Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and thoughts, Jim! I think we all need some fellow LGBTQ folks to take us under their wings and get us better acculturated, teach us the lingo, be patient with us seeming a little starry-eyed or annoying, and help us make connections.

I think there are a lot of reasons why the current generations of up-and-coming-out LGBTQ people struggle with such things. I can't speak to what the past was like, but it does seem to me from the outside that there is more difficulty in younger generations finding their queer mentors -- and some of this has to do with technology eroding the number of incidental/random contacts we make. But I also get the sense it is a political change too? I think there is less gratitude to simply meet anyone else who is queer today, and less of a sense of responsibility to look after one another and all be on the same team.

But I don't want to sound too idealistic and act as though everyone was politically conscious and patient in the past. I think also people are just more socially isolated in general these days, which breeds a lot of younger (and newly out) queer people feeling like they don't have the needed social skills and no idea of where to turn to find other people. And a lot fewer spaces for us to wander about and be a little annoying and then be taken care of through it.

But that's really just a guess! And it certainly varies a lot based on whether someone is urban or rural, what part of the world they are in, and what the oppression of their identity looks like these days.