Letters from Queer Elders: Transmitting Intergenerational Wisdom in LGBTQ+ Communities

ABSTRACT

Intergenerational relationships have been established as a critical locus of psychosocial development, meeting needs of identity development for youth, generativity for elders, and connection and belonging for both. However, intergenerational relationships are both rare in the LGBTQ+ community and sorely needed as a buffer to the discrimination and harm that those within the community experience from systemic and structural oppression. Focusing on sexual identity, and employing a letter writing paradigm, we investigated the content of wisdom that LGB elders have to share with youth. In a descriptive, exploratory, mixed-methods, and pre-registered study, 94 adults ranging in age 50 to 79 years (M = 55.98; SD = 6.30) wrote letters to a fictional youth, Sam, as well as completed surveys of psychosocial development and well-being. Letters were content coded for themes, as well as for emotional tone and subjective perspective. The most common themes of wisdom shared included knowing and celebrating oneself, negotiating an oppressive society, and finding one’s community. Those who wrote more emotionally positive letters scored higher on measures of wisdom and generativity, and lower on embitterment. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of cultivating opportunities for wisdom-sharing within LGBTQ+ communities to promote flourishing across the lifespan.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBTQ+
• generativity
• letter writing
• wisdom
• narrative
• intergenerational relationships

Acknowledgments

We warmly thank our participants who so graciously shared their wisdom with us. We also thank the Department of Psychology at Western Washington University for funding this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use the term “LGBTQ+” and “queer” interchangeably and inclusively. Our participants used both terms to describe their identities and experiences, so we honor their voices by using both.

2. We used an online recruitment firm that only allowed these labels for sexuality and did not include diverse gender identity labels. However, our prompt included gender identity, and some of our participants narrated experiences related to diverse gender identities.

3. We use the term “elder” even for those under 65, as we have found in our work that even a decade of difference in age is often viewed as making someone an elder, from the perspective of youth. To us, the term signals a sign of respect for the accumulation of knowledge in this generation.

4. Due to the lower kappas, we also report percent agreement, which is useful when there are some categories are infrequent, as is the case here.

5. We developed this idea amongst our team, but a reviewer pointed us to the composite storytelling approach developed from critical race theory (e.g., Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). We appreciate this link to an established method of which we were unaware.

Additional information

Funding

We warmly thank our participants who so graciously shared their wisdom with us. We also thank the Department of Psychology at Western Washington University for funding this project.