Day: January 28, 2018

enoughtohold:

As a 69-year-old lesbian, I am concerned about how your film will portray old lesbians. I am especially concerned about how your own ageism is apparently shaping the film and how it will reinforce attitudes which the lesbian and feminist communities are trying to change.

[… You write:]

We are very excited about the potential of this film to raise public awareness about the unique problems and concerns of older gays.

Surely you know that these “unique problems” are the problems of every gay in this country. If you ask a 30-year-old lesbian whether she’s concerned, when she enters a hospital, that her lover can be denied visitation rights, she’ll say, “Damn right, I am.” She might even tell you an experience in which she or her lover had been refused such rights. […] And do you believe that, across the country, in rural areas and in many cities, young lesbians are not today facing the loss of a lover with nobody to tell about it? It is dishonest, ageist and exploitative to have these battles and forms of oppression projected as unique to old lesbians — to have the battles fought on the turf of the old.

It is especially exploitative because old women are already seen as powerless and pathetic. We are already seen, ad nauseam, as the embodiment of younger people’s fear and shame around sickness, need, physical weakness, death, and loss of loved ones — as if these were our principal attributes, and as if they were unique to us. Must we continue to be portrayed as powerless and pathetic because that is how younger lesbians choose to see us? Or because it serves the purposes of younger lesbians?

Instead of selecting out old lesbians and gay men to ask how we feel about our “unique problems” around hospitals, wills, loss of loved ones, how about asking us, “How do you feel about being patronized by younger people, gay or straight?” If SAGE [then Senior Action in a Gay Environment] is to be used as a model for services across the country, if they are to advise film-makers about the lives of old lesbians, they need to start asking such questions. Or better yet, asking themselves, “How would I feel?”

SAGE circulates a reprint of a newspaper description of their services […] regarding their young volunteers:

One such volunteer is Liza, a young lesbian in her 20s who visits an infirm 80-year-old lesbian who has been confined to a hospital. “She is an important part of my life,” Liza said of her older friend. “She has so much knowledge, experience, and wisdom — she’s like a treasure. She’s like my own collected history — it’s like seeing pictures from the 1920s.”

This kind of sentimentalizing and fossilizing of old women is so offensive that when I think of this woman being subjected to it I am appalled. I am compelled to try to get the entire lesbian community to wake up to our own ageism and stop this exploitation of old women. Stop it and stop it now.

I am confirmed in my fears about the film by your title, The Silent Pioneers. We are all pioneers; why are old lesbians the “silent” ones? Why project closetedness onto us as if — again — it were our unique problem? […] “Silent” is not the adjective that sums up my life to me or to the lives of the lesbians I have known.

The world has not seen many images of old lesbians, and I insist that your film portray us as the real, strong women we are. […] With the framework you’ve publicized for The Silent Pioneers, how will you set up interviews that elicit power rather than victimization? Will old lesbians in your film be able to say, “I chose not to marry, I chose not to raise children for the male state, and I am sick and tired of being thought of as a grandmother, by straight and lesbian young people alike!”? If not, I’d rather see the strong straight old women from OWL, the Older Women’s League, saying, “We’re fed up with how we are treated,” than be objectified by my lesbian sisters of SAGE.

— Barbara Macdonald, writing to Pat Snyder about her planned film Gay Seniors: The Silent Pioneers, on which SAGE consulted, in “A Call for an End to Ageism in Lesbian and Gay Services,” in Lesbian Ethics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1984), ed. Jeanette Silveira. Italics in original; bold mine.