How to grow old and stay gay – 04/20/2023 – Equilíbrio

One afternoon not long ago, I was walking with my partner near Times Square in New York City and we were approached by a man handing out flyers. “Get one for your mother,” he said to my companion. I stopped, chilled.

“What did you say?” Sonja’s arm was around my shoulders, and I shook it off to face the man head on. “Do you think I’m her mother?”

The man looked into my eyes. He was probably 40 years old – ten years younger than me. I was wearing a mask. I pulled her down.

“Sorry, sorry,” he stammered.

Sonja pulled me away. We went, but when we were halfway down the block the man followed us to try once more to reconcile.

He pointed at my bottom and said it looked like a peach.

The price of passage back to the realm of youth was objectification.

I was upset and, to calm me down, Sonja said the error could be attributed to his occupation. The man had to scan hundreds of faces an hour, maybe thousands. He wasn’t really looking at anyone. He just saw my hair, which is gray, and did a quick calculation. Sonja is two years older than me, but her hair is mostly strawberry blonde. “You still look like a baby,” she said. “To think you could be my mother is crazy.”

But then it happened again. Another man, another corner. “You and your mother look like two sweets,” he said. This time I began to seriously think about dyeing my hair.

Sonja asked me not to paint. She likes my silver locks. I wear my hair messy and I think I look cool but maybe I’m confused. Maybe I just look like one of those older women who use scissors to cling to their youth. Am I an older woman? The words feel like marbles in my mouth.

The men on the street might have confused me with Sonja’s mother because of heterosexual prejudice: they just couldn’t see the gay situation, even with the clues, even though my arm was around her waist. The question is: why do I care? I suppose it’s this: the problem with not being seen is that we don’t always know how to see ourselves.

I remember when I was a kid and all the other girls would talk about growing up and getting married. They fantasized about their future husbands, and I felt butterflies in my stomach knowing that somehow I wouldn’t have that life. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t fit in, it was that I just couldn’t imagine myself. I didn’t know any gay people, didn’t have the word for what I would surely become. My future had no vision.

Something similar is at play now. I have no cultural context to imagine my own aging. There are few American films about middle-aged or older lesbians — notably, 2010’s “My Moms and My Father” and a short film called “Cloudburst” from 2011 about a lesbian couple who run away from their nursing home. to take a trip to the Canadian border.

There are much smaller arthouse films that capture older gay women — notably Barbara Hammer’s 1992 “Nitrate Kisses.” That came out when I was in college, though I didn’t see it until much later. “Nitrate Kisses”, it turns out, is only available on DVD now, so it’s not on the big circuit, but it does contain footage of an older couple having sex. It was subversive then, and it still is.

When I was in college at the University of California at Santa Cruz, I met an older lesbian professor who I fell in love with. She was in her 70s and I was in my 20s, and she gave me a vision of aging that I still retain. Marge Frantz wore her hair short and white (I can’t imagine she bothered to dye it) and lived near campus with her old partner, Eleanor.

Marge taught in what was then called the women’s studies department, and I learned from her about the intersection of Marxism and feminism. I followed her everywhere, not only because she was brilliant, but because she offered me a path that I had never seen, not in my family, not in the neighborhood or in any media. Marge was intellectual, old and gay. It felt like I could have a life.

Marge died in 2015, long after I moved to New York and we lost touch. She was in a nursing home at the end, and I read that Eleanor, who lived to be 108, was next to her.

I wonder how Marge and Eleanor, when she visited, were treated at the nursing home. This was in Santa Cruz, a city famous as a leftist, so perhaps they were respected as the partners they were. I’d hate to think they’ve been downgraded to female friends, but apparently only 18% of long-term care facilities across the country have policies on non-discrimination based on sexual orientation.

As I think of Marge and the man in the street mistaking me for someone her age, I realize that it’s not the fear of looking older, but of becoming older, that gnaws at me. Growing old and being gay feels like a free fall. I am afraid of losing my community, my sense of self and, frankly, my livelihood.

The truth is, I’ve lived an untraditional life — I’ve filled it with a family I chose, I’ve raised a teenager from my community who isn’t in a position to take care of me in the future, I’ve worked too many illogical jobs to survive as a writer. (The good thing about being gay is that it breaks the chains of expectation; you’re already doing something amazing that lets you live your life in ways other than the playpen.) But it’s not so great for long-term planning.

There are almost no studies on older gays and lesbians, and what few there are look terrible. We have a significantly smaller economy than our normal counterparts, and we are 20% less likely to access government services such as housing assistance, food programs, senior centers and so on. We are less likely to have health insurance, less likely to see doctors. We face more medical conditions. More of us live alone. And so on.

Maybe my partner and I could join one of the ten or so LGBTQIA+ specific retirement communities, although I doubt we could afford that (writer’s salary). And besides, as far as I know, there are only ten. I can’t imagine many older lesbians riding around in golf carts, but maybe they’ve all packed up and gone to the desert. I don’t know.

Like I said, I don’t see many of them around. Perhaps there is not the critical mass of visible older gays and lesbians because, quite simply, older people did not have the same opportunity to live in an obvious way in their youth. With more homophobic laws and culture, men and women were more often forced into the closet, and remained so. My generation is the first to expect equal treatment, or something like it, as we age.

It’s not that I want something specific that straight people have that I don’t – I want something that I can’t yet see or understand. Just as I had a gay way of growing up, I want a gay way of growing old.

It’s hard not to have a script. After all, if we stop being seen as sexual in midlife, how can we be seen for our sexuality? Straight women are still accurately branded as the wives or mothers they are – there is a place for them in the popular imagination. But we lesbians are misidentified. We become mothers or sisters or friends to our partners, and I can’t stand it. I’ve built a lifetime of proudly marking my tracks as a gay person –by standing out–, and I don’t know what it means to blend in all of a sudden.

Maybe if I could talk to Marge right now, she’d tell me I’ve got it all wrong and that getting older is the great unifier. Maybe there’s not a gay lens on aging because it doesn’t matter as much when the game starts to change. Of course, it’s important for your partner to visit you in the hospital, to be treated with dignity for the life you’ve lived, but also – we all walk step by step with our mortality, and there’s just nothing gay or straight about it. I wonder if I’m looking for a gay answer to a universal problem.

Still, I know there’s a specifically gay angle to it all. As the man in the street showed me, I’m not just afraid of growing old, but of losing the me I once knew. Not only am I afraid of being misrecognized, but of not understanding myself.

As I prepare for years to come to become more fragile or relinquish my agency, memory, or ability, I am also relinquishing my identity in a world eager to erase me. It would probably be easier to dye my hair, go back to at least looking like a younger messy dyke among all the others like me and in the mirror, where I can still imagine I have all the time in the world.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves