Rainbows and Mud: Experiments in LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Care

Abstract

While an increasing awareness of the economic, legal, emotional, social, and physical precarity of LGBTQ+ people has sparked new laws, policies, and medical and social services, their epistemic needs are just as urgent. For many decades, young people growing up in the United States have been systematically denied access to LGBTQ+ histories, knowledges, and older adults through homophobic and transphobic gatekeeping within education, community, and family networks. As a result, LGBTQ+ folks come of age in relative social isolation, lacking tools to understand their experiences within broader sociohistorical contexts and recognition from others as valuable sources of knowledge. In this article, we explore the complexities of epistemic care as relational work designed to counter legacies of injustice through The LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project. The project—a partnership between an LGBTQ+ community center, an art and design college, and a public research university—brings together racially, socioeconomically, and gender-diverse cohorts of LGBTQ+ younger (eighteen to twenty-nine years old) and older adults (sixty-two to eighty-four years old) for dialogue, art making, and shared meals. Over time, it has evolved as a collaborative hybrid pedagogical/research experiment in which participants become partners in education, community formation, and knowledge production. Interweaving ethnographic narrative from dialogues with theoretical discussion, we connect our work to earlier feminist and gay liberation consciousness-raising practices (1960s–80s) and feminist and queer scholarship on care ethics in both education and research methodologies to think about epistemic justice work as a form of collective self-care.