Students and faculty eagerly waited for a talk from alumnus Michael Patrick Vaughn ’12 titled “Three Gay Generations: The Influence of Lived Experience and Collective Memory on What it Means to be Gay.”
At the beginning of the talk, before getting into his research, Vaughn explained a little bit about himself. He graduated from Geneseo, and then went on to begin a graduate program for his MSW in social work, but decided it was not for him and left the program. Then, he enrolled in Emory University and is now almost done with his PhD in women, gender and sexuality studies.
These studies inspired his return to Geneseo, as he wanted to give a talk on his research and dissertation that he is working on—which will be completed at the end of March when he graduates from Emory and receives his PhD.
His dissertation is titled “Tops, Bottoms and the Ghost of HIV,” which covers three generations of homosexuality, how they define their own sexuality and what it means to be gay.
“This is the big research question that liberates the entire book,” Vaughn said. “How did people define their own sexuality in relation to the group’s history and their individual lived experience?”
After introducing himself and explaining his project, Vaughn dove into the research that he had conducted. He talked to three different generations of gay men who lived in New York City about what it means to be gay and divided these three generations by pre-AIDS epidemic, during the epidemic and today’s generation.
He found that for the first generation, there was a lot of psychology that influenced how gay men viewed themselves. These men viewed being gay as something that other people could see.
“These folks, when they talk about being gay, they let you know that there is something you need to be aware of—usually about psychology—and they’ll talk about the importance of being able to be visibly queer,” said Vaughn.
He found that the middle generation associated being gay with death, as this was a time of high mortality rates. He also found out that many men in this generation refer to themselves as “elders” even if they are only in their late 30s, because so many older gay men died during this time.
“This middle generation grew up during this high mortality rate of one or two funerals a week. So, we’re talking about people dying very, very regularly, which was often how sexuality was screened for them,” Vaughn said.
He also found that for the youngest generation, a lot of the younger men disassociate themselves with the older generations. They do this because they were not alive during the highest point of the epidemic, and therefore do not see themselves as part of it.
Vaughn’s talk provided valuable research on how people perceive themselves and what it means to be gay for different people. One thing that he found is that gay is a term that everyone can define for themselves.