When I started looking for men who had experienced the reversal of fortune that hit gay men in the early 1980’s, I assumed that I was going to make a doc series about ageism and loneliness. Perhaps I was projecting my own internalized hopelessness onto a group of men who had been stolen from me. When I was growing up, I knew two things would happen to me if I came out. First, I would get AIDS and then I would go to Hell. After I had my first gay kiss, I spent a year wondering if it would be the death of me. I called an HIV hotline and a nurse explained the difference between blood and saliva. I spent a lot of time imagining what Hell would be like. Perhaps if I had had access to a few gay men who were older and wiser, they could have held my hand and tried to convince me what in the world might be possible: love, fun, and even faith in a God who had made me just as I am.

Now I do have access to older and wiser gay men. The ones I asked to participate in this doc series are ambitious, hungry to live, and eager to do something with the years that had been denied to many of their contemporaries. In them, I see what straight people see when they look at their parents and grandparents: a future for myself. I also see the past more clearly. Queer existence before my time was varied, interesting, and more complicated than the media typically suggests. Film and television tend to pop out just a few varieties of gay men, and even fewer over forty. I needed more options. I developed Still Here Still Queer so that I could find them.