2 minute read
WE’LL HAVE A GAY OLD TIME
Netty Wendi
Netty´s World
I’m 52. When Mozart was my age he’d been dead for 17 years. As composing goes, it matters nought to me that I’m hurtling towards the grave without so much as a nursery rhyme to my name, but something else keeps me awake at night; it’s the thought that I might live long enough to be lonely. My partner and I have not even generated a ready-made care team. Oh well, never mind. It’s not a given that your kids look after you anyway.
Personally, I have a disproportionately high quota of older LGBTQ+ friends. To me, people over 60 are infinitely more interesting than youngsters; they’re living, breathing time-capsules filled with tales of bygone days. I’d love to know more young lesbians, but they’re as rare as hen’s teeth. The lack of young lesbian visibility today, indicates that the ‘me’ of tomorrow will not be writing about a scene she has had little to do with.
I think LGBTQ+ people age differently from the rest of the population. Lots of us have had to fight for the rights that so many straights take for granted, and it’s made us quite feisty if you please. Most older lesbians I know are either devoted to their partners, or very happily single. By single, I mean they don’t appear to crave sexual relationships to define them like so many straight women of their generation have to. They are the happiest people I know, and I wouldn’t cross them either!
Lots of the older gay men I know have benefitted from careers that paid well and provided decent pensions. These old queens travel the world, they love their partners, their pets, their sexual dalliances (not always in that order). I don’t think I will ever recover from some of the stories I’ve heard, I’ve laughed till I cried, and it’s men like this who keep me coming out to play on the Brighton scene. In these crazy days of the coronavirus pandemic, we have all come to realise just how precious our older, physically more vulnerable population is.
During the first week of lockdown, I was instantly cheered to see a Facebook post of darling David Raven aka Maisie Trollette, 86 years young and happily selfisolating. What a treasure he is.
David Raven (Maisie Trollette)
Some of them are quite literally old hippies, others are bohemians, some are Tories, most are openminded, unlike the old folk of anywhere else in the world (apart from San Fransisco). I believe we owe it to them to provide appropriate social care. I’d like to see old people’s homes designed to cater for our very special community, after all, I may end up there one day.
The old people today are the very fire starters who set the world ablaze with gay rights. They will not go gently into that great night, they’ll go out like so many of my older friends, raging against the dying of the light, laughing, loving, and covered in glitter.
