Reflections on Seniors A GOGO (Growing Older, Getting it On)
Seniors Sexual Health was not an area I was particularly drawn to as a 40 something community developer until a staggering statistic was pointed out to me:
Positive HIV tests among those over 50 have risen from 7.5% between 1985 and 1998 to 13.5% in 2005.
After some thinking on the statistic my colleague Nicole Hergert with The Calgary Sexual Health Centre and I explored some theories. It was clear that public health campaigns remain largely focused on the young as HIV and sexual health are perceived as topics for young people. Pharmaceutical campaigns also decreased certain function issues. Also clear was the generational gulf around talking openly around sexuality. The final piece of the puzzle was the understanding of how we were housing many of our elders in our community. Institutionally & communally.
“I remember what I was doing in residence in my twenties, why should this be any different?”
The implications of this cocktail of cultural silence, health campaigns targeted at youth, viagra and warehousing of seniors were clear. Education was important for this population and the generations that surround them. So the Seniors A GOGO project began. This partnership found myself (The Foundation Lab) working with my long term partners The Seniors Action Group in concert with The Calgary Sexual Health Centre in devising an approach that work.
I have a dual role with this group. I am a writer / director/ facilitator / collaborator & community developer. What does that mean? Generally, I am the person who gets you to do the things you never thought you would do on stage with the understanding that you are doing this in order to promote deeper understanding of a problem with an eye towards solution. I worked with the participants to tease out the stories that lay hidden.
The other role I took on out of a deep desire to undo the mess we are in culturally. My organization The Foundation Lab was developed when I understood how deeply our storytelling roots were laid. We build our culture on story, culture is what we build our future on. If we build our future on misinformed stories (or belief systems) we are doomed to miss some of the greatest opportunities our society has, we are also doomed to create some spectacular failures. The Foundation Lab strives to tell stories and build our culture so that we as a community can have a collective say on our future and move forward wisely in a way that we have never historically, as a species, been able to do. This is not easy but it is vital to our moving forward in line with life’s progress.
“The only reason the future is unknown is because we have imagined it yet.”
So back to the project. The Seniors A GOGO project moved me in ways much of my activism hasn’t previously. I have spent most of my life as a “sexual outlaw”. My background being theatre, my first theatre company Spinstergirl Productions looked at Feminist issues, morphing into gay, lesbian struggles with heterosexual issues. So, I felt well versed in the area of sexuality. I understood sexuality to mean more than the vulgar which it is often reduced to.
I came into this project with an understanding of how sexuality is on a continuum. I can explain the Kinsey Scale and unabashedly site human rights precedents and procedure... Something in this project, however, was different. As I moved through this process with our participants, as we dug deeper into the stories that illuminated the landscape of our culture and belief systems, it became evident that there much more here than we, as a culture were prepared to see.
As the project began we hit many roadblocks. (Blessedly none of them from funders or supportive agencies, but from individual human beings.) Shock, laughter, denial, repulsion and silencing. This came from youth, middle-aged people, professionals and, most heart-breakingly, seniors themselves. The attempts we made to overcome the roadblock came from every angle. When one approach failed we, our tireless core team of Nicole Hergert, George Hopkins, Gloria Zerr and myself, tried another. Poking from every angle to get our elders to open up about this “taboo” subject.
There is a story we love to recount and laugh about. Gloria, who, in an attempt to get people’s stories talked to her neighbors about what she was doing. They were all very polite but the next day she no longer had neighbors. They would close the curtains, turn away, ignore her. Gloria laughs because she is exceptionally resilient, committed to social change and has the support of a different community. It might not be so funny if she were like many seniors without those resiliency factors.
So questions arose. What was behind the silence? Fear? What was it that they feared? For some it was the breaking of societal norms: “WE don’t talk about that”. “Seniors don’t do that” playing into a misinformed belief system that this area of their lives was not only unspoken but inactive. Finally, we learned to speak a language of seniors sexuality and people agreed to participate, seeing how vital the conversation was. We set a date for a workshop. We returned for follow up workshop but they didn’t. Why? Out of fear? Fear of what? Fear of losing their community? Just like Gloria.
Go along to get along.
Slowly, remarkably, we built a community of 8 disparate elders between the ages of 60 - 82. They came from all over the city, for various reasons. First we had conversations one on one, then in groups of two or three. Then in a group of 4 or 6. It took a while for the whole group to come together. We hesitantly broke through the silence, sometimes with tea, sometimes with scotch.
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Over the course of these many months something intangible but remarkable happened and it was only evident when the entire group came together. The language used in many of stories around sexuality seemed to be playing out in front of us. I looked at Vera and saw a woman who looked 30 years younger. I watched as the group laughed and played with each other and thought of the word “blooming”... yes “blooming” after all this time. Some were more playful than ever, some were reducing the amount of pain medications they were on, some were reducing their isolation but they were all existentially changing.
Now being a group facilitator or a resourceful human mechanic, I have worked with many groups, I had never seen this kind of change. It was beyond group ownership. It was a liberation of a profoundly moving kind. What was the difference? Why this group?
Now let me be very clear, our group conversations, the stories told and the theatre create are highly respectful and speak mostly to the emotional challenges and responses to the intimate connection we label sexuality. This was not a crude process, nor was anyone “hooking up”. So what happened?
It’s not like we did much except speak out loud what was so deeply forbidden.
We recognized that we were not only working on the edge of what was acceptable but we were fighting an oppression. Was that about sexuality or was it something else?
I certainly woke up to the deepened understanding of how our sexuality is such an intrinsic part of our essential humanity. The two simply cannot be separated. How we touch, laugh, speak, connect, see & are seen... these are part of our sexuality that have nothing to do with intercourse.
More questions emerged. Why would we, culturally deny our elders that? Do we dehumanize them in order to rationalize how we, as a cultural, treat them, engage them, warehouse them, medicate them? Is it because we have created an output society? One that only values what you make for consumption so that when our elders no longer create “outputs” they are not longer valuable therefor less human? Does the human pattern of loosing agility, mobility and activity reminder that we are simple fragile animals that live and die, and if we recognize this possibility we realize we have built our lives on a house of cards? If we don’t see, don’t look and don’t listen we don’t have to acknowledge that fact and then, we are not like them.
What emerged for me were questions about the potential for human rights violation so tragic that I couldn’t help but shed tears. When we dehumanize people, we make them less than and there is great potential for abuse. We know this happens, look at the patterns of genocide. This tragic pattern played itself out in Calgary only recently when two young women attacked a 92 year old woman at a mall in broad daylight.
But here, in these workshops I was sitting with this resource, these amazing human beings who have lived almost twice my lifetime, with so much more information to share than I could even begin to share and they were being wasted. They were being silenced and dehumanized.
That would explain how hard it would be to speak up, be heard and be valued. To be fully alive in a culture that would prefer you not be.
That would explain the living that started to happen when the group came together. The celebration at being valued, being heard, being seen - intimately, as Wanda, one of our participants, says: “Intimacy: Into Me See... What do you see, really see when you see deeply into me.” There was laughter, fears, tears, joy and connection. We recognized that we were playmates, soul mates, venturers on the journey.
It is my profound hope that this group of Elders continue to cull out their stories and share them with us. We are very fortunate that they were willing to risk so much. Risking their community in order to tell these long silenced stories. Our planet needs our wise Elders to stand up, teach us, guide us and keep us on track.
Now all we need to do is learn how to be still & listen to their stories.
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