Patric McCoy’s photograph Scottie 11 is a sincere portrait of a Black, gay elder. As a young queer person, I come back to this work for the sense of seeing and being seen by someone who represents the reality of our past and shows us the possibilities of our future.

Head turned, as if greeting a friend, Scottie looks out over his shoulder, gray-white whiskers and weighty gaze showing his age. Scottie was 78 at the time this photo was taken, and his presence as a queer elder is made tangible in this look­­—offering a moment of recognition backed by a lifetime of experience.

As Juarez Hawkins, the exhibition’s curator, points out, “Scottie’s inclusion, like that of McCoy’s photograph Three Amigos, highlights a set of elder men-loving men… [and challenges the] popular trope of ‘the gay life’ being solely a young man’s arena.” A similar trope persists today. There is a felt generational gap within the LGBTQ+ community, caused in large part by losses suffered during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s. This creates a harmful misconception that there are no LGBTQ+ elders living today, making invisible our elders’ current fight for accessible and accessible and affirmative care. Such erasure also makes it difficult for younger queer people to imagine existing, let alone thriving, as we age.

Patric McCoy’s photograph tightly frames Scottie, and I imagine McCoy and Scottie sitting side-by-side, swapping stories, making a connection. Putting myself in McCoy’s shoes, the image creates the opportunity for younger queer people to recognize the potential of their future selves and find their places in the genealogy of the larger community and highlights the importance of multigenerational queer representation.

Molly Fulop (they/she) is a recent graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s M.A. in Art Education program who is interested in the impact of intergenerational and collaborative art making on LGBTQ+ people. They work closely with the LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project in Chicago, IL and the Rollins Museum of Art in Winter Park, FL on these topics.