OUR SCENE | SENIOR LIVING
Words of Wisdom
In Conversation with Patrick Scully BY ASHLEY BERNING Every community has their culture bearers, those who share their stories and knowledge with the younger generations in order to preserve and continue that culture. In the LGBTQ community, it is especially important for these elders to have a voice—we lost so many talented, beautiful people during the AIDS crisis, and that left behind a culture without many mentors. In the spirit of intergenerational dialogue, we had the opportunity to chat with Patrick Scully, local elder in the LGBTQ community, to talk about the power of representation, his experiences as a first generation post-Stonewall out gay man, and what wisdom he has to share.
ON GROWING UP QUEER
“When I was in junior high school, my American Literature teacher announced the next author we would be studying was Walt Whitman. He was known to many as the father of free verse. One of my more precocious classmates raised his hand and asked, ‘When you say free, do you mean that group at the university?’ (The university had just started a group called FREE: Fighting Repression of Erotic Expression.) She didn’t miss a beat. She just looked at him and said, ‘Andy, to answer your very obtuse question directly, yes: Walt Whitman was a homosexual.’ “Now, this is 1969. I didn’t yet know completely that I was gay; there wasn’t enough information out in the world that I lived in to imagine that could be possible, any more than I thought I could have a telephone in my pocket that takes pictures. “She rocked my world with that information at that time.”
ON LGBTQ REPRESENTATION IN SHOWBIZ
“A film called Word Is Out came out, I think, in ’77 or ’78. It was just a talking head documentary of the lives of gay men and lesbians in San Francisco and being out. For me in my mid-20s seeing that film, it gave me the permission to think, Yeah, this is gonna work. I can live my life openly as a gay man even though I don’t have role models that I know who did this. I can break new ground and make this happen.
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LAVENDER JANUARY 13-26, 2022
Photo by Sara Rubinstein
