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These days, especially, we’re all spending an inordinate amount of time on social media. To be fair, it is a Rear Window- like front seat blind to the circus of life as we, as voyeurs, can intimately experience, albeit virtually and vicariously.
The vast majority of my social media “friends” are LGBTQ. I don’t really know most of them. Like many users, making “friends” is often driven by the numbers. Along the lines of the friend of my social media friend is my friend, there’s the inevitable more-friends than thou competitive spirit that leads to the accumulations of thousands of them. Mine span the demographic spectrum in age, ethnicity, race and political affiliation as well as of all the letters of the acronym. Some have a sense of humor. Most do not. To be fair, delivering a smart one-liner on social media leaves it to the mood and wit of the reader to interpret as intended. Of course, the sheer volume of competing smart remarks, memes, amusing pet videos, and thirstily posted selfies, filter and distill even the cleverest commentaries to obscurity.
But then, what younger queer Facebook aficionados do react to, vehemently and cruelly, is an inadvertent misgendering. I once watched as an older woman unconsciously committed that ultimate affront to a non-binary, gender fluid them. As a consequence she endured a blistering barrage of ageist, body-shaming and sexist insult by them and their allies. I’ve been on the receiving end of a similar salvo but for no apparent reason other than being older.
It’s certainly easy for us boomers to look at the upcoming generation, and in the manner of time immemorial, shake our head in dismay over the decline of civilization as we know it.
Intimate Life Views
Then, one day, whilst a-scrolling on social media, I stumbled on a compilation of gay TikTok videos. The TikTok app allows users to post brief videos (15 seconds or so brief). It doesn’t sound like much but given attention spans these days, it’s apparently more than enough. In any case, the LGBTQ submissions, speaking of Rear Window, allow an intimate view of contemporary LGBTQ life as teens and 20-somethings know it. They sing, dance, play practical jokes, and contrive a range of content that astounds (and, at times, confounds). The energetic exuberance packed into these video vignettes is exhaustingly propelled by the matter-of-factness of pure, uninhibited gay joy. There’s a full cast of moms, friends, lovers and pets, too. It’s all mesmerizingly utopian.
I just binge watched the “Twilight Zone” marathon the other day. It included the familiar episode, “The Trade Ins”, with the old married couple of the future going to the shop to get beautiful youthful bodies. They saved as much as they could but only enough to afford one new body. They decide the husband will get the bod-job. When he appears transformed, bounding about in his freshly minted jock physique, his fragile little old lady wife looks on knowingly. She realizes she can’t keep up. The husband does, too, and switches back to his creaking aged form. They leave arm in arm, apparently to persevere into the sunset, happily ever after, together.
Lovely sentiment but watching TikTok and seeing what life after oppression looks like, I may not have ditched my spouse, but we would have certainly saved up for both of us—or just waited for a two-for-one sale.
