Steven LaChance Blog

You know, they say every generation of LGBTQ+ people stands on the shoulders of the accomplishments of the one before it. That is true, at least in part. And yet lately, it can feel as if we have faltered some along the way.

I catch myself in those darker hours of the night, when sleep will not come, wondering if we did enough. If we accomplished enough. If we settled too easily for fitting in when we should have been demanding to be met on our own terms. These are real thoughts, and they are real questions.

I think about those who did not make it through those years. I wonder if they would be proud of the steps we took forward. Would they believe we honored the gift of longer life that we were given? Have we remembered them well enough? Have we memorialized them fully, honestly, and with the dignity they were denied in their final days?

So many of them were treated unfairly and cruelly when they were most vulnerable. That kind of suffering does not disappear just because time moves on. I believe there is a quiet survivor guilt that follows gay men of my generation. A feeling that we have something to live up to. Almost as if we need to justify why we are still here when they are not. That guilt is not small. It is not imagined. And it is not something that should be brushed aside or dismissed. It is part of our history and part of what we carry forward.

Maybe the measure was never perfection or completeness. Maybe it was presence. Maybe it was staying, loving, remembering, and refusing to let their names and lives fade into silence. Maybe the work was never meant to be finished by one generation alone. We carry what we can, when we can, and we pass it forward imperfectly, humanly, and still with care.

I sit here now feeling as if we are nearing the end of our years of influence, wondering if those who will stand on our shoulders will understand that we did our best for them. That we tried to leave the world a little more open, a little safer, even when we did not always know the right way forward. I hope they see the effort, even where we fell short. I hope they understand that love and survival were sometimes the only tools we had. And I hope, when they look back, they feel held rather than burdened by what we tried to give them.