The grandson of Judy Garland's biographer looks back at how the Stonewall uprising helped millions of LGBTQ Americans tell their stories
Judy Garland embodied a central paradox in the world of mass entertainment culture and of modern life.
The gay sensibility of my post-Stonewall generation, by contrast, entailed an effort to distinguish ourselves as more modern and more authentically ourselves, or so we thought, than those arch, hissing queens who seemed to lack the courage to be themselves. It’s not that we were more earnest than our elders; in fact, we remained haughtily distrustful of emoting, suspicious of anyone, including ourselves, who dared to care too much.
Yet if some variety of self-flight was a defining feature of queer life for much of the last half century, there are signs that we may finally have landed somewhere beyond the rainbow. What Judy achieved only in the narrow confines of her performance life — accessing and exquisitely expressing genuine emotion — the descendants of Stonewall have begun to achieve in ordinary life.
Indeed, the LGBTQ movement didn’t just transform life for queer people, but changed the world, by inventing — and widely sharing — a simple act whose profound impact is indisputable: coming out. Data show a steady increase in the number of LGBTQ people who disclosed their identities in the decades after Stonewall, and research
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