Friday December 30, 2005 SGN.org |
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Volume 33 Issue 52 |
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Wednesday, Jan 07, 2009
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New report outlines ways LGBT community can overcome the 'Gay generation gap' |
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| New report outlines ways LGBT community can overcome the 'Gay generation gap' | ||
| Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) people must overcome communication challenges when working together across generations, according to a new publication by the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies. Whether working specifically with LGBT youth groups or in other contexts, people from different age cohorts have very different experiences and beliefs that reflect the rapid changes over time in the treatment of LGBT people in families, workplaces, schools, and communities.
"In interviews with LGBT youth and adults, we found a noticeable gap in communications across generations," noted Dr. Glenda Russell, a co-author of the report. "LGBT adults tend to project their own experiences onto today's young people, when in fact the lives of today's young people are often quite different." The study notes several examples of this generation gap. "Alternative proms" organized by LGBT adults for LGBT high school youth often seem to be designed to meet the needs of the adult organizers who missed their own proms rather than the needs of today's young people. Adults tend to focus on the suffering and isolation of LGBT youth, even though many LGBT teens are actually doing well. From the other direction, young LGBT people sometimes complain that no one is doing anything about discrimination, apparently unaware of decades of prior activism by LGBT adults. The challenge for the community is to turn these differences into opportunities for learning and growth. Co-author Dr. Janis Bohan notes, "The good news is that both sides can learn from each other. LGBT adults should be willing to follow the lead of young people, and young LGBT people should be willing to use adults as mentors." Young people often provide a fresh perspective on issues that is both less constrained by past strategies for problem solving and less reliant on older-and perhaps incorrect-assumptions about the degree of homophobia. Adults, on the other hand, have greater experience and resources and are more familiar with the historical roots of the LGBT movement. The study concludes with concrete suggestions for the LGBT community and organizations to overcome these communication barriers. The Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies is a nonprofit, independent think tank based in Amherst, Massachusetts. IGLSS provides policy-oriented research on issues of importance to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender communities. All IGLSS publications are available at www.iglss.org. An IGLSS press release |
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International Readers |
 
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