thinking about middle aged gay love is like. we have a future and we have time
my mother divorced my father when i was 7. it wasn’t because she was gay, though she did discover this later (another reminder that it’s okay to find out who you are at 40, at 50, etc, and also for who you are to change) but because she had thought he was the great love of her life and he turned out to be a shitty person.
my mother married my ma when i was 11. i think they do have a great love. i think they love each other the way you can when you’re middle aged – having seen the world, being able to see each other’s flaws, knowing themselves. they see each other in full, and they love each other and the world for it.
they dance on the street to buskers (very embarrassing when you’re twelve; very cute when you look back on it as an adult). i shit you not – they pass me their purses and dance on the sidewalk, laughing. i thought was something that only happened in movies.
my ma makes my mother eggs every morning because my mother can’t cook for shit. my mother presses my ma’s work blazers for her because my ma still can’t figure out how to work the new iron.
when it was warm, high-school me would wake up on the weekends and wander downstairs to find them sitting in the backyard in the sun, drinking coffee together and splitting the newspaper in a surgical, exact process since they’d worked out who wanted which sections years ago.
my mother is happier than she’s ever been. my ma, too. there is a future out there for every gay person who’s always known they’re gay, like my ma, and for everyone who figures it out later, like my mother. there’s time.
they’re growing old together. i cannot express to you how much they are leading happy lives, loving each other, with a huge family surrounding them. i cannot express to you how much they have this beautiful future that they are living and will live.
i want you to know, if you don’t have any older gays in your life: they’re out there. and they’re living these full, happy lives.
sometimes i look to my moms and i think, i want a life like yours. and looking at them makes me believe i will get it.
I’ve thought a lot about the fall of troy as the end of the world in terms of framing the odyssey and the aeneid as post-apocalyptic narratives, but I’m really grateful to christa wolf for pulling that into focus and asking what it means to the trojans to be living at the edge of the end of the world. building a life where there can’t be one. living happily during the war when they are bombing your houses. and the way she talks in the accompanying essays about living in east germany with such certainty of impending nuclear war and the annihilation of the entire continent of europe within the next three or four years at most—
the world is about to end. you wash the dishes. your lover comes home. you don’t talk about it. you go to the market. every so often something shifts and you see yourself clearly for a moment and it drives you insane. you get used to it.
These heartbreaking and incredibly moving images show the affection and love shown during the height of the Aids crisis. Photographer Gideon Mendel’s project The Ward began in 1993 when he spent a number of weeks on the Charles Bell wards in London’s Middlesex Hospital. All the patients on the ward were dying with the knowledge that there was no cure for the disease. During this time antiretroviral medications were not available and patients on the ward faced the prospect of an early death.
