ABSTRACT
Many different time-scales are at work in all our lives. For most lesbians and gay men there is the time-scale of our relations with our families, as our parents age, and our heterosexual siblings and other contemporaries raise families of their own. Then there is the time-scale of our own friendships, our love-affairs and partnerships, and the time-scale of our working lives, of where we’ve lived, the music we’ve loved, and so on. For most lesbians and gay men there is also the time-scale of the social and political history of our communities. ‘Coming out’ in the 1970s was very different from ‘coming out’ in the 1980s or the 1990s. The relative significance of all these different levels of experience will of course vary from person to person, according to our family backgrounds, and a host of different factors, including our unique, personal time-scales of individual growth, change, and development.
