Queer Inheritance

Queer Inheritance explores, through environmental portraiture and cross-generational dialogue, the significance of intergenerational connection in preserving culture, protecting collective well-being, and fostering queer identity. While the gravity of these relationships is evident in cultures around the globe, age segregation among queer people remains prevalent. Transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next is a cultural hallmark largely absent from the LGBT community, a disparity further reinforced by emerging political movements. My work illuminates intergenerationality through the historical documentation of elders from the first visible LGBT community in modern history.

Paul Monette, author, poet, and activist whose life and writing inspired the genesis of this project, wrote shortly before his AIDS-related death in 1995 on the loss of a queer friend and elder, “I understand now that it wasn’t just a friend who’d been taken away from me, but an elder and a mentor. [She] was my pioneer, a link to the dreams that made me different, the push I needed to go my own way”. 

It was through Monette’s writing that I recognized the universal desire for cross-generational connection. Thirty years after he wrote that essay, the LGBT community finds itself at a cultural crossroads where it has, for the first time in history, the opportunity to foster intergenerationality. Queer Inheritance meets this unique moment as a historical record of the first openly visible LGBT community, unifying a fragmented history and emphasizing the breadth of ideas that shaped a movement. These portraits are a call to nurture these relationships and serve as a reminder that the fight for LGBT rights is not only within living memory but presently unfolding. As a storyteller, this work is my contribution to the custodians of our queer inheritance, a link to the dreams that made me different.