people often ask what’s wrong with gen x, and, like, there are a lot of answers, but i think the AIDS epidemic and the specific people it wiped out is probably an under discussed contributor to the bomber with red dots diagram
Replies
💔 The personal stories I’ve heard I will never forget. Artists teachers gardeners beloved uncles and sons.
aug 27, 2025, 3:23 am • 18 0 • view
AIDS epidemic, growing up with the Reagan "Greed Is Good" mentality as kids and then having Clintonite Democrats ditch liberalism for "pragmatic" neo-liberalism by stealing/co-opting conservative ideas (which is why lefties sneer at "liberals" these days) Not every Gen Xer bought in, but a lot did.
aug 27, 2025, 11:18 am • 5 0 • view
I see @whiskeynachos.bsky.social quoted you. He put up four good reasons in a single post (click through mine to get to it including #3 which is yours). His fourth reason is expanded upon below... GenX caught a lot of abuse and neglect, both directly and indirectly: bsky.app/profile/kebe...
aug 27, 2025, 3:47 am • 5 0 • view
Don’t forget that we grew in the ‘70’s - heyday of serial killers. When I was in grade school there were 2 violent crimes in my small midwest city. On the news, every night, no one arrested.
aug 27, 2025, 6:18 am • 2 0 • view
I think it's more the fact that the Baby Boomers still don't realize we exist.
aug 27, 2025, 3:30 pm • 2 0 • view
That certainly was an issue - being latchkey kids who often only existed to our parents when they were angry at us about something. On a good day it was something we had done and not just because they were in a bad mood
aug 27, 2025, 10:19 pm • 0 0 • view
I think the steady reduction of socialization safe places & media has contributed. Cartoons (for kids) requiring educational values was a mistake. (And Saturday morn) They at least provided good v evil morality. We’ve gotten rid of arcades, and malls. The cartoons available are more adult centric.
aug 27, 2025, 10:12 am • 2 0 • view
Toys are pretty much restricted to adults or families with money, games are getting there as well. There’s just less development as children & parents/schools aren’t doing enough to help the kids develop socially. It varies from family to family, but in general we could be doing better
aug 27, 2025, 10:12 am • 2 0 • view
Grim but… yeah. Also lead poisoning.
aug 27, 2025, 9:18 am • 3 0 • view
The real ones died and the fakes have filled in. Easy enough with a ‘whatever’ generation.
aug 27, 2025, 3:54 am • 2 0 • view
Covid too. Or gravely disabled.
aug 27, 2025, 4:12 am • 3 0 • view
We’re living with the decimating of the neurodivergent (both known and unknown) and younger generations in particular right now is what meant by that.
aug 27, 2025, 4:16 am • 4 0 • view
Yes. We lost so many creative people as mentors as well as within our generation. It left us skewed to the right.
aug 27, 2025, 5:52 am • 4 0 • view
aaaaaaahh shit yeah
aug 27, 2025, 3:59 am • 0 0 • view
Goddamn as an elder GenXer who moved to San Francisco in 1988 and had their brain completely rewired, hell to the yes.
aug 27, 2025, 4:11 am • 9 1 • view
* [true 90s style was mock neck concert tees] I do think also that coming of age w intense fears about what’s “out there,” primed Gen X for “crime is coming for you!”
aug 27, 2025, 3:30 am • 13 0 • view
Gen X grew up during the most violent period in recent history. A lot of them never revised that baseline.
aug 27, 2025, 3:47 am • 13 0 • view
always say we don’t talk enough about the impact of the AIDS crisis used to think about it in terms of a return to puritanical attitudes about sex* and trad gender stuff, later about the ways it made us afraid to act in the world, but yes great point re the people we lost
aug 27, 2025, 3:26 am • 37 0 • view
I think in 15 years Gen Alpha will be asking “what’s wrong with millennials?” and so on. It’s mid-life crisis writ large.
aug 27, 2025, 8:52 am • 0 0 • view
reagan’s main streaming racism and rah-rah militarism and trickle down, no more pensions, 401k is your retirement, happened to #genx we all watched Roots on TV
aug 27, 2025, 11:41 am • 5 0 • view
I'm a SWF Boomer, but I lived in NYC during the '80s, and witnessed the terminal effects that rising housing costs, combined with HIV/AIDS had on arts and culture in the city. Struggling young creative people were an integral part of the community before then, and no longer are.
aug 27, 2025, 11:24 am • 5 0 • view
We lost so many. The survivors skewed to the timid ones who followed the rules. Not like the boomers, who were more likely to survive the Vietnam war if their families were rich.
aug 27, 2025, 5:28 pm • 2 0 • view
That's a depressing yet valid point. They got free love and flower power we got AIDS and mass deindustrialization. Gen X, the generation that likes to say "meh"
aug 27, 2025, 9:32 pm • 0 0 • view
God, I never fully thought this out. But yeah.
aug 27, 2025, 4:04 am • 1 0 • view
Most of those doing apartheid protests, Act-Up, Global Justice protests, etc. were Gen X. Battle for Seattle —this was Gen X. This is not to defend Gen X but to say that the ‘generational consciousness’ thing is not quite accurate and the truth is there has been an ongoing struggle since the 30s.
aug 27, 2025, 5:09 am • 20 1 • view
My theory is that my generation spent too much time on sex and drugs in the 90s and not enough on amassing political power, but I may be overweighting personal experience.
aug 27, 2025, 5:10 pm • 0 0 • view
Not enough of us did what I did in the 80s. Fight skinheads in the streets. They made a delightful thunk when their heads bounced off car hoods.
aug 28, 2025, 12:57 am • 0 0 • view
So many friends and acquaintances…
aug 27, 2025, 4:20 am • 2 0 • view
oh damn
aug 27, 2025, 4:45 am • 0 0 • view
Growing up under AIDS and the Cold War will give you a generation of checked-out sarcastic assholes with all the good people dead
aug 27, 2025, 4:47 am • 43 3 • view
Lost friends but would like to think that not all of the good ones were lost. That stated, sarcastic and unwilling to take prisoners on somebody's bullshit - totally there for that.
aug 28, 2025, 12:13 am • 1 0 • view
That and graduating into a shitty economy in the early 90s where jobs are scarce plus being told you won’t do as well as your parents. Signed, a Gen Xer who graduated in the early 90s. Who was one of the lucky ones to find a job.
aug 27, 2025, 5:56 pm • 2 0 • view
This is Fran Lebowitz’s argument, in part.
aug 27, 2025, 3:31 am • 6 0 • view
She's correct imo, considering she was friends with both the artists and critics in question youtu.be/WT3SdN0YVx8?...
aug 27, 2025, 5:16 am • 2 0 • view
It has been ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER for GenX. It has pretty much never been “ok.”
aug 27, 2025, 4:13 pm • 3 1 • view
Ding ...This might be true for subsequent generations as well, but we were first to encounter "Every single day is worse than the last your entire life" phenomenon, and had to bareback it with 1st-gen antidepressants often worse than nothing Honestly we don't cope "worse" than millennials or GenA.
aug 27, 2025, 4:26 pm • 5 0 • view
I know everyone else hates us but we have coped with shit for 50ish years now. Every fucking day. And it’s not getting better.
aug 27, 2025, 4:31 pm • 5 0 • view
...My experience has been everyone else doesn't really think of GenX at all. If you're older you get lumped as a Boomer, if you're younger you can pull off millennial which are marginally less revilled - for now.
aug 27, 2025, 4:34 pm • 3 0 • view
I remember one of the history/civics/world cultures/PoD teachers (I have forgotten which class I had him for) which I was in high school around 1990 saying that we were the first generation that could not expect to have a better life than our parents.
aug 27, 2025, 10:17 pm • 2 0 • view
They were right
aug 27, 2025, 10:37 pm • 1 0 • view
aug 27, 2025, 10:52 pm • 0 0 • view
Never thought of this but this might be one reason why there actually is a difference between Gen X's across the globe. The Gen X I am part of over here (Sweden) doesn't actually have all that in common with Gen X in America other than memories of music and cartoons.
aug 27, 2025, 3:37 am • 7 1 • view
I don't know. I think we're just bitter bitches. Going into old age still whining and crying which is why we voted for trump. To say that Gen X has been a HUGE disappointment is a reckless understatement
aug 27, 2025, 3:04 pm • 0 0 • view
Many gen X were too young. This was more a mid late baby boom epidemic at its earliest and deadliest phase. I got untested blood in the 1980s and won that dice roll. It’s still pretty vivid in my mind.
aug 27, 2025, 12:17 pm • 1 0 • view
Our boomer parents were handed everything by their parents. low cost college, affordable homes, affordable prices, good single income families and took it all away as they got older, then they turned around and called us lazy with no drive or ambition when everything was stacked against us.
aug 27, 2025, 4:59 am • 10 1 • view
Their parents literally gave them the moon and they threw it all away, as Spider Robinson put it
aug 27, 2025, 12:51 pm • 2 0 • view
They even admitted it out loud. There's a line in the Boomer apology film The Big Chill: "Nobody had a cushier berth than we did!"
aug 27, 2025, 5:16 am • 5 0 • view
Consider as well the cultural damage beyond the people who were lost. Queer visibility was rising steadily through the 70s and the 80s represented an explosion of popular culture experimentation. AIDS provided a cudgel for the conservative zeitgeist to latch on to and rally around. 🧵
aug 27, 2025, 12:27 pm • 4 0 • view
It was a rallying cry for the burgeoning evangelical mega church demographic. It provided fodder for the narrative of god’s punishment of a nation and rational to crusade and fight a holy culture war.
aug 27, 2025, 12:29 pm • 3 0 • view
I think AIDS and the Reagan admin response certainly shaped gen X, but at least partly because we saw the of failure of gov't to even face it, much less address it. Plus multiple 'once in a lifetime' economic crashes. You just get beaten down, man, learned helplessness and cynicism.
aug 28, 2025, 8:38 am • 0 0 • view
Its basically West Germany after the war. Look at all that color and artistry and poetry.
aug 27, 2025, 7:14 pm • 1 0 • view
And nazis still firmly ensconced in the political undergrowth.
aug 27, 2025, 8:44 pm • 0 0 • view
I have similar thoughts now that I'm slowly seeing more and more elderly queer couples about. It's kind of shocking how that basically didn't exist for so long.
aug 27, 2025, 3:43 am • 14 0 • view
Oh they existed- they always have. They just learned how to hide in plain sight.
aug 27, 2025, 5:03 am • 3 0 • view
Oh of course, but it seeing the gap close in terms of older couples is a shock. AIDS really did devastate a generation and seeing that slowly recede really brings it back.
aug 27, 2025, 5:06 am • 6 0 • view
See also: All the people with mental health issues in our family who had zero treatment.
aug 27, 2025, 4:29 pm • 2 0 • view
This ⬆️ cannot be emphasized enough. Mental health issues were something we were taught to deal with. Being "crazy" was less stigmatized than seeking treatment. Self medicating with alcohol and drugs was normalized. Taunting was part of life we were conditioned to accept/do.
aug 27, 2025, 5:33 pm • 4 0 • view
yeah, I had two uncles in my family--silent generation--die of AIDS :(
aug 27, 2025, 3:07 pm • 1 0 • view
Maybe, but the numbers don’t strongly support this as peculiar to Gen X. More AIDS deaths occurred among Boomers in the US.
aug 27, 2025, 5:01 am • 11 0 • view
Lots more Boomers than Xers in general though, so would have to be scaled on percent of generation as well.
aug 28, 2025, 12:22 am • 1 0 • view
We had boomer friends, siblings, bosses who died of AIDS. Seeing that as a young person fucks with you. It doesn’t have to be your exact age group
aug 27, 2025, 9:43 am • 4 0 • view
Yes. That includes my uncle and one of his partners (both boomers, both of whom I was close to as a kid). But the OP’s claim was about Gen Xers dying, and I am pointing out the numbers don’t line up with that claim.
aug 27, 2025, 11:24 am • 1 0 • view
I’m Gen x and I had friends my age die of AIDS. My anecdotal evidence doesn’t hold water with your numbers but my friends still died and I still mourn them
aug 27, 2025, 12:49 pm • 0 0 • view
Depending on what years you count for boomers, the younger end were in high school when the epidemic started.
aug 27, 2025, 8:10 am • 2 0 • view
That's Gen Jones. The youngest of them were graduating or just about to as it started.
aug 27, 2025, 8:41 am • 0 0 • view
aug 27, 2025, 4:49 am • 13 0 • view
One of the best musical talents of our lifetime. Gone far too soon.
aug 27, 2025, 6:08 am • 4 0 • view
I didn’t know people often asked that of me. But I often ask the same of them so fair
aug 27, 2025, 3:40 am • 0 0 • view
It’s a great point, but a large portion of Boomers were in their 20s and 30s when AIDS hit in the early 1980s. The devastation spread very quickly among Boomers in those years and was a full blown monster by 1985, before gen x even reached 21.
aug 27, 2025, 6:23 am • 2 0 • view
Thus Gen X was also robbed of its models of queerness. The point still stands.
aug 27, 2025, 7:38 am • 3 0 • view
Yes, that’s very true and if that’s the point, it’s a good one and it certainly stands (they said ‘if’ an epidemic wiped out some of the most colorful, best and brightest etc of millennials and boomers. There is no ‘if’ about boomers and AIDS.)
aug 27, 2025, 8:04 am • 1 0 • view
They didn’t say “if” at all.
aug 27, 2025, 9:02 am • 0 0 • view
3rd of their skeets down.
aug 27, 2025, 9:05 am • 1 0 • view
??? There are only two in the thread?
aug 27, 2025, 9:23 am • 0 0 • view
Huh. I’m seeing three (2nd one ends with ‘like’ and 3rd picks with ‘if an epidemic…). Oh well. Doesn’t matter. What you said earlier sums it up (I was only indulging in a history lesson). Gen x WAS robbed of its mentors, and gen x was therefore greatly affected by AIDS.
aug 27, 2025, 9:39 am • 3 0 • view
My best friend in college died of AIDS in 1991, my senior year. Gen X didn’t have some “great ole times” coming up.
aug 27, 2025, 6:09 am • 5 0 • view
Yes and forget the lead poisoning.
aug 27, 2025, 2:20 pm • 3 0 • view
I meant never forget. Lol
aug 27, 2025, 3:44 pm • 4 0 • view
Sorry, I keep forgetting it, due to the lead poisoning.
aug 27, 2025, 3:50 pm • 5 0 • view
Same. I drank from the garden hose and breathed too much leaded gas exhaust in the 80s.
aug 27, 2025, 3:55 pm • 2 0 • view
yeah. I read the lonely city and the gentrification of the mind recently and they’re both really good at describing the cultural impacts of the AIDS epidemic in NYC. I didn’t, and still struggle, to grasp the scale of what was lost
aug 27, 2025, 4:06 am • 15 0 • view
I just refuse entirely to engage in generational discourse. What do the demographics look like if you pick slightly different cutoffs for the named generations? We are all in this struggle together and we all have roles to play no matter when we were born or what experiences we’ve had thus far.
aug 27, 2025, 3:36 am • 10 0 • view
I think it’s relevant even if the cutoffs are arbitrary (many other sociodemographic categories are likewise very fuzzy categories) since the voting patterns clearly reflect some kind of correlation with generation, and the difference in life experiences do make for different politics
aug 27, 2025, 4:06 am • 9 0 • view
Millenials seem to be more liberal after graduating into the 2008 financial crisis and the slow recovery, as well as the war on terror. And an under appreciated factor in how they view Trump is how they grew up during the Clinton impeachment scandals when so many crowed about character over politics
aug 27, 2025, 4:08 am • 11 1 • view
Somewhere I read that which party is in power when you are in high school is hugely influential on how you vote later. So Reagan/Bush for 12 years… that’s a lot of high schoolers that grew up to become republicans later
aug 27, 2025, 7:04 am • 3 0 • view
It’s not so much the age cut offs and specific numbers as it is a group of people living their formative years during particular events. People who lived during rhe depression have certain characteristics that apply to the broader population of that time
aug 27, 2025, 9:51 am • 1 0 • view
Deep cut
aug 27, 2025, 3:20 am • 12 0 • view
Never thought of it this way. Also us media brain poisoned these people with the Ronald Reagan fluffing.
aug 27, 2025, 4:18 am • 3 0 • view
God yes! In terms of living under Trump and the accompanying ignoring/sabotaging of efforts to face the Climate Crisis, it truly is ALL REAGAN'S FAULT!
aug 27, 2025, 5:41 am • 1 0 • view
The first ones to die of AIDs were mostly boomers/Generation Jones. GenX mostly wasn't having sex in 1979. But, we lost elders. There is a huge hole in the generations.
aug 27, 2025, 12:30 pm • 1 0 • view
Interesting.
aug 27, 2025, 1:07 pm • 0 0 • view
We had so many sources of perspective warping dread that disentangling the effects of just one (which I agree is under accounted for) is probably missing the forest for the trees. Vietnam, stagflation, nuclear threat, AIDS, thalidomide, etc, layered on the stew of our parents faults and fears.
aug 27, 2025, 8:55 am • 5 0 • view
AIDS took a lot of younger Boomers too, which only reinforces this hypothesis I think
aug 27, 2025, 3:43 am • 4 0 • view
the majority of AIDS deaths were Boomers, even the *oldest* Boomers were only 42 when the peak began
aug 27, 2025, 4:13 am • 4 0 • view
We saw our older friends, siblings, uncles, bosses, musicians we loved die. It doesn’t matter that most of the death wasn’t our immediate age group
aug 27, 2025, 10:00 am • 1 0 • view
yes, some xers were close to the horror. how does that lead to gen x being the most Trumpy generation? their uncle died so they bought an extra VHS of Eddie Murphy Raw?
aug 27, 2025, 7:24 pm • 0 0 • view
Meh, if you care about what millenilol thinks that’s on u
aug 27, 2025, 7:57 am • 0 0 • view
Which “people” asks what’s wrong with GenX (which is absolutely nothing, BTW)?
aug 27, 2025, 9:29 am • 0 0 • view
was just discussing this exact thing w a friend. all the best people died already
aug 27, 2025, 5:04 am • 2 0 • view
Growing up gay in the 80s was not like now.
aug 27, 2025, 5:09 am • 5 0 • view
And the blatantly evil US & UK regime's that deliberately made it an epidemic b/c racism & homophobia. Also deliberately destroying urban neighborhoods with crack via IranContra. The 90s indie music scene was an exorcism & excorciation of the 80s.
aug 27, 2025, 2:07 pm • 6 0 • view
Mutually assured destruction didn't help.
aug 27, 2025, 12:06 pm • 2 0 • view
Not to mention the trauma of seeing that constant parade of sickness and death and the fear of being part of it - including things like the abandonment of the sick by friends and family.
aug 27, 2025, 3:25 am • 67 3 • view
How much of gen X’s overall attitude can be attributed to a general feeling that everyone dies alone, and both a terror of that and a desperate, grasping struggle to prevent it (that one can never admit to openly)?
aug 27, 2025, 3:34 am • 67 3 • view
How does that carry through to full on adopting Boomer positions on everything from commerce to culture?
aug 27, 2025, 5:41 pm • 0 0 • view
Ennui was our baseline.
aug 27, 2025, 3:37 am • 24 0 • view
My first CD was a THE THE album. Go ahead, listen to “Love is Stronger than Death” and experience what my 15yo brain was feeling
aug 27, 2025, 11:56 am • 7 0 • view
Look, a lot of GenX were straight people being shitty to queer people or anyone HIV positive. Most straight people thought only queers and Black people for it so they didn't care or think it would touch them.
aug 27, 2025, 5:19 am • 2 0 • view
Yup.
aug 27, 2025, 12:08 pm • 1 0 • view
No, no.. you're scratching something here. The AIDS epidemic was mishandled to hell and back. The bullshit that was spread during that time and the voices that were ultimately silenced bc they fell ill and died. It put y'all back a lot. Same with the latch key crap. But that same attitude toward
aug 27, 2025, 1:24 pm • 6 1 • view
The AIDS epidemic was used with Covid. Ppl are still disappearing bc they've become disabled bc if covid. And there are no nets to catch you. These struggles are connected.
aug 27, 2025, 1:24 pm • 5 0 • view
Crack and heroin and the rank xenophobia and racism accompanying it?
aug 27, 2025, 12:22 pm • 0 0 • view
Wasn't it a fighter
aug 27, 2025, 3:57 am • 0 0 • view
no
aug 27, 2025, 4:01 am • 1 0 • view
…. fuuuuuuuck
aug 27, 2025, 3:32 am • 1 0 • view
I don't get any of this. When I was 22 or so the novel Gen X came out and it was about people in their 30s, who were late boomers. If you want to say people in their 20s in the 90s are a cohort fine, but I have no idea what ideas define this group. It's nonsense. We loved Nirvana, we are not bad
aug 27, 2025, 4:46 am • 8 0 • view
Much conceptual work that people use in the 2000s was DONE in the 70s, 80s, 90s (or earlier). Protest, ongoing struggles for women/gender studies, ethnic studies, better history—pushback on textbooks, killing of bilingual ed, crackdowns on science, etc. People kept fighting and it paid off.
aug 27, 2025, 5:03 am • 3 0 • view
I don’t think generations are at all as cut and dry as people pretend. But it was striking—and absolutely DELIGHTFUL—to see the things that we were afflicted with like horrendous open racism, homophobia, sexual harassment, child abuse—be openly objected to so intensely by later generations.
aug 27, 2025, 5:00 am • 8 1 • view
oh of course you're right. as bad as it's getting--it's been worse
aug 27, 2025, 5:26 am • 2 0 • view
It’s been worse but the way it’s. going I think will lead to something worse than what we had.
aug 27, 2025, 5:32 am • 2 0 • view
It is set on 1990, and based on Douglas Coupland's own generation, Jones. He was born in 1961, and the characters are the same age as he and his peers. He specifically states it is about those Gen Joneses who became the mainstream of X, and AT THE TIME he wrote it, they were considered X.
aug 27, 2025, 8:50 am • 4 0 • view
In 1982, those at the end of Gen Jones were considered part of Generation X. It has been noted several times that Gen Jones had gay more cultural markers and similarities in common with X than with the first half of the Boomers, some of whom are their parents.
aug 27, 2025, 8:52 am • 1 0 • view
*way more cultural markers
aug 27, 2025, 6:40 pm • 0 0 • view
*1980-82
aug 27, 2025, 8:59 am • 0 0 • view
(I am weirdly fascinated with both Jones and X, and to a lesser degree with Boomers)
aug 27, 2025, 8:54 am • 0 0 • view
I genuinely think about this a lot, especially as a one-two punch with the so-called War on Drugs, and in a comparatively small generation
aug 27, 2025, 4:48 am • 5 0 • view
This, plus the casualties of the Drug War policies.
aug 27, 2025, 3:22 am • 47 1 • view
But it hit a lot of the latter 1/2 of boomers. People my age. Don’t think this is particular to gen x. I was 24 when Reagan was elected. Totally agree that it wiped out a generation+ of amazingly brave and creative folks.
aug 27, 2025, 5:04 am • 6 0 • view
Boomers would have been the generation that GenX looked up to, though. Just like all the Boomer cultural icons being Silent Generation.
aug 27, 2025, 5:17 am • 4 0 • view
No, it was McRib insecurity.
aug 27, 2025, 3:27 am • 2 0 • view
I’d return home from school in the 80s and find friends had…just disappeared. Pre–internet, no email, so you’d reconnect over the summer at jobs. Families would barely acknowledge that Scott or Coleman or Tim had been sick, or even died. No obituaries in staid, conservative, suburbia.
aug 27, 2025, 12:28 pm • 5 0 • view
This is spot on
aug 27, 2025, 5:16 am • 2 0 • view
Nope. AIDS was rampant when Gen X were teenagers, it killed mostly boomers. Gen X grew up with safe sex. So, you are wrong - but also more right than you realised, because you explained boomers
aug 27, 2025, 12:17 pm • 0 0 • view
Was talking with one of my students today, who is 4 years older than me (so, 60 to my 56 y i k e s) and we were discussing that - his line was "i went to a funeral every month for years running" and going thru what years our friends were diagnosed, what years they died, who was still left.
aug 27, 2025, 3:22 am • 158 2 • view
Beyond 💔💔💔
aug 27, 2025, 11:55 am • 0 0 • view
Yeah, been there.
aug 27, 2025, 3:32 am • 18 0 • view
<3 <3 <3
aug 27, 2025, 3:52 am • 5 0 • view
As a tail end generation Xer, only a coworker died from AIDS in the early 2000s; now I have an older millennial friend HIV positive that have the disease under control for 10 years and counting. The difference done by antiretroviral drugs is miraculous.
aug 27, 2025, 3:41 am • 8 0 • view
my closest friend from high school got diagnosed in 1996, at which point it still seemed like a certain death sentence, and he's still with us because of those. i needed post-exposure prophylaxis after a potential exposure in 2007 and even the idea that such a thing was possible was amazing.
aug 27, 2025, 3:51 am • 7 0 • view
I dunno what I would be like now if I hadn’t seen friends drop on the way through college and for a good while after. Don’t think I have diagnosable PTSD but I gotta figure it’s something like it. Just a vague sense of futility? Maybe?
aug 27, 2025, 3:35 am • 2 0 • view
We all have complex PTSD from using the internet at all. Generational trauma often starts it off, but I was maybe 5 or 6 when I learned we were a targeted family, and by then I already had full blown PTSD
aug 27, 2025, 11:51 am • 0 0 • view
I feel stupid that this hadn't occurred to me... For the people missing the reference: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivo...
aug 27, 2025, 4:37 am • 7 1 • view
There's an added element here since the man who created it, Abraham Wald, was a brilliant mathematician and Austro-Hungarian Jew only saved because his mentors brought him to the US just before the Second World War - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham.... A lot of his work went underheralded as a result.
aug 27, 2025, 12:19 pm • 0 0 • view
The sad irony is, though, that he and his wife died in a plane crash not that long after the War.
aug 27, 2025, 12:19 pm • 0 0 • view
I have seen this reference image before, and never understood it. Having pored over the Wikipedia entry, I feel as though I understand it pretty well. It's kinda mind-blowing.
aug 27, 2025, 5:39 am • 1 0 • view
Also highly recommend the podcast "Blindspot," hosted and co-created by Kai Wright: about how AIDS affected Black communities snd communities of color, and the unsung heroes who fought...
aug 27, 2025, 9:59 am • 0 0 • view
Predating the largely white entertainment class that talked about AIDS and made art about it. I'm 67 and lived in NYC in the 80s, and worked in theater. People just dropped. People vanished. Terror reigned. But...
aug 27, 2025, 9:59 am • 2 0 • view
Until I listened to "Blindspot," I didn't realize how white the prevailing AIDS narrative continues to be. And...I think that ignorance continues to this day with the Sars-Cov2 pandemic.
aug 27, 2025, 9:59 am • 5 0 • view
...the newest virus disproportionately attacks what Steven Thrasher calls "The Viral Underclass," and that includes poor people, people of color, and queer people, especially trans folk. And as I watch people drop and others pretend the virus doesn't exist, I wonder what we have learned. Cruelty?
aug 27, 2025, 9:59 am • 3 0 • view
Just imagine what the *current* virus is doing to the creative community
aug 27, 2025, 9:32 am • 1 0 • view
Iike, decimate your generation’s queer population and imagine what your generation looks like
aug 27, 2025, 3:41 am • 467 13 • view
fighting demons over here to not make a "we're working on it 🫡" dark joke
aug 27, 2025, 4:00 pm • 1 0 • view
I remember reading the late Kevin Conroy's autobiographical short story (Finding Batman). Beyond the trauma of seeing nearly an entire generation of your friends disappear, I didn't appreciate before then the loneliness and isolation one would feel. And how withdrawn one might become in response.
aug 27, 2025, 5:05 am • 14 0 • view
As a millennial I can't speak to going to funerals every day to mourn a loved one that you cared about. I have to imagine that going from a thriving community to sudden deafening silence would have done a number on anyone still left.
aug 27, 2025, 5:10 am • 8 0 • view
vast majority of Xers were kids during the AIDS crisis.
aug 27, 2025, 7:45 am • 5 0 • view
We came of age into it, without our elders.
aug 29, 2025, 5:15 pm • 0 0 • view
And it wasn’t particularly well explained to us (or well understood, tbh) and caused a lot of fear and weirdness around sex for everyone in the early days
aug 27, 2025, 11:45 am • 14 0 • view
I had public school teachers telling us AIDS was spread through saliva and that having sex was like playing russian roulette. everyone in middle school “knew someone” who has been intentionally infected with AIDs and died…it was an insane time. d
aug 27, 2025, 12:47 pm • 0 0 • view
It also took out a lot of the great people from the silent gen and boomers. Rock Hudson, for example. My dad had a friend die from AIDS in the 90s and he was an older Boomer. That's a big part of why what was left of those demographics voted like garbage for so long.
aug 27, 2025, 4:16 am • 33 0 • view
The weird thing from a UK perspective is that while Section 28 existed I do not think Th*tch*r (an evil person) was oppositionally homophonic because there were too many gay/bi Tory men in her milieu (mostly closeted) to discount.
aug 27, 2025, 3:57 am • 65 0 • view
Ronald Reagan, when first elected Governor of California, appointed a bunch of openly gay people to his administration. The rest of the Republican Party in CA had a hissy fit, and since Reagan was a political newbie, he didn't yet have the clout to force them into line, and had to fire them all.
aug 28, 2025, 4:39 am • 0 0 • view
He and Nancy had gotten along swimmingly with tons of Queer folks in their Hollywood days, he was best friends with Rock Hudson. He was not personally homophobic. Didn't stop him from firing his gay staffers when pushed to do so. Or letting his administration ignore the AIDS crisis for years.
aug 28, 2025, 4:39 am • 0 0 • view
This is what we mean by "Structural" homophobia, racism, and sexism. Even powerful people don't need to be personally racist, or sexist, or whatever, to be essentially forced by the carrots and sticks of societal structures around them into doing stuff that has racist/sexist/etc. consequences.
aug 28, 2025, 4:39 am • 0 0 • view
Part of being homophobic seems to be having a terrible gaydar
aug 27, 2025, 9:54 am • 2 0 • view
I’m not sure how the 80s UK “don’t die of ignorance” PSAs for AIDS compare to what was going on in the US at that time. placingthepublic.lshtm.ac.uk/2018/05/20/r...
aug 27, 2025, 4:09 am • 1 0 • view
I just remember the huge AIDS grave stone advert. Scared the shit out of me, and I didn't even know what sex was at that point. Still scares the shit out of me.
aug 27, 2025, 6:52 am • 3 0 • view
What I remember was awful sex education in schools, and TV adverts saying 'if you have sex you'll die' alongside a culture that wasn't exactly tolerant of anything queer, but at the same time having prominent and clearly queer entertainers. Not the best of times.
aug 27, 2025, 9:44 am • 0 0 • view
*homophobic damnit Like, nobody really thinks of Andrew Lloyd Webber as a maker of deeply heterosexual musicals, right? They’re queer along the way.
aug 27, 2025, 4:05 am • 47 0 • view
Starlight Express is an entirely heterosexual musical, said noone.
aug 27, 2025, 4:17 am • 33 0 • view
If autism was super gay.
aug 27, 2025, 3:14 pm • 0 0 • view
Ok but Bad Cinderella?
aug 27, 2025, 4:39 am • 3 0 • view
We don't talk about Bad Cinderella.
aug 27, 2025, 5:14 am • 10 0 • view
There's a lot of straight imagery in Evita.
aug 27, 2025, 9:22 am • 2 0 • view
Then again that was in the 70s, pre-Thatcher.
aug 27, 2025, 9:23 am • 2 0 • view
HoHoHo! HOMOPHONIA'S GOT TO GO
aug 27, 2025, 7:03 am • 0 0 • view
Normon Tebbit was institutionally homophobic and couldn't even bring himself to think he was homophobic. There was enough people in the cabinet to drive that unfortunately.
aug 27, 2025, 6:51 am • 0 0 • view
My Tory MP as a child was a nominally closeted gay man who was a close confidant/ally of hers. (TW: abuse - he also was widely known to abuse children in local care homes. The police/MI5 knew all about it and did nothing, except note it as a possible security risk.)
aug 27, 2025, 5:37 am • 2 0 • view
This entirely fits, alas. I know under-publicised stuff about Savile in similar ways.
aug 27, 2025, 5:43 am • 1 0 • view
Speaking of people who were personal friends of Thatcher...
aug 27, 2025, 7:27 am • 0 0 • view
Matthew Parris was out with her. Norman Tebbit said he knew there were gay Tory MPs.
aug 27, 2025, 9:21 am • 0 0 • view
AIDS took out a chunk of Boomers, but your point remains.
aug 27, 2025, 3:54 am • 10 0 • view
Boomers that remain aren’t that progressive.
aug 27, 2025, 3:59 am • 1 0 • view
then why is every photo & video i see of protests chockful of people in their 60s, 70s & older? also, large number of white gen xers voted for yamtits.
aug 28, 2025, 4:16 am • 0 0 • view
Um, probably better not to make that generalization. Especially if you're basing it on FB or something. A group of Boomer dykes has been working with an African lesbian group for over a decade. If you were progressive back in the day, odds on, you still are.
aug 27, 2025, 4:05 am • 4 0 • view
True, but at a much later point in generational identity formation. Arguably it's not just about the lost LGBT people but the cultural tone they would have helped set
aug 27, 2025, 12:19 pm • 1 0 • view
there were a lot more boomers
aug 27, 2025, 3:58 am • 16 0 • view
Right, I forget what a demographic bulge we were. Goat in a boa.
aug 27, 2025, 3:59 am • 10 0 • view
Tbf they gave your bracket five extra years that, IMHO, were misplaced.
aug 27, 2025, 5:05 am • 0 0 • view
It's literally in the name lol
aug 27, 2025, 3:36 pm • 1 0 • view
Fran Leibowitz on AIDS and the death of connoisseurship and criticism: youtu.be/WT3SdN0YVx8?...
aug 27, 2025, 5:09 am • 8 0 • view
Probably not a contributing factor but heroin wiped out the bulk of X’s musical talent too.
aug 27, 2025, 1:06 pm • 6 0 • view
if a fatal epidemic wiped out some of the most colorful and creative and best and brightest of the millennials or the boomers, what would they look like?
aug 27, 2025, 3:22 am • 1,077 66 • view
The staff of the Daily Wire
aug 27, 2025, 3:23 am • 255 3 • view
Future top NYT politics reporters assigned to Trump! After being hired by columnists like Maureen Dowd to be her assistants Failing upward and "meritocracy" promoted by NYT editors to write that Trump's speeches are comparable to James Joyce
aug 27, 2025, 3:41 am • 65 12 • view
Dowd had a college boy assistant when I met her at the 2000 Democratic convention in LA. Everyone called him “Maureen’s b*tch.”
aug 27, 2025, 4:15 am • 31 0 • view
aug 27, 2025, 12:08 pm • 1 0 • view
i mean it's not to the same degree but this is what the oxy wave did to millennials, like all of my friends died before 25
aug 27, 2025, 7:45 am • 2 0 • view
Gay boomers weren’t immune from AIDS. The youngest were in their late teens and early 20’s when AIDs was starting to be identified in the U.S. Freddie Mercury was a boomer. 💔
aug 27, 2025, 10:01 am • 9 0 • view
💔 "Freddie Mercury was a boomer."
aug 27, 2025, 12:32 pm • 3 0 • view
I always thought of it as mainly taking boomers but I guess older Xers too. For us younger Xers you just got the chance to consider every sexual encounter a potential death sentence.
aug 27, 2025, 4:00 am • 33 0 • view
Took the eccentric aunties and uncles who might otherwise have survived various art projects and assorted addictions
aug 27, 2025, 4:15 am • 23 0 • view
Wouldn’t it have also hit the boomers? Though I suppose not in their emergent years, mostly.
aug 27, 2025, 4:40 am • 3 0 • view
There are more of them to spare though
aug 27, 2025, 5:45 am • 2 0 • view
it would look like the AIDS epidemic, since the majority of AIDS deaths were among Boomers the *oldest* Boomer was still under 50 when the deaths started to come down (1996)
aug 27, 2025, 4:16 am • 6 0 • view
A fatal epidemic did take out some of the most creative boomers as that was the generation far more impacted by AIDS.
aug 27, 2025, 12:51 pm • 2 0 • view
as one of them.... AIDS was the defining event of childhood / adolescence
aug 27, 2025, 3:35 am • 25 1 • view
just as a kid in the culture - it was ubiquitous, not like people I knew were dying from it.
aug 27, 2025, 3:40 am • 17 1 • view
It was horrific.
aug 27, 2025, 10:11 am • 1 0 • view
Most of those wiped out by the aids epidemic were boomers, though
aug 27, 2025, 3:38 am • 15 0 • view
True but how many of your cultural influencers in your developmental years are around that same age? Maybe it's a little different now thanks to the internet, but that age gap tends to be around a decade at least, no?
aug 27, 2025, 12:51 pm • 1 0 • view
For sure
aug 27, 2025, 1:44 pm • 1 0 • view
Yeah that's a slightly different version of this chart, with similar results
aug 27, 2025, 3:58 am • 18 0 • view
What? Did you miss the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s? So many bright lights were taken from us in those days.
aug 27, 2025, 6:40 pm • 0 0 • view
Like Fran Lebowitz said: everyone everybody wanted to fuck died.
aug 27, 2025, 4:32 am • 7 1 • view
It did take out a lot of boomers, and there was a distinct shift in the character of that generation between the 1970s and the 1990s.
aug 27, 2025, 7:55 am • 1 0 • view
It also was this weird companion to the existential terror of nuclear war; lets say the maniacs in DC and Moscow don't pull the trigger; you still are going to die, at least if you have sex.
aug 28, 2025, 3:21 am • 4 0 • view
Wasn't great!
aug 28, 2025, 3:24 am • 1 0 • view
Don't like that it's back! We had a 10 or 15 year run after the Berlin Wall fell where that, like the ozone hole, seemed "safely behind us."
aug 28, 2025, 3:27 am • 3 0 • view
Not a fan, no!
aug 28, 2025, 3:28 am • 1 0 • view
this made me think of a post by heidi moore: xcancel.com/moorehn/stat...
aug 27, 2025, 3:34 am • 0 0 • view
It did wipe out the boomers, though. The vast majority of people dying of AIDS in the '80s were boomers.
aug 27, 2025, 1:48 pm • 3 0 • view
Interesting idea.
aug 27, 2025, 3:23 am • 1 0 • view
Your theory is just a riff on the 80s perspective that AIDS was killing the *right* people. Survivors were genetically lucky. They were also highly traumatized, losing their close friends while society initially treated the disease as a moral failing.
aug 27, 2025, 12:55 pm • 2 0 • view
How about the ‘best and brightest’ members of ACTUP who actually brought us the meds that saved million from death?
aug 27, 2025, 4:17 am • 11 0 • view
Think of what they could have gotten up to had they not been forced by circumstances to fight for those meds.
aug 27, 2025, 4:46 am • 14 0 • view
The dead or the survivors?
aug 27, 2025, 2:46 pm • 1 0 • view
Ask us or Zoomers in about 20-30 years, tbh.
aug 27, 2025, 3:39 am • 5 0 • view
not sure the AIDs epidemic didn't actually hit the boomers that way, as opposed X...we knew about condoms in high school and the cocktail hit in our mid-20s.
aug 27, 2025, 2:57 pm • 1 0 • view
Depends where you lived; growing up in Pennsylvania in the 80s and early 90s condoms were definitely not anything that was taught even in my public school. AIDS was but only as "here's why sex is dangerous and only for marriage" ways.
aug 27, 2025, 10:03 pm • 1 0 • view
I had a condom demo with a banana in required health class freshman year at Penn State. (88). But yeah high schools were more variable.
aug 27, 2025, 10:13 pm • 0 0 • view
Millions of Gen X were children during the AIDS epidemic
aug 27, 2025, 12:34 pm • 0 0 • view
The oldest Gen X were 17 when the first reports were made and the majority were teenagers before the 80s were over so easily affected.
aug 27, 2025, 10:00 pm • 1 0 • view
Makes me think about the frequency with which Chris Hayes (whose television news show has ~1 million daily viewers) reposts prominent transgender women on this platform.
aug 27, 2025, 3:57 am • 4 0 • view
But that fatal epidemic *did* wipe out some of the best and brightest Boomers. I know too many queer 70-something men who recall waves of friends, lovers, acquaintances born in the Baby Boom era dying brutally from AIDS. But I guess it affects queer people moreso than the Boomer gen as a whole.
aug 27, 2025, 11:22 am • 19 0 • view
Yup. I buried most of my friends from it throughout the 80s (all of us the youngest Boomers). It hit the oldest Xers, who were graduating HS in the 80s. What happened to them more was a lot of fear and "Just say No" psych ops, etc. - to all Xers. (Reagan, etc)
aug 27, 2025, 11:56 am • 12 0 • view
Thank you for sharing this 😥
aug 27, 2025, 1:24 pm • 2 0 • view
It's a miracle that the rest of us never caught it (we were all young and full of cum around NYC from like 16 on, and condoms/safer sex didn't start to become a thing til 83-84 or after) A lot of us have tried to make sure our lives have meaning since then.
aug 27, 2025, 2:53 pm • 3 0 • view
Generation x is quite a small generation. It is smaller than both the boomers and millennials.
aug 27, 2025, 11:48 am • 3 0 • view
I remember a gay man of that generation telling me he stopped going to the gym for a long time because he saw Kaposi sarcoma on a friend at the locker room and knew the guy was going to die before he knew
aug 27, 2025, 3:29 am • 100 0 • view
That's so sad.
aug 28, 2025, 2:25 am • 3 0 • view
Fucked me up!
aug 28, 2025, 3:19 am • 2 0 • view
I mean, it did also hit the boomers, and that's why so many of the remaining boomers are Like That.
aug 27, 2025, 5:58 am • 7 0 • view
Man. A point. And an example of how selection effects work that’s going to haunt me.
aug 27, 2025, 3:46 am • 5 0 • view
I get where you're coming from, but how much cultural influence did those people really have when they were still largely in the closet? Stonewall opened a 20-year window, AIDS closed it part of the way. PrEP pushed it open again, now Republicans are pushing it closed again.
aug 27, 2025, 3:32 am • 10 0 • view
They were out and dying when I was in college.
aug 27, 2025, 3:34 am • 5 0 • view
That is my point. We felt their absence more acutely because gay people our age +/- 10 were out in a way that previous generations had not been. Obviously, closeted gay people had cultural influence before, but I don't think the AIDS cultural fallout would have been as profound 20-30 years before.
aug 27, 2025, 3:43 am • 2 0 • view
Yeah. When I was in college was also when my father came out. Before that he'd just leave hints like saying Haight Ashbury was a gay neighborhood before it was a hippie hangout.
aug 27, 2025, 3:50 am • 2 0 • view
The gay community and the people close to them might have been even more devastated, to lose so many who never got a chance to live freely, just as that door was finally starting to inch open. But I do not think the rest of us would not have felt their absence as acutely.
aug 27, 2025, 3:47 am • 1 0 • view
I'm not so sure that republicans are gonna push it closed. it's too late now
aug 27, 2025, 4:38 am • 2 0 • view
They're certainly trying, & things are going to get worse before they get better. But I think it's unlikely that they'll be able to take us back to where we were in the 1980s or before.
aug 27, 2025, 4:42 am • 0 0 • view
you grew up a punk and loved art, you already know the answer to this question
aug 27, 2025, 3:34 am • 43 0 • view
People are clearly misunderstanding my question, which was in response to "what if this happened to the Boomers?" I'm not suggesting gay people born between 1960-ish to 1985-ish didn't have a lot of influence, but rather the Boomers, who could get arrested for being gay.
aug 27, 2025, 4:03 am • 2 0 • view
Philosophically I think it's less a matter of how influential they were then, and how influential they'd be now if they'd survived to be generational elder queers with the decades of life experience they were unfairly robbed of.
aug 27, 2025, 3:40 am • 26 1 • view
as a fifty-something, Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz and Arthur Russell and Freddie Mercury and Ricky Wilson and Alvin Ailey and Arnie Zane... lotta influence. and they didn't have to be out of the closet to have influence
aug 27, 2025, 3:45 am • 24 0 • view
I've read pieces that made the case that Kurt Cobain may have been trans and/or nonbinary. Culture still absolutely influenced.
aug 27, 2025, 4:00 am • 3 0 • view
"best and brightest of the millennials or the boomers, what would they look like?" Kurt Cobain was neither a boomer nor a millennial.
aug 27, 2025, 4:32 am • 0 0 • view
that's not really the part I was replying to, and I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here
aug 27, 2025, 4:52 am • 0 0 • view
You are missing my point. I'm saying our gay contemporaries, like all the people you just named, had more influence than the generation of gay people before them, who founded the Mattachine Society & the Sisters of Bilitis, which gave them more influence than the generation before.
aug 27, 2025, 3:53 am • 3 0 • view
what you're saying is that the gay boomers did not have as much influence because they were in the closet? sorry I did indeed miss that point
aug 27, 2025, 4:02 am • 1 0 • view
OTOH, still, if the John Cages and Merce Cunninghams and Allen Ginsbergs and William S. Burroughs (who I am not saying were good people) and... had largely died in their 30s it might have made a big difference to that generation
aug 27, 2025, 4:04 am • 2 0 • view
Of course it would, as would losing the gay people who came of age during the 1920s-30s, when the door opened a crack, only to be slammed shut by the Hays Code. But I don't think it would have been as deeply formative an experience for their straight contemporaries as it was for us.
aug 27, 2025, 4:22 am • 1 0 • view
I definitely could have been clearer about how that was a response to "how would a loss like that affected the Boomers relative to how it affected Gen X."
aug 27, 2025, 4:07 am • 3 0 • view
I get the point you're making and also think the original point stands--if the Boomers or Millennials had lost a huge proportion of their creative, smart folks, they'd be kinda fucked as a generation too, no matter what the subset of those folks were lost (gay, straight, Black, Californian, etc)
aug 27, 2025, 4:41 am • 4 1 • view
Alpha who lost a year or more at home is gonna be Going Through Some Shit if they aren't already
aug 27, 2025, 4:43 am • 3 0 • view
Gen X queer parent of Gen Z COVID demo. math scores in Mass schools down across all grade levels. widespread social issues. Also, we are about to have this wrt losing University level research scientists and international students. all 3 serious blows to human progress.
aug 27, 2025, 5:01 am • 2 0 • view
Old person here, eavesdropping.. besides AIDS, and the terrible losses from it, don’t forget those lost in unnecessary wars. Over 58,000 in Vietnam, most too young to have made use of their potential to contribute in the ways they might have done.
aug 27, 2025, 5:06 am • 1 0 • view
BTW, even in the 50s & 60s, the closets never had very good doors. People knew who was gay in many cases, as one gay friend tells me, the other kids at school knew he was gay before he had any idea.
aug 27, 2025, 5:06 am • 2 0 • view
He’s 85 now, my favorite former drag queen, tells about how the avoided the cops to have gay dance parties in Montreal.
aug 27, 2025, 5:07 am • 2 0 • view
Like, in 20-40 years we are going to have people saying "Why are Ukrainians of a certain age the way they are?" and the answer will be "2022-when they kicked Putin's ass back to Moscow." If that makes sense. I think that's OP's point
aug 27, 2025, 4:42 am • 3 1 • view
I mean, other than the fact that it actually WAS the boomers who lost the most people.... People seem to be mistaking "less of an impact" for "no impact."
aug 27, 2025, 4:46 am • 3 0 • view
Oh, people were coming out before the 70s, and in the 70s way WAY out. I often think about the same thing, and also, with COVID. So many lost, we all lost so much.
aug 27, 2025, 5:03 am • 1 0 • view
I mean they never got to have cultural influence, is I think part of the point
aug 27, 2025, 3:43 am • 7 0 • view
My point is the generation _before_ them did not have as much influence. But this entire conversation is kind of off, as it was actually the boomers that were hit the hardest, not GenX. We were just the first cohort who worried about AIDS when we first became sexually active.
aug 27, 2025, 4:38 am • 4 0 • view
The numerous GenX people who died never got much chance to make a cultural impact.
aug 27, 2025, 4:42 am • 1 0 • view
But yeah: the pall of coming of age in the height of the AIDS crisis is itself a thing wedged into the GenX psyche.
aug 27, 2025, 4:44 am • 3 0 • view
I’m fighting the urge to curse violently at that. In so many ways AIDS took away what we had and what we’d ever have.
aug 27, 2025, 3:43 am • 8 0 • view
Yeah, the only one of the DC vintage dealers I used to pick for in the 1980s that was not sick when I left DC was the one who was straight.
aug 27, 2025, 3:50 am • 5 0 • view
this is something i was thinking about last night when i met my mom's gay friend who she met in the 70s there's a photo of the san francisco gay men's choir taken in the early 90s that haunted me the 1st time i saw it: www.classicfm.com/discover-music/san-francisco-gay-mens-chorus-aids-epidemic/
aug 27, 2025, 4:09 am • 42 10 • view
I remember this photo stopping me in my tracks. Reagan dealt with AIDS similarly to 47 and COVID — ignore ignore ignore — until it hit the populations they cared about.
aug 27, 2025, 10:44 pm • 1 0 • view
I think a real solid one is the fact that our folks really only loved us surface level. Who we are as people was a concept they didn't really give a fuck about.
aug 27, 2025, 4:07 am • 19 0 • view
That was always my thought. We were raised by the "me" generation. They lived through innovations that allowed for much more free time and then used that time on selfish stuff instead of more family time and that was the modeled behavior. Very few of my friends' parents were engaged growing up.
aug 27, 2025, 1:16 pm • 1 0 • view
I can see that. It loomed so large over every sexual encounter I had that it was like having to check in with death before pulling my pants down.
aug 27, 2025, 3:22 am • 53 0 • view
In my mid-thirties I briefly dated someone ~5 years younger than me, and that was just enough of a generation gap for her to wonder why I was ambivalent about casual sex while single. "I went through puberty during the peak of the AIDS crisis" was not the answer she expected.
aug 27, 2025, 3:42 am • 82 2 • view
For all the talk of Reagan and optimism, we were raised on doomerism: the people you admire will die and we all might die any minute from nuclear war (less probable than AIDS but still a heavy part of the zeitgeist).
aug 27, 2025, 12:16 pm • 5 0 • view
have never thought of this tbh. We were basically feral. Kinda surprised how so many drifted right so may have some merit. My solid recollection of the time was no one gave a shit.
aug 27, 2025, 5:37 am • 4 0 • view
That's called "collective trauma."
aug 27, 2025, 8:33 am • 2 0 • view
Yeah, we were left to our own devices, but also got to go through the Satanic Panic. So it's like "You're on your own, kid. But also somebody is probably going to try to recruit you into a cult and do bad things to you. So you can't trust anyone."
aug 27, 2025, 5:54 am • 2 0 • view
This was a HUGE cloud over my childhood and youth. I lived through an actual witch hunt while living in a Bible Belt. Arson attempts, accusations of devil worship, and it even made the news.
aug 27, 2025, 8:23 am • 1 0 • view
Also “if you have sex you’re going to die.” And where were our potential queer models, mentors, confidants, friends, allies? Mostly dead.
aug 27, 2025, 7:42 am • 0 0 • view
not here to argue against anyone in this post: my opinion is that this raged during a significantly formative period for us. coming into adulthood and thinking sex could literally kill us was obv traumatic. getting tested repeatedly. welcome to the world, kids.
aug 27, 2025, 12:47 pm • 1 0 • view
in the 70s as elementary kids thinking the bomb would kill us, then the 80s it was sex. not comparing to what other age groups went through, it's not a competition. this is who we are.
aug 27, 2025, 12:51 pm • 1 0 • view
In all fairness, lots of us who hit our teens in the early to mid-80s still thought the bomb would kill us.
aug 27, 2025, 1:18 pm • 1 0 • view
...Yeah it's a surprise we had any kids at all. ...and surprise, here we are 45 years later, and they're *just now* rolling out and haggling over how much an HIV preventative treatment should cost - "a fortune" or merely "exorbitant" www.yahoo.com/news/article...
aug 27, 2025, 4:44 pm • 2 0 • view
My egg didn't crack till the 90s, but even then the wave was stil going. Still a lot of funerals.
aug 27, 2025, 5:26 am • 1 0 • view
Genuinely some of the greatest appreciators of art, media, music, etc--all wiped-out because a fascist government of "God"-appreciators felt they were better off dead. Reagan should have been beaten to death with sticks and bits of twine.
aug 27, 2025, 4:55 am • 13 0 • view
Yes, please!
aug 27, 2025, 5:42 am • 1 0 • view
youtu.be/WT3SdN0YVx8?...
aug 27, 2025, 5:12 am • 1 0 • view
hey just a head's up, this is a, like, how do we say, real big fucking weird theory that certain queers get on about when it comes to 'who survived' the plague, and it always leads to the conclusion that the 'interesting' gays died of AIDS and the ones who were left were conformists.
aug 27, 2025, 3:22 am • 61 0 • view
The folks that I knew who died of AIDS were my HS teachers… and some relatives too; wonderful, kind, often brilliant, funny… Regular people 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 They are still missed; it was traumatic
aug 27, 2025, 5:48 am • 3 0 • view
i'm not saying you're doing this but it's kind of a queer revisionist history thing where the people who died weren't random, which they were, but instead their dying reflected something about who they were and what place they occupied in culture. i don't know if you wanna wade into this.
aug 27, 2025, 3:24 am • 61 0 • view
I absolutely want to wade into that! Radical movements are led by risk takers. Many are sexually adventurous, especially when young. Hippies and artists and theater people and activists had very strong hookup culture, partly to show each other they were rejecting mainstream respectability.
aug 27, 2025, 6:00 pm • 0 0 • view
That is so interesting, and does make sense
aug 27, 2025, 8:41 pm • 0 0 • view
You’re not wrong: it was random But it was also a randomness that was weighted towards specific demographics and the people who loved them, and those specific demographics — not wholly, but more frequently than random chance — were less likely to be conservative rule followers afraid of change
aug 27, 2025, 3:40 am • 6 0 • view
yeah, i get it, and have seen the same arguments (and have sat at bar tables during them). i still think it’s a non-zero contributor.
aug 27, 2025, 3:30 am • 44 0 • view
i totally understand where you're coming from, but i don't know if there's enough nuance and complexity in the 300 char skeet to shake off the revisionist history surrounding it. it makes me a bit anxious for an enormous account to skeet something that can be read as supporting a real problem idea.
aug 27, 2025, 3:36 am • 7 0 • view
I'm too young to have been there but it makes sense to me. the one issue is that you couldn't really be a Buttigieg type married gay couple back then so I don't think there were really that many conformists.
aug 27, 2025, 3:39 am • 0 0 • view
from what I can tell of the historical record people slept around less and had more monogamous relationships out of fear, though.
aug 27, 2025, 3:39 am • 0 0 • view
Out and gay in the 90s. Yes and no. But condoms were important. Condoms and lube were at the door of every gay bar that existed. Safe sex ads in the bathroom, above the urinals. Behind the bar. Everywhere
aug 27, 2025, 3:42 am • 9 0 • view
we really should have that still, to be honest
aug 27, 2025, 3:43 am • 2 0 • view
Yeah...I watch everyone on PREP, but playing without condoms. And I just wince. It's just imprinted on me now.
aug 27, 2025, 3:44 am • 6 0 • view
I think the other read on this is that queer people on average contribute in a more impactful way to the culture and it wasn’t about losing the “most interesting gays” but losing so many of them because they are on average more interesting.
aug 27, 2025, 3:37 am • 82 0 • view
was gonna say this was my read too, its not that specific people in the LGBTQ community died, its that the straights overwhelmingly did not
aug 27, 2025, 4:00 am • 32 1 • view
Even a lot of the straight people who died were also part of that art community that queer people were in. My ex gf’s mother died from it in the mid 90s; she was an opera singer and a painter in jazz clubs, so probably hung out with a lot of bisexual heroin users.
aug 27, 2025, 4:09 am • 26 0 • view
The degree to which someone who's a 'noble victim' of a disease and gets treatment, where someone who 'deserves it' gets - well, care. It's a factor here as well. Built in bias. No need for specific programming, it's in the curse words.
aug 27, 2025, 4:53 am • 9 0 • view
(When I was much younger, I heard more than once that "the bis" were responsible for basically every woman who died of AIDS. Because it was "just" gay men getting it before some guys who'd play for either team spread it around.)
aug 27, 2025, 11:29 am • 2 0 • view
Also it's not just about who did or didn't die, it's about (especially for the younger end of Gen X & I imagine also elder millennials) living with that shadow, that you could get infected with HIV & get AIDS & would die horribly & alone. AIDS scared the absolute shit out of me as a kid in the 80s.
aug 27, 2025, 8:58 am • 10 2 • view
I side-gigged my way in dozens of waiver productions in West Hollywood from '85 to '90, and there is no way to overstate the devastation in LA theatre, film and design. But many of those with AIDS in that first decade were Boomers, the generation of creatives that was going to mentor us.
aug 27, 2025, 7:36 pm • 0 0 • view
I’ve got a gay uncle who basically spent the 80s doing hospice work and clearing out his friends’ apartments after they died. Dozens. It gave him PTSD which he didn’t even start addressing until a few years ago. To hell with anyone who calls him conformist because he had the nerve to survive.
aug 27, 2025, 8:15 am • 4 0 • view
also like, completely excludes lesbians/sapphics.
aug 27, 2025, 3:41 am • 3 0 • view
Is this... something from the younger set? I'm mostly asking cause coming out as a teen in the 90s and hearing people's direct stories did not have me come away with that theory and I haven't seen that in my peers so I'm curious to where it's being spread.
aug 27, 2025, 7:54 am • 3 0 • view
Yeah, this is a younger person thing, like Gen Z.
aug 27, 2025, 1:22 pm • 1 0 • view
That's...not good to hear but like I'm glad it's not ... Actually I'm not glad. This all kinda had me think a lot last night. I miss gay coffee shops and a lot of that was meeting people in person that aren't immediately in your peer, fuck, or special interest group.
aug 27, 2025, 1:24 pm • 1 0 • view
(like a lot of the dispelling of any thoughts I might have had of the above was getting to know the wild party guys who made it through, for one reason or another, especially when they talked about friends who were more sedated and still died)
aug 27, 2025, 1:26 pm • 1 0 • view
Yeah that tracks
aug 27, 2025, 4:09 am • 2 0 • view
This and the immediate proximity of deeply traumatized & untreated Korean and Vietnam War vets in our childhood homes and extended families are my two go-to explanations for Why We Are Like This.
aug 27, 2025, 3:22 am • 212 6 • view
like our parents ::cues rainbow:: ::sigh::
aug 27, 2025, 3:28 am • 27 1 • view
Oh look, Why I Have PTSD. Actually, I have several causes, but that was first.
aug 27, 2025, 3:33 am • 3 0 • view
'We're Gen X, what DON'T we have PTSD from?" is a fair question if we're being honest.
aug 27, 2025, 3:46 am • 11 0 • view
Mine was actually diagnosed. There are several causes. It gets complicated, transient issues versus environment.
aug 27, 2025, 3:47 am • 2 0 • view
Oh I've clinically got it too. A big chunk of it is from Hurricane Katrina, and I'll bet you can guess how that's acting up right now.
aug 27, 2025, 4:01 am • 2 0 • view
Oh, geez. Yeah I can imagine.
aug 27, 2025, 4:19 am • 1 0 • view
Oh, I'm so sorry. I only experienced it from a distance, but the frustration and anger I felt about the Bushes and their Republican buddies just letting Americans die like that is still burned into my memory. www.youtube.com/watch?v=22dv...
aug 27, 2025, 5:07 am • 0 0 • view
Both of my grandfathers saw combat in WWII. They never once spoke about their experiences on the front, but they sure showed it in plenty of other ways. Hoo-boy.
aug 27, 2025, 3:36 am • 78 1 • view
One of my grandfathers did, and the other was slightly too young; and my dad went to Vietnam, so….
aug 27, 2025, 3:41 am • 33 0 • view
My family was not gregarious about family history, but from what I've been able to piece together, I am the first male member of the family *not* to serve in the military, breaking a line stretching back to the Spanish-American War.
aug 27, 2025, 3:45 am • 42 0 • view
Good on you
aug 27, 2025, 4:20 pm • 1 0 • view
I never met my grandfather, who was in a Japanese POW camp in WW2. He drank himself to death afterwards because he was “a bum,” according to the rest of my family.
aug 27, 2025, 4:19 pm • 3 0 • view
Hm I hadn’t thought about that, but yeah my grandfathers being just the age to miss both WW1&2 combat was probably a big positive. Def my father spending his Army time pushing papers in Germany and Ft Knox instead of getting sent to Vietnam is something I was thankful for.
aug 27, 2025, 4:03 am • 1 0 • view
My maternal grandfather was a couple months too young on V-Day; but his older brother went, and his own father had served in WWI on a navy ship that went down in Pearl Harbor - so he lied about his age and tried to sign up again, but he was too old by then.
aug 27, 2025, 4:11 am • 1 0 • view
I never heard anything about my maternal grandfather's WWII experiences until after he died, because that's when my (already semi-succumbed to dementia) grandmother started telling stories.
aug 27, 2025, 4:07 am • 3 0 • view
One of my great-uncles was in WWII as a medic, but none of my or my mother’s generation knew he’d been in WWI as well, as a soldier, until I came across his records doing genealogy research. Not something he talked about much I expect.
aug 27, 2025, 4:17 am • 1 0 • view
My grandfather was a Lt. Colonel in the Army Air Force in WWII & Korea. I call him The Colonel, if that tells you anything. My mother said he was a real bastard of a father. My step-grandpa's brother flew bombers. He always had a whisky in hand, & we all knew not to ask Uncle Buzz abt the war.
aug 27, 2025, 8:31 am • 2 0 • view
YES - and-> We were first generation of the 24-hour cable news channel and unrelenting broadcast of human tragedy & accompanying social cruelty: -Ethiopian famine; -AIDS epidemic; -imprisonment of Nelson Mandela; -Iraq war; - all set against social commentary of shows like MASH & Archie Bunker.
aug 27, 2025, 2:10 pm • 1 0 • view
My Dad was chief engineer on CH-47 (chinhooks) helicopters. Didn't talk much about it, but from bits i heard he spent a lot of time as a meat wagon hauling bodies from fire bases. took a long time before he could tolerate the smell of cooked pork Slightest thing would make him angry
aug 27, 2025, 5:06 am • 0 0 • view
I worked on a record store with a guy who walked with a limp sand always wore an army green jacket festooned with pins We walked to lunch one day, and I asked why he limped. At 18 years old near the end of the war, he was a sniper, and lost his best buddy the same fight he took shrapnel to his leg.
aug 27, 2025, 8:19 am • 0 0 • view
I was shocked, because I hadn't realized he was anywhere near old enough to have been a sniper in the jungle, tripping on LSD so he could tell himself everything going on around him when all hell broke loose was just a hallucination. I knew he was older than me, but I hadn't done the math.
aug 27, 2025, 8:23 am • 0 0 • view
He's the only person I've ever met who has been willing to talk about it. My birth dad was there, but he's still way too angry to say more than that the US government is a bunch of liars, and he left his family after the war to go live in Europe. That war definitely took a toll on us.
aug 27, 2025, 8:25 am • 0 0 • view
This is what’s wrong with Gen X. This nonsense. The AIDS epidemic occurred in the 80’s when Gen X was learning to tie their shoes.
aug 27, 2025, 12:27 pm • 1 0 • view
The highest number of deaths occurred in 1995. I have it now and it's 2025. You're post is offensive.
aug 27, 2025, 12:49 pm • 3 0 • view
Deaths peaked in 1995
aug 27, 2025, 5:54 pm • 1 0 • view
For me, personally, living through Reagan and then watching people elect Bush II twice, with help from Ralph Nader and the homophobic Child LaCivita was a catalyst for cynicism. Watching them elect a worse Bush II with help from Jill Stein convinced me that people never learn.
aug 27, 2025, 1:18 pm • 9 0 • view
🤯
aug 27, 2025, 9:22 am • 0 0 • view
I often think of the Trump era's glorious efflorescence of gender nonconformity as something like the Reagan/Bush era Punk boom, but no, we could've *also* had that two generations ago dammit.
aug 27, 2025, 4:23 am • 7 1 • view
The loss of those people also had a lasting impact on the generations that followed, like a fracture in what should have been afterwards. Always think of that interview with Fran Lebowitz about the impact on culture and audience, and how fucking dumb the collective we is now.
aug 27, 2025, 10:10 pm • 1 0 • view
Specifically thinking of this - www.tumblr.com/theonlyhanki... (relevant video here: youtu.be/WT3SdN0YVx8?... )
aug 27, 2025, 10:14 pm • 0 0 • view
I think about this a lot not just for Gen X but for politics in general. The Revolutionary Left got set so far back between AIDs, various drug crises, and active repression. The New Left of the 60s is mostly forgotten because most of them didnt make it to the 90s.
aug 27, 2025, 10:36 pm • 2 0 • view
Oh SHIT
aug 27, 2025, 3:27 am • 78 0 • view
Never thought about this
aug 27, 2025, 3:27 am • 58 0 • view
Fran Leibowitz gets into the extinction of taste and discernment as a byproduct of the AIDS crisis at around 1:45 youtu.be/WT3SdN0YVx8?...
aug 27, 2025, 5:11 am • 34 7 • view
The wrong kid(s) died!
aug 27, 2025, 3:22 am • 2 0 • view
I’m gen X and I didn’t know there was anything‘wrong’ with us. As for the AIDS epidemic it is one of the things right with us. We fought for funding and a cure while providing care for our friends who had it when there were no services.
aug 27, 2025, 4:13 am • 8 0 • view
Some of us, myself included, did so while fighting the virus ourselves with no meds and no cure, a death sentence. So if you think we sat around mourning our losses, crack a book and learn what really happened before you form your half baked conclusions.
aug 27, 2025, 4:13 am • 9 0 • view
The generation that rose to the challenge of AIDS, which I am proud to be a part of, did so with more courage, grace and honor than any generation after will ever know. So before you start talking, learn what really happened
aug 27, 2025, 4:13 am • 9 0 • view
respectfully, Dean, I don't think your experience really speaks to the whole of your generation, rather a minority really.
aug 27, 2025, 5:40 am • 3 0 • view
And your ‘minority’ statement reinforces my point that the post is inaccurate in stating that what’s wrong with the generation as a whole is an epidemic that affected a select portion of the whole
aug 27, 2025, 5:46 am • 0 0 • view
idk, minority groups of single digit percentages affect the larger 90+% plenty (signed, a transexual)
aug 27, 2025, 5:53 am • 1 0 • view
I don’t claim it does. But if the author posts that what’s WRONG with the generation is the AIDS epidemic with no foundation for doing so, I’ll take the time to correct that
aug 27, 2025, 5:43 am • 0 0 • view
I believe the insinuation is that gen X was *robbed* of an influential and important segment of society, namely those snuffed out by the epidemic, which would negatively affect the rest of the generation.
aug 27, 2025, 5:50 am • 1 0 • view
Our experiences clearly differ and I doubt that we’ll agree so let’s leave it.
aug 27, 2025, 5:52 am • 0 0 • view
Were Karens. That’s what’s wrong with us
aug 27, 2025, 9:48 am • 0 0 • view
Check your cohorts voting patterns and reassess what might be wrong with them
aug 27, 2025, 5:14 am • 2 0 • view
I have thought a lot recently about this interview in the context of the current president’s taste in musicals. www.npr.org/2025/06/30/n...
![[At the time] you had the four mega musicals from England. You had Cats, Les Mis, Phantom and Miss Saigon. And basically, that's it. Like, we were not making musicals during the '80s and the '90s on Broadway. ... In 1995, the year before Rent there were only two musicals nominated for best musical. One was Sunset Boulevard, Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, and one was a show called Smokey Joe's Café that was a review of songs by [Jerry] Leiber and Mike| Stoller. So Sunset Boulevard actually won best score and best book by default. Two musicals. And that's where the industry was in the late '80s into the '90s. I think one big reason was AIDS. Look at the number of artists we lost, Howard Ashman, Michael Bennett. The artists we lost that we don't even know. And I think it was also about economics. And for some reason, Broadway was having a hard time attracting investment dollars in the '80s into the '90s.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:fmpt3hjil3j55etlnv4q5xpu/bafkreifrbvuuyv6ye5o4voo5jir753c5oqqmaom4xtvf7n7jlxts6jtf4e@jpeg)
aug 27, 2025, 3:27 am • 84 5 • view
Or, and stay with me here on this, he's just a G-d Philistine!
aug 27, 2025, 5:10 am • 0 0 • view
Oh, Howard Ashman, we barely knew ye.
aug 27, 2025, 5:09 am • 1 0 • view
The current president is especially fond of musicals from the period when the musicals were mostly foreign imports for the two big reasons Jeffrey Seller elaborates.
aug 27, 2025, 3:33 am • 4 0 • view
As others have said, there is a plausible alternate timeline where Daddy Fred is not quite as sociopathic and dependent on fraud where that particular son becomes a Broadway producer.
aug 27, 2025, 3:40 am • 11 0 • view
"The AIDS epidemic had the side effect of inflicting Andrew Lloyd Weber upon us" is not something I had considered before now...
aug 27, 2025, 3:35 am • 60 2 • view
So, I do not like musicals but I do not judge those who do, and the thing that Seller does not say but I will is that I think the decline in funding and the human toll of AIDS are not disconnected, the Reagan decade was just shit.
aug 27, 2025, 3:48 am • 38 1 • view
Reagan was the proto-Trump
aug 27, 2025, 11:45 am • 5 0 • view
Interesting how pandemics hit and then waves of conservatism/fascism follow every time.
aug 27, 2025, 7:35 am • 12 0 • view
This!
aug 27, 2025, 11:59 am • 1 0 • view
"The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination" by Sarah Schulman talks about this explicitly, really interesting
aug 27, 2025, 3:44 am • 23 2 • view
📌
aug 27, 2025, 11:17 am • 3 0 • view
#GenX, we came of age when global thermonuclear war was a legit fear.
aug 27, 2025, 2:44 pm • 1 0 • view
Queer people also help straight people in our proximity to become more normal and open-minded, so the epidemic wiped out a lot of would-be empathy and decency among the cishets too.
aug 27, 2025, 3:26 am • 115 3 • view
I think it has more to do with the threat of AIDS being used to inflict sexual puritanism on GenX by conservatives than the actual body count (it hit younger/mid Boomers much harder) mikethemadbiologist.com/2024/08/27/f...
aug 27, 2025, 11:35 am • 10 0 • view
I know an otherwise smart and not especially religious single GenX woman who voted Trump and when I asked why, she angry-muttered something about women using abortion for birth control.
aug 27, 2025, 12:16 pm • 0 0 • view
"Despite claims to the contrary, ideological currents unfortunately follow power far more than the converse." This. Most claim to be independent thinkers cause it's our highest ideal. But in truth most follow the crowd, and the crowd follows power.
aug 27, 2025, 12:06 pm • 3 0 • view
This gave me a total "ah-ha" moment. I don't know why, but I had never thought about it this way. Now you've pointed it out, it seems stick-in-the-eye obvious as being 100% true.
aug 27, 2025, 9:29 am • 2 0 • view
Same. I’m mid 50’s so a kid during the worst of it. I never considered the impact of traumatically losing a whole creative and compassionate layer of society. But wow it explains a lot about our culture.
aug 27, 2025, 11:29 am • 6 0 • view
Such a tragic blow to us all, losing so many bright and beautiful souls to that terrible scourge. Ronald Reagan has a lot of things to answer for, and his handling of the AIDS epidemic is one of the major ones. I kind of wish I believed in hell so I could imagine him frying there for all eternity.
aug 27, 2025, 11:35 am • 5 0 • view
aw damn :( it is such a tragedy. human society does such a poor job of mourning and remembering those we've lost, let alone honoring their loss by preventing those things happening to our other fellows
aug 27, 2025, 3:23 am • 22 0 • view
This. I used to wonder why the 1918-1919 Flu Pandemic left such a negligible mark on culture — where are all the novels and stories and movies about that vast culling of so many people? Now I see how it works.
aug 27, 2025, 4:09 am • 44 4 • view
It also immediately followed the collossal, bloody tragedy of WW1, so there was significant competition in the "things inducing generational trauma" stakes.
aug 27, 2025, 5:13 am • 10 1 • view
I've noticed this, too. It's one of the reasons I'm so fond of Barbara Hambly's Bride of the Rat God. The aftereffects of the 1918 Pandemic are discussed by the characters, and the effects on their families and personal history are shown. They don't talk about it much, though. Just like now.
aug 27, 2025, 5:28 am • 16 0 • view
That looks cool; will check it out. But still - the silence from those who could write it from living memory is extreme. Don’t know about other languages, but in 20s & 30s English language lit … where’s the flu? It killed an order of magnitude more people, even young ones, than did combat.
aug 27, 2025, 11:56 am • 3 0 • view
Yeah, the way all of those deaths is elided in literature and even history is really creepy....
aug 27, 2025, 2:31 pm • 3 0 • view
The masses behave in the same manner as an unhealthy mind because the people who hate therapy all teamed up and made a human pyramid because all the 70's leftists published books about how to subvert american democracy and the assholes all had library cards and thats why they hate libraries
aug 27, 2025, 9:57 am • 1 0 • view
Late Gen x here. (Xennial, if we need to isolate). What I have found about this is that most people I know in my age range +\- 44 by 2-4 years either way, mostly boils down to where you grew up. In Minnesota, I used to breakdown ideologies in people I know like this: -city -suburb -exurb -rural
aug 27, 2025, 4:03 am • 1 0 • view
Summary, we formed our politics in the 90’s/early 00’s. The “counterculture” then was aligned with the idea (fueled by our parents living thru Vietnam/Kent State etc. and we became independents, voting within the system and outside) acknowledging the reality you live in, u vote for the one vs other
aug 27, 2025, 4:15 am • 1 0 • view
this is insightful, man
aug 27, 2025, 3:25 am • 134 0 • view
I'm a boomer, and i lost friends to AIDS at the height of its destruction while still in my 20s. Younger and older than me.... It was terrible. Gen x doesn't own that time
aug 27, 2025, 5:00 am • 5 0 • view
We all live with the consequences, though. And that’s the point.
aug 27, 2025, 7:57 am • 4 0 • view
Gen X was a smaller generation, so the deaths were more widely felt
aug 27, 2025, 5:12 am • 2 0 • view
Gen x's loss of friends was no more tragic than the loss of my friends. There is plenty of sadness to go around.
aug 27, 2025, 5:28 am • 0 0 • view
Why do we feel the need to pretend one generations pain is somehow worse than another's. It just separates and compartmentalizes our humanity into age related tranches. We don't need that
aug 27, 2025, 5:28 am • 1 0 • view
I'm...not doing that? I'm not trying to quantify "pain", the Boomer generation literally has more people in it, so generationally-speaking Gen X was more affected by the sheer percentage of people they lost
aug 27, 2025, 2:12 pm • 2 0 • view
Exactly. Boomers lost more on actual basis. Xers likely lost as many or possibly more on percentage basis.
aug 28, 2025, 12:32 am • 2 0 • view
I don't think that's it.
aug 27, 2025, 4:23 am • 3 0 • view
I came out in HS in 1994. So late Gen X. And let's just say coming out in 94, AIDS made a giant imprint on the young gays then. You didn't see older gay men. There were so few 30-40 gays in the mid 90s. Everyone was older, or us younger ones.
aug 27, 2025, 3:35 am • 58 4 • view
Yeah. The 1990s gay high schooler experience was knowing what it was, but never having met a gay man, never seen one onscreen that wasn't dying or a predator. Wildly unhealthy in retrospect.
aug 27, 2025, 12:48 pm • 4 0 • view
Reagan. Reagan. Reagan. Literally the beginning of the end. Neoliberalism, destruction of unions, probably a mass extinction event (including us) all goes back to that bastard.
aug 27, 2025, 6:25 pm • 2 0 • view
Kids notoriously crave stability and dependability, and I think that might lead to a lifelong rate of inchoate conservatism
aug 28, 2025, 4:04 am • 1 0 • view
Gen X were kids and young adolescents during a period of wild cultural change (70s, race, gender roles, widespread divorce) as were Gen Z (explosion of smartphones and social media, and the pandemic obviously)
aug 28, 2025, 4:03 am • 0 0 • view
Another explanation: Boomers and Millennials were kids and young adolescents in conservative and staid times (1950-60s, 1980s-midOOs) and significantly liberalized US culture in the 70s and 10s
aug 28, 2025, 4:02 am • 0 0 • view
You're not wrong. I lost a lot of friends, mostly from the theater community. Most of those folks would have made real contributions, large and small. I'm not speaking for everybody, but I got jaded REAL early. I watched RR speak and realized that he's gonna get his way, whether he liked it or not.
aug 27, 2025, 3:35 am • 16 0 • view
Also too: that was when both the boomers and the generation before them started to pull up the ladder. I saw RR and his ilk recruit boomers to cut the throats of their own children. And Tip O'Neil helped them do it. Michael Douglas said it best: "Greed.... is good."
aug 27, 2025, 1:25 pm • 2 0 • view
Umm, we were children. Nope.
aug 27, 2025, 12:33 pm • 0 0 • view
As a geriatric millennial, I learned about the existence of sex and the fact that it could kill you at the exact same time. AIDS was the backbeat to the entire culture. And Gen X got an extra dose of nihilism: they were born into fear of nuclear war, then acid rain, the ozone hole, crack and AIDS.
aug 27, 2025, 12:02 pm • 19 1 • view
Watching fiends with AIDS be abandoned by their families. Holy fucking heartbreak
aug 27, 2025, 9:36 am • 2 0 • view
AIDS is one. Reagan. That dude is why we have MAGAts. The Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation. Literally 4 POC represented in media and gov. Multiple recessions. We’re just a mean generation. Were Karens. In a lot of ways our lives were a lot easier than millennials and Gen Z tho
aug 27, 2025, 9:31 am • 6 0 • view
There’s a book about that lareviewofbooks.org/article/inte...
aug 27, 2025, 3:57 am • 6 0 • view
I’ve been thinking of this a lot recently. My family worked in theatre and TV and lost dozens of friends and colleagues. The nostalgia for the 90s as an innocent and hopeful time is really jarring to me.
aug 27, 2025, 5:38 am • 6 0 • view
Also the continual thread of total nuclear annihilation, which I didn’t realize was such a cloud over my youth till I saw another Gen Xer mention it a few years ago.
aug 27, 2025, 3:25 am • 157 6 • view
When I was a kid growing up in Seattle one summer the big film was WarGames, in which a wise benevolent fatherly genius kindly explains to the protagonists he lives on Bainbridge Island just across the Sound from Seattle to make sure that he'll die instantly and painlessly when the bombs fall.
aug 27, 2025, 9:34 am • 6 0 • view
let the ants or bees take over
aug 27, 2025, 10:45 am • 1 0 • view
They showed us the documentary If You Love This Planet and it was ingrained into my psyche
aug 27, 2025, 12:12 pm • 1 0 • view
the day after i was too young to watch in 83 - but everyone, everyone was traumatized
aug 27, 2025, 3:49 am • 5 0 • view
When The Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs for me. Plus we live within spitting distance of GCHQ & my dad always said we'd just drive towards Cheltenham. I didn't realise how much that scarred me till the renewed assault on Ukraine made me not sleep for a month.
aug 27, 2025, 8:52 am • 2 0 • view
Shit, they filmed a nuclear trauma porn miniseries near my house.
aug 27, 2025, 3:36 am • 38 1 • view
My state was the setting for both War Games and Red Dawn. Because of that I was convinced we were next at 9/11 despite being thousands of miles away.
aug 27, 2025, 3:48 am • 33 0 • view
The Day After?
aug 27, 2025, 3:50 am • 0 0 • view
That's the one.
aug 27, 2025, 3:51 am • 0 0 • view
Was in high school when it aired. I spent more than a decade assuming that our future would inevitably look like that. It messed me up. Ironically I think a nuclear event is more likely now than it was then, but maybe I’m just revisiting my GenX youth trauma
aug 27, 2025, 3:55 am • 2 0 • view
“On The Beach” was filmed in and around my city. My friend’s dad (a Vietnam vet) encouraged us to watch it. Up until 1989 I was sure we would end in a mushroom cloud.
aug 27, 2025, 11:38 am • 1 0 • view
I didn’t trust it till like the mid-90s.
aug 27, 2025, 4:01 pm • 1 0 • view
I showed The Day After to my adult son about 3 years ago and realized I was having an actual panic attack during the launch scenes. Shortness of breath, unable to speak. Nuclear war was hanging over us for years and yeah, we were damaged by that.
aug 27, 2025, 4:14 am • 12 0 • view
I also suspect Gen X could see how their parents were just not stepping aside, modern science was aiding that, they were closing X out of career opportunities while locking up the wealth, and being pissed at the naked sell out from sixties counter-culture "values" their parents would still spout.
aug 27, 2025, 4:18 am • 10 0 • view
I learned about Mutually Assured Destruction from a sketch on You Cant Do That On Television.
aug 27, 2025, 10:44 am • 1 0 • view
bsky.app/profile/davi...
aug 27, 2025, 9:26 am • 5 0 • view
Learning of the AIDS epidemic, Live Aid, and a school trip to London when I was 10 all share an important role in shaping me. And for some really weird reason, that fucking Phil Collin’s song about the homeless seems to live with these 3 things in my brain.
aug 28, 2025, 3:13 am • 0 0 • view
Thank you for recognizing / saying this. I think about the magnitude of this loss from time to time and it breaks my heart.
aug 27, 2025, 3:57 am • 7 0 • view
Yeah, but it only wiped out the queers. Why should the polyps of America give a shit
aug 27, 2025, 3:48 am • 0 0 • view
That’s… not how HIV works. Reagan et al didn’t take HIV/AIDS seriously until het folks were contracting & dying, but it was not “a gay disease.”
aug 27, 2025, 5:00 am • 6 0 • view
Not to mention the children who died from blood transfusions.
aug 27, 2025, 5:02 am • 4 0 • view
I mostly remember the evangelical Christians twisting themselves into knots trying to have sympathy for the children who got HIV from blood transfusions while at the same time shouting that it was God’s wrath against homosexuals. And if you got it from IV drugs or a hetero sex partner, still a sin.
aug 27, 2025, 5:49 am • 7 0 • view
Never let anyone take your rights.
aug 27, 2025, 6:21 am • 2 0 • view
You wont get them back
aug 27, 2025, 6:26 am • 2 0 • view
Also haemophiliacs. In the UK 3500, from the age of 7 upwards.
aug 27, 2025, 6:46 am • 3 0 • view
Yeah, that was covered by “blood transfusions”. The famous AIDS death of a US child with hemophilia who was barred from classes due to unfounded fears of casual transmission, who died in 1990, was Ryan White. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Wh...
aug 27, 2025, 2:30 pm • 2 0 • view
I forgot that the UK did have a massive “infected blood” scandal that we didn’t see in the US. More than 30,000 people got HIV or hepatitis C. www.bbc.com/news/article...
aug 27, 2025, 2:57 pm • 3 0 • view
You did in fact see it in the US. There is a great breaking book about it, and thousands died there. It started there. The medications that caused it were American drugs with blood sources from American prisons
aug 27, 2025, 5:01 pm • 2 0 • view
BTW the reason I mentioned it is because it is my specialist topic. My family are bleeders and my PhD is in that topic
aug 27, 2025, 5:03 pm • 1 0 • view
Blood transfusions are different because they are a single unit of blood. Each haemophilia treatment helps 40k units of blood, with only one needed to be infected. So the risk was so much higher and they had to continue to take the treatment.
aug 27, 2025, 5:04 pm • 1 0 • view
But the conservatives still think it was.
aug 27, 2025, 8:57 am • 2 0 • view
Ah shit. I wasn’t trying to give a science lesson. It was a crude joke
aug 27, 2025, 5:20 am • 0 0 • view
Gen Xer here who went back to school for public health in the 2010s. I was a little surprised to realize I had to explain what AIDS meant before highly active anti-retrovirals became available in 1996. The kids I was in school with had not known HIV/AIDS as a death sentence.
aug 27, 2025, 5:50 pm • 3 0 • view
It has long seemed to me that the persistence of 10% gay people in the famous societies of history all across the globe and throughout time means that they are somehow essential to societal success. Maybe we’re seeing why they’re needed. Without them, society collapses
aug 27, 2025, 3:33 am • 19 0 • view
Maybe gay men, influencing quietly in male-only spaces, are what keeps male society from degenerating into what we’ve got the Trump cabinet right now
aug 27, 2025, 3:36 am • 18 1 • view
Leaded gasoline.
aug 27, 2025, 11:59 am • 1 0 • view
Gen-X didn't lose nearly as many as the Boomers did. I'm very firmly central X & by the time I was old enough to be aware, there had already been 10+ years of campaigns & protests & condom ed. If anything it's probably just that we inhaled a fuck ton of lead fumes from gasoline, TBQH.
aug 27, 2025, 5:51 am • 5 0 • view
Interesting point. Although for every Mapplethorpe or Harong there's probably a Roy Cohn. And the Boomers did have such an event: Vietnam. Killed 3 times as many people, over indexed on a vulnerable minority. Brutalized the entire society around it.
aug 27, 2025, 1:44 pm • 0 0 • view
This hits. Wow. 🙁
aug 27, 2025, 3:29 am • 4 0 • view
You went into dating like it was a Drs appointment & it messes you up. We went from Boomer free love to I need your sexual history & everyone you ever slept with & who they slept with very quickly. The 80s sucked. Reagan sucked. Coming of age with bad music, bad gov, gay ppl hiding it all sucked.
aug 27, 2025, 4:14 am • 17 0 • view
The atmosphere made me hold on to my virginity like it was a death sentence to lose it.
aug 27, 2025, 11:15 pm • 0 0 • view
Its not like they are ignoring us, hoping we all just die & go away again... Trying to erase memorials, existence... Show of hands, who wouldn't be shocked to see a state halt a display of the quilt, seize the quilts, & have them destroyed?
aug 27, 2025, 11:53 am • 2 0 • view
man that’s a depressing fucking thought
aug 27, 2025, 3:31 am • 230 2 • view
maybe, but as a tail end x-er, i am real tired of hearing from millennials about how we are the problem who don’t care how we became the problem
aug 27, 2025, 4:00 am • 180 2 • view
Bro if u believe you are not a part of the problem, sure i believe you, but being defensive makes it sound like you are. When people say "gen x" "boomers" "men" etc they do not mean EVERY SINGLE person in that group
aug 27, 2025, 4:14 am • 5 0 • view
no, they're just fucking lazy
aug 27, 2025, 6:37 am • 0 0 • view
who is? 😭 sorry I just dont know who ur referring to
aug 28, 2025, 1:56 am • 0 0 • view
They do mean “enough that it’s okay to say it generally with no qualifications” though. And the good ones are going to generally be hanging out with the good ones, so that doesn’t match their perspective.
aug 27, 2025, 6:13 am • 1 0 • view
Yes, but I don't think this disproves or adds to my point
aug 28, 2025, 1:55 am • 0 0 • view
We were young adults who witnessed: 💣 Cold War and its traumatizing documentaries; 💊 AIDS epidemic with its social cruelty; 🦴 Televised famine in Ethiopia; ⛓️💥 Mandela’s release & end of apartheid; 📌 Fall of Berlin Wall - end of USSR and Cold War; Entered workforce in recession and ‘downsizing’ era.
aug 27, 2025, 2:00 pm • 0 0 • view
...this lack of direction ultimately left society vulnerable to crisis and unprepared for the future. It's not your fault it's the boomers. Xers are just here basically as a do nothing generation, similar to the silent generation.
aug 27, 2025, 5:02 pm • 0 0 • view
Gen X slogan, "It works for me," embodies the generation's independent and freedom-oriented spirit during a period of declining social cohesion and regulation. This self-reliant attitude was a pragmatic response to a cultural shift towards neo-libs and a lack of guidance from older generations.
aug 27, 2025, 5:01 pm • 1 0 • view
I do not know what broke all these Gen X brains. Because, all the ones I know personally did not break! but I do know AIDS was childhood trauma even for those *extremely far removed* from the actual suffering, and it is worth thinking about.
aug 27, 2025, 4:06 am • 11 0 • view
No one blames where we are on GenX, they'd have to remember that we exist first to do that.
aug 27, 2025, 11:42 am • 1 0 • view
I have been trying to shout from the rooftops to anyone who will listen that GenX should be split into those born before the end of the Vietnam War and those after. Someone born in the mid-to-late 70s has very little in common with someone born in the mid-to-late 60s. We are built different.
aug 27, 2025, 5:56 pm • 2 0 • view
spoiler: covid wasn’t our first epidemic
aug 27, 2025, 4:01 am • 205 4 • view
I was in mass immunization clinics during COVID-19 in Winter 2020 / Spring 2021 and an old Nurse Practioner said it to me verbatim, "this isn't my first epidemic".
aug 27, 2025, 5:44 am • 1 0 • view
Correct. I’m an old GenXer. I’ve seen so much fucking death.
aug 27, 2025, 10:13 am • 5 0 • view
SAME. Born into people coming home from Vietnam, seeing backlash to civil rights, being told nuclear war was coming any day, childhoods with no seatbelts, cigarettes everywhere, women being degraded, coming of age during AIDS and Satanic panic. So many accidents. So much suicide and fatal illness.
aug 27, 2025, 12:11 pm • 5 2 • view
Not to mention being told the following regarding sex: “Boys, go get it! Whatever you gotta do! Drug her? Hilarious! Let’s put it in movies and your character is the hero! Girls, if you do it you’re whores. But also all of you, esp if you’re gay, which wait you’re not, are you? SEX WILL KILL YOU.”
aug 27, 2025, 12:20 pm • 6 2 • view
Following you, now.
aug 27, 2025, 5:44 pm • 2 0 • view
As an early GenX gay man who was in college in mid-80s, you summed it up perfectly. It was a killing field.
aug 28, 2025, 12:07 am • 2 1 • view
It was horrific. People don’t know.
aug 28, 2025, 12:34 am • 2 0 • view
Sure, by the time late Gen X turns 16, 1996, antivirals start to become available. Gen Jones and early Gen X would be the primary affected.
aug 28, 2025, 12:37 am • 2 0 • view
Yep. I was born in ‘66, so early Gen X, hubs is ‘63, so, Generation Jones. We saw it all. Spent nights in an apartheid shack in the center of campus in an effort to get the university to divest, saw many of my friends die of AIDS, moved to DC, saw the AIDS quilt, etc. That’s just how it was.
aug 28, 2025, 12:42 am • 1 0 • view
Also explains why we fucking hated the CDC and Fauci, the Hypervillain of HIV
aug 27, 2025, 11:48 am • 1 0 • view
COVID wasn’t our first epidemic, Iraq (Dubya edition) wasn’t our first badly justified war of choice, Trump wasn’t our first crook/ratfucker/election manipulator, Netanyahu isn’t our first US sponsored murderous dictator
aug 27, 2025, 11:49 am • 2 0 • view
Everyone GenX I know is either grown up Alex P Keaton or a wine mom with Rage Against The Machine on repeat and a lot of time to yell at Senators
aug 27, 2025, 11:52 am • 1 0 • view
Also we were raised by boomers. Aka TELEVISION. So sick of people talking in generations. Like what is with the constant need to categorize people? It’s not helpful to anyone except marketing experts and Nazis.
aug 27, 2025, 12:07 pm • 8 0 • view
This. Thank you.
aug 27, 2025, 1:50 pm • 1 0 • view
For us younger Gen Xers, growing up watching adults stigmatize people with AIDS, say they deserved it, abandon them. I would have thought it would have showed us all how vile that behavior is, made us all more empathetic and less likely to fall for hate. Seems most just learned to do it themselves.
aug 27, 2025, 4:13 am • 146 9 • view
There's a couple things happening though that distorts things. 1. u don't really hear about the person donating 10,000's to rewilding projects, yet u have Stephen Miller in your face all the time. 2. Institutions that want to have people think in terms of personal morality have billions, while those
aug 27, 2025, 5:53 am • 3 0 • view
who critique systems have millions 3. Human psych prioritizes group safety over knowledge 4. As someone disabled, ableism is so everywhere & like water in capitalism, that it should be talked about just as much as racism & sexism. 5. people break after faith is lost. If u were promised a certain
aug 27, 2025, 5:53 am • 2 0 • view
future, if u believed in things like "hard work", if u believed that this person would be your forever person, if u believed that this job would change the world, if u believed that knowledge would save u & the OPPOSITE happens, nihilistic rage often pops up, & people just want to burn it all down
aug 27, 2025, 5:53 am • 1 0 • view
Jerry Falwell etc found their grift and rode it to hell
aug 27, 2025, 7:55 am • 5 0 • view
By the time Reagan mentioned AIDS in a speech, 10,000 gay men were already dead. Across the entire political spectrum, basically no one cared.
aug 27, 2025, 7:07 am • 2 1 • view
Right? Ffs
aug 27, 2025, 6:20 am • 1 0 • view
Don't leave out Vietnam. Plenty of us can also remember live fucking news shots of Vietnam. We wore MIA bracelets with the names of our friends' big brothers or cousins or uncles, and sometimes their fathers.
aug 27, 2025, 8:16 am • 1 0 • view
I just said that too. We had a teacher who would have episodes - they used to call them “flashbacks” in class and he’d jump behind the desk. It was terrible. Heartbreaking and scary. And almost everyone you knew had lost a brother or son. Also don’t forget the hostage crisis or gas shortages!
aug 27, 2025, 12:13 pm • 1 0 • view
Not to mention the Cold War. I was in college when perestroika happened and the Wall came down. Imagine what being a Boomer kid must have been like at the height of the Cold War. 😬
aug 27, 2025, 6:45 pm • 2 0 • view
Like at least we didn't have to depend on our desks to save us from nuclear annihilation.
aug 27, 2025, 11:04 pm • 1 0 • view
ok but aren’t older people always going to be the problem for younger people if things have gone amiss, most societal problems are not caused by 15 year olds
aug 27, 2025, 7:45 am • 1 0 • view
To be fair most of the ones who survived don't care how you became the problem either.
aug 27, 2025, 10:09 pm • 0 0 • view
And stubbornness. Being so set in one’s ways and refusing to listen to one another. I feel it was more of the generational gap depending on the years of each person. I hope that makes sense. I wish most of the people weren’t so rigid and set in their ways. It really made it hard for both people.
aug 27, 2025, 4:58 am • 0 0 • view
I hate how Gen X and Millennials were so distrusting and hateful towards each other. I think now being friends with some Gen Z people it’s helping with the generational trauma. Who the problem was is not clear. I don’t think it was completely Gen X or Millennial’s faults. Misunderstandings.
aug 27, 2025, 4:56 am • 6 0 • view
Se of the most wonderful ppl in my young queer life were cishet gen x ers who were just willing to listen and have a kid disagree with them sometimes ngl. One of them designed the tattoo I got to celebrate my transition.
aug 27, 2025, 9:10 am • 2 0 • view
Millennials care too much and Gen X cares too little; it's just water and oil.
aug 27, 2025, 5:32 am • 9 0 • view
Is this a thing that exists offline? I’m an elder millennial and have plenty of gen x friends and haven’t seen any sort of generational distrust or hate offline.
aug 27, 2025, 11:36 am • 3 0 • view
Some are actually good! I agree! But I was simply noting how in general two generations seem to just have it tough..
aug 27, 2025, 3:00 pm • 0 0 • view
Survivor bias is the hidden key to understanding how Gen X sees itself and is seen. Its no joke that our memes are more "we xxxx and survived" than "ah the good old days". Its certainly more fun than tallying the losses. And no surprise that the response to Latch Key Kids was Helicopter Parenting.
aug 27, 2025, 9:42 am • 2 0 • view
I’m an older Gen X and my god…the way the AIDS crisis colored everything. The fear, the pain, the uncertainty, the tragedy. An entire generation of creativity snuffed out. 😞
aug 27, 2025, 6:00 am • 7 0 • view
Add to that, those of us who survived have always known we’re a *tiny* generation to start with and that we would never really have political power like our parents did. Apathy gets more attractive when you already know trying will just get you kicked in the face.
aug 27, 2025, 10:39 pm • 0 0 • view
And it seems the boomers were at least a little overhated; Stonewall and the normalization of protesting America’s direct involvement in other countries’ offensive wars was them.
aug 27, 2025, 4:45 am • 1 0 • view
I liked it better when we were being ignored entirely.
aug 27, 2025, 4:09 am • 2 0 • view
I’ve heard a similar argument before: people don’t become more conservative as they get older, those are just the ones who live to be that age because they’re wealthy enough to have access to the things that keep you alive
aug 27, 2025, 4:03 am • 18 1 • view
Yeah it is youtu.be/WT3SdN0YVx8?...
aug 27, 2025, 5:10 am • 0 0 • view
That's a very good observation.😔
aug 27, 2025, 3:26 am • 1 0 • view
We were forced to survive at any cost. It seems, though, we didn't pass this along probably because we didn't want our kids to go through the same. But here we are.
aug 27, 2025, 12:40 pm • 3 0 • view
we've also got to try and move away from clunky generational tags. I was born in 1977. I was a kid during the AIDS epidemic I have more in common with those born in 1984 than 1970. There's nothing wrong with gen x becaus there is no gen x.
aug 27, 2025, 12:59 pm • 0 0 • view
Cuspers (tail end of one generation, beginning of another) are a thing (Sandwich Generation, Generation Jones, Xennials). Those of us born between ~75 and ~85 (diff depending on the researcher) do have issues matching a "generation type" and we can identify with aspects from either.
aug 27, 2025, 3:42 pm • 1 0 • view
As someone born in 1978, I know how you feel - I "drank from the garden hose" and was a "latch key", "feral" child, but also am a "digital native" and identify very strongly with a lot of other millennial characteristics. It's socio-cultural identifications can be interesting.
aug 27, 2025, 3:47 pm • 0 0 • view
I really felt that when I was in high school and university and had conflict with my cousin who was simply unable to understand how had changed, like why paying for college an issue. We're both Gen X but 10 years apart.
aug 27, 2025, 10:27 pm • 1 0 • view
Yep. I completely understand that. People were all, your fulltime summer job should be able to cover your rent, and tuition once you go back, i’m like HOW? (Late 90s. I was waitressing..) dropped out, returned in 2001 and went how tf did this get worse - students loans got crazy..
aug 28, 2025, 3:08 am • 0 0 • view
It just all seems so arbitrary. It’s not like there was some huge cultural shift in 1974 or 1981 or whatever.
aug 27, 2025, 10:49 pm • 0 0 • view
The shift wasn’t the birth dates. The shift was the world those born between those years grew up in. The 80s and 90s had very large social, political, cultural and technological changes that impacted on those that grew up through them and became adults near Y2K.
aug 28, 2025, 2:59 am • 0 0 • view
I saw a friend from high school a couple years back, hadn't seen him in decades. I asked him, "Did I imagine this, or did we all believe we'd be dead by 30?" He doesn't hesitate, "Oh, yeah, of course we all thought that."
aug 27, 2025, 4:13 am • 38 2 • view
I never expected to live this long
aug 27, 2025, 9:38 am • 2 0 • view
Oh, and ... Neither one of us is gay. Death was everywhere. Everybody saw it.
aug 27, 2025, 4:14 am • 19 0 • view
People forget how much more dangerous it was to a) simply exist and b) be a kid. Kids die less in nearly every metric now -- accidents, cancer, murder, etc. Kids were about 5 times as likely to die of respiratory infections before age 5 in the 80s, for example.
aug 27, 2025, 5:21 am • 3 0 • view
I did not expect to make it into my 50's, and it's kind of weird. (Only half-gay, to use an old audience line from my Rocky Horror days...)
aug 27, 2025, 4:42 am • 12 0 • view
i was most disconcerted when the cold war ended and went "shit ... now i have to consider the existence of the future"
aug 27, 2025, 9:30 am • 12 1 • view
Yeess!! youtu.be/QYDEpeBl-hY?...
aug 27, 2025, 2:43 pm • 1 0 • view
I feel like this is akin to the analysis of why France had the reaction they did to World War II. I think people underestimate the impact of losing an entire generation of a certain type of person.
aug 27, 2025, 3:35 am • 28 0 • view
I should not at 44 years old be considered an LGBT elder.
aug 27, 2025, 9:43 pm • 0 0 • view
AIDS is an immense in GenX nihilism, rarely discussed because there’s an insane and alienating drive to erase the plague toll. A huge memorial quilt just vanished. Two close friends of mine died suffering; not uncommon, now never discussed. Sex was inextricable from fear.
aug 27, 2025, 3:37 am • 58 6 • view
And if you were female, rape was always present as a risk as well Our media treated it as normal at best and even celebrated it
aug 27, 2025, 4:51 am • 21 0 • view
“Boys will be boys” 🤨
aug 27, 2025, 4:58 am • 9 0 • view
imo bitter incels were less of a thing in the ‘80s because the culture used to broadly cater to them
aug 27, 2025, 5:02 am • 14 0 • view
Tailhook scandal in the early 90’s kind of showed how ingrained the attitude was.
aug 27, 2025, 5:06 am • 12 1 • view
A soap opera had Luke rape Laura as a love theme. I as a parent was shocked and angered that it was used as a love story. My gen x daughter watched the show.
aug 27, 2025, 1:42 pm • 2 0 • view
I was really young when I lost my godfather, not long after he lost his partner. Reagan and a swarm of televangelists dominated TV. My folks were estranged from their folks, so we embraced found family during a whirlwind of intra/extra tumult.
aug 27, 2025, 5:10 am • 1 0 • view
repo man somehow the perfect movie of this era
aug 27, 2025, 11:03 am • 2 0 • view
…immense *factor* in GenX nihilism…
aug 27, 2025, 11:50 am • 0 0 • view
What is the "bomber with red dots" diagram?
aug 27, 2025, 12:01 pm • 0 0 • view
Survivorship bias?
aug 27, 2025, 12:18 pm • 0 0 • view
what it sounds like, commonly used to illustrate an urban legend about WWII aircraft and the mathematician Abraham Wald. Well a possibly partially true urban legend that he specifically told the navy to stop adding armor to parts of planes that came back with a ton of bullet holes.
aug 27, 2025, 12:21 pm • 0 0 • view
Specifically because those survivable hits.
aug 27, 2025, 12:22 pm • 0 0 • view
So it’s a popular illustration of survivorship bias.
aug 27, 2025, 12:24 pm • 1 0 • view
Oh, right! That one. I thought someone had a TikTok meme or something I missed.
aug 27, 2025, 12:23 pm • 1 0 • view
Ok, so I think that most people who died of AIDS were actually Boomers, not Gen X. (At least, I'm X, and I didn't know anyone my age who died of AIDS. I did know people of my parents' generation.) But I think it fucked us up in all sorts of very complicated ways, including loss of role models.
aug 27, 2025, 11:25 am • 9 0 • view
The first big celebrity deaths I remember were Liberace and Rock Hudson (my grandmother's generation).
aug 27, 2025, 1:33 pm • 0 0 • view
And there were other big things going on in the '80s and early '90s: the crack epidemic, for instance, and the epidemic of violence in cities. I had a pretty sheltered late '80s/early '90s urban childhood, and I knew more peers who died of murder than of AIDS.
aug 27, 2025, 11:28 am • 5 0 • view
Oof.
aug 27, 2025, 3:26 am • 0 0 • view
Not being hired after accurately clocking the Iraq invasion managed to professionally kill off the competent Gen X journos
aug 27, 2025, 11:48 am • 6 1 • view
Counterpoint: Mark Taibbi. Who followed a very gen X professional path.
aug 27, 2025, 1:30 pm • 0 0 • view
So I'm 50ish, squarely in the lead generation, shit. I thought I missed that, but we really didn't give a fuck in the 70's. The violence and decreased intelligence makes sense looking back now.
aug 27, 2025, 4:07 am • 10 0 • view
Impulse control was a big problem too.
aug 27, 2025, 4:09 am • 5 0 • view
Covid will probably be doing similar now
aug 30, 2025, 7:11 am • 1 0 • view
www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-08...
aug 30, 2025, 7:13 am • 0 0 • view
Yup
aug 27, 2025, 9:40 am • 0 0 • view
Those of us of a certain age carry a graveyard in our hearts. So many friends died; each left behind stories like the above from everyone around them. It hit us hard, knocked us down, killed our friends, and left us reeling.
aug 27, 2025, 5:24 am • 25 2 • view
This, so very very much. I was in my mid twenties and fully immersed in the arts in Boston from rock to politics to opera in '81 when the first deaths began. The grimness of trying to help, the non-stop funerals, the love and talent lost...the sense of carrying the stories of those who were gone...!
aug 27, 2025, 10:52 am • 3 0 • view
This 💔
aug 27, 2025, 5:37 am • 3 0 • view
We carry a mountain of unprocessed grief. We will take the PTSD from it all the way to the grave. None of my peers who survived ever talk about it. ...Not that I would want to. I avoid the topic like the plague. (HA!)
aug 27, 2025, 5:24 am • 10 1 • view
The shadow of the eighties and nineties fell on my Gen X peers for too long. Some of us will never recover from the grinding dread and constant low-grade horror of the time.
aug 27, 2025, 5:24 am • 11 0 • view
@marcmaron.bsky.social and @jonlovett.bsky.social were talking about the problems with GenX in their interview I listened to just today and AIDS never came up. I think it's a big blind spot.
aug 27, 2025, 5:11 am • 10 0 • view
I think a lot of us just desperately want to forget that time. It was terrifying and heartbreaking, and we were expected to just accept it, and I think for a lot of us, we'd really like to keep it snuggly locked away in that cobweb-covered vault in the back of our minds. So much horror came from it.
aug 27, 2025, 8:38 am • 2 0 • view
100%
aug 27, 2025, 3:22 am • 0 0 • view
The New Decameron m.youtube.com/watch?v=ENp1...
aug 27, 2025, 9:29 am • 0 0 • view
Just Arthur Russell not dying in ‘92 all by itself would have made the world about 1% better than it’s turned out
aug 27, 2025, 6:04 am • 0 0 • view
Gen X, the so-called “middle child” of generations, didn’t just get left off the family tree—they got handed the existential mop and told to clean up after Boomers and Millennials while being ignored by both.
aug 27, 2025, 8:06 am • 7 0 • view
Are you suggesting that the problem with gen x is that too many of their gay people died from AIDS?
aug 27, 2025, 4:00 am • 0 0 • view
Been thinking about this all morning. In addition to the loss of life and creative voices, and the shunning that laid bare the hypocrisy of many nuclear families, our generation also lost so many of those child-free "uncles" who historically provided safe spaces for queer and not queer teens.
aug 27, 2025, 12:50 pm • 4 0 • view
It should be noted that people tend to vote for the party that was in power when they were in their early 20s and teens. For Gen X, it was Reagan and Bush, along with a very conservative political culture. This pattern has been borne out over multiple generations. Not just Gen X.
aug 27, 2025, 6:28 pm • 0 0 • view
I've had this discussion with some friends and we came to the conclusion that AIDS caused a vaccuum without which people like Damien Hurst would never have had a carreer.
aug 27, 2025, 11:40 am • 4 0 • view
Leaded gasoline got the rest of 'em.
aug 27, 2025, 3:33 am • 12 1 • view