Simon Blake is Chief Executive of the LGBTQIA+ charity, Stonewall (www.stonewall.org.uk). Have a question about LGBTQIA+ life, love or identity? Send it to Simon for advice at asksimon@gaytimes.com

Q: I'm a 55-year-old gay man working in a young, creative industry. Many of my colleagues are queer, trans or non-binary, and sometimes it feels like we're speaking different languages. I've always seen myself as progressive, but I stumble over they/them pronouns, don't know half the terminology, and I'm scared to ask questions in case I offend someone. I also resent feeling like my generation of gay men is suddenly viewed as hopelessly out of touch. My LGBTQIA+ colleagues all went to Pride together a few months ago and didn't invite me. How do I connect with them without pretending to understand everything?

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Simon Blake's advice: Thank you for your question. It speaks to something I hear a lot at Stonewall. You and I grew up at about the same time when homophobia was rife, there were very few role models and often little understanding about sexual and gender diversity in our communities. 

When I came out to friends and family some said very similar things about not knowing the terminology; then it was a shift to the word partner instead of boyfriend or girlfriend which is common parlance now. When we don’t understand something or don't have the right words, it can be scary, difficult, and even isolating – but it doesn’t have to be. 

Queer went from a tool to hurt us to a term more and more people feel increasingly comfortable with.

Throughout my life, and specifically on LGBTQIA+ issues since being at Stonewall I have learned that we do not need to understand everything to cheerlead others or belong. I have been ‘out’ for over three decades. In that time the words we have used for ourselves have changed and evolved. Queer went from a tool to hurt us to a term more and more people feel increasingly comfortable with. Most people my age have learned about non-binary identities later in life, this vocabulary didn’t exist when we were younger and neither did half the vocabulary a 25-year-old uses today without a second thought. 

Not knowing something is not a failure on your part – it is what happens when a movement is moving. Language evolves because how people understand themselves evolves. That, to me, is progress working exactly as it should.