Aging and Mentorship in the Margins: Multigenerational Knowledge Transfer Among LGBTQ+ Chosen Families

For LGBTQ+ communities, learning often happens among chosen families, including older adults. Building on Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical concepts of capital (e.g., economic, social, cultural, symbolic) and queer theory of sexual capital, this article examines how LGBTQ+ chosen families share expertise to build knowledge and power across the life course.

Using a transformative sequential mixed-methods design from a larger project, this subproject includes data from 6 intracategorical focus groups with multigenerational and multiracial LGBTQ+ participants (n = 37), including older adults, in a Midwestern community to center their voices, understand their experiences within and outside LGBTQ+ communities, foreground experiences of LGBTQ+ aging, and explore challenges and supports.

We identified 3 ways in which LGBTQ+ chosen families shared knowledge about various forms of capital: latent mentorship, bi- or multi-directional mentorship, and transgressive mentorship. We call these 3 types of knowledge sharing "mentorship in the margins," in which knowledge is shared within and among communities whose intersecting positionalities both limit and expand ways to imagine mentorship for navigating structural barriers and social, economic, and political inequities, especially regarding shared housing, family formation, and marriage equality.

The breadth and depth of multigenerational transfers of knowledge across the life course demonstrate the centrality of multigenerational chosen families for LGBTQ+ communities as they age, especially among multiply-minoritized communities (e.g., transgender women, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color [BIPOC] same-gender-loving communities). Knowledge shared among chosen families also reflects how "mentorship in the margins" builds individual and collective power that helps LGBTQ+ communities survive and thrive as they age.