Last week, The Advocate ran a piece about The Kids™️, aka Gen Z, who — as you may have heard from other, similar pieces that periodically run — are more openly queer and specifically more bisexual than previous generations. The Kids™️! They don’t want to be labeled! Their understanding of gender is too expansive to want to be hemmed in by binary labels like “straight” and “gay,” and to that I say, good for them.
But I’m also hesitant to get too excited about this news, or to assume it portends something big and exciting for people like me (and, likely, you) because, well, a couple of things. First and foremost, I’m old enough that I’ve lived through several “the kids are sexually fluid now, grandpa” cycles — indeed I’m old enough to remember that Sex and the City did an entire (very shitty) episode about that premise. So there’s a part of me that can’t help but wonder if “the kids are sexually fluid” is just one episode in the grand trend piece cycles (along with, of course, “the kids are doing sex wrong”).
And don’t get me wrong, it’s good that larger numbers of Gen Zers are openly identifying as queer and bi and all that, but at the same time —
I think there is this logical error that a lot of us make, acting as though The Kids™️ set the agenda, or that their more liberal (and occasionally libertine) attitudes towards life immediately override the worldviews of people older than them. The Kids™️ are more multiracial, more queer, more interested in fighting climate change, and yet… well, here we are, aren’t we. The Kids™️ can feel all sorts of ways, but that doesn’t mean that everyone from older generations has suddenly dropped dead, you know? The Kids™️ are but one subset of all the peoples who exist on the planet at any given time, and while they may be the wave of the future, they are not necessarily the dominant voice of the present.
Which matters for, you know, me, personally, as a forty-one year-old single bi woman. What does it mean for me personally that people twenty years younger than me are more sexually fluid (and more comfortable with sexual fluidity) if the people I’m more likely to date are folks who came of age when Ellen DeGeneres was just coming out? I feel some times like there’s an urge to throw older queer people in the trash and act like our plight doesn’t matter because the wave of the future is clearly pro-queer and yet… I mean, it does matter to me, you know, what my peers think of me. How my peers talk about me. It matters quite a bit, and it’s not necessarily changing just because The Kids™️ are more bi.
[I feel like I would be remiss here if I didn’t acknowledge that even as there are many bi Gen Zers there’s also a contingent of biphobic TERFy lesbian Gen Zers because statistics are about mass trends not about every individual and things are complicated.]
Anyway. Things are better for the bisexuals, certainly. And yet I still think we have work to do. It means a lot to me that more young people feel safe being openly queer, being openly bi — and now I just want to build a world that will reward that sense of safety, rather than slapping them in the face with the same creeping sense of disappointment that so many of us have felt and continue to feel, sigh.
PS My COVID test this morning came back with only the faintest hint of a line, I think I’m almost totally well. Hooray!
It's great they all feel safe enough to be out. But it's still depressing for us older folks trying to find other bisexuals on the dating apps...wish more older people would feel safe to come out.
I'm glad you're on the mend!