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Globe and Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Queer folks can find common ground across generations
Pete Crighton is the author of The Vinyl Diaries: Sex, Deep Cuts, and My Soundtrack to Queer Joy. As we stare down another summer of Pride festivals across the country, I keep thinking about what it all means to me. It's not about parties, floats, drag queens or glitter (though those things are important). For me, Pride is all about community and friendship. When I turned 45, I had very few queer friends. For a man born in 1969, and who had been out of the closet for two decades, I was a bit of an anomaly in this regard. I came of age at a strange time: post-Stonewall gay liberation and smack dab in the middle of the HIV/AIDS crisis. While I should have benefited from the work of my elder-queers, the terror of that pandemic shut me down sexually and emotionally for many, many years. Gay male mentors felt completely lacking in my life when I was in my teens and 20s. Instead, I spent most of my 20s and 30s with people who were around my age. We shared the same perspectives and experiences. I didn't know what I was missing. It wasn't until my mid-40s when I finally recognized the benefits, and beauty, of intergenerational queer friendships. I'd suddenly found myself single for the first time in 15 years after two back-to-back monogamous relationships. When I entered the dating pool again, I was surprised at how many young men were interested in connecting with me. At first, I was full of misguided bravado: I was sure that I would be mentoring these guys, leaning on my experience and self-perceived wisdom. What I never imagined was how much each of those men, some decades younger, would teach me. While sex came easily, the conversations that followed were often tough. We chatted about HIV/AIDS, stigma in the LGBTQ+ community, ageism, money, fear of getting older and more. These younger men relished the opportunity to open up and talk about their deepest fears and most fervent desires with someone who had already walked a life path they might one day follow themselves. More LGBTQ+ Americans are looking to come to Canada since Donald Trump was elected And I learned so much from them, too. Their bravery and life choices – often coming out in their early teens and challenging institutions and systems they didn't agree with or fit into – inspired me. They taught me how to live with less fear. They also showed me that age doesn't matter in queer relationships and opened up my own ideas on how old an appropriate partner could be – I'm now in a partnership with a man 14 years my senior. These discussions also made me realize that people are hungry for real intimacy and connection. I broadened my scope of conversational partners and talked with a myriad of folks across generations and genders; older queer women who shared stories of communal housing on Toronto's Spadina Avenue in the seventies and early eighties; young trans folks making sense of their identities and their bodies; straight folks navigating careers and relationships in a city that makes home ownership a distant, and oftentimes unattainable, dream; an out gay Episcopalian priest in his 80s who was married and lived in New York most of his adult life. I learned so much from them. The upside of all these new connections and conversations is that it deepened my friendships with people my own age, too. I can't tell you when a person officially becomes a queer elder but all signs point to me being one. Is it 45? Fifty? The qualifications here are murky but I've definitely crossed that bridge. I'm no role model and don't aspire to be one, but what I can offer is an example of one possibility for a queer life. And that's something. Democracy's canary: What anti-LGBTQ politics tell us about our democratic future Not long ago I had a conversation with a similar aged friend who made me realize that we're the first generation of gay men (and queers more broadly) to age while out of the closet, to enjoy (for now) equal societal benefits (marriage, shared pensions, etc.) and not have a plague decimating our community. The world is a dark place right now, especially for queer and trans people, and I recognize the sense of hopelessness I feel in my heart right now. Still, we're the luckiest aging gay population yet. What we do with that privilege remains to be seen. One thing we can offer is friendship to our younger friends. The more we reach across generational boundaries, the more we learn from each other and understand the changing perspectives of the time we're living in. The more we find common ground.
CBC
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Pete Crighton dishes on music, sex and finding his soundtrack to queer joy
Social Sharing Growing up in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic left Pete Crighton with a huge fear of sex — and he threw himself into music as a way to cope with those anxieties. "Even before I was struggling to make sense of my queerness, music just was another world for me," said Crighton on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "It was just a play-land where I didn't have to worry about my peers. I didn't have to worry about what I said or looked like or acted like." It wasn't until his 40s that Crighton knew he needed to face his fears and figure out how to live his queer life to the fullest. In his memoir The Vinyl Diaries, he takes readers on this journey — pairing big moments with the music that shaped them. On Bookends, Crighton tells Roach about his later-in-life exploration of sex and why music was so formative to his queer experience. Mattea Roach: This memoir is structured in a way where you're tying events in your life, relationships that you're in, to the music that you were listening to at the time. When did you realize that this nonlinear structure of association was the way that you wanted to write about your life? Pete Crighton: It's a great question. I don't know that I really consciously thought about it and it really just happened organically. It's the way I move through the world. All my markers are through what records I've bought, what records I've listened to and how I remember my life is really through those moments. All my markers are through what records I've bought, what records I've listened to and how I remember my life is really through those moments. - Pete Crighton I kept really detailed journals and when I would go back and look at things that I wanted to write about, I would actually have written down like, we listened to this record. This song was the one that Preston really liked. So I had this record of these things. When I would think of something I wanted to write about, it would just be in this journal, all of these associations from different points in my life because of those record albums and those songs. You were in this long-term relationship through your entire 30s. In your memoir, you write about how it was a little bit stifling for you that a lot of your creative impulses and interests didn't have space to breathe in that relationship. Can you tell me a bit about how you realized that that was not working? With all due respect to the person in question, it was all about me. It wasn't about him, but it was a slow build for sure. I was really, really terrified of HIV and AIDS when I was a youngster. So just the idea of being married, for lack of a better word, in a very heteronormative kind of way, was my salvation. To me, that's how I'm going to survive. That's how I'm going to thrive. I didn't really get to date a lot of people. I didn't get a lot of connections with other people. So I didn't really know what worked for me and what would bounce. I was with this person for over 10 years and it probably wasn't a great match for either one of us, to be perfectly frank. But one of the things I point to in the book is that he hated my record collection. That should have been a sign right from the start that maybe we weren't compatible because it's such an important part of my life. I think it's just those things that build up over time. There was no real thing that I could point to to be like, this was the day that it became untenable for me. You talk about marriage and monogamy as this kind of salvation, was the word that you used. Can you talk more about that? Why did it feel so central that you'd be willing to sacrifice some of your major interests and freedom and creativity in order to access monogamy? I was just so terrified of sex because of the HIV/AIDS crisis. I was 16 years old when Rock Hudson died and that was this big moment in the mass culture's understanding of what HIV and AIDS was and it just shut me down from truly wanting to explore my queerness and particularly my sexuality. So it wasn't so much marriage that I was after, but that idea of a monogamous relationship where we knew no one else was having sex with anyone else. And that felt safe to me. That felt like a protection from the thing that I was most afraid of, which was HIV and AIDS through sexual contact. What's really fascinating about this book is you tell this story about getting to explore hook up culture in your 40s, which is a story that I've heard about from talking to guys your age who've had that experience, but not a story that I'd read about in a book before. Why did you want to dig into that part of your journey? In fairness, to see it. I hadn't read this story and I grew up thinking your mid 40s is sort of like you're done, like that's the end of your life and you might retire and then you might play some golf or something like that. And I had never really read about this midlife excellence or excitement. So that was a real part of it for me was like, "Let's just be honest about what this journey is." For so long I wasn't honest about my own desires and my own sexuality that it just felt like laying it out really openly felt like the right choice to do as an artist and a writer.
