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We Forgot the Face of Our Fathers — But Not Their Fire

Underground Joy, Lost Elders, and Why We Need Each Other Again

Right. Where Do I Start?

Before the sponsorships.

Before every bank suddenly discovered rainbows in June.

Before we started arguing about who makes Pride look respectable.

There was joy.

And not the polished kind.

The underground kind.

The kind that existed in leather bars with no signage. In backrooms you found because someone trusted you enough to tell you. In spaces that absolutely would have been shut down if the wrong person walked in.

It wasn’t safe.

But it was ours.

And that matters.

Those Rooms Weren’t Just About Sex

When people talk about places like the Mineshaft now, it’s always with this raised eyebrow.

Like it was some wild myth. Some extreme era we’ve evolved past.

But here’s the thing.

Those rooms were infrastructure.

They were where men who had been told their whole lives they were wrong learned how to stand properly in their own skin.

There were rules. Dress codes. Ways of negotiating. Ways of reading the room.

You didn’t just walk in and flail around.

You watched. You learned. You figured out who you were.

And then AIDS hit.

And it didn’t gently knock.

It wiped out entire friend groups.

The men who should be our elders now? A lot of them aren’t here.

That’s not dramatic.

That’s just maths.

The Elders We Should Have

You know what we should have?

Rooms full of older gay men telling stories.

Men in their seventies saying, “This is how we survived the police.” “This is how we negotiated leather.” “This is how we buried friends and still found a way to laugh.”

Instead, a lot of us became the “older ones” way too early.

There are gaps.

Missing faces at Pride. Missing voices in the room. Missing hands on shoulders.

And younger queer people inherited Pride without inheriting the cost.

That’s not their fault.

The transmission got interrupted.

But interruption doesn’t mean we give up on passing it on.

We Used to Know We Needed Each Other

Here’s the part that gets me.

When we were criminalised, we understood something very clearly:

We needed each other.

Leather men. Drag queens. Bears. Trans women. Activists. The lot.

We didn’t all agree on everything.

But we knew fragmentation was dangerous.

Now?

We argue about who’s cringe. Who’s too sexual. Who’s too loud. Who makes us look bad.

Meanwhile, outside our community, rights are being questioned again.

Books banned. Healthcare attacked. Existence debated.

History doesn’t repeat exactly.

But it rhymes loud enough to hear.

Have We Forgotten the Face of Our Fathers?

There’s a line in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower that always stuck with me:

“You have forgotten the face of your father.”

In that story, it’s not about your literal dad.

It means you’ve forgotten your training. Your lineage. The code that shaped you.

And in queer terms?

It hits.

It’s not about idolising older gay men.

It’s about forgetting what built us.

Forgetting that leather wasn’t just an outfit — it was a language.

Forgetting that bear culture wasn’t a vibe — it was a rebellion against being told our bodies were wrong.

Forgetting that pup culture isn’t silly — it’s negotiated trust and play in a world that often denies both.

When we dismiss these things as embarrassing, we’re not evolving.

We’re cutting our own roots.

The Joy Isn’t Gone

Here’s the hopeful bit.

The joy didn’t die.

It’s just… quieter right now.

You still see it.

• In a proper bear hug.
• On a packed dance floor.
• In a leather titleholder mentoring someone half his age.
• In a trans kid finding community and finally breathing properly.

Joy isn’t naive.

It’s strategic.

We chose it before.

We can choose it again.

This Isn’t Nostalgia

This isn’t about going backwards.

It’s about remembering properly.

Younger queer people deserve to know:

• That underground joy once held us together.
• That AIDS didn’t erase us.
• That elders existed.
• That rooms were built deliberately.

Because a community that knows its history is harder to fracture.

We may have forgotten the face of our fathers.

But we have not forgotten how they danced.