Introduction: Queer Aging and the Significance of Representation
A ConspiCuous AbsenCe
Valerie Taylor’s 1988 novel Ripening is a slender volume, the fourth in a series of lesbian pulp novels, which has, by now, fallen largely into obscurity. Nevertheless, it contains what is perhaps one of the most unexpected openings in American literature:
The telephone was ringing. Erika dropped her briefcase, turned the key, pushed the door open, and got there before it stopped. “Hello? Hello?”
“Miss Frohmann? Erika?”
“Isabel?” Erika’s forehead puckered. I’ve been her grandmother’s lover for more than twenty years and she still doesn’t know what to call me. Well, be fair, the kid never heard of me until six months ago and she hasn’t exactly been eager to get acquainted. (Taylor 1988, 1)
How often does one encounter the phrase “grandmother’s lover” in print? How often does “lover” in this case designate a woman?
Both Isabel’s insecurity in her interaction with Erika and the revelation that the women’s relationship has been kept a secret from the granddaughter for all her life point to the obscurity that characterizes Erika’s identity as the “grandmother’s lover.” It is an obscurity that has marked older LGBTQ persons’ lives in North America and representations of queer aging in North American fiction alike for a long time. Even today, three decades later, the novel’s opening resonates with a persistent blind spot in North American culture,1 one that is not limited to grandmothers. How often do
© The Author(s) 2019
L. M. Hess, Queer Aging in North American Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03466-5_1
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we think of grandfathers as having boyfriends, or of trans-persons as grandparents? How often do we encounter representations of older persons as anything other than heterosexual? In the second decade of the twenty-first century growing old, aging, and old age are still principally imagined in heteronormative terms.
This project began in 2010, when two seemingly unrelated subjects clicked together. I first encountered age studies in a graduate course on “Gender and Aging in Literature.” It was this course that made me aware of age as a significant category of identity and meaning-making. I began to take note of (often stereotypical) representations of aging, and specifically old age, in novels, in advertising, in films, on television. For this reason, age was an element to which I paid particular attention when, around the same time, I became interested in queer fiction and queer theory. Whereas I found that, generally, positive representations of aging were greatly outnumbered by what age studies scholar Margaret Gullette (2004) calls the “decline narrative” of aging (i.e., narratives that equate aging with loss and decay), I suddenly realized that representations of aging LGBTQ persons seemed to be missing almost altogether from narratives about aging as well as from works of queer fiction. After some research, it became clear that only very few scholars had noted this absence, and even fewer were looking at fiction. One of the few whose research focused on LGBTQ aging was Nancy J. Knauer, a law professor, who explained this particular blind spot as a result of overlapping stereotypes. She pointed out, “It is easy to do the math. If seniors are perceived to be asexual (or at least no longer sexual), and gay men and lesbians are primarily defined by their sexuality, then seniors, by definition, cannot be gay or lesbian” (2011, 6). At first glance, the same seemed to hold true for fictional representations as well. Yet the more attention I paid to the subject, the more it became apparent that where older LGBTQ characters seemingly remained absent, age and growing older frequently formed central elements of narratives with queer characters. It also gradually became clear that representations of queer aging did exist—they simply did not seem to receive any attention. As so often in history, it turned out that the “uncharted territory” was not actually unoccupied. A “blind spot,” after all, merely indicates an inability to perceive what’s there from one’s current vantage point, rather than the absence of something to see.
In her book The Becoming of Age, Pamela Gravagne aptly captures what is perhaps the most significant premise of aging studies in the humanities; the conviction that “the pictures we paint of growing older and the stories
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we tell about aging and old age matter” because “they actually constitute both our understanding and our lived experience of what it means to grow older – our becoming of age” (2013, 1). Two main “pictures” or, perhaps more fittingly, storylines currently dominate North American’s understanding of aging.2 The decline narrative is one of them, and probably the most ubiquitous way in which North American societies imagine aging into old age. Who is not familiar with laconic sayings such as “Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” and who has not heard or told anecdotes about the various aches and pains of growing older? How often do people of various ages say, “I am getting old” in reference to something that they experience as a loss of some ability? And while these instances are often amusing and harmless enough, collectively they paint aging as an arduous process, a losing battle against the decline of mental and physical abilities.
More recently, the aging-as-decline narrative has been overtaken by the concept of “successful aging.” At first glance, the concept provides a positive, invigorating narrative of aging because it is defined by such indicators as continued good health and an active and independent life (Rowe and Kahn 1997; Katz and Calasanti 2015). Any online search for “successful aging” will turn up an array of images showing smiling silver- and whitehaired couples riding bicycles, walking along the beach, playing with grandchildren, and so on. What is wrong with this picture? Two things. First, as age studies scholars have observed, responsibility for success is put on the individual, ignoring systemic factors such as gender, race, class, and sexuality as central factors that affect a person’s life course and aging. Fuelled by the underlying perpetual threat that one could fail to age successfully, the pressure to ensure that one remains youthful, active, healthy, reinforces anxieties of the decline narrative (Sandberg 2008; Katz and Marshall 2004). Second, and of prime interest to this book, successful aging is exclusively imagined in heteronormative terms, meaning that it ties in with a world view that assumes heterosexuality to be the only normal and natural expression of sexuality. As Barbara Marshall and Linn Sandberg have noted, “heteronormativity and its promises of happiness constitute a powerful narrative that organizes dominant understandings of the good (later) life” (2017, 3).
The realization that heterosexuality is a prerequisite for imagining aging as successful explains the conspicuous absence of older LGBTQ persons from discourses and cultural representations of aging in North America, which seems to find no place for queer aging—at least not within the boundaries of successful aging. Growing old might generally be con-
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sidered a strenuous process, but it is especially so if one ages in ways that challenge or defy the norms of the heteronormative life course. While aging into old age has rarely been the focus of queer theory, queer theorists such as Lee Edelman and J. Jack Halberstam have explored hegemonic temporal norms and have revealed their strong regulatory influence. As age studies scholar Mary Russo has noted, in North America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, lifetime is presented through the “dominant fiction of chronological aging [which] plots our lives in continually increasing numbers” (1999, 25).3 What seems like a rather obvious fact is indeed worth noting, as it has extensive ramifications. The temporal norms that suffuse our lives establish and police authoritative “blueprints” or “scripts” of how individuals imagine their life courses or plan their futures. As Sarah Schulman puts it,
[e]ven though many heterosexuals avoid the fate/destiny of romance/marriage/parenthood, it is a well worn and instantly recognizable structure upon which most mainstream representations are based. In other words, most bourgeois straight people already know the storyline their lives are supposed to follow before their lives are even begun. (2012, 83)
These scripts go by many names. Edelman has coined the term “reproductive futurism” (2004), whereas Tom Boellstorff speaks of the logic of “straight time” (2007). Halberstam refers to “heterofuturity” (2011), and Elizabeth Freeman uses the concept of “chrononormativity” (2010). All four terms point to the fact that temporal norms are so deeply embedded within the culture that they appear as “natural”—telling us how a good life course should ideally unfold.
Acts of policing are most likely to be perceived as such by those who are reluctant, unwilling, or unable to comply with the norms. With regard to aging, such policing occurs, for example, when nearly all available representations of growing older as an LGBTQ person tell a tragic story and make use of negative stereotypes. A vivid example of this is the figure of Gustav Aschenbach, protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), who, despite his European origins (Mann’s novel and Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film), has become perhaps the exemplary representation of queer aging in North America as well. Though fictional, his is the example frequently cited in social studies to illustrate the general societal perception of LGBTQ aging (Kimmel et al. 2006; Knauer 2011). Aschenbach’s narrative follows the middle-aged man’s hopeless infatuation with a
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13-year old boy during his vacation in Venice. Driven by his desire, he refuses to leave when an outbreak of cholera strikes the city. Stricken with illness, he finally collapses at the beach, while watching the boy play with friends. Another pervasive variant of policing the norms is that of erasure. Vito Russo has observed this phenomenon in The Celluloid Closet, revealing that, even as portrayals of LGBTQ characters in Hollywood films multiplied in the 1960s, this new inclusivity was not a sign of acceptance. Russo states that in such movies “[g]ays dropped like flies” since “[s]urvival was an option only for nonthreatening characters, and almost all homosexuals threatened the heterosexual status quo by their very existence” (1981, 156). Moments of policing expose the violence inherent in normative blueprints of the life course, which aver their correctness and desirability by discouraging and obscuring other ways of imagining the life course.
To see how pervasive the scripts of heterofuturity are, we simply have to take a good look at the stories and images that pervade our society, a prime source of which are fictional narratives. In which ways are life courses of LGBTQ persons depicted? We can detect those underlying blueprints when, for example, in William Wyler’s 1961 film adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour (1934), Aunt Lily admonishes her niece Martha, who is at most in her mid-20s:
You’re fond of Karen, and I know that. And it’s unnatural, just as unnatural as it can be. … You were always like that even as a child. If you had a little girlfriend, you always got mad when she liked anybody else. Well you’d better get a beau of your own now – a woman of your age. (18–19; my emphasis)
Aunt Lily sees Martha’s “tardiness” in pursuing heterosexual marriage, in combination with her fondness for Karen, as dangerous. Martha’s failure to adhere to the demands of the heteronormative timeline earns her the label “unnatural,” which at the same time transports a threat of stigma and violence. In fact, Martha and Karen lose their jobs as teachers and are ostracized by the community after a young girl spreads rumors that they are lovers, and Martha eventually commits suicide when she realizes that she does have feelings for Karen. Given that the film is from the 1960s, can we hope that its representation is outdated? The answer is yes and no. One look at twenty-first-century popular culture reveals that tropes of aging and the life course still support anxieties about “undesirable” life trajectories.
The Canadian/US TV series Queer as Folk (2000–2005), which focuses on five gay men living in Pittsburgh who like to go out to gay clubs all night long in order to dance, admire styled male bodies, and find partners for one-night stands, exemplifies this continuity. In the course of the first season, two of the protagonists, Michael and Brian, have the following conversation:
Michael: “They threw a party for me at work today.”
Brian (sarcastically): “Awww. That’s cute.”
Michael: “Right. Like that’s supposed to make me happy, knowing that all my best years are behind me . . . You’re not planning some kind of piteous birthday surprise, are you?”
Brian: “Why would I want to celebrate a tragic event like that?”
Michael: “Good, ’cause I want that day to pass without a single reminder that I’ll never be young and cute again.” (Queer as Folk 2001, Episode 11)
The “tragic” event that the two are discussing is Michael’s thirtieth birthday, and this dialogue presents only one of many stabs the characters of the series take at aging. Brian’s own thirtieth birthday party, at the end of the first season, is set up by his friends as a funeral at which they offer him “death-day-cake”—a cake in the shape of a tombstone—and present him with a certificate of membership in the “dead faggots society” (Queer as Folk 2001, Episode 22). Aging-beyond-youth is equated with old age, which is in turn equated with invisibility, unattractiveness, and rapid decline, and is accompanied by the suggestion that one “might as well be dead.”
For the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, the storylines of Death in Venice, The Children’s Hour, and Queer as Folk exemplify the majority of narrative treatments of growing older outside of heteronormative script. They represent pressure to adhere to the heteronormative blueprint, anxiety, loss, misery, and death. There are counterexamples—Valerie Taylor’s Ripening (1988) being one of them—though they seem to have remained largely unheeded and unnoticed, at least until the 2010s. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the representation of queer aging experienced a sudden and surprising breakthrough. Since 2014/2015, for example, viewers can turn to TV shows such as Transparent (Amazon) or
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Grace and Frankie (Netflix) and find complex and positive narratives that feature queer protagonists in their 70s. And yet one likewise finds articles, such as “62 Lesbian and Bisexual Female Characters Killed Over Past Two TV Seasons” (Philipps 2017), that confirm that what is now popularly known as the “Bury Your Gays”-trope seems to be alive and well. This highlights that the days of queer erasure are, in fact, not of the past, and consequently that representations of queer aging are still far from commonplace. Nevertheless, changes are underway, and such changes rarely happen out of nowhere. So how did we get here? What is some of the history behind representations of queer aging? How did obscurity give way to visibility? In which ways did age and aging play a role in works of queer fiction in the past? These are some of the questions at the heart of this book.
LoCAting Queer Aging
Examples such as The Children’s Hour and Queer as Folk reveal two essential elements that the study of queer aging must take into account. They make clear that the discursive link between successful aging and heteronormative life trajectories is so strong that it habitually erases alternative ways of imagining one’s progression through life and of seeing growing older in a positive way. They also illustrate, precisely because their protagonists would generally not be considered “old,” that the theme of aging extends beyond “old age” in chronological terms. They reveal that age and aging are as much cultural concepts as biological phenomena. While we may intuitively associate the term aging with retirement age,4 Rüdiger Kunow has pointed out that “even when measured in seemingly ‘objective’ chronological terms, ‘old age’ is not an ontogenetic [i.e., biologically determined] state” (Kunow 2011, 23). Instead, age is a relational category, one whose meaning depends on context (23). In this respect, “age” as a category resembles David Halperin’s definition of “queer” as a “positionality vis-à-vis the normative [and as a] horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance” (1995, 62). In the same way, “old” is always positioned vis-à-vis “youth,” and the meaning of any given age cannot be known before knowing its context.
However, even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, within general public discussion and much of academia, aging is generally not approached as a cultural construct, but rather as a factual problem, a threat, or even a looming catastrophe, as numerous news headlines warning of the
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“silver tsunami” about to engulf contemporary North American societies would have it.5 In accordance with this increasing sense of urgency about aging, the field of age studies has expanded considerably in the last two decades, first and foremost in the area of medical gerontological research, which often embraces the ideology of successful aging in ways that ultimately delegate responsibility of managing their health and lifestyle to individuals.6 Within the humanities, a more critical view of the concept dominates. Critical age studies have taken up the task of dismantling ageist ideologies that, on the one hand, drive the rhetoric of doom and, on the other hand, help market models of successful aging that construct the responsibility to stay youthful and agile as the duty of the good citizen. They also draw more attention to systemic factors that determine the availability or unattainability of successful aging to individuals. Within the last decade, the heightened interest in age has also produced a number of studies on LGBTQ aging, such as James T. Sears’s Growing Older: Perspectives on LGBT Aging (2009), Nancy J. Knauer’s Gay and Lesbian Elders: History, Law, and Identity Politics (2011), and Brian de Vries’s and Catherine F. Croghan’s Community-Based Research on LGBT Aging (2015). While some authors of such studies note the crucial impact of cultural narratives, these works are primarily anchored in the social sciences and largely concerned with social, legal, and economic realities of aging LGBTQ persons, such as issues of housing and health care. Undeniably, these are necessary as well as illuminating studies. At the same time, an equally dedicated analysis of the narratives that constitute, influence, and are determined by the realities of queer aging is indispensible. Dustin B. Goltz’s Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representations: Tragedy, Normativity, and Futurity (2010) and Eva Krainitzki’s “Exploring the Hypervisibility Paradox: Older Lesbians in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema (1995–2009)” (2011), which examine fictional representations of gay aging and lesbian aging respectively, represent the significant exceptions that focus on ideas, imaginaries, and narratives of queer old age. Consequently, these two works provide important building blocks for my own inquiry here as I take the next step forward, merging the methodologies of aging studies and queer studies further, while also expanding the scope of analysis and establishing a distinct focus on queer aging as a mode of representation.
In this book, I focus on themes of queer aging in works with gay and lesbian protagonists who find themselves at odds with the parameters that constitute the heteronormative blueprint of the life course, and who, in some cases, contest or dismantle them. This focus results from the available
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works of queer aging.7 Moreover, I do not mean to suggest that narratives of queer aging may never be found in narratives of aging with heterosexual protagonists.8 After all, the very term queer aging moves away from ideas of essence. However, I do argue that by virtue of their cultural history, LGBTQ persons and characters occupy a specific position in North American society, one that has a much greater propensity for producing narratives of queer aging than heterosexual persons and characters possess. I also contend that such representations of queer aging have the power to crack open heteronormative concepts of time and future that still limit the available perceptions and representations of aging significantly. Narratives of queer aging do so, first of all, by making those restrictive norms visible as such, exposing the violence of the heteronormative timeline, and second, by calling for transgressions of these norms as well as for the invention of alternative narratives.
The perseverance of heteronormative scripts of aging might explain why, even though both aging studies and queer studies are deeply invested in analyzing cultural imaginaries (as well as in investigating the discursive power of representations), neither field of research has to date produced a comprehensive analysis of representations of queer aging. Yet the second decade of the twenty-first century is the point in time at which such an analysis becomes indispensable. Aging LGBTQ persons have finally gained visibility in recent years, be it through the journalistic coverage of the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision in the United States in 2013, which brought the story of 82-year old Edith “Edie” Windsor and her late wife, Thea Spyer, into the focus of nationwide and worldwide news coverage, or the representation of LGBTQ protagonists in films (Tru Love 2013; Love Is Strange 2014) and streaming TV shows (Transparent 2014; Grace and Frankie 2015). The suddenness with which representations of aging LGBTQ persons appeared on the scene may be explained to some extent by the fact that “the 2000s can broadly be defined as the decade when a first generation of self-identified gay men and lesbians reached old age” (Krainitzki 2011, 13). However, the following chapters will show that present-day twenty-first-century representations, such as Transparent, which focuses on a trans-woman in her 70s, did not simply appear out of nowhere, but rather developed in conjunction with substantial cultural and socio-political developments in North America throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
To capture the—often uneven—development that representations of queer aging have undergone up to the present watershed moment, I will
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provide in-depth analyses of six novels and two films published or released between 1943 and 2011, covering a time period of eight decades overall. As Anita Wohlmann has pointed out, fictional narratives of aging are part of a two-way process: they simultaneously “feed from the culture from which they emerge” and “send out messages about age and aging to their viewers and readers” (2014, 17). In other words, novels and films are particularly illuminating because they not only mirror and archive cultural discourse passively, but they also actively shape them through affirmation, critique, or resistance. A chronological approach may appear counterintuitive in a book interested in narratives that challenge the linear logic of the heteronormative life course. Nevertheless, it serves well to provide a historical framework for the presently emerging visibility of queer aging. Two noteworthy findings that consequently surface are that (a) there are significant differences between representations of lesbian aging and representations of gay aging as they emerge in different cultural contexts, and (b) protagonists become increasingly older as new possibilities for imagining queer aging develop over time and as narratives increasingly push for those possibilities. It is for such reasons that I anchor each chapter in a significant cultural moment of LGBTQ history. These points of reference for the individual close readings allow me to examine these works not as isolated but as situated in specific cultural and historical contexts.
Because we proverbially age from the moment we are born and because age is a relational category, my analysis also examines significant themes of aging in works whose protagonists are not old. At times, the very narratives in which aging does not present itself as a possible future for LGBTQ characters reveal much about the anxieties around queer sexualities and age, for example when aging is forestalled by premature accidental deaths, violent murders, or suicide. The non-representation of older LGBTQ persons, coupled with the presence of young LGBTQ persons who die prematurely while the heterosexual heroes prevail, sends a clear message about viable versus undesirable—or even unintelligible—identities and models of the life course. Because unintelligibility signifies that “the laws of culture and language find you to be an impossibility” (Butler 2004, 30), it becomes a specifically poignant form of invisibility.
In addition to focusing the analysis of queer aging upon narrative subject matter, my goal is also to bridge the gap between queer studies and aging studies by merging queer theory’s investigations into normative temporal scripts and concepts such as “queer temporality” and “queer failure” with pivotal research of age studies scholars on topics such as the master-
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narrative of decline, the ideology of successful aging, and the constructed and relational character of age. Both Linn Sandberg (2008) and Cynthia Port (2012) have argued for the usefulness of adopting queer studies’ approaches to temporality within age studies. However, to date, the only application of queer temporality for the analysis of non-heterosexual aging in fictional representations is Goltz’s analysis of gay aging in American film and television.
Queer theory has proven an effective tool for exposing norms as cultural constructions rather than unalterable facts, as well as a creative way of undermining these norms. Looking at aging through the lens of queer theory therefore helps to dismantle understandings of aging that conceive of growing older solely as a series of biological processes to be managed and optimized. Applying these tools to explore representations of age and aging of non-heterosexual characters goes a step further. As discussed above, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century non-heterosexual persons have generally not been included in imaginations of successful aging. In fact, even the negative stereotypes of “the old” as having lost interest in sex still imagine them as latently heterosexual. Representations of queer aging expose the normative regimes that separate success from failure and render visible what otherwise so often remains invisible. Specifically within the current North American cultural and historical moment, representations of queer aging are of significance not only to LGBTQ persons but also to everyone else who plans to grow old. At a time when societal anxieties about aging find expression in terms such as “the silver tsunami” while consumerist versions of successful aging proliferate, analyzing representations of queer aging can not only irritate and disrupt normative assumptions of what constitutes a meaningful life course but also create alternative and more daring understandings of aging that resist compulsory linearity as well as compulsory heteronormativity.
While in the individual analyses I largely use the terms gay and lesbian to refer to the respective protagonists, I use the term queer aging to refer to narratives that negotiate aging at odds with and in resistance to the norms that shape aging within chrononormative culture. Practices of queer reading filter into the analysis of queer aging because not all narratives are equally subversive, and not all are subversive in the same ways. The subversive potential of narratives that actively deconstruct ageist or heteronormative representations of aging is easily apparent; other narratives require the reader to read against the grain, to pay attention to gaps in the narrative and to its erasures. Analyzing queer aging narratives is
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sometimes a matter of demonstrating the impact of individual passages that resist normative readings. At other times, it involves paying attention to the policing effects of a narrative’s affirmation of heterosexual norms.9 Works produced in the same time period can contain very disparate portrayals of aging. Even within a single work one finds contradictory elements. Many narratives contain a mix of heteronormative and subversive passages. Thus, rather than a clear-cut dichotomy of subversive and nonsubversive narratives, the various works present a complex continuum.
The term queer in queer aging is central because queerness disturbs identities rather than defining them (Edelman 2004, 17). In this vein, I understand queer as a term that actively seeks possibilities to challenge and upset norms and expectations (Dickinson 1999, 5). Since the early 1990s, when queer theory developed, largely as a result of the AIDS crisis of the preceding decade, the term stood for critical resistance—for example “an urgent need to resist dominant constructions of HIV/AIDS” (Halperin 1995, 62). Queer theory’s interest in denaturalizing categories in general therefore puts pressure on “systems of classification” and their “lines of demarcation” (Hall 2003, 14). Queer is therefore “opposed not simply to ‘straight,’ but more broadly to ‘normal,’” as Tim Dean points out; moreover, it “involves creating alliances between sexual minorities and other social groups whose marginalization or disenfranchisement isn’t necessarily a direct consequence of their nonnormative sexuality” (2013, 155). The adjective “old” marks one such marginalized and disenfranchised group.
Like the category “queer,” the category “old” has no clear boundaries. The designation “old/older” is always determined in relation to younger persons and always fluid. The awareness of this shared fluidity allows us to challenge understandings of age and aging as exclusively anchored in physical, biological fact and to expose the linear life trajectories that generally go unremarked because they represent deeply engrained norms of North American society. It also invites us to look at age, and queer aging specifically, as a category that not only changes in altering historical and cultural contexts but that also essentially gains its meaning and functions from these contexts.
Core themes
Narratives of aging are “potent site[s] for the production of cultural knowledge” (Chivers 2011, xviii). The way we think of the life course, the way we imagine growing older, is shaped by the narratives and images we
have available to do so. As Gravagne puts it, “shared meanings become narratives and . . . various philosophical positions and their assumptions about the fundamental nature of the world and existence lead us to see aging and old age in particular ways and prevent us from imagining other ways to age” (2013, 13). Age narratives not only shape expectations and attitudes toward aging but also easily become self-fulfilling prophecies, especially if they are validated and frequently reiterated by the culture that surrounds us. As Gullette observes, we are “aged by culture” because “[o]ur age narratives become our virtual realities” (11). In the United States and in Canada the themes of temporality, futurity, productivity, success, and failure form essential leitmotifs of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury narratives of aging. Growing older is intimately tied to the passing of time and understood as a progression toward the future. Imaginaries of successful life courses are firmly tied to productivity, in the sense of biological reproduction and capitalist productivity within a heteronormative society. If living up to these requirements signals success, then not living up to them signifies failure. In this way, the fear of failure itself serves as a policing mechanism, providing “motivation” to strive harder for success. Critically examining these themes is therefore indispensible when exploring narratives of queer aging.
Elizabeth Freeman has described the structuring principle of “chrononormativity” as a powerful mechanism that aims to “organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity,” creating “hidden rhythms –temporal experiences that seem natural to those they privilege” (2010, 3). Within the framework of chrononormativity, the success of one’s life course is measured in terms of one’s productivity, which is in turn defined in terms of heterosexual reproduction, accumulation of wealth, and seeing the achievements of one’s own life as something that can be passed on to one’s heirs (4–5). On the surface, the chronological understanding of the life course might appear harmless and even practical, but the problem with “hidden rhythms” is that they make certain ways of life appear natural and others abnormal. Moreover, they contribute to an understanding of aging as a process “beyond the social” (Sandberg 2008, 118), one that considers aging to be determined by biological facts. This viewpoint in turn obscures other ways of thinking about aging. Consequently, it becomes crucial for any queer approach to aging to clarify that categories of age and aging cannot exist “independently of the ideas, images, and social practices that conceptualize and represent them” (Cole 1992, xxiii). This means that
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while the biological processes of aging, old age, and death cannot in the last resort be avoided, the meaning which we give to these processes and the evaluations we make of people as they grow physically older are social constructions which reflect the beliefs and values found in a specific culture at a particular period of history. (Featherstone and Hepworth 1995, 30–31)
Judith Butler’s concept of “doing gender” serves well to illustrate the complex entanglement of physical, social, and “ideological” aspects of aging. As Butler explains, one’s “performance” of gender is “never fully self-styled” because “the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. In other words, the body is a historical situation” (1988, 522). Age and aging, like gender and sexuality, are performative. They are performed, yet “never fully self-styled.” They are circumscribed by understandings of biology as well as physical processes, and, ultimately, by convictions of what makes a good life. Such understandings are tied to historical and culture-specific conventions. At the same time, reading representations of age and aging as performative serves to dismantle seemingly coherent narratives of “natural” age identities. Reading narratives of queer aging with this framework in mind provides a lens that sharpens the critical focus in analyzing how a given representation of age might support and maintain or, perhaps, even challenge and deconstruct prevalent discourses.
In the last two decades, scholars of both queer studies and aging studies have worked to question and contest dominant ideas of time and the life course. Theories of queer temporality, developed and applied by authors such as J. Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, Lee Edelman, José Muñoz, and Dustin Goltz, challenge normative temporalities, while findings by age studies scholars, such as Margaret Gullette, Leni Marshall, Stephen Katz and Barbara Marshall, Roberta Maierhofer, and Eva Krainitzki, denaturalize aging as a solely biological and chronological process, highlighting its cultural construction instead. Forging an alliance between the two fields is therefore particularly helpful to investigate how narratives “lead us to see aging and old age in particular ways and prevent us from imagining other ways to age” (Gravagne 2013, 13), as well as to explore how narratives may intervene and begin to dismantle deeply engrained understandings of temporality, futurity, and productivity, as well as the binary of success and failure.
Heteronormative imaginaries of the life course profess that “[m]onogamous love, marriage and procreation provide the keys to the kingdom”
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(Goltz 2010, 83). Within the logic of reproductive futurism the next generation serves to provide meaning beyond decline and death because “values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next” (Port 2012, 17). Tom Boellstorff describes this as the logic of “straight time” (2007). Problematically, straight time depends on a view of non-heteronormative aging in exclusively negative terms, as demarcated by misery and loneliness. In his analysis of representations of gay aging, Goltz observes,
Aging is crafted as a ritual of punishment, where worshipped and admired gay youth are haunted by the ticking of the clock, forever aware that aging and future are to be actively avoided. . . . The gay male, both young and old, are constructed as the victims of time and future, yet these tragic rituals of gay aging are determined by the exclusionary logics of heteronormative temporalities. (2010, 16)
If one looks closely, one can find numerous instances of such “hauntings” in queer fiction. A particularly illuminating example occurs in Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner (1974). The novel’s protagonist, a 39-yearold track coach, becomes suddenly afraid for his relationship with his college-age partner, Billy, when he examines his middle-aged body in the mirror:
I looked at myself in the rust-specked old bathroom mirror, and the great gay dread about aging hit me. There is no society, no law, no social convention to keep two gays together. . . . The moment you cease to be desirable to your partner, he decamps. I ran my hand back over my close-barbed curls. My hair was still good, though its brunette color now had a gunmetal tint. But sooner or later, I’d start to bald. . . . By the time Billy was my age, and still a healthy vigorous man, I would be nearly sixty. Sooner or later he might elbow me aside for someone younger. (Warren [1974] 1996, 107)
Harlan accepts without question the exemplary nature of heterosexual relationships. He speaks of “the great gay dread about aging” because he believes that without a heteronormative framework of laws, social conventions, and a specific blueprint to follow, his relationship with Billy will fail and aging will eventually equate misery. The Front Runner also illustrates that cautionary tales about queer aging are not limited to actual depictions of miserable old age. Instead, various depictions of age, aging, and agerelations all serve to assert the heteronormative life course as the only
viable option, while cautioning against the negative consequences that await those who dare deviate from it.
Within the logic of straight time the family and heterosexual reproduction stand at the center of imaginaries that continually “project the child as the future, and the future as heterosexual” (Halberstam 2011, 73). Straight time obscures and erases queer futurity. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman argues that America’s ideology of reproductive futurism is committed to preserving “the absolute privilege of heteronormativity” and intent on rendering queer alternatives “unthinkable” (2004, 2). In Edelman’s view, queerness exemplifies the antithesis to the temporality of reproductive futurism. He states that queerness not only signifies “abjection” and “stigma” (3) but that it moreover “comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity” (4). While Edelman’s theory has often been read as pessimistic or nihilisitc, he articulates the violence inherent in the exclusionary power that reproductive futurism sustains. If queerness is thus excluded from “the future,” then it seems that queerness must likewise be excluded from “aging,” as the process of growing old(er) proposes a trajectory into the future.
In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Muñoz seemingly contradicts Edelman’s approach when he argues not only that alternative constructions of meaningful futures are possible but also that “the future is queerness’s domain” (2009, 1) because “queerness is primarily about futurity and hope” (11). For Muñoz, queerness is essentially connected to futurity rather than directly opposed to it. He states, “Queerness . . . is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility of another world” (1). What Muñoz and Edelman have in common, despite their otherwise divergent perspectives, is their search for ways to critique and disturb the logic of straight time, in the here and now. In the case of queer aging, claims to the future begin by resisting obscurity. One such intervention can be found in Valerie Taylor’s novel Prism (1981). Ann Bassani, the 65-year-old lesbian protagonist, provides an example of forging alternatives to heteronormative aging and of beginning to imagine a queer future. After having moved from Chicago to Abigail, NY, to save money in her retirement, Ann initially resigns herself to going back into the closet, thinking that it would be risky “to parade down Main Street with a lambda sign” in this small-town community (Taylor 1981, 15). However, when she falls in love with a local widow, Eldora Pierce, she begins to imagine
INTRODUCTION: QUEER AGING AND THE SIGNIFICANCE…
alternative futures: “After all, people have all kinds of relationships, no matter where they live. . . . Ann didn’t doubt that a great deal went on, at all age levels” (34). In the course of the narrative, the two women do start a relationship, despite their respective reservations, and finally even overcome Eldora’s fear of her children’s and grandchildren’s reactions. At the very end of the novel, Ann feels confident enough to dream of starting “a little gay community right in Abigail” (146), rejecting moreover a here and now in which
[t]he editors of the women’s magazines and books on sex seem to take for granted that no one forms any new relationships after about thirty-five. Old people in nursing homes get married to the tune of Isn’t it cute? Aren’t they sweet? Only hetero couples, at that. (76)
Ann and Eldora as aging lesbian women embody the alternative that emerges from this rejection. They insist on the possibility of a queer future by exchanging the common tropes of aging, such as heterosexual marriage and the nursing home, for their vision of a gay community. Representations of aging LGBTQ persons are not numerous, but where they exist, their characters habitually have to find ways to withstand societal norms that mark their lives as undesirable or even unintelligible.
Being a successful adult in North American society is equated with “reproductive maturity” as well as with “wealth accumulation” (Halberstam 2011, 2). During the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries both older people and LGBTQ persons were habitually associated with unproductiveness. It was, for example, assumed that LGBTQ persons would remain childless and would thus defy “reproductive temporality,” in which “values, wealth, goods, and morals” would be passed on from generation to generation (Halberstam 2005, 153; Weston 1991, 22), despite the fact that many LGBTQ persons did and do have children. This prejudice insinuates that LGBTQ persons are not contributing to society by not having families. Moreover, growing old without children to fulfill prospective responsibilities of caretaking in their parents’ old age is also seen as a failure to fulfill a duty to one’s community. While automatic equations of a person’s nonheterosexual orientation with childlessness are clearly false and also ignore the significance of chosen families, the assumption reveals the ideologically privileged association of heterosexuality and generativity.
Old age is likewise linked with the idea of non-productivity. For women this cultural trope is particularly poignant because menopause, the passing
into biological non-reproductivity, is often cited as a significant signpost for female aging. As Gullette remarks, menopause is still framed as an event that “crudely divides all women’s lives into two parts, the better Before and the worse After, with menopause as the magic marker of decline” (1997, 177), an understanding that ties the phrase “biology as destiny” specifically to the process of aging. Retirement is another event commonly associated with aging and with passing into non-productivity.10 The common assumption that old age equals biological and economic non-productivity also feeds ageist stereotypes of older people as “incompetent,” as “noncompetitive,” and as posing a burden on their families (Miller 2009, 5). In this way, both old age and non-normative sexuality are situated outside the heteronormative and capitalist ideal of productivity, and, consequently, aging LGBTQ persons are doubly marginalized as unproductive.
Being perceived as unproductive signifies a depreciation within a heteronormative, capitalist system, in which factors such as reproduction, generativity, and productive citizenship are understood as essential elements of a meaningful life, of growing older, and, ultimately, of successful aging. Yet, age studies scholars have explored ways of imagining aging that envision a different kind of productivity. Roberta Maierhofer’s Salty Old Women (2003), for example, offers such a diverging perspective on women’s aging; one that (a) is not tied to reproductive generativity and that (b) re-interprets the decline narrative. Building on Ursula Le Guin’s essay “The Space Crone” (1976), Maierhofer suggests that menopause can serve as a catalyst for a woman to become “pregnant with herself” (Le Guin [1976] 1989, 5). This divergent form of “pregnancy” signifies actively shaping and creating one’s own identity in old age apart from prescriptive norms (Maierhofer 2003, 159). While Maierhofer’s focus does not explicitly lie on non-heteronormative sexualities, she introduces a perspective that offers ways to “queer” female aging and that illustrates that cultural scripts of aging and decline are not, after all, unalterable. Other works suggest alternative understandings of legacy and generativity, for example by focusing on the legacy of narratives themselves—what Stephanie Foote calls “the print archive” (2005, 169). Moreover, scholars of queer studies and aging studies alike have rejected normative parameters of productivity and success outright.
As longevity rates continue to rise, the compulsion to age “successfully”—to show no signs of aging—grows stronger and supports the interpretation of (physical) decline as a personal failure, a sign of “moral laxity” L.
M. HESS
INTRODUCTION:
(Sandberg 2008, 135). Stephen Katz and Toni Calasanti indicate that “successful aging is one of gerontology’s most successful ideas” (2015, 26), but at the same time a very problematic one, because too often
successful aging research conceives of health advantages and disadvantages as the results of individual responsibility, buoyed by media narratives of aging winners and losers (Rozanova 2010), [and] thus fails to acknowledge social relations of power, environmental determinants of health, and the biopolitics of health inequalities. (29)
Additionally, as Robert Kahn has pointed out, a focus on successful aging easily has the “effect of defining the majority of the elderly population as unsuccessful and therefore failing” (2002, 726). Understanding old age chiefly as physical failure is particularly precarious in North American society, in which, as Robert McRuer has shown in Crip Theory, the norm of able-bodiedness is just as compulsory as the norm of heterosexuality (2006, 2), and in which, moreover, “compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness and vice versa” (31). Jane Gallop has elaborated on the ways in which aging and what she calls “late-onset disability” are closely interwoven. Not only do the physical processes of aging often bring about late-onset disabilities, but, more importantly, the decline narrative feeds on the core anxiety of losing able-bodiedness (only exceeded by anxieties about the loss of mental abilities). Such anxieties loom over the temporality of growing older, fostering expectations of “catastrophic loss,” a loss that, as Gallop explains, threatens one’s sexuality, one’s gender expression, and one’s very sense of identity (2016). Within the ideology of reproductive futurism this anxiety is somewhat abated by a reliance on the next generation to carry on one’s legacy (which may cover anything from biological to material inheritance). Ultimately, however, the binary construct of success and failure connects any palpable form of aging to negative images, particularly for those who “fail” to follow the cultural scripts of the heteronormative timeline.
A number of queer theorists have aimed to resist this ideology and to break up the success/failure binary in their engagements with queer temporalities. Halberstam and Sandberg specifically employ the concept of failure in this context. Sandberg points out that “failure holds a very significant position in queer theory and critiques of heteronormativity,” where it consequently “opens up possibilities for change” (2008, 127). Halberstam likewise suggests that failing to live up to heteronormative ideals might provide a
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juggles with the people’s desire for enlarged foreign markets and freer exchanges by pretending to establish closer trade relations for a country whose articles of export are almost exclusively agricultural products with other countries that are also agricultural, while erecting a Custom House barrier of prohibitive tariff taxes against the rich countries of the world that stand ready to take our entire surplus of products and to exchange therefor commodities which are necessaries and comforts of life among our own people.
S . 5.—We recognize in the trusts and combinations which are designed to enable capital to secure more than its just share of the joint product of capital and labor, a natural consequence of the prohibitive taxes which prevent the free competition which is the life of honest trade, but we believe their worst evils can be abated by law, and we demand the rigid enforcement of the laws made to prevent and control them, together with such further legislation in restraint of their abuses as experience may show to be necessary.
S . 6.—The Republican party, while professing a policy of reserving the public land for small holdings by actual settlers, has given away the people’s heritage till now a few railroad and nonresident aliens, individual and corporate, possess a larger area than that of all our farms between the two seas. The last Democratic administration reversed the improvident and unwise policy of the Republican party touching the public domain, and reclaimed from corporations and syndicates, alien and domestic, and restored to the people nearly one hundred million acres of valuable land to be sacredly held as homesteads for our citizens, and we pledge ourselves to continue this policy until every acre of land so unlawfully held shall be reclaimed and restored to the people.
S . 7.—We denounce the Republican legislation known as the Sherman act of 1890 as a cowardly makeshift fraught with possibilities of danger in the future which should make all of its supporters, as well as its author, anxious for its speedy repeal. We hold to the use of both gold and silver as the standard money of the country, and to the coinage of both gold and silver without discriminating against either metal or charge of mintage, but the dollar unit of coinage for both metals must be of equal intrinsic and exchangeable value, or be adjusted through international agreement or by such safeguards of legislation as shall insure the maintenance
of the parity of the two metals, and the equal power of every dollar at all times in the markets and in the payment of debts, and we demand that all paper currency shall be kept at par with and redeemable in such coin. We insist upon this policy as especially necessary for the protection of the farmers and laboring classes, the first and most defenceless victims of unstable money and a fluctuating currency.
S . 8.—We recommend that the prohibitory ten per cent. tax on State bank issues be repealed.
S . 9.—Public office is a public trust. We reaffirm the declaration of the Democratic National Convention of 1876 for the reform of the civil service and we call for the honest enforcement of all laws regulating the same. The nomination of a President, as in the recent Republican convention, by delegations composed largely of his appointees, holding office at his pleasure, is a scandalous satire upon free popular institutions and a startling illustration of the methods by which a President may gratify his ambition. We denounce a policy under which federal office-holders usurp control of party conventions in the States, and we pledge the Democratic party to the reform of these and all other abuses which threaten individual liberty and local self-government.
S . 10.—The Democratic party is the only party that has ever given the country a foreign policy consistent and vigorous, compelling respect abroad and inspiring confidence at home. While avoiding entangling alliances it has aimed to cultivate friendly relations with other nations and especially with our neighbors on the American continent whose destiny is closely linked with our own, and we view with alarm the tendency to a policy of irritation and bluster, which is liable at any time to confront us with the alternative of humiliation or war.
We favor the maintenance of a navy strong enough for all purposes of national defence and to properly maintain the honor and dignity of the country abroad.
S . 11.—The country has always been the refuge of the oppressed from every land—exiles for conscience sake—and in the spirit of the founders of our government we condemn the oppression practised by the Russian government upon its Lutheran and Jewish subjects, and we call upon our national government, in the interest of justice and humanity, by all just and proper means, to use its prompt and
best efforts to bring about a cessation of these cruel persecutions in the dominions of the Czar and to secure to the oppressed equal rights.
We tender our profound and earnest sympathy to those lovers of freedom who are struggling for home rule and the great cause of local self government in Ireland.
S . 12.—We heartily approve all legitimate efforts to prevent the United States from being used as the dumping ground for the known criminals and professional paupers of Europe, and we demand the rigid enforcement of the laws against Chinese immigration or the importation of foreign workmen under contract to degrade American labor and lessen its wages, but we condemn and denounce any and all attempts to restrict the immigration of the industrious and worthy of foreign lands.
S . 13.—This Convention hereby renews the expression of appreciation of the patriotism of the soldiers and sailors of the Union in the war for its preservation, and we favor just and liberal pensions for all disabled Union soldiers, their widows and dependents, but we demand that the work of the Pension Office shall be done industriously, impartially and honestly. We denounce the present administration of that office as incompetent, corrupt, disgraceful and dishonest.
S . 14.—The federal government should care for and improve the Mississippi River and other great waterways of the Republic so as to secure for the interior States easy and cheap transportation to the tidewater.
When any waterway of the Republic is of sufficient importance to demand the aid of the government, that such aid should be extended, a definite plan of continuous work until permanent improvement is secured.
S . 15.—For purposes of national defence and the promotion of commerce between the States we recognize the early construction of the Nicaragua Canal and its protection against foreign control as of great importance to the United States.
S . 16.—Recognizing the World’s Columbian Exposition as a national undertaking of vast importance, in which the general government has invited the co-operation of all the Powers of the
world, and appreciating the acceptance by many of such Powers of the invitation for extended and the broadest liberal efforts being made by them to contribute to the grandeur of the undertaking, we are of the opinion that Congress should make such necessary financial provision as shall be requisite to the maintenance of the national honor and public faith.
S . 17.—Popular education being the only safe basis of popular suffrage, we recommend to the several States most liberal appropriations for the public schools. Free common schools are the nursery of good government and they have always received the fostering care of the Democratic party, which favors every means of increasing intelligence. Freedom of education being an essential of civil and religious liberty as well as a necessity for the development of intelligence, must not be interfered with under any pretext whatever. We are opposed to State interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government.
S . 18.—We approve the action of the present House of Representatives in passing bills for the admission into the Union as States of the Territories of New Mexico and Arizona, and we favor the early admission of all the Territories having necessary population and resources to admit them to Statehood, and while they remain Territories we hold that the officials appointed to administer the government of any Territory, together with the Districts of Columbia and Alaska, should be bona fide residents of the Territory or District in which their duties are to be performed. The Democratic party believes in home rule and the control of their own affairs by the people of the vicinage.
S . 19.—We favor legislation by Congress and State Legislatures to protect the lives and limbs of railway employés and those of other hazardous transportation companies and denounce the inactivity of the Republican party and particularly the Republican Senate for causing the defeat of measures beneficial and protective to this class of wageworkers.
S . 20.—We are in favor of the enactment by the States of laws for abolishing the notorious sweating system, for abolishing contract
convict labor and for prohibiting the employment in factories of children under fifteen years of age.
S . 21.—We are opposed to all sumptuary laws as an interference with the individual rights of the citizen.
S . 22.—Upon this statement of principles and policies the Democratic party asks the intelligent judgment of the American people. It asks a change of administration and a change of party in order that there may be a change of system and a change of methods, thus assuring the maintenance, unimpaired, of institutions under which the Republic has grown great and powerful.
The
Tariff Issue, 1892.
REPUBLICAN.
We reaffirm the American doctrine of Protection. We call attention to its growth abroad. We maintain that the prosperous condition of our country is largely due to the wise revenue legislation of the Republican Congress.
We believe that all articles which cannot be produced in the United States, except luxuries, should be admitted free of duty, and that on all imports coming into competition with the products of American labor there should be levied duties equal to the difference between wages abroad and at home.
We assert that the prices of manufactured articles of general consumption have been reduced under the operation of the tariff act of 1890.
We denounce the efforts of the Democratic majority of the House of Representatives to destroy our tariff laws, as is manifested by their attacks upon wool, lead and lead ores, the chief product of a number of States, and we ask the people for their judgment thereon.
DEMOCRATIC.
We denounce Republican Protection as a fraud as a robbery of the great majority of the American people for the benefit of a few. We declare it to be a fundamental principle of the Democratic party that the government has no constitutional power to impose and collect a dollar for tax except for purposes of revenue only, and demand that the collection of such taxes be imposed by the government when only honestly and economically administered.
[The above paragraph was adopted by a vote of 504 to 342 as a substitute for the following, reported from the majority of the committee: “We reiterate the oft repeated doctrines of the Democratic party that the necessity of the government is the only justification for taxations, and whenever a tax is unnecessary it is unjustifiable; that when Custom House taxation is levied upon articles of any kind produced in this country, the difference between the cost of labor here and labor abroad, when such a difference exists, fully measures any possible benefits to labor, and the enormous additional impositions of the existing tariff fall with crushing force upon our farmers and workingmen, and, for the mere advantage of the few whom it enriches, exact from labor a grossly unjust share of the expenses of the government, and we demand such a revision of the tariff laws as will remove their iniquitous inequalities, lighten their oppressions and put them on a constitutional and equitable basis. But
in making reduction in taxes, it is not proposed to injure any domestic industries, but rather to promote their healthy growth. From the foundation of this government, taxes collected at the Custom House have been the chief source of Federal revenue. Such they must continue to be. Moreover, many industries have come to rely upon legislation for successful continuance, so that any change of law must be at every step regardful of the labor and capital thus involved. The process of reform must be subject in the execution of this plain dictate of justice.”]
