Bridging the Gap, now in its fourth year, is a twelve-week intergenerational LGBTQ theater project, offered free to participants. During the course of weekly workshops held in Chelsea, group members collaborate to create an original 45-minute play through improvisation, group reflection, and revision. The show presents issues and ideas that matter to our participants. Group members also build theater skills, celebrate difference, challenge their assumptions about age and have fun!

Bridging the Gap is now in its fourth year. Since its inception, SAGE has been our committed community partner. This year, the group is comprised of new participants as well as returnees. Some of those returning are doing so for the third and fourth time. The returnees and SAGE’s continued partnership are significant indicators as to the valuable impact on the LGBTQ community.

Bridging the Gap is a community-based, intergenerational theater project designed to explore the LGBTQ generation gap through the creation of original theater. In New York City, LGBTQ people from different generations have had very few opportunities to connect. This has robbed them of opportunities to weave a common history and share the strategies they have used to survive and thrive. Bridging the Gap brings these LGBTQ generations into the same room and uses theater to spark a dialogue between them.

Bridging the Gap offers a platform to amplify voices from within the LGBTQ population that are frequently ignored/not considered, from both ends of the age spectrum. These alternate perspectives are not the dominant voices we normally hear in LGBTQ discourse.

There's a temptation in intergenerational work to suggest that age 'doesn't matter' and that 'everyone is the same underneath their skin.' But we've found that that isn't necessarily the case! While finding commonalities among the two groups is important, it's also important to pinpoint the areas of difference and figure out ways to navigate those. Perhaps the best example of this is the use of language in the two groups. The term 'queer' has very different meanings for the older generation than it has for the younger generation. While many of our older participants consider the word a slur, many of our younger participants actually use it as a label for their identity. We think that having the conversation about honoring and respecting people's identities while also being able to contextualize certain words and honor their complicated history is an essential (not to mention extremely interesting) part of what Bridging the Gap can do.

To create our performances, we work with a process that is sometimes called playbuidling and sometimes called devising. This means the scenes are generated from the ideas, opinions and experiences of the people in the group. Through a series of prompts, discussions and structured improvisations we eventually come up with individual scenes tied together.

“Is there truly an antipathy between younger and older gay men? Are there conflicting interests?” Raymond M. Berger may have been the first scholar to consider the existence of a gay generation gap in Gay and Gray: The Older Homosexual Man. Berger reached no conclusion in 1982 when the book was published, but did cite that older gay men of the time were deeply marked by “the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the anti-homosexual witch hunts of the McCarthy era.” He also stated that the AIDS crisis would likely shape generational relationships between gay men in the future, noting, “It is intriguing to speculate about the dimensions this social phenomenon is likely to take.”

Over twenty years later, on the eve of Gay Pride 2009, New York Magazine published Mark Harris’ article “The Gay Generation Gap.” In the essay, Harris answers Berger’s question by detailing the friction between gay men in their twenties and gay men in their forties and fifties.

Harris sharply illuminates the silence generated by the gap, predicting that during the coming days of Pride, men from both sides of the gap would find themselves together in the same space and, “We will look at them. They will look at us. We will realize that we have absolutely nothing to say to one another. And the gay generation gap will widen.” Harris makes a heartbreaking conclusion noting that young gay men have no need for older gay mentors in modern times:

"For decades, gay men functioned as unofficial surrogate parents to the newly out and/or newly outcast … Today, though, the notion of a quasi-parental gay mentorship feels ancient, a trope out of Tales of the City."

Maybe a “mentorship” is not what is needed today as researchers have called for a new type of intergenerational relationship between LGBT generations. In their article, “Gay Youth and Gay Adults”, Scholars Janis S. Bohan, Glenda M. Russell, and Suki Montgomery investigated the gap not just between gay men, but between all LGBT youth and adults. Their research profiles the lack of understanding between LGBT teens and LGBT adults, stating that both adults and youth do not have a clear picture of each other’s life experiences and they have not had the opportunity to cultivate a means of communicating with each other in a meaningful way, concluding that “the absence of such an understanding hamstrings individuals in both age groups as well as the community and the movement as a whole."

In a later, condensed review of this research, “The Gay Generation Gap: Communicating Across the LGBT Generational Divide”, Russell and Bohan issue a call to action outlining both the assets and needs of LGBT youth and adults.