"The one who had to eat rats" and queer stories
Pace of Change, the Myth of Resilience, and Queer Legacy
Our stories only benefit subsequent generations when threads of continuity bind us. As LGBTQ+ people gain social acceptance and the queer experience changes, our stories will fade into irrelevance — a testament to progress. It’s a good thing; queer suffering never had any rationale, nor was it inevitable.
Growing up attracted to boys in the 1990s, I was convinced there were only a handful of people like me often featured as victims, as in the book Les Eygletieres (1965) (spoiler alert: the gay couple commits suicide) or the movie Philadelphia (1993). Millions of us had that experience simultaneously. Before the internet, before we were featured in films, before politicians, businessmen, and movie stars came out, our isolation was total. In a connected world, very few LGBTQ+ people have a similar experience today.
The irrelevance of past suffering is not new. When I asked my grandmother about the generational differences shortly before she died, she responded, “You will never have known hunger.” She sometimes spoke to me about rationing during the Paris Occupation, waiting in long lines for food, and feeling hungry—an experience she shared with her ancestors. My parents have a painting by Boutet de Monvel, which I always knew as the portrait of “the great-great-great grandmother who ate rats,” Louise Rondeleux, because she allegedly did during the Paris siege of 1870. Experiencing hunger or war is as alien to me as it was to my parents.
When my sons were babies, I used to stay up at night scourging online national registries to explore my ancestors' existence. Unconsciously, I knew there might be clues there. And there were.
What I took away was that it is a mistake to think that we are living through critical times or that our lives have much importance. All epochs feel pivotal. And whatever our accomplishments are, we will most likely be forgotten. Stories of queer lives won’t be of much use one day besides to demonstrate the magnitude of suffering that can result from hatred and discrimination.
The lessons from the previous generation of gay men charted a path that informed my queer journey, even as the world changed around us. What I learned from coming out at the turn of the 3rd millennium and the twenty-five years that ensued I got from the previous generation of gay men. Their experience - including the tragic life of my gay cousin Michel Benjamin - helped me design a queer life. Our experiences were still very similar. They mapped some of the way forward for me even though things were already changing.
I no longer feel that my experience coming out in the early 2000s has much relevance to younger LGBTQ+ people. Too many things are changing, and the pace of change is accelerating. And yet, it made for such a strange life. Being gay was, and still is, a lot of heartbreaks. So many gay people of my generation experienced long periods in the closet, sometimes well beyond their twenties, long-lasting family rejection, suicide attempts, rape or sexual harassment, building and rebuilding their lives from scratch, making terrible decisions and learning from them, and eventually patching a life together. All these lives are book-worthy and movie-worthy (at least on Bravo), yet they are so common that they are not book or movie material. There is little silver lining to them besides the unduly celebrated “LGBTQ+ resilience.”
Resilience, a concept once used to describe the physical endurance of materials, has become a badge of honor, especially in America, where overcoming victimization is often celebrated as character-building. Celebrating LGBTQ+ resilience sometimes feels like the equivalent of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis saying Black people learned beneficial skills as slaves. Maybe LGBTQ+ people would have been better off never needing to be resilient in the first place.
There is never any silver lining to queer suffering. And hopefully, there is not much for the next generations to learn from it. And yet, I feel the preservation of our stories matters. Documenting the LGBTQ+ experience in all its facets ensures that our history is remembered not as mythology but as a testament to what we had to endure — another unfortunate chapter in the human saga. May we ever learn from our mistakes.