Sounds like a song title! Thinking about words that rhyme with "over" for the lyrics, only "rover" turns up. "Cover, hover and lover" use the short o-2 sound, and "mover" uses the long-U. And the perp in this crime? Convention demands silence, but eww, what fun that would be! ;-)
Abigail, I apologize for not having sent the article below in its entirety to you yesterday. Thank you for your response to my having mentioned it to you then. I have been reading Women Rowing North:... by Mary Pipher in an effort to organize my thoughts on the issue of my own aging--I am 70yrs old--especially since I have shared my life for the past 35 years with a man who is 16yrs my senior and, statistically-speaking, risks predeceasing me sooner than later.
I too have a preference for "lesbian." There is so much new vocabulary being used that my head is spinning simply trying to orient myself. I live an exceedingly isolated existence, particularly, during/after COVID and have not even begun to imagine how I plan, should I live so long, to navigate my own 80s and 90s.
I am wondering if you would consider it a misplaced intrusion if I were to mention 2 very successful experiences that I have had in coping with extreme emotional and physical distress using the services of two talented hypnotherapists--once in 2000 and once in 2012. The first event had to do with an 8mo case of intractable vulvodynia that no medical practitioner could help me with and the second had to do with the 1991 Easter Sunday suicide of my mother in San Francisco. In both instances, after much psychological and physical suffering, I had post-hypnosis session improvements in my quality of life that continue to guide my choices a decade or two later. And, especially, guide where and how I look for self-care/-calming assistance.
Thanks, Pamela, I'll check out WOMEN ROWING NORTH and also a new one, REACHING NINETY, by Martin Duberman. I'm sorry to hear of your medical problem and your mother's suicide in 1991, which must have been very difficult for you! Glad to hear you found help in hypnotherapy. I write tongue-in-cheek references to therapy only because it's the standard recommendation for every conceivable situation and can be amusing. But of course it can also be enormously helpful, as you experienced.
Thank you very kindly, Abigail. I'm very glad to be able to read your reflections and thoughts on your personal experiences of the past year that revolve around the "enormous changes at the last minute" and how you have had to cope with them. I admire your determination and your willingness to both share and allow others to benefit from your hard-won successes in both being still and moving forward with your own daily life and feelings. I especially liked your reference to therapists being--in my words--young enough to be one's grandchildren. I hated that at 45 and would certainly hate it now. I'd need a nonagenarian at this point to feel like I had an "adult" therapist! Ha! Ha! Ha! Gawd. I would love to hear what you think of Mary Pipher's book should you have occasion to read it.
Very best wishes to you for an encouraging spring,
One afternoon not long ago, I was walking with my partner near Times Square and we were approached by a man passing out leaflets. “Take one for your mom,” he said to my partner. I stopped cold.
“What did you say?” Sonja’s arm was around my shoulder, and I wriggled free to face the man head on. “Do you think I’m her mother?”
The man looked into my eyes. He was probably 40 — 10 years younger than I am. I was wearing a mask. I pulled it down. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he stammered. Sonja tugged at me to leave. We did, but once we were halfway down the block, the man followed us to try one more stab at reconciliation.
He pointed at my backside, and said it looked like a peach.
The price of the ticket back into the realm of youth was objectification.
I was upset, and to placate me, Sonja said that the mistake could be chalked up to his occupation. The man had to scan hundreds of faces in an hour, maybe thousands; he wasn’t really looking at anyone. All he saw was my hair, which is gray, and he made a quick calculation. Sonja is two years older than I am, but her hair is nearly all strawberry blonde. “You still have a baby face,” she said. “To think you could be my mother is insane.”
But then it happened again. Another man, another street corner. “You and your mom sure look sweet,” he said. This time, I started to think seriously about dyeing my hair.
Sonja asked me not to do it; she likes my silver streaks. 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 using scissors to cling to their youth. Am I an older woman? The words feel like marbles in my mouth.
The men on the street may have mistaken me for Sonja’s mother because of heterosexual bias: They simply couldn’t see queerness, even with the cues, even though my arm was tucked around her waist. The question is: Why do I care? I suppose it’s this: The trouble with not being seen is we don’t always know how to see ourselves.
I remember when I was a kid and all the other girls talked about growing up and getting married. They fantasized about their future husbands, and I felt a pit in my belly knowing that, somehow, I wouldn’t have that life. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t fit in, but rather that I simply couldn’t imagine myself at all. I didn’t know any gay people, didn’t have the language for what I would surely become. My future was void of vision.
Something similar is at play now. I don’t have the cultural context for imagining my own aging. There are only a few North American movies about middle-aged or older lesbians — significantly, “The Kids Are All Right” from 2010, and a small movie called “Cloudburst” from 2011, about a lesbian couple who break out of their nursing home for a road trip to the Canadian border. There are much tinier art films that capture older queer women — notably Barbara Hammer’s “Nitrate Kisses” from 1992. This came out when I was in college, though I didn’t see it until much later. “Nitrate Kisses,” it seems, is only available on DVD now, so it’s not in wide circulation, but it features clips of an older couple having sex. It was subversive then, and still is.
When I was in college at U.C. Santa Cruz, I met an older lesbian professor who I kind of fell in love with. She was in her 70s and I was in my 20s, and she offered me one vision of getting older that I hold on to still. Marge Frantz wore her short hair white (I can’t imagine she ever fretted about dyeing it) and lived near campus with her long-term 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 I had never seen, not in my family or neighborhood or in any media. Marge was intellectual and old and gay. It seemed like I could have a life.
Marge died in 2015, long after I had moved to New York and she and I had lost touch. She was in a nursing home at the end, and I read that Eleanor, who lived to be 108, was by her side.
I wonder how Marge, and Eleanor when she visited, were treated at the nursing home. This was in Santa Cruz, a famously lefty town, so maybe they were respected as the partners that they were. I would hate to think they were downgraded to friends, but apparently, only 18 percent of long-term-care facilities nationwide have nondiscrimination policies for sexual orientation.
As I think about Marge, and the man on the street mistaking me for someone her age, I realize that it isn’t the fear of looking like an older person, but of becoming an older person, that roils inside. To grow old and gay seems like a free fall. I’m afraid of losing my community, my sense of self and, quite frankly, my livelihood.
The truth is, I’ve lived a nontraditional life — I’ve filled it with chosen family, I’ve parented a teenager from my community who’s in no position to care for me down the line, I’ve held many illogical jobs to survive as a writer. (The good thing about queerness is that it breaks the bonds of expectation; you’re already doing something astonishing, which allows you to live your life in other ways beyond the picket fence.) But it’s not so good for long-term planning.
There are almost no studies on aging queers, and the few that exist look pretty terrible. We have significantly less savings than our straight counterparts, and we’re 20 percent less likely to gain access to government services like housing assistance, meal programs, senior centers and so on. We’re less likely to have health insurance, less likely to go to doctors. We face more medical conditions; more of us live alone. And on and on.
Maybe my partner and I will be able to slip into one of the few L.G.B.T.Q.-specific retirement communities, though I doubt we’ll be able to afford it (ahem, writer’s salary). And besides, as far as I can tell, there are only 10. I can’t imagine too many older lesbians are actually tooling around on golf carts, but maybe they’ve all packed off for the desert; I can’t tell.
Like I said, I don’t see too many of them around. Perhaps there isn’t the critical mass of visible older queerness because, simply, older queers didn’t have the same opportunity to live in an obvious way in their youth. With more homophobic laws and culture, they were more often forced into the closet, and so they stayed that way. 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 — it’s that I want something I can’t see, or understand, just yet. Just like I’ve had a queer way of being young, I want a queer path forward into growing older.
It’s hard not having a road map. After all, if we stop being seen as sexual at middle age, then how can we be seen for our sexuality? Straight women are still accurately marked as the wives or mothers that they are — there’s a place for them in the popular imagination. But we lesbians get misidentified. We become our partners’ moms or sisters or friends, and I cannot bear it. I’ve built a whole life now proudly marking my tracks as a queer person — standing out — and I don’t know what it means to suddenly blend.
Maybe, if I could talk to Marge now, she’d tell me I’ve got it all wrong and aging is the great unifier. Maybe there isn’t a queer lens on getting old because it doesn’t matter all that much when the stakes begin to shift. Of course, it’s important to have your partner visit you in the hospital, to be treated with dignity for the life you’ve lived, but also — we all go toe to toe with our mortality, and there’s simply nothing gay or straight about that. I wonder if I’m looking for a queer answer to a universal problem.
And still, I know there is a specifically queer angle to all of this. As the man on the street showed me, I’m not just afraid of growing old but also of losing the self that I knew. I’m not only afraid of being misrecognized but also of not comprehending myself. As I prepare in the years to come to grow more frail, or to forgo my agency, memory or ability, I also forgo my identity in a world eager to erase me. It would probably just be easiest to dye my hair, to go back to at least looking like a younger scrappy dyke amid all the other queers like me, and in the mirror, where I can still imagine I have all the time in the world.
Cris Beam is the author of five books. She teaches writing at Columbia University and N.Y.U. and is currently at work on a collection of essays.
Thanks, Pamela. The NYT won't let me read the article, but it definitely sounds interesting! (Well, with the exception of "queerness" in the link, a term with which I do not identify. "Lesbian," yes, "queer," no.) There are a LOT of us, not just lesbians but women generally, in our 70's, 80's and even 90's who are cognitively acute and physically in charge of ourselves, who need to organize! I'm going to focus my Substack posts on our issues henceforth. Would love to hear your ideas!
I was about to say there’s something maddenly reassuring that these things still happen to women over 65, and that you are both feisty and inspiring, but considering how the year has been thus far for you,forget all that—-and go with the dinner offer in San Jose!
I’ve been known to give “organ recitals” but without euphemisms.
Mourning, readjusting to civilian life after long-term military service, widowhood, and being left after years together—all take differing amounts of time, depending on the people and the situation, and no two are alike.
Not having a way to initiate contact, I’ve been waiting for you to post so I could send this note.
Dunno if you’ve seen this, used it, or have thrown it at a wall.
Topic shift: Deborah Harkness is another author who writes (mostly) het but lives privately lesbian, but also like you grabs so many topics out of my concentrated interest cauldron that I can’t help but squee—several times in rapid succession.
Please feel free to contact me directly should you be coming to the Bay Area, as I live in San José, and if you would like to meet. I cook . . .
Sounds like a song title! Thinking about words that rhyme with "over" for the lyrics, only "rover" turns up. "Cover, hover and lover" use the short o-2 sound, and "mover" uses the long-U. And the perp in this crime? Convention demands silence, but eww, what fun that would be! ;-)
Abigail, I apologize for not having sent the article below in its entirety to you yesterday. Thank you for your response to my having mentioned it to you then. I have been reading Women Rowing North:... by Mary Pipher in an effort to organize my thoughts on the issue of my own aging--I am 70yrs old--especially since I have shared my life for the past 35 years with a man who is 16yrs my senior and, statistically-speaking, risks predeceasing me sooner than later.
I too have a preference for "lesbian." There is so much new vocabulary being used that my head is spinning simply trying to orient myself. I live an exceedingly isolated existence, particularly, during/after COVID and have not even begun to imagine how I plan, should I live so long, to navigate my own 80s and 90s.
I am wondering if you would consider it a misplaced intrusion if I were to mention 2 very successful experiences that I have had in coping with extreme emotional and physical distress using the services of two talented hypnotherapists--once in 2000 and once in 2012. The first event had to do with an 8mo case of intractable vulvodynia that no medical practitioner could help me with and the second had to do with the 1991 Easter Sunday suicide of my mother in San Francisco. In both instances, after much psychological and physical suffering, I had post-hypnosis session improvements in my quality of life that continue to guide my choices a decade or two later. And, especially, guide where and how I look for self-care/-calming assistance.
Best wishes for a lovely spring 2023, Abigail,
Pamela
Thanks, Pamela, I'll check out WOMEN ROWING NORTH and also a new one, REACHING NINETY, by Martin Duberman. I'm sorry to hear of your medical problem and your mother's suicide in 1991, which must have been very difficult for you! Glad to hear you found help in hypnotherapy. I write tongue-in-cheek references to therapy only because it's the standard recommendation for every conceivable situation and can be amusing. But of course it can also be enormously helpful, as you experienced.
Thank you very kindly, Abigail. I'm very glad to be able to read your reflections and thoughts on your personal experiences of the past year that revolve around the "enormous changes at the last minute" and how you have had to cope with them. I admire your determination and your willingness to both share and allow others to benefit from your hard-won successes in both being still and moving forward with your own daily life and feelings. I especially liked your reference to therapists being--in my words--young enough to be one's grandchildren. I hated that at 45 and would certainly hate it now. I'd need a nonagenarian at this point to feel like I had an "adult" therapist! Ha! Ha! Ha! Gawd. I would love to hear what you think of Mary Pipher's book should you have occasion to read it.
Very best wishes to you for an encouraging spring,
Pamela
OPINION
GUEST ESSAY
There’s No Road Map for an Aging Lesbian
April 8, 2023
By Cris Beam
One afternoon not long ago, I was walking with my partner near Times Square and we were approached by a man passing out leaflets. “Take one for your mom,” he said to my partner. I stopped cold.
“What did you say?” Sonja’s arm was around my shoulder, and I wriggled free to face the man head on. “Do you think I’m her mother?”
The man looked into my eyes. He was probably 40 — 10 years younger than I am. I was wearing a mask. I pulled it down. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he stammered. Sonja tugged at me to leave. We did, but once we were halfway down the block, the man followed us to try one more stab at reconciliation.
He pointed at my backside, and said it looked like a peach.
The price of the ticket back into the realm of youth was objectification.
I was upset, and to placate me, Sonja said that the mistake could be chalked up to his occupation. The man had to scan hundreds of faces in an hour, maybe thousands; he wasn’t really looking at anyone. All he saw was my hair, which is gray, and he made a quick calculation. Sonja is two years older than I am, but her hair is nearly all strawberry blonde. “You still have a baby face,” she said. “To think you could be my mother is insane.”
But then it happened again. Another man, another street corner. “You and your mom sure look sweet,” he said. This time, I started to think seriously about dyeing my hair.
Sonja asked me not to do it; she likes my silver streaks. 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 using scissors to cling to their youth. Am I an older woman? The words feel like marbles in my mouth.
The men on the street may have mistaken me for Sonja’s mother because of heterosexual bias: They simply couldn’t see queerness, even with the cues, even though my arm was tucked around her waist. The question is: Why do I care? I suppose it’s this: The trouble with not being seen is we don’t always know how to see ourselves.
I remember when I was a kid and all the other girls talked about growing up and getting married. They fantasized about their future husbands, and I felt a pit in my belly knowing that, somehow, I wouldn’t have that life. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t fit in, but rather that I simply couldn’t imagine myself at all. I didn’t know any gay people, didn’t have the language for what I would surely become. My future was void of vision.
Something similar is at play now. I don’t have the cultural context for imagining my own aging. There are only a few North American movies about middle-aged or older lesbians — significantly, “The Kids Are All Right” from 2010, and a small movie called “Cloudburst” from 2011, about a lesbian couple who break out of their nursing home for a road trip to the Canadian border. There are much tinier art films that capture older queer women — notably Barbara Hammer’s “Nitrate Kisses” from 1992. This came out when I was in college, though I didn’t see it until much later. “Nitrate Kisses,” it seems, is only available on DVD now, so it’s not in wide circulation, but it features clips of an older couple having sex. It was subversive then, and still is.
When I was in college at U.C. Santa Cruz, I met an older lesbian professor who I kind of fell in love with. She was in her 70s and I was in my 20s, and she offered me one vision of getting older that I hold on to still. Marge Frantz wore her short hair white (I can’t imagine she ever fretted about dyeing it) and lived near campus with her long-term 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 I had never seen, not in my family or neighborhood or in any media. Marge was intellectual and old and gay. It seemed like I could have a life.
Marge died in 2015, long after I had moved to New York and she and I had lost touch. She was in a nursing home at the end, and I read that Eleanor, who lived to be 108, was by her side.
I wonder how Marge, and Eleanor when she visited, were treated at the nursing home. This was in Santa Cruz, a famously lefty town, so maybe they were respected as the partners that they were. I would hate to think they were downgraded to friends, but apparently, only 18 percent of long-term-care facilities nationwide have nondiscrimination policies for sexual orientation.
As I think about Marge, and the man on the street mistaking me for someone her age, I realize that it isn’t the fear of looking like an older person, but of becoming an older person, that roils inside. To grow old and gay seems like a free fall. I’m afraid of losing my community, my sense of self and, quite frankly, my livelihood.
The truth is, I’ve lived a nontraditional life — I’ve filled it with chosen family, I’ve parented a teenager from my community who’s in no position to care for me down the line, I’ve held many illogical jobs to survive as a writer. (The good thing about queerness is that it breaks the bonds of expectation; you’re already doing something astonishing, which allows you to live your life in other ways beyond the picket fence.) But it’s not so good for long-term planning.
There are almost no studies on aging queers, and the few that exist look pretty terrible. We have significantly less savings than our straight counterparts, and we’re 20 percent less likely to gain access to government services like housing assistance, meal programs, senior centers and so on. We’re less likely to have health insurance, less likely to go to doctors. We face more medical conditions; more of us live alone. And on and on.
Maybe my partner and I will be able to slip into one of the few L.G.B.T.Q.-specific retirement communities, though I doubt we’ll be able to afford it (ahem, writer’s salary). And besides, as far as I can tell, there are only 10. I can’t imagine too many older lesbians are actually tooling around on golf carts, but maybe they’ve all packed off for the desert; I can’t tell.
Like I said, I don’t see too many of them around. Perhaps there isn’t the critical mass of visible older queerness because, simply, older queers didn’t have the same opportunity to live in an obvious way in their youth. With more homophobic laws and culture, they were more often forced into the closet, and so they stayed that way. 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 — it’s that I want something I can’t see, or understand, just yet. Just like I’ve had a queer way of being young, I want a queer path forward into growing older.
It’s hard not having a road map. After all, if we stop being seen as sexual at middle age, then how can we be seen for our sexuality? Straight women are still accurately marked as the wives or mothers that they are — there’s a place for them in the popular imagination. But we lesbians get misidentified. We become our partners’ moms or sisters or friends, and I cannot bear it. I’ve built a whole life now proudly marking my tracks as a queer person — standing out — and I don’t know what it means to suddenly blend.
Maybe, if I could talk to Marge now, she’d tell me I’ve got it all wrong and aging is the great unifier. Maybe there isn’t a queer lens on getting old because it doesn’t matter all that much when the stakes begin to shift. Of course, it’s important to have your partner visit you in the hospital, to be treated with dignity for the life you’ve lived, but also — we all go toe to toe with our mortality, and there’s simply nothing gay or straight about that. I wonder if I’m looking for a queer answer to a universal problem.
And still, I know there is a specifically queer angle to all of this. As the man on the street showed me, I’m not just afraid of growing old but also of losing the self that I knew. I’m not only afraid of being misrecognized but also of not comprehending myself. As I prepare in the years to come to grow more frail, or to forgo my agency, memory or ability, I also forgo my identity in a world eager to erase me. It would probably just be easiest to dye my hair, to go back to at least looking like a younger scrappy dyke amid all the other queers like me, and in the mirror, where I can still imagine I have all the time in the world.
Cris Beam is the author of five books. She teaches writing at Columbia University and N.Y.U. and is currently at work on a collection of essays.
I read your article here with great attention a couple of days ago and just before rereading it today I read this article in the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/08/opinion/aging-queerness.html
and I wonder if you've had occasion to read it. I feel like it is a very good supplement to your own writing on this subject.
Wishing you a wonderful day,
Pamela
Thanks, Pamela. The NYT won't let me read the article, but it definitely sounds interesting! (Well, with the exception of "queerness" in the link, a term with which I do not identify. "Lesbian," yes, "queer," no.) There are a LOT of us, not just lesbians but women generally, in our 70's, 80's and even 90's who are cognitively acute and physically in charge of ourselves, who need to organize! I'm going to focus my Substack posts on our issues henceforth. Would love to hear your ideas!
Who took the "L" out of "Lover"
I was about to say there’s something maddenly reassuring that these things still happen to women over 65, and that you are both feisty and inspiring, but considering how the year has been thus far for you,forget all that—-and go with the dinner offer in San Jose!
Dinner, yeah!
I’ve been known to give “organ recitals” but without euphemisms.
Mourning, readjusting to civilian life after long-term military service, widowhood, and being left after years together—all take differing amounts of time, depending on the people and the situation, and no two are alike.
Not having a way to initiate contact, I’ve been waiting for you to post so I could send this note.
Dunno if you’ve seen this, used it, or have thrown it at a wall.
https://www.bookbub.com/books/the-sh-t-no-one-tells-you-about-divorce-by-dawn-dais
Topic shift: Deborah Harkness is another author who writes (mostly) het but lives privately lesbian, but also like you grabs so many topics out of my concentrated interest cauldron that I can’t help but squee—several times in rapid succession.
Please feel free to contact me directly should you be coming to the Bay Area, as I live in San José, and if you would like to meet. I cook . . .
Thanks, I’ll check out the Dais book while hoping I wind up in San Jose at some point. Dinner is SO attractive!