by Неизвестный
In response to the rising STD rate, Flushing House has invited the Visiting Nurse Service of New York to come in and lead two sex-ed programs: one for the men and one for the women. “They can’t get them to talk if they do it together,” Katie, the activities leader, says of her clients. “They just don’t think about [STDs], because in their day and age, they didn’t.”
But Flushing House is an independent-living facility, not a nursing home, which drastically limits the level of supervision. Sure, the staff can stop someone from looking at porn on the communal computers, but when one resident started going out clubbing, for example, they turned a blind eye. If anything, relationships—as a useful antidote to loneliness—are encouraged. There’s a darkened TV room that plays a constant cycle of romantic oldies. There are tables for two in the dining room. There are even frequent dances in the glass solarium on the roof, from where you can see all five boroughs; security cameras recently caught one couple up there going at it in the nude.
The population is overwhelmingly heterosexual—though, until recently, there was one transgender resident—and more than two thirds are female, meaning that the men typically get to do the picking. When a guy comes on the scene that the women consider a catch—someone who you can tell was handsome years ago—jostling ensues. One male resident confessed to me that he hadn’t had sex in three days, as if it were a crime. Another confided that he still gets blow jobs.
The dining room is the social nexus of the facility. There’s Tony and Alice’s group, which is usually one of the first to be seated, with their friend Hilda begging Abraham (a staffer who escorts residents to their seats) not to put them in “Sing Sing,” one of the tables farthest from the door. There’s a table of five women who implore Abraham to fill the sixth seat with “either a gorgeous guy or another woman we can talk to.” There’s the woman who always wanted to sit with the man who looked like her dead husband, until she did and realized he wasn’t like her husband at all. “I was married fifty-five and a half years,” she explains. “I don’t think I could go with anybody else.”
The most-sought-after dinner companion of late is a man named Roosevelt, who is a young seventy-one and who wears pressed shirts and speaks in a velvety rumble. Shortly after his arrival, Abraham noticed a trend: women were trying to save a seat at their table, and as soon as Roosevelt sauntered up to the hostess stand, they would eagerly wave Abraham their way. Not that it did them much good in the end. By and large, Roosevelt feels the women at Flushing House are just too old for him.
Age, unsurprisingly, is the biggest deterrent to dating at Flushing House. Most of its residents have already nursed and lost one life partner and are not keen to do it again. As one woman explains, “I was married twice, and then I had a boyfriend. I don’t want to be bothered now.” Another resident tells me he doesn’t want to date an older woman, but refuses to make himself “ridiculous” by being seen on the arm of a young one. Even when residents are partnered up, there can come a point when one’s body becomes too fragile to entrust it to someone else. Herb and Henrietta, ninety-seven and ninety respectively, were both too sick to even come downstairs most of this past winter. “Sex?” she says. “Oh, honey, there isn’t any.”
Al and Sally have had the most tumultuous relationship at Flushing House. They’ve broken up and rekindled and broken up four or five times. Al blames Sally’s declining health: not only has their sex life dropped off, but she needs a walker these days and rarely agrees to leave the building. “I want to go out,” he says. “I want to drive to Jones Beach and take her to dinner. But she just says no. It wasn’t like that before.”
When Al’s family came to visit, “I invited her all week long. I said, ‘Sally, don’t forget you’re coming with me. We’re going to eat with them. We’re gonna go out to eat.’ The following day, she calls me up in the morning, and she says, ‘Al, I don’t feel good.’ I told her, ‘You’re full of shit.’”
Sally, for her part, can’t understand why Al expects a woman her age to always be up for anything. She’s had three husbands—a lifetime filled with men. If there were ever a moment when she should be let off the hook, when little should be asked of her, then that time is now.
And she isn’t alone in her no-nonsense approach. The couples at Flushing House seem to engage in a distilled form of dating. There’s a practicality that comes with knowing there are certain undeniable limits to how long a romance can last, or what romance at the age of eighty-five even means. Gone are certain external factors (financial viability, child-rearing capability, long-term life goals); compatibility can now boil down simply to the types of shared interests that traditionally populate personals ads—taking sunset walks or reading paperback mysteries. Couples may tell one another, as Kitty told David, “You’re the best thing in my present life,” but when they do pass on, they’ll often be buried next to their first spouses, as if their latter-day loves never took place.
All of which takes the pressure off; no one here is burdened with finding the loves of their lives. The cafeteria’s complex pecking order may recall high school, but relationships don’t have nearly the same all-consuming nature as when residents were younger. Of those now dating, only Henrietta and Herb have moved in together, despite the economic advantages of double occupancy. For the most part, people don’t feel the need to alter their lives substantially. “I want a little peace in my life for the first time in seventy years,” Roosevelt tells me. “I want my space, and I want freedom. And I finally got it.”
Bridget, a tiny woman with cherry-red hair and an Irish accent, met her ex-boyfriend Nelson a few weeks after moving into Flushing House when they were outside the building waiting for Access-a-Ride. (“How romantic!”) “I had my eye on him,” she says. “He wasn’t a good-looking man, but he had nice lips.” Things progressed quickly from there: “Your time is limited. When you reach eighty, what have you got to lose?”
However, when Nelson left the facility to move in with family who could give him more care and asked Bridget to come with him, she was more “levelheaded.” She had already been married and knew what it was like to tailor her life for a man. Why can’t it just be about having fun?, her thinking now goes. Bridget has since become something of a flirt. She prefers to spend her time in the company of men and particularly likes one named Jim, who has so far been unresponsive, even after she tried bringing him his favorite dessert, sugar-free cookies. “He’s like a stone,” she says. “I can’t move him.”
One evening a few months ago, Flushing House’s nightly poker game was shaping up to be a lively one. This is where Al fell in love with Sally. The only permanent player not in a couple was Doc, who usually deals. “Full house!” Al announced at the end of one game.
“Ooh, Albert, that’s beautiful!” Sally proclaimed.
“Uh-huh. Can I have all that, please?” he asked, swooping a stack of dollar bills toward his end of the table and then looking over to Sally. “You’re rich, sugar.”
“Oh, thank you, sweetheart,” she purred.
“Oh, get me a shovel!” Rita exclaimed in mock disgust. She met her husband, Irving, a World War II vet, at an upstate weekend retreat for older singles after both of their previous spouses had died. (“We like to say they ran off together,” she says. “To heaven.”) They married in their seventies and moved to Flushing House a few years later.
Someone asked Roosevelt, who had just joined the game, why he didn’t come in to play earlier.
“I got caught on the outside with one of the residents.”
“With one of the women?” asked Irving.
“Yes. She wanted to confess to me.”
“Her love or what?” Rita smirked.
Roosevelt grinned back at her. “I don’t want anybody hanging on my arm.”
“Roosevelt, you got a line of bullshit that will sink a ship,” Irving boomed, then he suddenly grew pensive. “Let me tell you something, just to be honest with you. If I didn’t have Rita backing me…” He didn’t
complete the thought, but then he didn’t need to. It was clear he relied on Rita’s care, which was why their last trip to Atlantic City had been so hard. They’d been given a room with a Jacuzzi, and Irving had wanted to get in. “I wanted the two of us to go in there to see what we could do,” he said, looking over at Rita. “But when it came to trying to get in, I couldn’t lift my foot up high enough to get over. And if I would have gotten in, how am I going to get out?”
“That was supposed to have been a handicapped room,” Rita jumped in, protectively. “It wasn’t a good room.” (A few months after I met Irving and Rita, Irving passed away.) Sally gripped Al’s arm. Their relationship was still hot and heavy at the time. Yet when the cards were put away, they headed back to their respective rooms. No matter where they are as a couple, they’ve never spent the night together, though Al has wanted to on many occasions. “She has a really tremendous bed with pillows, beautiful linen. My bed, she almost fell out of! I had to hold her.” But Sally values her space and her rest. From their own beds, like high-school sweethearts, they’d usually call each other from under the covers. But their conversations, as Sally recalls, were anything but sweet. “When we’d talk on the phone, I’d say, ‘If anybody is listening, their ears will burn off!’”
Notes from a Unicorn
Seth Fischer
Back in 2002, when I was still in college, I lived in DC for a quarter in a quad dorm room that felt like the set of a queerish Adam Sandler movie. I—a semi-closeted bisexual drunk—lived with a gay guy from Beverly Hills I’ll call Mark; James, a kind-hearted straight stoner with whom I shared a room; and Mark’s best friend, an even straighter dude who looked exactly like Corey Feldman. I had a secret crush on Mark. Sometimes the four of us would stay up late at night watching CNN and drinking. For special occasions, we went to the Cheesecake Factory. Then we’d get up and be interns, whatever that meant, for the people who ran the world because that’s how we thought we could go about saving it.
Mark hit on me the way gay men hit on straight men they’re already comfortable with, the way straight women hit on gay men. He’d go “Mmmmm” when I walked by and say, “Why are you straight again?” He could tell it made me a little uncomfortable but not too uncomfortable. He could tell I liked it a little. He was tall and good looking and rich, and he’d tell me all about his trips giving road head to hot flight attendants in the Florida Keys. He might have been telling me the plot of a porn he’d watched or it might have been the truth, but I was enthralled and jealous and disgusted and turned on.
One night, the four of us went out together for drinks. Across from our dorms was a place called The Fox and The Hound where we smoked cigarette after cigarette. For three bucks, you could order a whiskey and Coke, which meant they’d bring you a bucket glass full of well whiskey and a tiny bottle of soda. We drank and gossiped. Mark’s foot brushed my leg. I don’t know if it was on purpose or if he thought it was a table leg, but I let his foot keep brushing mine, over and over, and I lost my breath for a second. He was looking at Corey Feldman, talking about some date he’d just been on. He hated straight places. “I’m bored I’m bored I’m bored,” he said, jumping out of his seat, trying to talk us into going to a gay bar. Corey Feldman wasn’t having it. “Fuck,” I said finally, “Let’s just go back up to the room.”
We stumbled across the street, made it to the apartment and sat down in the living room, all of us on the couch but Mark, who was standing. He still wanted to leave. Someone plopped on CNN.
It had been eating at me. He’d been flirting with me since I moved in. I hadn’t told many people, but this was different. He had to know, or if he found out later, he’d have a right to resent me. I didn’t want that.
“Mark,” I said, and then I mumbled at him for a bit until he rolled his eyes at me.
“Spit it out.”
“You should know that I’m bi.”
This was the part where in my imagination he smiled, maybe gave me a hug, and welcomed me to his club, where the streamers came from the ceiling and the music started blaring. Instead, he took a seat on a chair near the couch. His smile disappeared. Everyone was sober all of the sudden. Corey Feldman, who was sitting next to me, said something like, “That’s my cue, bro,” and went to bed. James stayed put, his eyes glued to the TV, but not a peep came from him, either.
I sighed and fell back farther into the couch.
Mark looked down at the ground for a minute and shook his head. He wanted to say something and stopped himself. He picked his head up and looked me right in the eyes.
“You like men and women?”
“Yep,” I said. I hadn’t told many people yet, but I’d done it enough. I knew that the questions were coming.
“I don’t believe in that.”
I flipped him off, smiling. “I’m sitting right here.”
He recoiled a little and rubbed his hands through his hair. “No, no, sorry. What I meant is, well, do you prefer one or the other?”
His whole body was turned toward me now.
“It’s just…the person. I’m attracted to the person,” I said.
He stared at me. The wrong facial expression, just a little something wrong with the curl of my lips, and he would never believe me. He could mark me off as gay but not ready or just out for attention. I had to be just the right amount of angry and the right amount of confident.
He turned the TV down.
“So why aren’t you out?” he asked.
“I want to work in politics,” I said, enunciating now like Peter fucking Jennings. “I’m lucky enough to be attracted to women, too, you know? This business isn’t easy.”
He looked back at the TV, where I’m guessing something or other was blowing up on the other side of the world, and nodded.
“That’s probably pretty smart,” he said, a little bit of edge in his voice. I took another shot and headed off to bed. James asked me if I was okay before he headed into the shower. I said, “Sure.”
Mark sat in the chair, alone now, flipping through the channels.
Two weeks after I came out to Mark, I met a woman named Kate in a course about drug policy we had to take while doing our internships. Our professor ranted every day about the evils of needle exchanges and medical pot. Anytime I disagreed, he’d say, “You must be from Santa Cruz.” He was right. Both Kate and I were students at Santa Cruz, but we hadn’t met until that quarter in DC. After class, I caught her eyes as she was trying to make an exit and asked, “So, do you want to hang out?” She said, “Sure,” and then ran off. But I messed up and forgot to ask for her number. I never ask anyone out, but I couldn’t get her out of my head. I waited for the next week, and then I got in the same elevator she did and asked for her number, in front of everyone, so she had to give it to me. Then—I’d never done this before either—I actually called her. And she said yes. She went out with me on date after date and every fucking second I was around her I wanted to be touching her, somewhere, anywhere, even just her wrist.
After a couple of dates, we went to her room. One of her roommates was always out at clubs looking for Navy guys and the other was gone. We had some drinks. I held her hand and said, “Can I kiss you?” like a fucking idiot, because I had no idea how to do this, how to be the one smitten. I kissed her cheek, then her ear, then her mouth, and she kissed back. I started shaking, my back started shaking, and I tried to figure out how to make myself stop, but I couldn’t, so I just went with it. She didn’t say anything, but she moaned back when I kissed her. We eventually made it to her bed, and even though she lived in a crappy dorm, too, it was the coziest place I’d ever been. She told me I smelled bad—getting used to DC’s humidity wasn’t easy after Santa Cruz. Instead of taking it personally and storming off or ignoring her I replaced my deodorant with antiperspirant and started putting it on every single day, which she thought was hilarious. Later, she said, “I like your smell now, but you should keep the antiperspirant on for other people’s sake.” I went around for abo
ut a day thinking, “She likes my nasty smell!” and dancing with myself.
A few weeks into it, I told her I was bi—the first time I’d ever told a girlfriend that—and she said, “Does that mean you’ll break up with me for a guy someday?”
“No, of course not,” I said.
I didn’t. Instead, we broke up because I chose to take a job working for a congresswoman in Palo Alto instead of moving with her to Manhattan.
In the few years I spent working in politics pretending I wasn’t bi, I learned a lot of things, but the most disturbing thing I learned was how to win: What you do is find the simplest possible message that resonates with people—and when I say simple, think, “It’s the economy, Stupid” or in local races just, “Bob for State Senate”—and then you repeat it ad nauseam and get other people to repeat it ad nauseam and then ask them to get other people to repeat it until every front lawn and bulletin board and doorhanger and public space in the place you care about is filled with your message.
Somehow, in the last half century, LGBT activists have pulled off one of the biggest public relations coups in history while dealing with one of the most complex issues. It was less than forty years ago that the American Psychological Association agreed to stop saying non-straight people were sick. Today, I work at a school with a program that’s created just to train therapists to be sensitive to the needs of LGBT people. Ten years ago, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court stopped thirteen states from prosecuting people for sodomy; today, seventeen states allow gay marriage or domestic partnership.
All still isn’t good. Besides ex-gay camps, which have destroyed countless lives, LGBT people are victims of violent hate crimes at six times the overall rate, it’s legal to fire people for being gay in twenty-nine states, and being gay is illegal in seventy-six countries and punishable by execution in five. That’s the short list. I could go on for pages.