're not free of is the consequence of that choice.
(09:11):
And that has kind of stuck with me all week.
And I think that we do that every day, whether it's a good decision that we make and the
consequence helps us or helps other people, or we choose to bring ourselves or other people
down and the ripple effect of whatever that's going to be.
I guess that's really brought insight to me this week.
Yeah.
That would be mine.
(09:31):
Awesome.
Awesome.
My inspired insight, I think maybe has a little bit of play actually on maybe all of yours,
but I was thinking about stuff going on in the world around us and thinking about politics
and elections.
And I was thinking about how easily folks take something from our past or even maybe
(09:59):
a mistake that we made and how it's twisted and used to create a completely different
narrative, which then might force us to play all defense.
And so I've been thinking about what is my responsibility or ownership of somebody's
misperceptions about me?
Am I responsible that somebody has taken a different approach of how they view me?
(10:27):
A misperception about me?
Is that my responsibility?
And I feel this weight come off my shoulders when I realize, no, that's not my responsibility.
That's not my job.
If I have done, I think to your point, Paul, if I have done something deliberately to hurt
somebody or to do something malicious, then yeah, there are consequences that are probably
(10:50):
going to ripple back towards me.
But if somebody is waiting for me to screw up so they can use that against me, that's
not on me.
And that says more about that person than it does me.
So a little bit of fear, hate, stigma, stereotype, and consequence in action and behavior.
Yeah.
(11:11):
I think that a lot of people, too, to speak to that, they hear different things about
you without actually knowing you.
And a lot of times the story they've made up about you is not actually who you are.
And it's not your responsibility to go back and fix that.
Whatever somebody else thinks, says, or does about you is their business.
It has nothing to do with you.
Yeah.
Soren and I talk a lot about how criticism impacts us.
(11:33):
And Soren has some really incredible views on what we can learn from hate and what we
can take from somebody spewing terrible things.
Whereas my style is a little bit like, I'm not going to care.
I tune it out.
Yeah, latent disregard, which I think is likely far more productive emotionally, depending
(11:55):
on whether or not you can really separate yourself from the emotional impact of criticism
and analyze and dissect it more effectively.
But I would say that that's a fairly advanced technique.
It's hard.
Yeah, it's difficult.
But actually, I have a question about ageism in the queer community.
(12:17):
Do you feel like for everybody around here, because I'm sort of in the vibrant period
of my life, the pinnacle, as it were.
But do you feel like you've sort of been ostracized by the queer community as you grow older or
your experience of it has just transitioned and you've found a older queer culture?
(12:41):
Like great question.
Do you think you've been ejected or is it more just a transition in the way that you
interact with other queer folks?
That's a great question.
For me, I've been very fortunate because I've been interested in the whole field of anti-ageism
(13:06):
for a long time.
And I had mentors, social work mentors in my undergraduate and graduate work that were
gerontological social workers.
They study aging.
And so I was in on that from early on.
And not all social workers get that in their training.
It's much better now.
So I was fortunate.
(13:26):
So I started to scope out what was going on in the queer community with regard to ageism
and was able to figure out how was I going to take care of myself and parts of my community
that I care about and provide social opportunities, intergenerational opportunities as much as
(13:50):
possible.
So that's really challenging because we've been also separated by age.
And so for me, the answer is to counter the ageism that's there.
I wouldn't think of going to a gay bar or probably a youth-oriented queer event unless
(14:16):
I knew there would be a lot of age diversity because I have felt invisible in some ways.
But I also have to say that for me, in the kind of white, cisgender, gay male scene where
(14:37):
that sexual commoditization and all of those things can be so prevalent in the bar scene
and the party scene, which I'm not really that up on anymore, that was hard to take
oneself out of because it was my people in a certain way.
(14:59):
So to break away from that and forge ahead with a different kind of social life and social
structure was hard because I wanted to belong.
After I came out in the late 70s, I wanted to belong and I thought I had found my way.
(15:19):
But there were a lot of things there in that kind of gay male subculture that were not
helpful.
And so I stay connected through organizations that support older queer people.
(15:43):
And I do everything I can to try to support those groups.
But I feel like I'm fortunate.
So part of my work is to advertise that and get people more involved because people are
very isolated and living by themselves and not plugged into those groups.
Yeah.
That idea of invisibility resonates with me a lot.
(16:06):
I feel like as somebody approaching my 50s, I feel like in gay culture, I'm an old guy
now, even though I feel like from a lifestyle perspective, we still like to do stuff and
go out there.
(16:28):
But I don't necessarily know that I feel like I fit in with the younger crowd as much as
I at one point thought I did.
That idea of invisibility is really one that I've experienced as well.
Do you still desire to fit in with the younger crowd?
(16:48):
Is that something that you aspire to?
That's a really good question.
Yeah.
You know, Sorin knows this about, well, probably the three of you know about me.
I identify as a very proud Swifty.
And so I think about the Taylor Swift stuff.
So when my husband and I went to see the Heiress tour last summer in person, we were some of
(17:18):
the older folks in that crowd.
When we went to the movie theater to see the movie, we were absolutely some of the oldest
people in that theater.
So I definitely associate with things that probably have a younger crowd.
There's also an older Swifty community out there as well that I feel like I can have
(17:41):
a foot in both places.
But Sorin, for your question, I don't know.
Like Frank said, I don't have any interest in hanging out at any bar, let alone a gay
bar.
Like I don't have any interest in being part of that scene.
Because to your point, Frank, when I was doing those things, there are elements of that scene
(18:08):
that aren't helpful or aren't healthy.
And I see myself as one who needs to keep myself away from that stuff.
I don't know that that is something I care to do now.
What about you, Paul?
I'm right in between the two of these.
(18:29):
What I know for sure is that everybody wants to feel seen, heard, and that they matter.
I'm moving towards 40.
I'm at the point where I can start to feel the shift between young 20 and what that looks
like in a bar and in a club and on a beach to what it looks like as you approach 40 and
as you start to actually fade back into the background.
(18:56):
So I spend my time here, which is very rural, but then I also have a camp right in the center
of Agunquit, which is like the gay mecca.
And the thing about Agunquit is there is such an age variety there.
So around me, I have 12 neighbors that all of us are gay, we're all in a big circle.
(19:16):
And some of them are retiring and buying houses in Agunquit and Palm Springs.
And that is because they're looking for a sense of community and a sense of connection.
I still like to go out.
I still like to go to the bar.
I don't like how it makes me feel sometimes when I'm there.
But I'm scared to feel that invisibility because it changes the identity of who you are and
(19:44):
unless you're grounded to who you are by the time you get there, you can take a horrible
path.
And I love your point around as humans, we all have a need to feel seen and feel a sense
of community, a feel a sense of belonging.
So what about you, Sorin, as you're hearing the three of us kind of talk about the decades
(20:05):
ahead?
Well, okay.
I would say I'm still in my early youth.
I don't think I've reached the, well, I know I haven't reached the, like, I would say heart
of queer culture, which is to some extent like the early 20s bar scene and such.
I'm still in my youth and I would say my social group is fairly isolated relative to perhaps
(20:34):
some of the other social situations that queer men find themselves in the early years of
their life.
But I wouldn't say that I feel like ostracized, but I am not really a part of a large overarching
queer community.
(20:55):
And that's simply because there's just not as many queer youth in the area.
Like I go to a relatively small school in a quite rural area.
And I'm, as far as I'm aware, the only like fully gay senior.
It's not that I am necessarily desirous of speeding up my high school career and joining
(21:20):
a larger queer community, but I think that it will be really fun and exciting because
I've never had the opportunity to interact with somebody of that scale.
Yeah.
And something you and I have talked about off and on over the last season was the differences
(21:42):
of when I was in school and deeply closeted and your current experience.
And there are that term queer encompasses a whole lot of identities.
And so you have some friends at school who identify under that umbrella term of queer.
(22:07):
There was not one, not one out person, regardless of whether you're talking sexual orientation
or gender identity, not one out person, publicly out person for the entire three years of middle
school, four years of high school.
So you've heard me say to you, like, I am just so, there's a sense of awe and wonder
(22:34):
and envy when I think about your experience.
And so I'm sitting here though, inspired insight light bulb over my head to hear you say, despite
having this umbrella community of other youth, other high school students that might identify
as queer, you're the only male bodied out gay person.
(23:00):
In my grade.
Yeah.
So that's like, because we use that term queer, I think so loosely now, which I think for
maybe three of the four of us at this fire.
It used to be fired.
Yeah.
This fire pit.
Yeah.
Fire table chat.
This language, right?
This idea of how communities change and language changes.
(23:23):
And it becomes a chicken and egg thing for me too.
As the language changes, does the community then follow suit?
Yeah.
I think as we've developed more nomenclature to describe different facets of awareness,
(23:43):
I think there's certainly been more cultural speciation among queer communities in high
school, in my high school.
And I think because there's less persecution and criticism, it has resulted in less of
a tight knit in group of queer people because we don't have to sit there and band together
(24:08):
and defend ourselves anymore.
Right.
Although there is still a fair amount of bullying.
It's no longer like a life or death thing where we feel that it's necessary to really
be in a tight packed group and support each other.
So it's less of like a tight knit queer community at my school.
(24:32):
And instead just there's a number of queer individuals that go to my high school.
What's interesting about that as I was listening to you talk, I've been out of high school
for a minute, like a minute.
I just had my 20th high school reunion, which I didn't go to.
I thought I would you.
But I was out in high school.
(24:55):
But as you were talking, I was thinking about this.
I don't really have a coming out story.
I've never actually come out.
My mother is gay and my father is gay.
So my existence was just my existence.
So in high school, I could probably count on one hand the amount of queer people that
existed either on whatever side of that spectrum they were on.
(25:16):
But I kind of feel the same way where at the time queer was a bad word and it was used
to hurt you, not to define who you are.
But it's amazing to see how in high school you thought about safety and walking home
alone and changing in the locker room and what that looked like to just now being in
(25:40):
a watching a generation that can just live authentically who they are without the consequence
of that.
Yeah, it's wonderful.
What about you, Frank?
Did you come out in school?
No, no, no.
Fag, queer, all those pejoratives.
(26:02):
All I wanted to do was stay away from that and keep away from that and not have not be
labeled that even though I was gay.
I was a gay boy.
And everybody knew it.
I was the last one to know when I came out in 78.
But high school, junior high and high school were nightmarish.
(26:25):
And I smoked a lot of pot, drank a lot of beef, did everything to escape that and try
to conform and fit in at a terrible price.
And so when I came out in 78, I was liberated.
And it was a good time in the sense that there was a nascent queer civil rights movement
(26:50):
and things were happening.
But the same year that I came out, Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated
in San Francisco.
So there was all this violence right there too.
And that went on.
And then in the early 80s, of course, HIV AIDS, which affected all of us.
(27:11):
What was that like though?
What was it like?
It was another nerdy there.
It was horrifying.
Because I can imagine that that would place a spotlight on you, whether or not you had
it or whatever.
But I just...
It was horrible.
When I was younger, very young, because I was born in the middle of the 80s, but my
(27:33):
mother's partner at the time had a brother who was living with us and he had AIDS and
I didn't understand what it was at the time.
But I'm fortunate in the fact in my generation that when I was growing up, it wasn't something
that you dealt with like you would if you had come up in the 80s and 90s.
Yes.
And I came out in Portland and Portland was not an epicenter of the epidemic, but it was
(28:01):
the epicenter in Maine.
And so I lost many friends to HIV AIDS and people who I knew.
The only good thing that came out of that was activism and organizing and filling all
the gaps that were there because the government and state and even local officials would do
(28:22):
nothing.
So we had to do it.
And also at the same time, the Maine Lesbian Gay Political Alliance was formed in 84, 85
after the murder of Charlie Howard here in Bangor.
And so the movement started coalescing in Maine and that was exciting and good and was
(28:47):
a counterweight to the nightmare of HIV AIDS.
The other thing I wanted to say was for most of us, I think the emotional response to all
of this persecution and mistreatment was shame.
And so how do you deal with shame?
I mean, as human beings, shame is one of the most difficult emotions to deal with.
(29:11):
And so people do a lot to avoid shame.
And there are lots of great sociological research studies done on the lengths that people will
go to reduce shame like passing and covering and trying to reduce the effects of the stigmatized
(29:33):
identity that is so shameful.
And I was thinking of gay male culture, not all queer culture, but not associating with
men who behaved in feminine identified ways and stratifying that way, all of those things.
I think that's changed.
I really do.
(29:53):
I've seen progress because I think shame has been reduced about being queer somewhat.
It's still externally, the shame from a judgment from others.
Yeah, projected onto the individual.
That's one of the most powerful ways that minorities are separated from the majority
culture.
(30:14):
You bring up such a good point about that.
Even when you, okay, so if you step inside, and my perspective is obviously from a gay
man's perspective, but once you get into the gay community, it's not like we're all friends
and we're all hugging each other.
There are so many subsets of the gay community and then we're mean to each other in so many
ways.
(30:35):
Then it's about how old are you?
What do you look like?
What do you drive?
How much money do you have?
What do you do for work?
Who are you connected to?
And all of those things put you in different categories of gay men and what you have access
to and who you have access to, what parties you're invited to, who your friends are.
So I think that for a long time, it was a fight out and it was a fight in.
(30:56):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, you know, also in my social work world and clinical work, shame is always in
that treatment space.
It's always present.
And I do reflect often about, I did not, as Zorin has heard me talk about, I did not come
(31:20):
out until formally to my family, like, okay, this is, everyone knows now until 99, a year
almost to the date after Matt Shepard's death in Wyoming, had a very similar impact on me
(31:40):
that his murder plays very heavily in my coming out story.
And at almost 50 years old though, living the first 25 years of my life, like coming
up to my 50th year, half of my life was closeted.
And so as confident as I sometimes feel coming into my 50th year, that shame stuff catches
(32:09):
me when I least expect it.
And as even producing this podcast and part of what Zorin and I often have to do is go
back and listen to episodes and re-listen to episodes.
I have heard both of us say, I hate how I sound.
I hate listening to my own voice.
Yeah.
And for me, 95% of that is, I sound gay.
(32:34):
Five percent of that is, I'm a pretentious knucklehead sometimes.
That 95% of that is, am I sounding too gay?
That is like false shame.
Actually I think what's super interesting now is yes, we've seen a lot of shame reduction
(32:55):
in the public space, but obviously I'm still in high school and I was recently in middle
school.
And I think that those are two of the most shame-driven culture that one can witness
in modern America.
I would say likely that and the only right.
(33:20):
And what I've noticed is that yes, a lot of early high school and middle school, essentially
it's a social stratification through shame and it creates like social adherence and coherence
through shame.
But now as I'm about to enter my senior year and junior year, I noticed a market shift
(33:45):
in the way that the school's population views themselves and how they interact with the
school body.
People don't care about popularity, at least of what I've seen anecdotally, as much as
they used to.
And there's less hierarchy to the social setting in high school.
(34:10):
And I think that that allows for kids to express themselves far more openly, whereas previously
that was not really an opportunity presented or at least without backlash.
And even in middle school and still now, I do feel like a lot of the times I'm like,
(34:36):
wow, I'm acting far too gay right now.
And a lot of the outfits I'll wear, I'll be like, I'm not fitting in with a group.
And in a lot of the social situations that I find myself in, I am interacting with a
lot of just straight men that are just regular straight men.
And in those situations, I definitely tone down my personality a lot.
(34:59):
I dress and act in different ways.
And I remember in middle school, I used to, over one of the summers, I was only hanging
out with these two other boys and I would cry about how I'm not like them at all because
they were two straight jocular men and I'm me.
(35:20):
And although we've made a lot of progress, shame, I feel like, is a lot of very internal
experience and self-driven.
And we've talked about this concept of how we sometimes dull our own shine in order to
not bring attention, to fit in.
And sometimes we are our own worst critics or we're our first bullies.
(35:45):
That voice in our head that tells us, knock it off.
Can't you just walk like a normal teenage boy?
Can't you just dress like a normal teen?
Why can't you throw a football?
Those voices.
And I think to your point, Sorin, for many of us, especially many of us in the LGBTQ
community, our formative middle school and high school years continue to shape us in
(36:12):
not so great ways decades later.
Everything about, like you said, middle school and high school can be rooted in shame.
And I still, again, at almost 50 years old, walking into a public restroom, walking into
a locker room.
All of that feeling comes back the minute that door opens and closes.
(36:38):
And we have to work at it every single day.
We're works in progress, right?
Another theme of our podcast.
We are all works in progress.
And as confident as I know the four of us present professionally, that stuff is in the
back of our head all the time.
And I think for me, very important.
(37:00):
I think the most important thing for me is to make sure that I realize that that shame
was projected onto me.
That none of the things that come up as triggers or those indicators of internal shame, like
(37:20):
being hesitant to do something because of that, like you say, go into a locker room
or be with straight identified men comfortably.
It was projected onto me from a very young age.
As soon as I became aware, way before middle school, as soon as I became aware that I was
(37:42):
different, no one helped me struggle with that.
We were on our own, or at least I was.
No, 100%.
And other gay boys.
And the only way we could identify, because I connected with several gay boys in schools,
but we didn't talk about it.
(38:03):
We did certain things together, but not others.
I was in a theater group with one.
But with my straight friends, I didn't talk about that.
So we were trying to manage, I was trying to manage all of this shamed identity, all
on my own.
It's really amazing.
(38:24):
I mean, that brings a lot of resilience into it to survive, to survive something like that.
And the other thing I want to say about the shame is that being connected to the community
that I choose is shame reducing.
(38:44):
And just where I can be myself.
And we have to create that ourselves.
We really do.
But we're on our own with it.
And that's not fair.
Right.
It's not fair.
And then you talked about this too, sorry, Frank, we've talked about this too, about
how the humans we are today, for many of us, are scars, whether physical or emotional,
(39:18):
have made us who we are.
And as the four of us sitting around the fire table chatting and knowing, you know, I think
I have the privilege of knowing each of you individually better than you all know each
other collectively.
Your skills, your reputations, your accomplishments, your decency as humans is perhaps also due
(39:45):
in part to the bullshit that we all went through.
And because of that bullshit, that we are the incredible humans that we all are today.
Well, that's why I found my home in social work.
Yeah.
I know all the values and principles of social work practice and also working with folks
(40:07):
who have been marginalized.
Yeah.
That's right.
And helping them find their voice.
I have never been a bully and I feel fortunate because not everybody who's been bullied has
that passion.
Because I think what you were describing, Paul, about how people get categorized and
(40:29):
then get judged and bullied because of those differences.
That sometimes people who are bullied do bully.
And I'm grateful for that.
Doesn't mean I can't be judgmental, but...
Comes with the territory.
Yeah.
And I'm grateful for that gift, wherever I'm from.
I actually wanted to talk a little bit more about the in-group pressure that the queer
(40:57):
community presents and some of the difficulties of being immersed in gay culture and the social
pressure that that puts on you and judgment from other queer people.
Because I think that we see a lot of minorities, instead of pushing outward, they push inward
(41:22):
and put more pressure on their own in-group to succeed and fit in.
That's right.
Or better model what they think the people within the in-group should be.
So I haven't had a lot of that stress simply as a result of not interacting with a ton
of other queer youth.
(41:43):
But I have had friends who, especially older friends, interacting with more college queer
culture.
There's a lot of pressure to fit into a certain body type and a lot of judgment around appearance,
sexual promiscuity and a number of things such as that.
(42:04):
So I was curious to hear you guys' experience on if you've experienced pressure from other
queer members of the community and what difficulties you face around that.
And I think that that was a really good point, Paul.
I really like that.
So I'll answer that because I can answer that really quickly.
I think part of my journey and part of that shame that was put on me that I still to this
(42:33):
day work to push back or put into a different place, I didn't even when I, certainly not
in school days, but even when I publicly came out in the late 90s, I chose to not associate
a whole lot with other members of the LGBTQ plus community.
(42:54):
I still rejected that.
And some of that rejection was that pressure.
I didn't even feel like I always fit there either.
And so I have just been aware of the ageism within our community, of some of the stereotypes,
(43:15):
some of the stratification that you're talking about.
Was I this?
Was I that?
You know, and all of these subcultures within gay male culture and never felt like I fit
in there either.
So it's probably because of some of that pressure, whether external or internal, I pushed that
(43:37):
community away.
And it wasn't until I got into my thirties that I started embracing my LGBTQ plus friends.
That's where it starts to get good.
Yeah, it did.
It started to get really good in my thirties.
And I met my husband in my thirties and developed our life together in my thirties.
(43:59):
And so, yeah, I think that was where my shine really started to burst through.
And you know, there are lots of different coming out models, you know, stage models
and all of that stuff.
And part of one that I find interesting is that the models I find interesting are that
(44:22):
process that you're describing, that you come to terms with your own sexual identity or
sexual orientation, gender identity, and then you make forays outside yourself into the
communities.
And then at the end, you embrace it.
And what a process that is.
(44:44):
And I was thinking about how at every stage we have to reduce that shame and move forward.
And it's really tough, again, on your own.
And then you get the community support later when you've plugged in, you know, and people
will affirm you.
Like this conversation right today is very affirming and interesting.
(45:05):
And I know I'll bring a lot from it.
But until that happens, you know, we're on our own.
I keep going back to that, which is really when you think about the systems that we operate
in, it's a very effective technique to keep people isolated by themselves, not organized,
(45:31):
and feeling not just badly about oneself, but also badly about others who are like you.
That's right.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a very, very effective strategy.
And I was trying to think about hierarchies, too, you know, and, oh, you know, we as human
(45:51):
beings, we have to fight against not putting things into hierarchies.
But we also live in a capitalist society that is very stratified by income.
Look at how all the different ways income stratifies us.
100%.
Yeah.
We're headed to higher education and advanced degrees and all of those things.
(46:14):
That's all good.
And it's all wonderful for our development, but it also stratifies us.
Something that I'd like to loop back to is advocacy.
When you were talking about sort of the flashpoints in the early queer liberation movement that
resulted in organization and members of the community coming together, it was all very
(46:38):
poignant, negative events that resulted directly in change.
How can we make it so the movement is not reactive, but instead continuous?
I think that's a great point.
I want to point out that there are a lot of very proactive things that are happening because
(47:01):
of that foundation that was placed because of that reactivity.
We'll always have to be reactive, I think, after the fact because of acts of violence.
As long as there's movements going on, we have the anti-trans legislation across the
country.
It's absurd.
I understand.
I understand the utility of attacking such a small and already marginalized group, but
(47:28):
I would say the trans community is small enough that it has functionally no major bearing
on anything.
It's all money.
Literally just...
We were marginalized.
Gay, bi, queer folks were attacked in the exact same way.
Yeah.
30, 40 years.
Well, you saw this across your career, right?
(47:51):
In the 80s, it was AIDS and the stigma around promiscuous gay men.
In the 90s, it was leading into some of the marriage stuff.
Then all through the 2000s, you were on the front lines here in the state of Maine around
marriage equality.
Now, the big money donors, the talking points against trans youth, and whether it's sports,
(48:19):
use of restrooms, healthcare, that conversation drives big dollar donors into that party who
chooses to use those talking points.
The trans community was vulnerable.
It has an interesting history, the whole LGBT addition of transgender to LGB politics.
(48:53):
The were vulnerable, we weren't ready for that, right?
They are paying the price for that.
100%.
One quick thing I want to say is that talk about invisibility, where are women and lesbians
and people of color in this conversation?
Those folks are all marginalized and stratified within our communities too.
(49:18):
You can always follow the money, but trans folks were much more vulnerable, especially
trans youth.
Easy target.
Because you say they're a smaller minority than folks who are identified in other ways,
that's for sure.
But look at trans youth.
Their parents had to try to come in, some of them supportive, some of them not supportive,
(49:43):
to try to advocate for their children to get medical care.
That's where this anti-trans movement started was with healthcare, medical care.
I think I talked to you about this one day too, but to think about the infighting between
all the different groups internally, there is a segment of the LGB community that wants
(50:05):
the T removed.
That is shocking to me.
If you come for one, you come for all.
That is just another subset of what I was talking about, where once you get into the
community, it goes by body type, it goes by activity, it goes by what you do and how you
do it.
I think that the shame comes in not only externally there from people projecting it to us, but
(50:31):
then us projecting it to each other on the right-hand side out.
I think that it just rolls.
What I thought was interesting about shame, I read a lot of Brene Brown.
I try to stay in the arena, not always the easiest thing to do.
But what is interesting about the shame is, I talked about earlier, one of the things
(50:53):
that I worried about when I was in high school is going into the locker room and changing.
Then I was at the gym and I walked into the locker room and it just hits you like a wave,
but you don't see it coming.
Then you have to process back through something that you didn't think about for a while.
That's right.
I don't really go into locker rooms.
Yeah, right.
We've talked about it.
(51:14):
We were forced into it.
I was forced into it.
I don't know about you two, but we didn't have any choice.
You were forced through this agony of having to try to be part of something that you wanted
nothing to do with.
It was horrible.
It was horrible.
There was nothing wrong with us.
Right.
(51:34):
Again, that is the punchline for us today.
I was inadvertently thinking about one of the inspired insights I shared that other
people's perception of us is about them, not us, and there was nothing wrong with us.
No.
Yeah.
(51:55):
No.
Friends, I could sit here all day and continue this conversation.
I know we're at a point where we need to wrap up.
I want to do maybe some final thoughts, final points.
Paul, I'm going to put you on the spot to go first.
Okay.
I think that the conversation today enlightened, obviously, because there's four generations
(52:18):
of people here.
I think the message that I'm going to walk away with and be more cognizant of is that
we're all in it together.
Regardless of how we try to pull each other down or pull each other apart, we're only
going to succeed if we all do it together.
That's right.
Frank, final point, final thought.
I agree with Paul that we're all in this together.
(52:39):
We always have been.
It's so wonderful to come together and be part of this because we are.
This is doing it together.
I really appreciate that.
We can't leave out the political, social, cultural, economic factors that we've got
to touch on, but we could do an hour on those.
(52:59):
Well, hours.
I got you both on speed dial.
Final point, final thought.
Yeah, I think to echo these two lovely gentlemen's point, let's not throw people off the life
raft so it stays afloat.
Let's expand it.
(53:21):
I'm so pleased that we had the opportunity to bring you guys on because I think it did
diversify our perspectives and I really enjoyed hearing what you guys had to say.
I would just like to thank you two.
Yeah, and that's my final thought.
That's what I'm taking away.
In addition to what you all said is gratitude.
This conversation has been inspiring and enlightening and I just feel so thankful that you both
(53:46):
got up super early on a dead morning to share your time, but Soren and I, and who knows,
this might be a to be continued.
So thank you all.
This has been an episode of the Inspired Insights podcast.
I've been Chris McLaughlin.
I've been Soren Peterson.
We'll see you next time for another episode.
Thanks so much.
Bye.
Thank you.
(54:07):
The Inspired Insights podcast has been brought to you by Inspired Consulting Group, LLC.
Edited and produced by Amanda Seidel and Derek Herter.
Marketing support for the Inspired Insights podcast by Elizabeth Keenan.
Music by Derek Herter.
Please visit www.inspiredcg.com to learn more.
Copyright 2024.
(54:28):
All rights reserved.
The Inspired Insights podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should
(00:04):
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(00:52):
Welcome to the Inspired Insights podcast.
I'm Chris McLaughlin.
I'm Sorin Peterson.
We are not in the studio right now.
Something a little different and new for us.
At Chris's lovely abode.
And we've got some guests, so I want to take a few minutes and introduce our guests.
And then we're going to get started with some conversation.
So to my right, I have Paul Berube.
(01:14):
Welcome Paul.
Thank you.
Tell us about Paul.
Well, I work in finance.
I think that's my day job most of the time.
But that other than doing that and spending time trying to figure out how to live my best
life in every aspect of that, that's pretty much what I do most of my day is finding the
(01:34):
joy in the moments in between.
Oh, Sorin and I love conversations about joy.
I love it.
And full of it.
We love it.
And to my left, my friend and mentor, Frank Brooks.
And thank you so much for having me here.
Thanks for being here.
I'm so happy to be here.
I am a social worker and I'm retired from paid work right now, but I continue on with
(01:57):
volunteer, community volunteer activities.
And right now, my project is I just joined the board of the Maine Council on Aging.
Awesome.
And so that's my major project this year in retirement.
So-called retirement.
(02:18):
Yeah, you're not retiring very well.
No.
And I worry about that for myself too, to be quite honest.
It's you.
Frank, you are a superstar in the social work world and here in the state of Maine.
And I'm so thankful that you are spending your morning with us today.
Well, thank you.
And I don't know about superstar, but I feel so grateful to have found social work as a
(02:42):
profession way back in my undergraduate program and it's been an incredible experience, life
experience.
Well, you are a rock star.
I can tell you that.
So for today's episode, Sorin and I had thought it would be really interesting to bring different
(03:03):
perspectives, different voices and different ways of looking at things into the conversation.
And we started thinking about this idea of generations.
And one of the themes of the Inspired Insights podcast is bridging generations to bring conversation
out to kind of model the importance of listening and honoring youth voice and recognizing there
(03:30):
are some older lived experiences that also are still really relevant.
And what Sorin and I have also found and talked about is that in the queer community, there's
such a stigma around age and there's such a stigma around youth and...
Totally beauty and body.
(03:51):
Yeah, beauty and body.
And at what age do we as queer individuals of older ages kind of be expected to wander
off into the sunset and make room for new generations?
And Sorin and I both believe that there is so much value in bringing all voices together
(04:13):
and learning from the different generations that as a young person, there's so much I
learned from Sorin every single time we sit down and chat.
And so just being open and receptive to those different voices and those different perspectives.
So we thought it'd be really cool to bring four different generations together and just
(04:35):
chat and see what comes from the conversation.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I think there's so much value that we can yield from increasing our demographic size
as far as perspective.
I don't think I've ever heard someone's perspective and then gone away from it with nothing.
(04:58):
And I'm super excited for the opportunity to have some older and younger gentlemen on
the podcast.
So as y'all may know, we do something called Inspired Insights for the Week, which is just
basically a tidbit of knowledge, something that we learned maybe, a little bit of wisdom
(05:19):
to start off the podcast.
Of late, I've been reading a lot on late antiquity.
This does not surprise me at all.
I've yielded an insight that I think is super important and still holds true today.
(05:41):
And that is how easily instability translates to hate.
Especially in late antiquity, there was a lot of instability, especially with the Christian
persecutions of Deccius during the crisis of the third century, Diocletian's Christian
persecutions, Nero's Christian persecutions after the great fire in 64.
(06:09):
In all of these examples, we see a tenuous time resulting directly in the people in power
suppressing and abusing minorities in order to create a fall man, a scapegoat for the
(06:30):
less than ideal geopolitical conditions that were happening in the Mediterranean during
that time.
I was reading on your school break.
River for bed.
Well, I was just reading Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
But we see that today, the global economy is a little weaker than it has been in the
past.
(06:51):
We're seeing more political instability and less trust in our systems in the United States.
And as a result, that instability is directly translating into fear, which we know how easily
fear converts to hate.
And I think it's something very pertinent to keep in mind how the situations around us
(07:15):
can affect the population's mindset, thusly resulting in more hateful policy and such.
And you and I have talked in the past about how fear is a tactic that folks sometimes
use to create fear.
It's a very deliberate act as well.
(07:36):
Light reading from Soren Peterson.
Bright.
Inspired insight of the week.
Well, it's deepened.
I have a deepened insight that across the lifespan, all groups are affected by ageism.
And that it's just not older people who are affected by ageism, but younger folks too,
(08:00):
who are often discounted and what, perspectives are minimized or not paid attention to.
So of course, I've been working on at the MCOA, main council on ageism is to eliminate
ageism by 2032.
So part of my inspired inspiration now will be to make sure that we're talking about ageism
(08:27):
across the generations.
Right.
And not just one particular generation, but that it insists everywhere.
Yes.
And I'm so grateful for this conversation because it's intergenerational.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Paul, inspired insight.
I actually was having this conversation this week.
I went on a walk with my best friend and we were just chatting through the day and what
(08:51):
had happened.
Somebody had made a decision that we were talking about it and I could not wrap my head
around how they got to where they were going.
And we were just volleyballing that back and forth with each other.
And finally I said to him, I think people can make whatever decision they want.
What they're not free of is the consequence of that choice.
(09:11):
And that has kind of stuck with me all week.
And I think that we do that every day, whether it's a good decision that we make and the
consequence helps us or helps other people, or we choose to bring ourselves or other people
down and the ripple effect of whatever that's going to be.
I guess that's really brought insight to me this week.
Yeah.
That would be mine.
(09:31):
Awesome.
Awesome.
My inspired insight, I think maybe has a little bit of play actually on maybe all of yours,
but I was thinking about stuff going on in the world around us and thinking about politics
and elections.
And I was thinking about how easily folks take something from our past or even maybe
(09:59):
a mistake that we made and how it's twisted and used to create a completely different
narrative, which then might force us to play all defense.
And so I've been thinking about what is my responsibility or ownership of somebody's
misperceptions about me?
Am I responsible that somebody has taken a different approach of how they view me?
(10:27):
A misperception about me?
Is that my responsibility?
And I feel this weight come off my shoulders when I realize, no, that's not my responsibility.
That's not my job.
If I have done, I think to your point, Paul, if I have done something deliberately to hurt
somebody or to do something malicious, then yeah, there are consequences that are probably
(10:50):
going to ripple back towards me.
But if somebody is waiting for me to screw up so they can use that against me, that's
not on me.
And that says more about that person than it does me.
So a little bit of fear, hate, stigma, stereotype, and consequence in action and behavior.
Yeah.
(11:11):
I think that a lot of people, too, to speak to that, they hear different things about
you without actually knowing you.
And a lot of times the story they've made up about you is not actually who you are.
And it's not your responsibility to go back and fix that.
Whatever somebody else thinks, says, or does about you is their business.
It has nothing to do with you.
Yeah.
Soren and I talk a lot about how criticism impacts us.
(11:33):
And Soren has some really incredible views on what we can learn from hate and what we
can take from somebody spewing terrible things.
Whereas my style is a little bit like, I'm not going to care.
I tune it out.
Yeah, latent disregard, which I think is likely far more productive emotionally, depending
(11:55):
on whether or not you can really separate yourself from the emotional impact of criticism
and analyze and dissect it more effectively.
But I would say that that's a fairly advanced technique.
It's hard.
Yeah, it's difficult.
But actually, I have a question about ageism in the queer community.
(12:17):
Do you feel like for everybody around here, because I'm sort of in the vibrant period
of my life, the pinnacle, as it were.
But do you feel like you've sort of been ostracized by the queer community as you grow older or
your experience of it has just transitioned and you've found a older queer culture?
(12:41):
Like great question.
Do you think you've been ejected or is it more just a transition in the way that you
interact with other queer folks?
That's a great question.
For me, I've been very fortunate because I've been interested in the whole field of anti-ageism
(13:06):
for a long time.
And I had mentors, social work mentors in my undergraduate and graduate work that were
gerontological social workers.
They study aging.
And so I was in on that from early on.
And not all social workers get that in their training.
It's much better now.
So I was fortunate.
(13:26):
So I started to scope out what was going on in the queer community with regard to ageism
and was able to figure out how was I going to take care of myself and parts of my community
that I care about and provide social opportunities, intergenerational opportunities as much as
(13:50):
possible.
So that's really challenging because we've been also separated by age.
And so for me, the answer is to counter the ageism that's there.
I wouldn't think of going to a gay bar or probably a youth-oriented queer event unless
(14:16):
I knew there would be a lot of age diversity because I have felt invisible in some ways.
But I also have to say that for me, in the kind of white, cisgender, gay male scene where
(14:37):
that sexual commoditization and all of those things can be so prevalent in the bar scene
and the party scene, which I'm not really that up on anymore, that was hard to take
oneself out of because it was my people in a certain way.
(14:59):
So to break away from that and forge ahead with a different kind of social life and social
structure was hard because I wanted to belong.
After I came out in the late 70s, I wanted to belong and I thought I had found my way.
(15:19):
But there were a lot of things there in that kind of gay male subculture that were not
helpful.
And so I stay connected through organizations that support older queer people.
(15:43):
And I do everything I can to try to support those groups.
But I feel like I'm fortunate.
So part of my work is to advertise that and get people more involved because people are
very isolated and living by themselves and not plugged into those groups.
Yeah.
That idea of invisibility resonates with me a lot.
(16:06):
I feel like as somebody approaching my 50s, I feel like in gay culture, I'm an old guy
now, even though I feel like from a lifestyle perspective, we still like to do stuff and
go out there.
(16:28):
But I don't necessarily know that I feel like I fit in with the younger crowd as much as
I at one point thought I did.
That idea of invisibility is really one that I've experienced as well.
Do you still desire to fit in with the younger crowd?
(16:48):
Is that something that you aspire to?
That's a really good question.
Yeah.
You know, Sorin knows this about, well, probably the three of you know about me.
I identify as a very proud Swifty.
And so I think about the Taylor Swift stuff.
So when my husband and I went to see the Heiress tour last summer in person, we were some of
(17:18):
the older folks in that crowd.
When we went to the movie theater to see the movie, we were absolutely some of the oldest
people in that theater.
So I definitely associate with things that probably have a younger crowd.
There's also an older Swifty community out there as well that I feel like I can have
(17:41):
a foot in both places.
But Sorin, for your question, I don't know.
Like Frank said, I don't have any interest in hanging out at any bar, let alone a gay
bar.
Like I don't have any interest in being part of that scene.
Because to your point, Frank, when I was doing those things, there are elements of that scene
(18:08):
that aren't helpful or aren't healthy.
And I see myself as one who needs to keep myself away from that stuff.
I don't know that that is something I care to do now.
What about you, Paul?
I'm right in between the two of these.
(18:29):
What I know for sure is that everybody wants to feel seen, heard, and that they matter.
I'm moving towards 40.
I'm at the point where I can start to feel the shift between young 20 and what that looks
like in a bar and in a club and on a beach to what it looks like as you approach 40 and
as you start to actually fade back into the background.
(18:56):
So I spend my time here, which is very rural, but then I also have a camp right in the center
of Agunquit, which is like the gay mecca.
And the thing about Agunquit is there is such an age variety there.
So around me, I have 12 neighbors that all of us are gay, we're all in a big circle.
(19:16):
And some of them are retiring and buying houses in Agunquit and Palm Springs.
And that is because they're looking for a sense of community and a sense of connection.
I still like to go out.
I still like to go to the bar.
I don't like how it makes me feel sometimes when I'm there.
But I'm scared to feel that invisibility because it changes the identity of who you are and
(19:44):
unless you're grounded to who you are by the time you get there, you can take a horrible
path.
And I love your point around as humans, we all have a need to feel seen and feel a sense
of community, a feel a sense of belonging.
So what about you, Sorin, as you're hearing the three of us kind of talk about the decades
(20:05):
ahead?
Well, okay.
I would say I'm still in my early youth.
I don't think I've reached the, well, I know I haven't reached the, like, I would say heart
of queer culture, which is to some extent like the early 20s bar scene and such.
I'm still in my youth and I would say my social group is fairly isolated relative to perhaps
(20:34):
some of the other social situations that queer men find themselves in the early years of
their life.
But I wouldn't say that I feel like ostracized, but I am not really a part of a large overarching
queer community.
(20:55):
And that's simply because there's just not as many queer youth in the area.
Like I go to a relatively small school in a quite rural area.
And I'm, as far as I'm aware, the only like fully gay senior.
It's not that I am necessarily desirous of speeding up my high school career and joining
(21:20):
a larger queer community, but I think that it will be really fun and exciting because
I've never had the opportunity to interact with somebody of that scale.
Yeah.
And something you and I have talked about off and on over the last season was the differences
(21:42):
of when I was in school and deeply closeted and your current experience.
And there are that term queer encompasses a whole lot of identities.
And so you have some friends at school who identify under that umbrella term of queer.
(22:07):
There was not one, not one out person, regardless of whether you're talking sexual orientation
or gender identity, not one out person, publicly out person for the entire three years of middle
school, four years of high school.
So you've heard me say to you, like, I am just so, there's a sense of awe and wonder
(22:34):
and envy when I think about your experience.
And so I'm sitting here though, inspired insight light bulb over my head to hear you say, despite
having this umbrella community of other youth, other high school students that might identify
as queer, you're the only male bodied out gay person.
(23:00):
In my grade.
Yeah.
So that's like, because we use that term queer, I think so loosely now, which I think for
maybe three of the four of us at this fire.
It used to be fired.
Yeah.
This fire pit.
Yeah.
Fire table chat.
This language, right?
This idea of how communities change and language changes.
(23:23):
And it becomes a chicken and egg thing for me too.
As the language changes, does the community then follow suit?
Yeah.
I think as we've developed more nomenclature to describe different facets of awareness,
(23:43):
I think there's certainly been more cultural speciation among queer communities in high
school, in my high school.
And I think because there's less persecution and criticism, it has resulted in less of
a tight knit in group of queer people because we don't have to sit there and band together
(24:08):
and defend ourselves anymore.
Right.
Although there is still a fair amount of bullying.
It's no longer like a life or death thing where we feel that it's necessary to really
be in a tight packed group and support each other.
So it's less of like a tight knit queer community at my school.
(24:32):
And instead just there's a number of queer individuals that go to my high school.
What's interesting about that as I was listening to you talk, I've been out of high school
for a minute, like a minute.
I just had my 20th high school reunion, which I didn't go to.
I thought I would you.
But I was out in high school.
(24:55):
But as you were talking, I was thinking about this.
I don't really have a coming out story.
I've never actually come out.
My mother is gay and my father is gay.
So my existence was just my existence.
So in high school, I could probably count on one hand the amount of queer people that
existed either on whatever side of that spectrum they were on.
(25:16):
But I kind of feel the same way where at the time queer was a bad word and it was used
to hurt you, not to define who you are.
But it's amazing to see how in high school you thought about safety and walking home
alone and changing in the locker room and what that looked like to just now being in
(25:40):
a watching a generation that can just live authentically who they are without the consequence
of that.
Yeah, it's wonderful.
What about you, Frank?
Did you come out in school?
No, no, no.
Fag, queer, all those pejoratives.
(26:02):
All I wanted to do was stay away from that and keep away from that and not have not be
labeled that even though I was gay.
I was a gay boy.
And everybody knew it.
I was the last one to know when I came out in 78.
But high school, junior high and high school were nightmarish.
(26:25):
And I smoked a lot of pot, drank a lot of beef, did everything to escape that and try
to conform and fit in at a terrible price.
And so when I came out in 78, I was liberated.
And it was a good time in the sense that there was a nascent queer civil rights movement
(26:50):
and things were happening.
But the same year that I came out, Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated
in San Francisco.
So there was all this violence right there too.
And that went on.
And then in the early 80s, of course, HIV AIDS, which affected all of us.
(27:11):
What was that like though?
What was it like?
It was another nerdy there.
It was horrifying.
Because I can imagine that that would place a spotlight on you, whether or not you had
it or whatever.
But I just...
It was horrible.
When I was younger, very young, because I was born in the middle of the 80s, but my
(27:33):
mother's partner at the time had a brother who was living with us and he had AIDS and
I didn't understand what it was at the time.
But I'm fortunate in the fact in my generation that when I was growing up, it wasn't something
that you dealt with like you would if you had come up in the 80s and 90s.
Yes.
And I came out in Portland and Portland was not an epicenter of the epidemic, but it was
(28:01):
the epicenter in Maine.
And so I lost many friends to HIV AIDS and people who I knew.
The only good thing that came out of that was activism and organizing and filling all
the gaps that were there because the government and state and even local officials would do
(28:22):
nothing.
So we had to do it.
And also at the same time, the Maine Lesbian Gay Political Alliance was formed in 84, 85
after the murder of Charlie Howard here in Bangor.
And so the movement started coalescing in Maine and that was exciting and good and was
(28:47):
a counterweight to the nightmare of HIV AIDS.
The other thing I wanted to say was for most of us, I think the emotional response to all
of this persecution and mistreatment was shame.
And so how do you deal with shame?
I mean, as human beings, shame is one of the most difficult emotions to deal with.
(29:11):
And so people do a lot to avoid shame.
And there are lots of great sociological research studies done on the lengths that people will
go to reduce shame like passing and covering and trying to reduce the effects of the stigmatized
(29:33):
identity that is so shameful.
And I was thinking of gay male culture, not all queer culture, but not associating with
men who behaved in feminine identified ways and stratifying that way, all of those things.
I think that's changed.
I really do.
(29:53):
I've seen progress because I think shame has been reduced about being queer somewhat.
It's still externally, the shame from a judgment from others.
Yeah, projected onto the individual.
That's one of the most powerful ways that minorities are separated from the majority
culture.
(30:14):
You bring up such a good point about that.
Even when you, okay, so if you step inside, and my perspective is obviously from a gay
man's perspective, but once you get into the gay community, it's not like we're all friends
and we're all hugging each other.
There are so many subsets of the gay community and then we're mean to each other in so many
ways.
(30:35):
Then it's about how old are you?
What do you look like?
What do you drive?
How much money do you have?
What do you do for work?
Who are you connected to?
And all of those things put you in different categories of gay men and what you have access
to and who you have access to, what parties you're invited to, who your friends are.
So I think that for a long time, it was a fight out and it was a fight in.
(30:56):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, you know, also in my social work world and clinical work, shame is always in
that treatment space.
It's always present.
And I do reflect often about, I did not, as Zorin has heard me talk about, I did not come
(31:20):
out until formally to my family, like, okay, this is, everyone knows now until 99, a year
almost to the date after Matt Shepard's death in Wyoming, had a very similar impact on me
(31:40):
that his murder plays very heavily in my coming out story.
And at almost 50 years old though, living the first 25 years of my life, like coming
up to my 50th year, half of my life was closeted.
And so as confident as I sometimes feel coming into my 50th year, that shame stuff catches
(32:09):
me when I least expect it.
And as even producing this podcast and part of what Zorin and I often have to do is go
back and listen to episodes and re-listen to episodes.
I have heard both of us say, I hate how I sound.
I hate listening to my own voice.
Yeah.
And for me, 95% of that is, I sound gay.
(32:34):
Five percent of that is, I'm a pretentious knucklehead sometimes.
That 95% of that is, am I sounding too gay?
That is like false shame.
Actually I think what's super interesting now is yes, we've seen a lot of shame reduction
(32:55):
in the public space, but obviously I'm still in high school and I was recently in middle
school.
And I think that those are two of the most shame-driven culture that one can witness
in modern America.
I would say likely that and the only right.
(33:20):
And what I've noticed is that yes, a lot of early high school and middle school, essentially
it's a social stratification through shame and it creates like social adherence and coherence
through shame.
But now as I'm about to enter my senior year and junior year, I noticed a market shift
(33:45):
in the way that the school's population views themselves and how they interact with the
school body.
People don't care about popularity, at least of what I've seen anecdotally, as much as
they used to.
And there's less hierarchy to the social setting in high school.
(34:10):
And I think that that allows for kids to express themselves far more openly, whereas previously
that was not really an opportunity presented or at least without backlash.
And even in middle school and still now, I do feel like a lot of the times I'm like,
(34:36):
wow, I'm acting far too gay right now.
And a lot of the outfits I'll wear, I'll be like, I'm not fitting in with a group.
And in a lot of the social situations that I find myself in, I am interacting with a
lot of just straight men that are just regular straight men.
And in those situations, I definitely tone down my personality a lot.
(34:59):
I dress and act in different ways.
And I remember in middle school, I used to, over one of the summers, I was only hanging
out with these two other boys and I would cry about how I'm not like them at all because
they were two straight jocular men and I'm me.
(35:20):
And although we've made a lot of progress, shame, I feel like, is a lot of very internal
experience and self-driven.
And we've talked about this concept of how we sometimes dull our own shine in order to
not bring attention, to fit in.
And sometimes we are our own worst critics or we're our first bullies.
(35:45):
That voice in our head that tells us, knock it off.
Can't you just walk like a normal teenage boy?
Can't you just dress like a normal teen?
Why can't you throw a football?
Those voices.
And I think to your point, Sorin, for many of us, especially many of us in the LGBTQ
community, our formative middle school and high school years continue to shape us in
(36:12):
not so great ways decades later.
Everything about, like you said, middle school and high school can be rooted in shame.
And I still, again, at almost 50 years old, walking into a public restroom, walking into
a locker room.
All of that feeling comes back the minute that door opens and closes.
(36:38):
And we have to work at it every single day.
We're works in progress, right?
Another theme of our podcast.
We are all works in progress.
And as confident as I know the four of us present professionally, that stuff is in the
back of our head all the time.
And I think for me, very important.
(37:00):
I think the most important thing for me is to make sure that I realize that that shame
was projected onto me.
That none of the things that come up as triggers or those indicators of internal shame, like
(37:20):
being hesitant to do something because of that, like you say, go into a locker room
or be with straight identified men comfortably.
It was projected onto me from a very young age.
As soon as I became aware, way before middle school, as soon as I became aware that I was
(37:42):
different, no one helped me struggle with that.
We were on our own, or at least I was.
No, 100%.
And other gay boys.
And the only way we could identify, because I connected with several gay boys in schools,
but we didn't talk about it.
(38:03):
We did certain things together, but not others.
I was in a theater group with one.
But with my straight friends, I didn't talk about that.
So we were trying to manage, I was trying to manage all of this shamed identity, all
on my own.
It's really amazing.
(38:24):
I mean, that brings a lot of resilience into it to survive, to survive something like that.
And the other thing I want to say about the shame is that being connected to the community
that I choose is shame reducing.
(38:44):
And just where I can be myself.
And we have to create that ourselves.
We really do.
But we're on our own with it.
And that's not fair.
Right.
It's not fair.
And then you talked about this too, sorry, Frank, we've talked about this too, about
how the humans we are today, for many of us, are scars, whether physical or emotional,
(39:18):
have made us who we are.
And as the four of us sitting around the fire table chatting and knowing, you know, I think
I have the privilege of knowing each of you individually better than you all know each
other collectively.
Your skills, your reputations, your accomplishments, your decency as humans is perhaps also due
(39:45):
in part to the bullshit that we all went through.
And because of that bullshit, that we are the incredible humans that we all are today.
Well, that's why I found my home in social work.
Yeah.
I know all the values and principles of social work practice and also working with folks
(40:07):
who have been marginalized.
Yeah.
That's right.
And helping them find their voice.
I have never been a bully and I feel fortunate because not everybody who's been bullied has
that passion.
Because I think what you were describing, Paul, about how people get categorized and
(40:29):
then get judged and bullied because of those differences.
That sometimes people who are bullied do bully.
And I'm grateful for that.
Doesn't mean I can't be judgmental, but...
Comes with the territory.
Yeah.
And I'm grateful for that gift, wherever I'm from.
I actually wanted to talk a little bit more about the in-group pressure that the queer
(40:57):
community presents and some of the difficulties of being immersed in gay culture and the social
pressure that that puts on you and judgment from other queer people.
Because I think that we see a lot of minorities, instead of pushing outward, they push inward
(41:22):
and put more pressure on their own in-group to succeed and fit in.
That's right.
Or better model what they think the people within the in-group should be.
So I haven't had a lot of that stress simply as a result of not interacting with a ton
of other queer youth.
(41:43):
But I have had friends who, especially older friends, interacting with more college queer
culture.
There's a lot of pressure to fit into a certain body type and a lot of judgment around appearance,
sexual promiscuity and a number of things such as that.
(42:04):
So I was curious to hear you guys' experience on if you've experienced pressure from other
queer members of the community and what difficulties you face around that.
And I think that that was a really good point, Paul.
I really like that.
So I'll answer that because I can answer that really quickly.
I think part of my journey and part of that shame that was put on me that I still to this
(42:33):
day work to push back or put into a different place, I didn't even when I, certainly not
in school days, but even when I publicly came out in the late 90s, I chose to not associate
a whole lot with other members of the LGBTQ plus community.
(42:54):
I still rejected that.
And some of that rejection was that pressure.
I didn't even feel like I always fit there either.
And so I have just been aware of the ageism within our community, of some of the stereotypes,
(43:15):
some of the stratification that you're talking about.
Was I this?
Was I that?
You know, and all of these subcultures within gay male culture and never felt like I fit
in there either.
So it's probably because of some of that pressure, whether external or internal, I pushed that
(43:37):
community away.
And it wasn't until I got into my thirties that I started embracing my LGBTQ plus friends.
That's where it starts to get good.
Yeah, it did.
It started to get really good in my thirties.
And I met my husband in my thirties and developed our life together in my thirties.
(43:59):
And so, yeah, I think that was where my shine really started to burst through.
And you know, there are lots of different coming out models, you know, stage models
and all of that stuff.
And part of one that I find interesting is that the models I find interesting are that
(44:22):
process that you're describing, that you come to terms with your own sexual identity or
sexual orientation, gender identity, and then you make forays outside yourself into the
communities.
And then at the end, you embrace it.
And what a process that is.
(44:44):
And I was thinking about how at every stage we have to reduce that shame and move forward.
And it's really tough, again, on your own.
And then you get the community support later when you've plugged in, you know, and people
will affirm you.
Like this conversation right today is very affirming and interesting.
(45:05):
And I know I'll bring a lot from it.
But until that happens, you know, we're on our own.
I keep going back to that, which is really when you think about the systems that we operate
in, it's a very effective technique to keep people isolated by themselves, not organized,
(45:31):
and feeling not just badly about oneself, but also badly about others who are like you.
That's right.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a very, very effective strategy.
And I was trying to think about hierarchies, too, you know, and, oh, you know, we as human
(45:51):
beings, we have to fight against not putting things into hierarchies.
But we also live in a capitalist society that is very stratified by income.
Look at how all the different ways income stratifies us.
100%.
Yeah.
We're headed to higher education and advanced degrees and all of those things.
(46:14):
That's all good.
And it's all wonderful for our development, but it also stratifies us.
Something that I'd like to loop back to is advocacy.
When you were talking about sort of the flashpoints in the early queer liberation movement that
resulted in organization and members of the community coming together, it was all very
(46:38):
poignant, negative events that resulted directly in change.
How can we make it so the movement is not reactive, but instead continuous?
I think that's a great point.
I want to point out that there are a lot of very proactive things that are happening because
(47:01):
of that foundation that was placed because of that reactivity.
We'll always have to be reactive, I think, after the fact because of acts of violence.
As long as there's movements going on, we have the anti-trans legislation across the
country.
It's absurd.
I understand.
I understand the utility of attacking such a small and already marginalized group, but
(47:28):
I would say the trans community is small enough that it has functionally no major bearing
on anything.
It's all money.
Literally just...
We were marginalized.
Gay, bi, queer folks were attacked in the exact same way.
Yeah.
30, 40 years.
Well, you saw this across your career, right?
(47:51):
In the 80s, it was AIDS and the stigma around promiscuous gay men.
In the 90s, it was leading into some of the marriage stuff.
Then all through the 2000s, you were on the front lines here in the state of Maine around
marriage equality.
Now, the big money donors, the talking points against trans youth, and whether it's sports,
(48:19):
use of restrooms, healthcare, that conversation drives big dollar donors into that party who
chooses to use those talking points.
The trans community was vulnerable.
It has an interesting history, the whole LGBT addition of transgender to LGB politics.
(48:53):
The were vulnerable, we weren't ready for that, right?
They are paying the price for that.
100%.
One quick thing I want to say is that talk about invisibility, where are women and lesbians
and people of color in this conversation?
Those folks are all marginalized and stratified within our communities too.
(49:18):
You can always follow the money, but trans folks were much more vulnerable, especially
trans youth.
Easy target.
Because you say they're a smaller minority than folks who are identified in other ways,
that's for sure.
But look at trans youth.
Their parents had to try to come in, some of them supportive, some of them not supportive,
(49:43):
to try to advocate for their children to get medical care.
That's where this anti-trans movement started was with healthcare, medical care.
I think I talked to you about this one day too, but to think about the infighting between
all the different groups internally, there is a segment of the LGB community that wants
(50:05):
the T removed.
That is shocking to me.
If you come for one, you come for all.
That is just another subset of what I was talking about, where once you get into the
community, it goes by body type, it goes by activity, it goes by what you do and how you
do it.
I think that the shame comes in not only externally there from people projecting it to us, but
(50:31):
then us projecting it to each other on the right-hand side out.
I think that it just rolls.
What I thought was interesting about shame, I read a lot of Brene Brown.
I try to stay in the arena, not always the easiest thing to do.
But what is interesting about the shame is, I talked about earlier, one of the things
(50:53):
that I worried about when I was in high school is going into the locker room and changing.
Then I was at the gym and I walked into the locker room and it just hits you like a wave,
but you don't see it coming.
Then you have to process back through something that you didn't think about for a while.
That's right.
I don't really go into locker rooms.
Yeah, right.
We've talked about it.
(51:14):
We were forced into it.
I was forced into it.
I don't know about you two, but we didn't have any choice.
You were forced through this agony of having to try to be part of something that you wanted
nothing to do with.
It was horrible.
It was horrible.
There was nothing wrong with us.
Right.
(51:34):
Again, that is the punchline for us today.
I was inadvertently thinking about one of the inspired insights I shared that other
people's perception of us is about them, not us, and there was nothing wrong with us.
No.
Yeah.
(51:55):
No.
Friends, I could sit here all day and continue this conversation.
I know we're at a point where we need to wrap up.
I want to do maybe some final thoughts, final points.
Paul, I'm going to put you on the spot to go first.
Okay.
I think that the conversation today enlightened, obviously, because there's four generations
(52:18):
of people here.
I think the message that I'm going to walk away with and be more cognizant of is that
we're all in it together.
Regardless of how we try to pull each other down or pull each other apart, we're only
going to succeed if we all do it together.
That's right.
Frank, final point, final thought.
I agree with Paul that we're all in this together.
(52:39):
We always have been.
It's so wonderful to come together and be part of this because we are.
This is doing it together.
I really appreciate that.
We can't leave out the political, social, cultural, economic factors that we've got
to touch on, but we could do an hour on those.
(52:59):
Well, hours.
I got you both on speed dial.
Final point, final thought.
Yeah, I think to echo these two lovely gentlemen's point, let's not throw people off the life
raft so it stays afloat.
Let's expand it.
(53:21):
I'm so pleased that we had the opportunity to bring you guys on because I think it did
diversify our perspectives and I really enjoyed hearing what you guys had to say.
I would just like to thank you two.
Yeah, and that's my final thought.
That's what I'm taking away.
In addition to what you all said is gratitude.
This conversation has been inspiring and enlightening and I just feel so thankful that you both
(53:46):
got up super early on a dead morning to share your time, but Soren and I, and who knows,
this might be a to be continued.
So thank you all.
This has been an episode of the Inspired Insights podcast.
I've been Chris McLaughlin.
I've been Soren Peterson.
We'll see you next time for another episode.
Thanks so much.
Bye.
Thank you.
(54:07):
The Inspired Insights podcast has been brought to you by Inspired Consulting Group, LLC.
Edited and produced by Amanda Seidel and Derek Herter.
Marketing support for the Inspired Insights podcast by Elizabeth Keenan.
Music by Derek Herter.
Please visit www.inspiredcg.com to learn more.
Copyright 2024.
(54:28):
All rights reserved.
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