What a special place! Of course I'll always have a soft spot for the Center, since I met my late husband Lenny there in 1990. And attended meetings of Queer Nation. And volunteered for SAGE. And hung out in the garden. I met Quentin Crisp in the garden, as a matter of fact.
I took classes, got health care, and felt like I had a home full of queer people for the first time ever —that wasn't a bar.
By the time I got to New York City, Act Up general meetings had moved from the Center to Cooper Union, but lots of Act Up work still went on at the Center.
I remember being distinctly conscious in those days of how unique and special our community was. Similar energy existed in big cities like Philadelphia, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but in most of the United States, queer community was seriously hard to find.
I went to high school and college in Iowa, where the only queer community I had access to was a tiny bar in downtown Des Moines that was so discreet it didn't even have a name — just a sign with a small pink question mark in a back alley.
Today, physical queer communities exist in so many more places, for so many more queer people.
Reactionary forces are trying to strangle that progress, like in Texas where queer student groups at public universities have been shut down by the state.
And ironically, Wisconsin, which was a pioneer in LGBTQ rights back in the day, is now a battleground. Since you mentioned Catholic school, it's probably worth mentioning that the Catholic Church in Wisconsin is working as hard as they can to strangle our rights and to make us disappear.
But you know what? You are absolutely right that young people today aren't going to sit still for that. They have your example, and they have examples of so many more of an older generation that worked so hard to get us to good places.
They take that as inevitable. Most of them don't even realize they're standing on your shoulders, and isn't that how it should be?