What We Did Next

Ken Plummer famously highlighted the importance of sexual story telling in articulating and developing a sense of identity, meaning and community among lesbians and gay men in the wake of gay liberation from the late 1960s. The most characteristic form of this was the coming out story: a narrative of dawning awareness of a sense of gender and sexual difference in an oppressive family and cultural context, a growing experience of prejudice and discrimination and rejection; a tentative contact with and identification with others like yourself; climaxing with a moment of recognition and liberation by coming out to self and others through involvement in new social worlds, with new possibilities opening up. This was a transformative experience for a new generation of sexual actors and activists, largely of the baby boom generation coming of age in the 1960s (the Plummer generation). Collectively, this generation helped reshape the possibilities of being gay in a host of different ways. But what happened next for them? Many of the pioneers of this generation have in the past few years published memoirs of their experiences (including the present writer). Inevitably, these new stories echo the coming out narratives that shaped their own lives, but they are essentially post liberation stories, reflecting but also re-shaping new possibilities of intimate life. Using a selection of these memoirs, this chapter explores the shifting meanings of the new worlds created by the era of gay liberation and the new forms of identity and belonging that have emerged among key storytellers 50 years later. It is a move I suggest from a culture of transgression to a new definition of what it is to be ordinary in a rapidly and radically changing world of sexuality, gender, and intimacy.