Pathways to queer thriving in an LGBTQ+ intergenerational community.

Abstract

LGBTQ+ people and communities continue to survive and thrive within the context of complex and unrelenting personal, structural, and collective trauma. Psychological research has examined this adaptive capacity through frameworks of resilience and posttraumatic growth. Through multidisciplinary engagement, we have identified limitations of these frameworks when they are applied to LGBTQ+ communities. In the first half of this article, we reconceptualize resilience and posttraumatic growth as queer thriving and offer the Möbius strip as a metaphor to challenge and expand normative ideas around direction, trajectory, timeline, and outcomes of positive change through adversity. In the second half of this article, we explore pathways to queer thriving within an LGBTQ+ intergenerational community project-an ethnographic experiment-that we have cofacilitated since 2019. We view generational divisions in LGBTQ+ communities as both a reflection and a form of trauma. In our ethnographic experiment, LGBTQ+ younger and older adults have the rare opportunity to heal this division by coming together for storytelling, dialogue, and artmaking around themes and issues important to their lives. In this article, we present three ethnographic vignettes that powerfully illustrate the potential for queer thriving through intergenerational social connection. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of mixed-disciplinary, community-engaged, and descriptive approaches to examining resilience and posttraumatic growth within marginalized communities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).