Imagine growing up without ever seeing a version of yourself that you could aspire to become.
No father figure who openly shared your experience. No older brother who could show you the ropes. No group of older men who could teach you about relationships, intimacy, self-respect, heartbreak or what it means to build a life with another man.
For generations of gay men, this wasn't a hypothetical situation. It was reality.
We grew up learning how to hide before we ever had the opportunity to learn how to belong.
We learned to monitor our behaviour, adjust our voices, hide our attractions and carefully manage what other people knew about us.
We became exceptionally good at reading rooms, anticipating rejection and protecting ourselves.
But who taught us how to love?
Who showed us how to navigate relationships with other men?
Who taught us how to disagree without abandoning each other, how to communicate our needs, how to recognise healthy love or how to build lasting connections?
And perhaps most painfully, where were the men who could have shown us?
Research on gay men of the generations that lived through the epidemic has documented how those deaths disrupted the social networks of particular birth cohorts — the friendships, partnerships and community ties that held those men's lives together.
The AIDS epidemic didn't just take lives. The men who died were our elders before we knew we needed them — the ones who might otherwise have become mentors, role models, friends, partners and guides for younger generations.
Whether that loss produced a corresponding shortfall of mentors for younger gay men is a reasonable historical reading, but it isn't a finding anyone has measured directly. It's an interpretation. A defensible one — but worth naming as such.
We lost people who had stories to tell, experiences to share and wisdom that would never be passed down.
Where role models are accessible, research links them to identity acceptance, psychological safety and self-confidence. Where they're missing, that link is missing too.
Work specifically on LGBT young people has looked at what happens when role models are accessible — and when they're not.
And while the world gradually became more accepting, many of us were still left trying to figure out things that other generations had learned through observation, family and community.
We had to work it out ourselves.
We learned through heartbreak. Through rejection. Through relationships that hurt us. Through experiences we didn't always have the language or support to understand.
Perhaps some of the things we now identify as personal shortcomings are, at least partly, the consequences of growing up without the guidance, representation and community that every human being deserves.
Perhaps we weren't failing at adulthood.
Perhaps we were learning how to be adults without ever having been shown how.
And maybe that's where our work begins.
Not by blaming previous generations, not by living in the past, but by recognising what was missing.
Because we can become the men we needed when we were younger.
We can learn to communicate differently, build healthier relationships, create meaningful friendships and become positive role models for the men coming after us.
We don't have to keep repeating what we never had the opportunity to learn.
We deserve more than simply surviving.
We deserve to learn how to live, love and belong.
Sources
How AIDS deaths disrupted the social networks of gay men in particular birth cohorts.
Positive role models linked to identity acceptance, psychological safety and self-confidence.
Accessible and inaccessible role models for LGBT young people.
Klassen (2021). Facing it Together: Early Caregiving Responses to Vancouver's HIV/AIDS Epidemic
Oral histories of caregiving and community response during the AIDS epidemic.
Where a claim rests on research, it's cited above. Where it's my own reading of what that research means, I've said so in the piece.
If any of this sounds familiar, that's where coaching starts
Understanding what was missing is the beginning. Changing how you respond when it shows up is the work.
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