Traumatized

SR, who grew up white and well-off in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era, says that she occasionally has flashbacks to seeing black people walking down the street in her town, clothing mismatched, eyes on the ground, looking, she now realizes, traumatized.  She was surrounded by traumatized people there, although she had no words for it and no way even to frame the concept.
Now about to retire and spend at least winters in Sarasota, FL, she says she saw the same look in the eyes of the people at the MCC Church (serving the LGBT community) there.  Add to that that the MCC theology feels pretty rigid-- the bible is not "myth and symbol," as her "Freshman Bible" professor said-- and it's not a church she wants to attend.  The people look traumatized, she said-- at least the ones her age.

Three things:

1.  Look at how life as an outsider can affect the expectations, the very ways of being, of people who are trying to participate in the traditions of those on the inside.  Dominant-culture Christianity is at best a minefield, and sometimes a battlefield, for gay people.  When they gather together and try to worship the same god the Evangelicals worship, there is always an element of reaction to that dominant culture, where they are not only unwelcome but reviled.  Of course they are traumatized.

2.  How much has the experience of living through the AIDS epidemic affected the generalized trauma older gay people suffer?  And how different is the experience of a gay person now in his/her twenties from one in his/her 40s, 50s, 60s?  See the Kaiser Family Foundation's Timeline of the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic, and this wonderful Oral History Project by ACTUP-- dozens of interviews with activists for AIDS research, funding, etc.  SR pointed out that as difficult and life-changing as it was for lesbians to see so many friends dying so, so terribly, we did not also have the fear that men had that it would happen to us.  It must have felt like Russian Roulette, and surely those who lived experienced survivor's guilt.

3.  "Traumatized" is way too strong a word, but is on the far end of the spectrum of how, I realize, I am interacting with life.  When it comes to getting married, for example, or being out at school, or even going to church, I am stepping into situations expecting negative reactions (parents won't want their children in my classes because I'm gay; no one will take our marriage seriously because we're two women, etc.).  Meanwhile, other friends who are my age and just as gay are legally married (albeit only in one state) and legally adopting a child in the state where they live.

I could certainly start stepping into the world in terms of what is possible, rather than what I fear.  It's not 1986 anymore.