LGBTQ Nation asked our elder readers to tell us how life has changed for LGBTQ+ people in the past decades, and we got a lot of responses! Here’s one of them.

Reader Lucy explains how the resources available to many LGBTQ+ youth in the U.S. have changed over her lifetime.

She said that she needed help after coming out in school in the 1980s, but that help wasn’t affirming of her identity. To the contrary, she soon realized that school counselors had “more interest in enforcing heteronormativity and upholding the status quo in general than in providing bona fide help.”

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Her father tried to get her help from a therapist, but he and the therapist gaslit her and made her think she was “confused” and “incapable of making wise choices” because she “couldn’t recognize my own feelings.”

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“This psychotherapeutic gaslighting was nothing but a secular form of conversion therapy as far as I’m concerned,” she told LGBTQ Nation.

“I was traumatized by coming of age and coming out in the 1980s,” she added, explaining that she lost friends in the process of coming out. “To this day, I am hesitant about seeking help because of my initial experience with therapy and am apprehensive when it comes to getting acquainted and trying to make friends.”

Lucy was closeted after high school and only came out after “ending an abusive relationship with a chemically dependent Vietnam veteran with PTSD.” They had a son together, who they coparented, and her father tried to use her son to get back into her life.

“I stopped speaking to him for more than a year until he backed off,” she said. “I’d like to think he may actually have learned something.”

Now things are different for LGBTQ+ youth, she said. Her half-sister, for example, cofounded a GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance or Gender-Sexuality Alliance) at her high school, and their father “acted proud and supportive of her.”

And it’s not just something that Lucy is seeing in her life. The first GSA was founded in 1988 in Massachusetts, but it took years for the idea to spread throughout the country. Today, Lambda Legal estimates that there are over 4,000 such associations in schools.

The help GSAs provide is real. Studies have shown that they help LGBTQ+ youth find “a sense of hope,” improve self-esteem, and help young people negotiate early relationships. Research has shown a relationship between the presence of a GSA at school and lower depression and psychological distress among LGBTQ+ youth.

Lucy said she doesn’t take any of this progress for granted. “I make it a point to support the work of both social service and advocacy organizations that help younger members of the community.”

And she has a message for younger LGBTQ+ people: “I particularly want young LGBTQ+ people to understand the importance of political involvement and community engagement so that the bad old days I just finished describing remain securely and irrevocably in the past.”

If you’re an LGBTQ+ elder and you want to share your story with us, please use this form.

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