ABSTRACT
As I get older, the significance of generations for understanding social life becomes more and more striking. When I was young, I only had a couple of decades of my own life: everything was new and exciting and many of the old ideas given to me by my elders had to be rejected—this was by now the 1968 generation of baby boomers after all. But now I have nearly seven decades to incorporate. And so, whilst I am still very excited by the new, I can also sense clearly just how the very new so soon becomes the very old. And the very old is soon forgotten. When I started my research, I was active in the (rapidly and now very long defunct) Gay Liberation Front; these were probably the pivotal moments of my life. Gagnon and Simon’s Sexual Conduct was published in 1973, and Foucault’s History of Sexuality in 1976. During the research there developed the famous feminist “sex wars”—linked ultimately to the Columbia Conference and Carole Vance’s collection Pleasure and Danger (1984). Shortly after my research ended, in 1981, AIDS came to thwart, haunt us, and change sexual meaning forever. Queer theory did not arrive till a full decade later—at roughly the same time as computers became widespread (but long before the Internet). At the same time, in a good number of countries around the world, “homosexuality” became legitimized through anti-discrimination laws and ultimately marriage. Same-sex relations became part of a world agenda as the world has changed. All of this is now a generation or three away from me, but it does not die. It lives on in my generation and me in the present moment. We cannot unlive this and, for a short while before we die, we are the carriers of history. And now in 2014 the world I live in is very different indeed from the world of my research. New generations are possibly surprised when they read Jeffrey Weeks’ book The World We Have Won (2007), where he traces the history of gay change and liberation in England over his life (which roughly parallels mine) and sees profoundly positive changes that have transformed sexual possibilities. Indeed, we have both witnessed this change over the short span of 60 years of our lives. The sexual world has indeed changed massively over the past half century and each generation brings different understandings to this complicated whole.
