Each morning this month when I sit in front of my computer with my first cup of coffee of the day to check my email inbox and Facebook posts to see how my friends are doing and which psychic reader has all the answers for me on any given day, both are filled with reminders, reports, and pictures about Pride Month.

I have noticed a trend when pictures of proud GLBT people are included. They are all pictures of stereotypical shirtless, muscular, young Gay men and semi-clad curvaceous , young women in places with great scenery. If all you knew of The Gay Community came from these pictures, many from advocacy groups, you would think there is an age limit on survival within the GLBT Community, and only one body type.

Proud Gay people all seem to be between the ages of 16 and somewhere in their 30’s, mostly White, with an aversion to clothing. They all go the gym, live in tony neighborhoods, and have great taste in clothes, and apparently the incomes to afford both.

What you don’t see are older GLBT people, and as one of those, this bothers me.

How can we claim to be proud, when we send the old guys into the kitchen when people come over?

At one point the older members of the community were young, and they lived in the time when being Gay meant finding ways to survive in an oppressive society without many of the rights enjoyed now.

Bars were hidden and places to meet were limited and clandestine.

These older guys are the people who rebelled against this and fought to get what too many assume is the way it was, is, and the way it will remain.

These are the people who gave much of their youth through their older years working for change and have the battle scars to show for it. They lost their jobs, their housing, their significant others. They were jailed and beaten. Some are alone because somewhere in time someone thought it was perfectly acceptable to beat to death, many times after some torture, the person they loved.

They saw friends die because people accepted that AIDS was a punishment from a horribly cruel God.
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And, yet, here they are still around.

That old guy sitting at the end of the bar that you assume is just some old guy sitting at the end of the bar may have been one of the people who made it possible for the young members of the community to walk into and out of a club without the fear of being clubbed or arrested for simply having been in there.

Those two old guys you can’t imagine having sexual relations, ewww, have been together for years and showed their love of each other by going through the history they did in spite of what they faced.

They forced open the closet doors, and in many places took them off the hinges.

They are proud of what they have accomplished, but don’t seem to deserve that being acknowledged because they are not, apparently, photogenic enough.

If your only conception of the Stonewall Rebellion is that recent and smarmy misrepresentation of it in that confused movie (Thank you hinterland white kid who came to town to get it all going), or all those iconic black and white photos from that time, that is Stonewall frozen in time, but the people in them aren’t, and they have aged.

Within the last year I as admonished by a 25 year old in a progressive state who has never known discrimination, tacitly accepted bullying in school, loss of housing and employment, or the fear of being beaten just for being, that had the older people done something when they were young, perhaps they would have gotten the rights he enjoys today when they were his age. He apparently does not know who got him those rights and how long and hard they fought to get them.

He is the prospector’s grandson who, after inheriting the mining company the grandfather formed after finding what he had been looking for, can’t understand how it could possibly have been hard for his grandfather in  light of all the equipment and employees he has inherited.

Don’t hide the old guys. If you are really proud, be proud of them too.