As I take into consideration Marge, and the person on the road mistaking me for somebody her age, I notice that it isn’t the worry of trying like an older individual, however of changing into an older individual, that roils inside. To develop previous and homosexual looks like a free fall. I’m afraid of shedding my neighborhood, my sense of self and, fairly frankly, my livelihood.
The reality is, I’ve lived a nontraditional life — I’ve stuffed it with chosen household, I’ve parented a teen from my neighborhood who’s in no place to look after me down the road, I’ve held many illogical jobs to outlive as a author. (The advantage of queerness is that it breaks the bonds of expectation; you’re already doing one thing astonishing, which lets you dwell your life in different methods past the picket fence.) Nevertheless it’s not so good for long-term planning.
There are nearly no research on growing older queers, and the few that exist look fairly horrible. We have now considerably much less financial savings than our straight counterparts, and we’re 20 % much less prone to acquire entry to authorities companies like housing help, meal applications, senior facilities and so forth. We’re much less prone to have medical insurance, much less prone to go to docs. We face extra medical circumstances; extra of us dwell alone. And on and on.
Possibly my associate and I will slip into one of many few L.G.B.T.Q.-specific retirement communities, although I doubt we’ll have the ability to afford it (ahem, author’s wage). And apart from, so far as I can inform, there are solely 10. I can’t think about too many older lesbians are literally tooling round on golf carts, however perhaps they’ve all packed off for the desert; I can’t inform.
Like I stated, I don’t see too a lot of them round. Maybe there isn’t the essential mass of seen older queerness as a result of, merely, older queers didn’t have the identical alternative to dwell in an apparent means of their youth. With extra homophobic legal guidelines and tradition, they had been extra typically pressured into the closet, and they also stayed that means. My technology is the primary to anticipate equal therapy, or one thing prefer it, as we age.
