Grey, gay and out at last
One of the most pressing issues for today’s ageing gay population is what will happen as they grow old and have no immediate family to share and care.
Research by the Sefton Pensioners Advocacy Centre on Merseyside shows that one of the greatest fears of pensioners is finding themselves isolated or living in homes where they cannot acknowledge their sexual orientation. Living openlyHaving survived the years when being gay was the love that dare not speak its name, the people I have talked to all say they are living in the best of times so far, because it has become so much easier to live openly and honestly. All the gay people interviewed here now live openly with partners, or feel able to acknowledge publicly that they are gay. But they have lived through times of prohibition and profound disapproval. The main reason why gay men who lived through the years before the 1967 Act got married was a desire to “get over” their gay desires and be able to live “a normal life”. Dirk BogardeThe torment this has caused so many was the subject of the controversial film Victim (1961) in which Dirk Bogarde plays a lawyer who desperately wants to suppress his homosexual desires, and has tried to sublimate them in marriage and a family. A woman who was a teenager in the Sixties, so shocked her parents when she said she was a lesbian that her mother took her for aversion therapy. This involved injections to induce vomiting and electric shocks when pictures of women were shown on a screen. She says wryly: “It put me off women for a time but it didn’t make me like men.” The key point in many of their lives was the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, when homosexuality between consenting adults over 21 became legal. Next came the era of gay liberation. Written by Angela Neustatter
This article was created: 13 July 2006.
This article was last edited: 11 December 2006.
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