I’m going to preface this by saying I’m still learning many things. We all have much to learn through our lives, but I haven’t even lived the 25 years that counts as a ‘generation.’ It’s likely that I don’t know much about many things people would consider important.
But something I consider important that I do, in fact, know a bit about, is equality. And I think sometimes, people think it’s okay to be uninformed on the various ‘isms’ that permeate our culture-such as racism, sexism, ableism, and so on-because the person who is uninformed comes from a different time.
Kaare Askildt wrote a story for last week’s paper, titled “Struggles with the gap between generations and living in a different world.” I found most of his statements in it funny and entertaining. I, too, have had to deal with discovering that items from my childhood, such as Walkmans and VCRs, are obsolete. A few of his statements, however, were ones I found a tad inaccurate.
At one point in the article, Askildt mentioned that “Closets were for clothes, not for ‘coming out’ of.” I’m wondering if he meant to imply that in his generation, people who were not heterosexual did not exist. As long as people have existed, there have been different sexualities, but it wasn’t until recent movements that people identifying with those sexualities were confident enough to ‘come out.’
Consider William Shakespeare, who wrote his sonnets to a male lover, while having to marry a woman in order to be seen as normal. The White Horse Inn in Oakland, California, is now the oldest gay bar in existence, after starting its operation in 1933. The inn’s website said that back then, homosexual people were seen as ‘barely human,’ and had to avoid touching or even talking sexually to other bar-goers at a place that was supposed to celebrate their existence. Before that, molly-houses were common gathering places for gay men in the 18th century, where one could dance and find a partner without fear of hatred.
Some of the greatest men and women in history were not heterosexual. Alexander the Great had a lover named Hephaestion, and their closeness was described by Aristotle as “one soul residing in two bodies.” Abraham Lincoln had many male lovers, and Alan Turig, the founder of the concept of artificial intelligence as well as a cryptanalyst who decoded messages during the Second World War, was chemically castrated to ‘cure’ his homosexuality.
And I’m not even going into the discrimination against bisexuality, asexuality, and so on. People of other sexualities definitely exist, but they were just far more hidden. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that they can finally be accepted as they are.
Another concept that eluded Askildt’s understanding was operations for transgender people. He stated that they did not exist in his generation (which is actually untrue, as Karl Meir Baer underwent a female-to-male sex change operation in 1906), and that people just “made do with how (they) were made.”
This is another statement that is a little inaccurate. As much as sex change operations for those whose genders do not match their biological sex were not common, there were still plenty of people who identified as a different gender. In the First Nations and Métis culture, there is a concept known as ‘two-spirited,’ which was used to describe someone who identified as both male and female. They were actually seen as blessed in their tribes because they were granted both the spirit of a woman and the spirit of a man.
People who were gender-neutral or people who identified as a third gender also existed, and were the subject of a study by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1922. The history of genders shows that even if transgender people did not often get the opportunity to surgically transition in the past, they still existed, and they definitely did not just make do.
I understand how Askildt felt in his article. I know it seems like concepts of gender and sexuality are difficult to understand now, and that some people who are confused by it may wish to go back to the ‘good old days.’ But I think what’s happening in society now is certainly a good thing, because it means the people who originally were hidden in our history are being revealed as present, no matter the generation. The world is changing for the better, and that’s a fact I want to embrace.
