Introducing genXy

A place for the minority of the minority generation…

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We’re genXy. Oh well, whatever.

Greetings and salutations! And welcome to genXy.

I’m Dana — a GenX word nerd in the Pacific Northwest and long-ish time writer. I run a couple of publications and am also a Boost nominator on Medium.

Meet Lawrence. He’s a gay half-Jewish GenX political nerd and also one of my lifelong very best friends. I’ve written about Lawrence and our shared love of the Magnetic Fields. I shared how I married him 18 years after he married me. In typical GenX fashion, neither marriage worked out. But we still have each other. And he always gives the best advice.

Lawrence is an amazing writer. Fun fact, he beat me for the “best writer” award our senior year. I couldn’t even be mad about it — not then or now.

Together we’re excited to announce our new publication, genXy!

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Our aim at genXy is to explore the unique joys, pitfalls, and opportunities of our shared lived experience as the most overlooked generation–relationships, family, career, music, identity, aging, fun, all of it.

But let’s make one thing clear: not everyone in Generation X is genXy.

Writ large, GenX sucks. We broke for Trump 53% to 45% in 2024. The conservative Washington Reviewer wrote, “Generation X delivered the White House to Trump,” and even went on to proclaim us, “the Trumpiest generation.” GenX can be disgraceful.

Sure, we were all raised as latchkey kids, before the age of participation trophies. We lived robust young adulthoods before the Internet. We gained the life skills and took the hits associated with coming of age in our small and not-mighty “whatever” generation.

But being genXy means we continued to grow and evolve beyond our misspent youths. And we still do. Our fashion, music, and cultural values aren’t frozen in 80s-nostalgia, even as we still love Night Ranger*.

GenX came to life completely analog, but genXy adapted. We’re technology savvy. We may have written our college papers on typewriters, but we can still pivot tables with the best of them.

Being genXy means you’ve had and lost music across every format ever available — and are sort of fine about it. Perhaps you’ve lined your bookcases with thousands of alphabetized records and CDs. Or maybe you sold yours for cash back in the 90s in favor of digital music, and still live with that regret (guilty). Now we’re bemused our kids want cassettes and vinyl and shitty old digital cameras — but also, we get it. We understand the appeal of physical media, and we love our yearly Spotify Wrappeds, even though we know they suck for artists.

We’re unabashedly liberal, feminist, and LGBTQ+ supporters. We believe in science. We loathe Nazis.

genXy is the minority of the minority generation.

We’re also a bellwether.

We’re old enough to remember a time with more stability, when a one-income household could support a family. We watched it on TV while that reality was slipping away in our own homes and lives.

We were too young to grasp what the shift from pensions to 401ks under Reagan meant, but now GenX is the first generation to stare down retirement in the post-pension era. Let’s just say, our future isn’t so bright — and no shades are going to help.

And not only are we not ready to retire, but we’re also getting pushed out of the workplace early, especially in tech roles — with no social safety net, no company loyalty, and into a job market flooded with 1,000s of applicants per job opening. Financially, thing are bleak AF for many of us.

GenX is also the first generation where it was normal to have divorced parents. We had front-row seats to the decline of the nuclear family, but still came of age during an era of presumed monogamy. Those of us who are single now are staring down a world of ethical non-monogamy, solo-poly, and a general unwillingness to compromise or commit — further de-stablilizing many of us.

As for me, I came of age with unprecedented opportunity as a woman. Unlike my mom and her peers — who went to college to get their “Mrs degrees” and had limited career choices, like teacher or secretary — college was a given for me, and every major felt accessible. I never knew a time when I couldn’t have a credit card, buy my own car, or hold my own mortgage. Birth control pills were dispensed like candy. I never knew a time when abortion wasn’t legal.

Until now, of course.

Lawrence came of age when no one came out, at least not in high school. Even with me, he only came out after college. But as adults, queer GenXers could live out and proud in ways no generation before them could. Sadly, gay men of GenX lost their immediate predecessors to the AIDS crisis, and came of sexual age during a health pandemic that meant death. As ever, GenX has been a fulcrum: able to remember the deep closets and tragic loss of life in the queer generation before ours, and the emergence of PrEP and the passing of marriage equality in the generation to follow. We’ve been overjoyed by the forward momentum.

Until now, of course.

GenX has witnessed it all.

But genXy has been rooting for the right side of history.

genXy is very tired.

But we have a lot of thoughts and stories to share, so here we are.

Want to join us? Leave a comment and we’ll add you as a writer.

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*Ahem, Lawrence here. Not all of us still love Night Ranger. Some of us never did.

Lawrence and Dana in the 90s. We haven’t aged a minute!