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Thousands marched yesterday in gay pride parades across the country. It’s a significant anniversary. Forty years ago, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. The riots that followed sparked the gay rights movement. Four decades later, there’s no question that gay people enjoy a degree of freedom unknown to their ancestral brothers-in-arms.

Television shows and movies featuring openly gay people no longer raise eyebrows. Gay marriage is now legal in New Hampshire and five other states. And the severe homophobia surrounding the AIDS crisis has subsided. Ironically, acceptance has created a rift between older gay men, who grew up hiding their sexual preference out of fear of persecution; and younger men who benefit from the struggles that took place before they were born.

Forty years after Stonewall, writer Mark Harris noticed that few of the gay men he knew associated with people 20 years younger or older than themselves. He writes about the gay generation gap in New York Magazine.

New York Magazine: The Gay Generation Gap

(Photo by Rene Bach via Flickr/Creative Commons)