It was a pretty apt nickname. Though my grandmother was born into poverty, she was able to work her way out by sheer force of will. The woman had seven children, one of whom died in a freak bike accident in his teenage years. She raised them all while running an enormous multinational semiconductor business with my grandfather over the course of forty years. When I was growing up, she would tell a story about being the champion mountain climber in her grade school class though she was short and a girl. She explained that so much of a person’s success or failure depends on whether they can grit their teeth and find the courage to keep climbing when others have given up.

For reasons I will never know, I was her favorite. Apparently, I would always ask her to come and sleep next to me, only for her to find that I would sneak into the next room to watch TV once I thought she’d fallen asleep. We’d then watch TV together until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. About a month ago, my mom called to say that ma-ban had been hospitalized. Her liver cancer had relapsed and metastasized to her kidneys. The doctors gave her three months.

Visiting ma-ban and my parents in January

Ma-ban was admitted to the ICU the day I arrived in Taiwan from London. Her condition had worsened far quicker than anybody could have predicted. She had developed pneumonia complicated by septic shock, which was leading to multiple organ system failure. I wasn’t able to visit her until the next morning, when my family begged the nurses to let me into the ICU before the half-hour visitation period because I hadn’t yet had a chance to see her.

The nurse brought me to bed 38, where ma-ban was resting, her flesh flaccid, her complexion sallow. She was being kept alive by the variety of machines connected to her body, a shadow of the person I’d seen only a few months ago when we were all in Los Angeles briefly. Her eyes were bloodshot and barely open. Her belly was distended from an accumulation of fluid in her abdomen. They’d stuck a tube down her throat so that she could breathe. Her hands were tied to the bed so that she wouldn’t accidentally pull it out.

I called out her name: ma-ban. She was unresponsive for a second, but her eyes started to focus and widened at the sight of me.

“Do you know who I am? It’s Andy. I’ve come to see you.” She nodded.

“Do you remember the story you used to tell? About being first place at mountain climbing?” Another strong nod.

“You have to have the courage you had then. We all love you very much. And when you get out of here, we’ll go and climb mountains again.” A vigorous nod.

“I have to go now, but I’ll come and see you again as soon as I can. You need to rest right now.” She lifted her body out of the bed and nodded again.

Over the next several days, her condition only got worse. We would visit her twice a day when the doctors allowed. I would hold her hand while my parents would apply body cream to her arms and legs, which were dessicated from too many rounds of dialysis. We spoke to her and tried to remain positive, refusing to cry in her presence. Her other children could only bear to see her briefly.

Ma-ban had always suffered from asthma and was now choking on the breathing tube. The family decided on morphine and sedation in order to let her sleep, but they would only allow the doctors to give her the minimum dosage because the siblings insisted on keeping her alive. Though I obviously wanted her to live and get better, that seemed impossible. To me, keeping her half-sedated until she woke from the pain was shockingly inhumane.

Because she’d never imagined that she would be in this situation in her late sixties, my grandmother had not written a will. Her children had always fought over money, and her oldest son had even sued her and my grandfather amidst a spat about an apartment complex they put in his name. There was always plenty of jealousy surrounding the money my grandparents apportioned to each child in order to start his or her own business and plenty of finger-pointing when each business — including my parents’ — crashed and burned.

Ma-ban’s dying wish was to keep the business she and her husband had built alive. The physical building the company is housed in is owned by the family, but the estate is owned by the company. The idea was always that the family would purchase the land from the company to avoid government seizure for taxation purposes. To do so, my grandparents had kept their life savings in a Hong Kong bank account, to be opened after they’d both passed.

My grandmother was the type of person who would refuse to turn the air conditioning on in the heat of the sweltering Taiwan summer because the cost was too high. She refused herself any real luxuries so that there would be money to support her kids and their kids if anything were to happen to her. What she could not anticipate was that her second-oldest, Peter, would flee Taiwan for Hong Kong the moment he heard that her condition was irreversible and collect the money while his mother was on her deathbed.

Though my grandmother had more than a dozen grandchildren, I was the one she wanted to see. Our connection was unexplainable. Chinese people call it yuanfen. When I suffered from severe depression after a devastating first break-up, a required withdrawal from Princeton, and my parents found out I was gay, she told a story about how she had felt precisely the same way when she was younger and a girl that she was close with ended their friendship. She said that we need to keep on climbing when others give up. Later on, my mother would tell me that ma-ban never opened her heart to anybody the way she did to me, that she loved me more than she loved her own children.

Ma-ban passed away Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 8:36PM Taiwan Standard Time. I stood by her side and held her hand for three and half hours while her body slowly shut down. My mom combed her hair and put lotion on her face. The ministers from her church came and read Psalm 23 and led us in some hymns. Her children told her they loved her, perhaps for the first time in their lives. One of my uncles admitted that he had been selfish and vowed to change. Biting back tears, my father told a story about how ma-ban had been the person to meet him at the train station the day he came back from the marine corps. He said that she’d been closer to him than any other parent figure in his life. We played her favorite songs on my uncle’s cell phone.

My mother said that the last words ma-ban had said before the doctors inserted the breathing tube were that she was tired and wanted to sleep. My mother kept repeating that it was okay to sleep while putting her hand on ma-ban’s eyelids, which were now permanently open and vacant. Her blood pressure and oxygen levels dropped to zero. Minutes later, her heart stopped. Her children, my father, and I stood watching. Numb. Peter never came.

I didn’t cry until her body went into the morgue. To that point, I had been consumed with guilt that the work I’ve committed my life to could do absolutely nothing for ma-ban as she lay there dying. I wasn’t a doctor and didn’t know what to inject to ease her pain. I wasn’t a lawyer and couldn’t think of a way to expedite the legal paperwork necessary to fulfill her last wishes. I had chosen a profession that my mom explained to her as “advertising” — something that seemed so very worthless and effete in those final moments.

As we waited for her body to cool before putting it into the refrigeration unit, we all said a few final words. I told her that I know I’ve always been a frail kind of kid — the kind that almost died in the incubator, the kind that fell apart from something as simple as heartbreak, the kind that just cannot seem to meet people’s expectations. But I told her that she didn’t need to worry because I had learned to live my life with the same kind of courage and determination that marked hers. I promised her that I would make her proud, that I would love the people closest to me the way she loved me, and that I would never give up on myself and my beliefs.

I promised that I would keep climbing. Because that’s what ma-ban would do.

I leave London in a matter of weeks. In most ways, I’m excited to return to the US. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends, to starting grad school, to finally feeling at home. And yet, some part of me wonders what will become of the memories once I leave this place. Despite periods of loneliness and self-doubt — or perhaps because of them — I credit this year with teaching me to be more truthful with myself and less afraid of failure.

I think that it’s hard for many of us to admit that it’s natural to seek external validation. We want to be told that the things we value are as true for others as they are for ourselves. I have come to believe that I will likely always be bound — to some extent — by a need to be loved and understood. And yet, my experiences this year have helped me understand the worth of my own convictions, even as I subject them to constant scrutiny and questioning.

Edinburgh, site of the Fulbright End Cap conference. More photos here.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working frantically to complete my Fulbright project at the Helen Hamlyn Centre. We ended up with two poster campaigns: Safe Sex at Every Age, a health education campaign aimed at older people that encourages them to protect their sexual health, and Love Is, a public awareness campaign aimed at mainstream society attempting to destigmatize intimacy in later life. In addition, we’re working on a final round of edits to a 40-page book that compiles all of the designs and the research that led to their production. Preview available here.

Working on this project has allowed me to understand how sociology and design are natural complements. Without the input of the older people who questioned my preconceptions and criticized my designs, I would never have been able to produce work that addresses the challenges they face every day. One of my respondents remarked, “So much graphic design out there is so disrespectful. It’s done by designers who have the right intentions but no idea about the issues. There’s this stuff that says 50 is the new 20. Why does 50 have to be 20? Why can’t 50 just be 50?”

What I’m most proud of is that the designs don’t take on the patronizing character indicative of most health-promotion literature, but instead try to imagine a world where older adults are valued as complete human beings with genuine needs for care and affection. As another of my respondents explained, “We manage. We all of us manage. But is it really about managing? That’s what the stiff upper lip is about. That’s what this whole nation is based on. Managing is not a full and satisfying life.”

Postcard versions of the Safe Sex at Every Age campaign

Rendering of Love Is campaign on the London Underground

Campaign rendering on the side of a bus

Because it just went through a massive merger, Age UK, our charity partner, is unlikely to publish the work in the near future. However, we’ve been very fortunate to meet leading researchers in HIV/AIDS and aging from the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA) in New York City and and Terrence Higgins Trust in London. In particular, Dr. Steve Karpiak from ACRIA has become a passionate advocate for my work and has poured an immense amount of effort into helping me apply for a Sappi Ideas That Matter grant to distribute the work publicly in the United States. We will be notified about the results in September. Fingers crossed.

As if that weren’t enough, the charities brought me along to the International AIDS Conference in Vienna last week, where 15000 postcard-sized versions of my work were distributed to conference attendees, and I had the privilege to speak at a satellite event on Aging and HIV. Media coverage here and here. This was my first time presenting at any kind of conference, and there wasn’t anything that wasn’t humbling about the experience. Luckily, the audience was receptive to a design approach, and the charities were very pleased.

One gentleman said it was the best session he’d been to all week because the speakers really “got it.” Another commented that he was moved that a young person could have empathy for the difficulties facing older people with HIV. Several experts from the Netherlands and Africa approached me afterwards expressing their interest to incorporate design into their own efforts. Gottfried Hirnschall, Director of HIV/AIDS at the UN’s World Health Organization, was in attendance and responded to our presentations by saying: “Aging with HIV is not just a clinical challenge, it is a clinical and a social challenge, and it’s not just confined to one part of the world versus another.” While these responses are obviously flattering, I think we’re all just very grateful that the presentations gave voice to an issue too often ignored. I certainly am.

Presenting at the International AIDS Conference

Me and the incredible group of researchers from ACRIA and THT

Alongside all this, I’ve also been fortunate enough to work on a project called the Anti Design Festival during my last few months here in London. Essentially, I’ve been given the opportunity to work with Neville Brody, the creative director of Research Studios in Islington, to help put on a 9-day festival in September that challenges the prevailing notion that art and design exist only to make money. To do so, we are collecting and exhibiting work that prioritizes experimentation and risk above commercial gain and expectation.

My main responsibility is to help curate and manage one of the main festival spaces. The experience thus far has been overwhelming and inspiring in equal parts. I sometimes become frustrated at the seeming randomness that often pervades the work, only to find that the chaos serves a fundamental and foundational role to an event of this kind. The designers in the studio have been incredibly generous and have been teaching me much about opening myself to new ways of reaching people with design.

If nothing else, this year has taught me that it’s okay to walk into a room where you’re the least-experienced, least-knowledgable person, so long as you maintain a positive orientation towards learning and possess enough self-belief to accept criticism and praise with an equal measure of gratitude. At the beginning of my Fulbright year, I remember commenting that I felt lost in the sea of talent and achievement that surrounded me. I felt the same way at Pentagram where I worked around people I idolized. That feeling hasn’t really gone away, but I’ve come to accept that there are certain things I do well, and that I should never belittle my talents.

Anti Design Festival logo by Neville

Over the last month or so, I’ve been hanging out quite a bit with my new friend Adam, a chemical engineering student from Georgia Tech who was staying at the hostel I’ve been living in for the past year. Maybe it’s a sign of how homesick I am, but it was overwhelmingly nice to meet someone from the United States. Adam made me realize that I had been focused only on my work in London to the exclusion of actually experiencing the city. The day after I spent an all-nighter completing my book design, he dragged me to Les Misérables (one of my favorite shows), followed by Henry IV at the Globe Theatre (a three-hour, standing-room experience). Both performances were incredible, though I was nearly falling asleep standing up.

This last weekend, Adam’s father Jim joined us in London shortly before they departed together for a three-week journey throughout Europe. We saw the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the London Philharmonic Choir perform themes from the apparently-iconic British sci-fi series Dr. Who at the Royal Albert Hall for £5 (another standing experience) — alongside thousands of rabid British fans. We then spent Sunday in Oxford punting (aka rowing) down the River Thames with some friends that Adam had made previously.

Dr. Who Promenade at the Royal Albert Hall

Punting with Adam and Jim

Recently, I’ve realized how difficult it is for me to accept the impermanence of human experience. I’ve moved around so often in these past few years that I don’t really know where home is. And friends, well, friends come and go. Certainly, transience is what gives life its value, but I can’t help but feel like I’m always clutching at people and moments to keep them from blurring into imperfect memory. Non-attachment is a faraway goal. I can’t help but hold on.

The chorus of the Tracy Chapman song goes: “I remember when we were driving, driving in your car. Speed so fast I felt like I was drunk…And I had a feeling that I belonged. And I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone.” Very soon, all these adventures will become just another chapter of recollections past. But having spent all night writing them down, I’ve realized that these experiences are what make me who I am. They are what I believe in, and they will always be part of me — even as they retreat from my memory.

For our lesson one day, Mrs. Galliver read the story of Lot to our first-grade class from our children’s illustrated Bible. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah were so deeply depraved that God sent angels to smother them with fire and brimstone. God respected Lot and forewarned him to gather his family and leave without looking back. As they escaped, Lot’s wife turned back in defiance of God’s command. The Almighty, in His vengeance, transformed her into a pillar of salt. “That’s why we call them sodomites,” Mrs. Galliver noted, “because men who like other men are wicked in the eyes of God.” Her words seem inappropriate in retrospect, but so were the praise songs we were taught to sing every Friday: “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before.”

I would spend recesses watching this blond boy named Stephen — who happened to be the school pastor’s son. Stephen was amazing at kickball. He was the first boy I knew to put gel in his hair. I would sit and watch it glisten in the mid-day sun. We went to the same school for seven years, but I never dared tell him how I felt. Instead, I tried earnestly to pray the gay away and vowed never to turn back.

The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah by John Martin

Despite steady opposition from the religious right, the LGBT movement has made significant strides in recent years. Same-sex marriage is now legal in five states and the District of Columbia. And just this last Thursday, the House of Representatives and the Senate Armed Forces Committee voted to authorize the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that has prevented gays from serving openly in the military.

While it is important to celebrate these markers of progress, I can’t help but feel that we have a long way to go. Legal victories are one thing; popular attitudes are another entirely. I honestly wonder if I will live to see a generation where children are no longer taught to fear homosexuality. I wonder if I will ever live in a society where the shame I have come to internalize about my sexual orientation will finally be regarded as a relic of bigotry past.

As a graphic designer, I believe that part of the solution lies in creating images that redefine the very way sexual orientation is understood and discussed. Despite the advances we have made, homosexuality is still portrayed as something alien or pathological to mainstream sexuality. This “otherness” is the basis on which discriminatory attitudes are built and sustained, and where designers play a significant role in engaging the struggle for LGBT rights.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell by Jeff Sheng

This essay analyzes the role of graphic design in the interconnected history of the gay rights movement and early AIDS activism. It suggests that the disease-prevention tactics of the past are ineffective at promoting LGBT equality in an age where HIV/AIDS is no longer a death sentence, and offers new communication strategies aimed to include LGBT people in the context of mainstream society.

Presently, the argument against LGBT rights stems from the logic that homosexuality violates traditional, “natural” institutions like marriage and childbirth. For example, the National Organization for Marriage posits that the authorization of same-sex marriage would harm families by forcing them to accept an aberrant condition: “Two men might each be a good father, but neither can be a mom. The ideal for children is the love of their own mom and dad. No same-sex couple can provide that.” Though empirically false, this argument is powerful precisely because it is implicitly rooted in the same fears that Mrs. Galliver proselytized: homosexuality goes against God, and the wages of sin is death.

It comes as no surprise, then, that stigma surrounding LGBT status is intricately tied to its pathologized history: it wasn’t until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. The movement for LGBT rights, furthermore, has been unwittingly connected to the history of the AIDS epidemic. Originally referred to as GRID (Gay-related immune deficiency) or the “gay plague,” AIDS was thought to be transmitted exclusively through homosexual contact and was characterized as punishment for sexual promiscuity. This “serves them right” mentality led to the design of slogans like “AIDS Kills Fags Dead” (a play on the bug spray tagline “RAID Kills Bugs Dead”) and “AIDS Cures Fags,” all based on the belief that the epidemic was divine retribution for sexual immorality.

God’s Children Hate Fags. Photo by K. Ryan Jones.

Activists faced a daunting task: they had to dispel homophobic misperceptions surrounding AIDS as a “gay disease” while coping with the reality that the epidemic seemed to disproportionally affect men who had sex with men. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) decided to confront this challenge head-on and invented the tagline “SILENCE = DEATH” set in stark white type (Gill Sans Extra Condensed Bold) on a solid black background. They cleverly adopted the pink triangle – a downward-pointing version of which was used by the Nazis to mark homosexuals in the concentration camps – and turned it upright, taking a symbol of shame and discrimination and reclaiming it to represent the fight for survival.

In a single breath, the “SILENCE = DEATH” campaign enjoined LGBT people to speak out about their sexuality and release themselves from the shame of getting tested for HIV. By registering mainstream anxieties about the connection between “gay” and “plague,” ACT UP used graphic design to attack stigma by exposing it. According to sociologist Joshua Gamson, this mentality galvanized activists into staging raucous, theatrical kiss-ins that usurped public spaces like baseball games and cocktail parties – commonly considered the territory of middle America: “ACT UP here seizes control of symbols that traditionally exclude gay people or render them invisible, and take them over, endowing them with messages about AIDS; they reclaim them, as they do the pink triangle, and make them mean differently. In doing so, they attempt to expose the system of domination from which they reclaim meanings and implicate the entire system in the spread of AIDS.”

In my estimation, the “SILENCE = DEATH” graphic derived its power from anger among the LGBT community towards governmental inaction regarding the AIDS crisis. The bottom of one campaign poster actually reads: “Why is Reagan silent about AIDS? What is really going on at the Center for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Vatican? Gays and lesbians are not expendable…Use your power…Vote…Boycott…Defend yourselves…Turn anger, fear, grief into action.” This spirit of rebellion manifested itself in powerful images of social protest laced with personal grief, including Tibor Kalman’s infamous photo of Ronald Reagan with Kaposi’s sarcoma. By demonizing the Reagan administration, the campaign put the onus on individuals to speak out fiercely and engage with participatory democracy as a matter of life or death, effectively linking individual accountability with social activism in the battle against disease.

SILENCE = DEATH Poster by ACT UP

In recent years, it seems that the urgency surrounding HIV/AIDS activism has waned. Certainly, this has to be viewed in a positive light. Anti-retroviral therapies have been successful at confronting the virus, HIV is no longer regarded as a death sentence, and the general public has been made aware that protection against sexually-transmitted infections is a matter of how you have sex and not whom you have it with.

This relaxing of attitudes surrounding HIV/AIDS, however, is not without its problems. According to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), people who self-identify as “men who have sex with men” (MSM) continue to be the cohort most severely affected by HIV, accounting for more than half of all new infections in the United States. While the incidence of HIV has declined among the general population since the 1990’s, the rate of new infection has steadily increased in the MSM population, especially among the youngest age group (13-29). In a CDC study of five U.S. cities, one in four MSM were found to be infected; among those infected, half were unaware of their status: “Results were particularly alarming for black MSM and young MSM, with more than two-thirds of infected black MSM, and nearly 80 percent of infected young MSM (aged 18–24), unaware that they were infected.”

The CDC posits that the MSM population is particularly at risk because of a lack of knowledge about HIV issues, complacency about risk, and fear of social discrimination. Especially among the younger population, who did not experience the illness and death indicative of the early AIDS epidemic, HIV is not a serious reality. Younger gay men are less likely to speak openly about their HIV status and more likely to make false assumptions about their partners’ status. Many participate in “serosorting,” or having sex with people they believe to be of the same HIV status.

ACT UP Archival Photo

For my generation, the “SILENCE = DEATH” design is relatively meaningless. On a superficial level, we simply don’t believe that AIDS will kill us or that our proclivity for disease is in any way affected by our degree of “out-ness.” On a deeper level, a campaign couched in the bifurcated language of outrage, on the one hand, and the fear of death, on the other, bears reduced significance for younger LGBT people.

Though it is arguably easier to come out than it ever has been, those who are still uncomfortable committing to the “gay” label are unlikely to align themselves with the proposition that their silence is inherently self-destructive. Strangely enough, then, the very slogans and symbols that once empowered a generation of activists have now become effete and even self-stigmatizing.

In part, this has to do with the disease-prevention premise of slogans like “SILENCE = DEATH” or “Don’t Die of Ignorance.” While powerful at the time they were produced, designs aimed at using fear and shame to compel at-risk audiences to be tested for HIV/AIDS now only redouble stigma. Many LGBT people are already afraid of playing into society’s beliefs about the unnaturalness of their sexual orientation and would sooner silence themselves than admit to participation in risk behaviors: “There is evidence of a desire to conceal that which might stigmatize [yourself], in an effort to allay the threat of censure…The link between AIDS, gay men and God’s punishment contributes to a spoiled identity.”

Contrast by Olivia Marie

To successfully address these issues, we should not merely aim to prevent disease or infirmity; we should strive to promote health — that is, the right to a fulfilling, satisfying life free of stigma and shame. If that’s the case, then the visual language we use to confront HIV/AIDS should empower people to choose lives that are consistent with their own ideals and not merely lecture them to use condoms. On a broader level, this approach invites people to participate in defining what health is on their own terms, as opposed to forcing them to restrict that understanding to the terror and dread of disease.

This is not to say, however, that we should fail to register the sense of loss that accompanies the onset of HIV. Sunny, optimistic campaigns like LIVESTRONG might succeed in raising money for cancer research, but they often fail to provoke real awareness for the struggles that survivors, their families, and the bereaved face on a daily basis. The branding approach has a tendency to reduce the complexities of disease to a colorful fashion accessory, emotionally detaching audiences from the stakes of inaction. Particularly with a disease so complexly intertwined with issues of sexual orientation, a wristband or ribbon doesn’t really cut it.

Is it possible, then, to give people the freedom to make choices about their health while being honest about the grief and devastation that accompany HIV/AIDS? More broadly, how do we deal with the challenge that gay and bisexual men are the most susceptible group to infection without reinforcing the connection between sexual orientation and disease? In an age where “SILENCE = DEATH” and the like are no longer effective, how do we empower young LGBT people to protect their sexual livelihoods?

Elton John at the bed of Ryan White. Photo from LIFE.

The strongest technique, I believe, is to recognize the specific challenges the LGBT population faces while couching those challenges in a broader, empathic narrative about the universal desire for health. As an example, our designs could tell the stories of young LGBT people who are living with HIV — living on their own terms and not dying on somebody else’s. Instead of emphasizing the link between silence and death, we should draw a connection between openness and life. Being tested for HIV and asking about HIV status before sex should be regarded as an essential part of this openness.

In addition, we need to provide a basis from which non-LGBT people can relate to these stories by making the case that every person living with HIV/AIDS — gay or not — is somebody’s son or daughter and deserves an equal measure of respect and dignity. Broadly speaking, we need to portray LGBT people as part of the collective human tapestry rather than antagonistic or external to it. We need to put a stop to the “us against them” mentality that has typified the thinking behind the previous generation’s design solutions: instead of trying to reclaim words like “queer” in attempts at resistance, we need to get mainstream society to see us as “human.” Instead of staging kiss-ins intended to elicit feelings of disgust among the heteronormative mainstream, we should strive to create a condition where two men kissing in public is just as acceptable as a man and woman kissing.

To be clear, I am not arguing that we should diminish the individual ways in which LGBT people express their sexuality or abandon the impulse to speak out against discrimination and homophobia. Matthew Shepard was tortured, beaten, and hung on a fence to die because he was gay; it is our responsibility to keep his story alive. But in a world where the “unnaturalness” of the LGBT population is still used as an excuse to withhold otherwise inalienable rights, I believe that we can do better. Social dissent is not more powerful simply because it aims to antagonize.

Vigil for Matthew Shepard. Photo by Reuters.

We need a visual vocabulary that celebrates the individuality of LGBT people within the context of mainstream society rather than one that aligns the goals of the LGBT effort against the values of the rest of the population. Even as we focus on individual cases of discrimination in order to countenance the experience of homophobia, we need to connect the dots and show how that discrimination damages our values as a society.

In concrete terms, the way gay pride has been imaged is an insufficient response to homophobia. While I have nothing against celebrating sexual openness and the diversity of LGBT sub-cultures, the promiscuity and flamboyance of the pride parade ought not be the only take-home image mainstream society has of LGBT people. We can’t just drape everything in rainbow and call it a day.

As a case in point, in the penultimate episode of Ugly Betty, Justin, Betty’s nephew, debates whether to come out to his traditional Latino family. Though the audience has witnessed Justin struggle for weeks with his sexuality and even openly deny being gay, his family finds out about his new boyfriend and tries to plan a party replete with rainbow flags and feathers. Marc, the show’s resident gay, rushes to stop the party because it tramples on Justin’s right to come out on his own accord, despite his family’s positive intentions. A person’s sexuality does not define them; they define their sexuality.

Instead of a clichéd, weepy scene worthy of the show’s usual melodramatic tenor, Justin decides to come out by bringing his boyfriend to the dance floor at his mother’s wedding party. The power of this approach lay in its subtlety: by making Justin just like any other kid with feelings of self-doubt, the show dealt with his coming out in a sweet, sensitive way that provoked feelings of understanding and empathy.

Justin Comes Out on Ugly Betty

There are days when I am furious that my home state, California, voted to “protect marriage” and thereby made it illegal for me to marry the person I love. When organizations like the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) claim that the gays are trying to “redefine marriage for the rest of us,” they are willfully ignorant of this reality: that by upholding the status quo, they are defining marriage for me. I have proudly participated in street demonstrations against the injustice that NOM peddles as traditionalism, but I often wonder how effective these are in effecting lasting change.

We need to find a way to convince the Mrs. Gallivers of the world to stop teaching first-graders that sodomites are worthy only of the wrath of God. We have to offer comfort to young LGBT people growing up in countries where it is still an executable offense to be gay. Difficult as this fight is, I believe that the day will come when we will begin to realize that the greatest sin is not being gay. The greatest sin is giving up on tolerance, compassion, and hope.

Another part has to do with an inability to accept impermanence. Over the last year, I have gone through so many different identities. As soon as I feel like I’m starting fit in somewhere, I have to uproot, move on, and become somebody else. I am so grateful for all the good things that have come my way, but on nights like this — sitting here alone in a heatless room in London — I just wish I had something to belong to, and somewhere to call home.

This has been the most accomplished year of my life. It has also been the most lonely. But I think what drives me forward every day is to concentrate on the things that I really care about. Somehow, that keeps me centered and focused. It fights off the loneliness. It staves off the fear.

Poster defending older people’s right to intimacy

I love graphic design. Big surprise, right? I spend a lot of time talking and writing about the way design can serve as a form of social advocacy. But I rarely mention the way it sustains me on a deep, personal level. Design is not just a hobby or a vocation. It is an obsession. It is my addiction.

The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is click through my favorite blogs, soaking my brain in visual information. Throughout the day, I spend time analyzing graphic design everywhere I go, cataloguing the way type is spaced on Waitrose risotto packaging, or the way a photograph is treated on the new Jon McGregor novel, or the way scale contrast is employed on a poster for a new Italian movie starring Tilda Swinton. I can’t help it.

And when it comes time to make design, I feel like Remy in Ratatouille. In the words of my friend and mentor, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, there resides a deep love of visual pleasure in every graphic designer’s heart. Our interpretations of what constitutes visual pleasure vary widely, but we all have an uncontrollable urge to make that love manifest through our work.

Preliminary comp of packaging design for a line of Asian seafood crackers. Illustration by Mandy Lee. Photos by Waqas Jawaid. More to come soon.

The power behind visual communication lies in its ability to create connections. We don’t just deliver a product. Our job is not just to sell. Instead, we are responsible for delivering an experience. We make people laugh. We instill fear. We provide clarity. We manufacture desire. We offer hope. But if we don’t provoke a response — intellectual or emotional — our work fails.

The exciting part about graphic design is that it’s always about something beyond the design itself. Design is communication, not decoration. It connects people to new ideas and unexpected experiences, focused through the lens of a designer’s creativity. Design can give shape and color to a world that can otherwise seem drab and redundant. And for me, it serves as a way of speaking out against exclusion and injustice.

But it also fulfills a penetrating, incomprehensible need to express myself. As big a deal as many theorists make about graphic design as a “crystal goblet” to hold somebody else’s “wine,” I pour every ounce of myself into my work. Nobody ever said the goblet couldn’t have a character of its own.

Posters aimed at older people drawing attention to safe sex

I love food. And the Asian in me loves photographing it. This is a really difficult love for me because I’m also deathly (some would say irrationally) afraid of getting fat. Having been at one point 185 pounds, I’m scared of putting on weight. Unfortunately, my love for food is often overwhelming, and I give in easily to temptation, especially when chocolate is involved.

I’ve always believed that I can’t cook, so I’ve done the next best thing: make friends with people who can. At this point, I’ve convinced three incredible restaurant owners in three different cities to exchange food for design. Most recently, I redesigned a menu for my friend Patrick, the owner of a French bistro in London. His seafood pasta feels like home, his salmon with dijon sauce warms my heart, and his moelleux au chocolat is so good that it makes me cry.

Recently, I’ve actually started to cook for friends. I make this one pasta dish with pesto sauce, white wine, and a combination of Western and Chinese spices. Shockingly, everyone who’s tried it has loved it. It could be that they’re just trying to be nice, but it’s inspired me to experiment more in the kitchen. I’m tired of cafeteria style dining facilities and am planning on doing a lot more cooking in grad school. Fingers crossed.

Filet de Saumon à la Dijon at Chez Patrick

I love my friends. This should be a given, but I really don’t give them enough credit — not publicly anyway. I spent the last two weeks in Princeton and New York with some of my closest friends. And though they were busy with theses and other work, they made the time to see me, take me out for food, and even sit down to episodes of Ugly Betty. Somehow, half a year’s time and thousands of miles of distance have only made the bonds between us stronger.

What I value most is that they believe in me and in what I do. They endure video after video about Paula Scher and question after question about whether the type on a poster looks right. They put up with my insecurities, offer affection and comfort, yell at me when I’m behaving foolishly, and force me to be truthful when I can’t find the courage to be.

One of my greatest regrets about taking the Fulbright is that I have to be so far away from them. I’ve made some good friends in London, but seven months in, I still feel like a stranger here. I suppose this has to do with not being part of a structured program. It’s taught me to be more independent. But it’s also shown me how much I rely on the people I left back home.

The people who keep me most myself

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about these verses from the Gospel of Matthew: “Lay not for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth destroy, and thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven…for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” It sounds obvious, but I think that many of us get so lost in measuring life by what we achieve and accumulate that we lose sight of the things that truly fulfill us.

What I’ve come to understand over the past year is that giving into fear is like stealing happiness from yourself. Conversely, hope comes from putting faith in the things and people you love. I’m sitting here at 6AM, typing this entry, and I’m shivering because the maintenance staff is refusing to turn on the heat. But somehow, writing this has given me hope: I know that tomorrow, the things I hold dear will still be there — because I’ve fought to keep them in my life today.

I was on the upper level of a night bus — on the way home from my friend Amy’s flat in Camden. It had been a quiet journey. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just a lot of sleepy people trying to get home from the bar or work or their friend’s flat on a Saturday night.

Suddenly, we hear screaming. Multiple voices shouting. FUCK YOU, YOU MOTHERFUCKING CUNT! Don’t you fuck with me! Don’t you fucking fuck with me! A young teenage girl dressed in tawdry pink scrambles up the stairs chased by a boy in a blue hoodie and baseball cap. They shriek at each other, and the boy wrestles her to the ground. Large fake pearl bracelets fly everywhere and it looks like she is bleeding. He is whipping her with a gigantic belt. Or she is whipping him. I can’t tell. They are a tangled blur. Her arms are flailing in his face. Screaming. Whipping. Punching.

Graphic by Rebeca Mendez

More teenagers run up the stairs, all screaming and cursing. FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! The guy across the aisle from me stands up and roars at the boy in the baseball cap. Get your fucking hands off her! The boy turns around angrily and punches the man in the face. CAN’T YOU FUCKING SEE I’M FUCKING TRYING TO KEEP THEM APART! The man refuses to back down. His wife starts screaming. Peter, you have a child! Remember that you have a child! Peter refuses to back down, yells at the boy some more. The boy slams him in the face again with something I can’t see. A gun? A knife? A mobile phone?

One of the teens yells. THE FEDS ARE COMING! Let’s get out of here the police are coming! All of them except for the boy in the baseball cap, the girl in pink, and another girl hurry down the stairs. The two girls start hissing and clawing at each other. The boy pushes them away from each other. The second girl spits at the girl in pink. She spits back and hits a trembling woman. Screaming. Punching. Cursing. Hissing. Spitting. Blood dripping on the floor. Bystanders silent. Some crying.

And then, as suddenly as they arrived, they are gone. We sit immobile, incapable of uttering a word. The wake of a hurricane. The police arrive and take statements. Aside from the man, nobody is hurt. One woman can’t stop crying. We find out that we are in Notting Hill, one of the poshest residential areas in London. Nobody can make sense of what just happened. Gang warfare? Cat fight? Who knows.

We are lucky to be unhurt.

Over the years, as I have deviated more and more from plans that she considers financially-secure and socially-acceptable, we have fought each other to a point past tears. Why not apply to law schools alongside design schools? Why turn down Yale for a joyride in London? Why choose a grad school that none of us have heard of before?

I have never been the ideal son, nor she the perfect mother. When I was very young, I had a weak stomach because I was born premature. She would spend hours feeding me, and I would callously upchuck it all. On one occasion, she was so frustrated that she lashed out physically, forcing me to re-ingest the vomit. It was meant to teach me shame. Though things have changed considerably, I still live with the self-same fear of disappointing her.

The Madonna and Child at the V&A

Over the last several weeks, I have been traveling around England to interview a wide variety of older people for my project. I’ve been most fascinated by my interactions with older gay men and women, who grew up in an age where homosexuality was illegal in the UK. In our conversations about their experiences with closetedness, I frequently found myself empathizing with the notion that fear often emerges out of a competition between the demands exacted on us by the people we love and the desire to be fully who we are.

One of my respondents, Carol (names used are authorized), who underwent sex change surgery 9 years ago, said, “I was always attracted to women, not men. I transitioned myself — I was born male, but I always questioned my gender identity. It was just a relief because I hid it away all my life. I was married. I have two children. And for me, I nearly died when I was 40. I decided I had to stop living a lie. I’ve got to be true to myself. I was afraid of losing contact with my children, but I transitioned in my early fifties when I think suicide became an option.”

Carol now identifies as a gay woman. She still maintains close relationships with her children and ex-wife, and credits her transition with giving her her life back. Though she faces spinal disk problems, she makes an effort to maintain an active lifestyle by going to dance clubs and remaining sexually-active. By most measures, Carol is living a more fulfilling life than she ever used to. Not everybody is so lucky, though.

A portrait of one of my respondents

Another of my respondents, Roger, works with LGBT people who are transitioning into residential care. He told me that many gay people — even those that are “as camp as anything” — are forced back into the closet when they move into care homes. Roger’s own experience is devastating: “I’m very much aware of what I can’t do now. That’s frustrating, and it’s depressing too at times. Because I’ve lost two partners in the last 10 years, I’m very much aware of my own mortality. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about death.”

When I asked him about the perceptions of older gay men about the process of aging, he responded, “The gay world is a very youth-oriented world. The gay world believes that the only way you can find happiness is to stay young. And that, I think, is not just stupid, it’s dangerous too. It’s dangerous in our new world of being out. People need to realize that there are all sorts of ways to express their sexuality without necessarily having to have sex with the same frequency and the same intensity.”

Roger’s comment is interesting in light of many respondents’ comments that sexual activity keeps them young. The danger, I think, lies in assuming that old age and youth are binary opposites. We all have layers of our younger selves within us, and it is no sin to approach life with a sense of childlike wonderment and youthful energy. Where this breaks down, I think, is when youth is seen as a means of escaping or correcting age. This perception, coupled with a lack of understanding about STI prevention, tends to lead to unsafe behavior.

Dancing at the Older LGBT Group’s Pink Party

One of my youngest respondents, a gay man in his early fifties, said, “After my brain injury, it was like my youth had disappeared. It’s like the boy in you had left. You think of your youth, and you think of doing things when you were young. When you get to a certain age, you think — all this is changing. I screwed up on things. Like sex. I met someone who I thought was quite nice. I couldn’t quite think of what was what at the time. We had a bit of a play around. And before I could do anything about it, he did it without a condom. And it was all over in a few seconds. I couldn’t work out what went on…I went down to the clinic, and they said I had HIV.

“I was vulnerable at the time. I was very suicidal, very upset. Why did this happen to me? How could I let this happen to me? It’s still an issue where people don’t…you know. I had to come to terms with it myself to get out of this difficulty. It was just another obstacle. It was like getting back on my bike after my injury. I did it because I had to. If you can survive through a lot of shit, then you can come through anything.”

These interviews hollow me out on the inside. Though I try to maintain a sense of ethnographic distance and calm, it is often intense and difficult to share another person’s grief and pain. But I am also deeply inspired by these stories. The courage and strength my respondents display compel me to create designs that return a measure of dignity to older people’s sex. My goal is to create a call to action — to be respectful, but also provocative. In the last two weeks, I have worked with the design tutors here at the RCA on a set of three experimental posters that illustrate the content of my interviews. While these are just sketches of incipient ideas, I think they indicate a powerful conceptual and visual direction that excites me.

Experimental posters derived from research

In January, I interviewed for a fellowship that would help cover the expenses of graduate study at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I will begin my MFA this fall. The first question the Soros committee asked was: “You wrote in your application that your goals for yourself diverge from you parents’ expectations. What would constitute failure in your parents’ eyes?”

I didn’t quite know how to answer. I told them that my parents started from nothing and lived in car at one point — that through sheer determination and will, they managed to build a computer empire that was destroyed overnight by an unjust lawsuit. I told them that my parents have been unemployed for nearly ten years, that they expect me to support them, and that they are rightfully skeptical of the path that I plan to take. I ultimately said, however, that failure in my parents’ eyes would be an inability for their son to live life on his own terms, and that my job is to do my best to prevent that at all costs.

Weeks later, I was notified that I had been selected to receive the fellowship. I called my mom to tell her. Her first question, predictably, was financial. I explained the terms, and she and I discussed how best to make the funds last for three years. At the end of our conversation she said, “Andy — you know it’s time to celebrate, right? You should know that a lot of people admire you.” I was confused: “I don’t know that what I’m doing is worth admiring.”

“Well, I admire you.”

Jokes aside, I can’t help but admire her courage. How many Republicans do you know who are actively campaigning to repeal California’s Proposition 8? How many conservative parents do you know who would publicly and unashamedly share the silence experienced by their children?

The photo is not merely a form of political dissent: it is the portrait of a mother’s grief. Despite its formal shortcomings, the design manages to make the debate on gay marriage personal. Cindy is claiming that Proposition 8 isn’t just about political disenfranchisement. It hurts families. It silences mothers.

Cindy McCain posing for NO H8

For the design community, the image raises important questions on how we countenance the experience of social exclusion in our work. McCain’s photo departs from most “No on 8” images by moving away from the language of “equal rights” and “justice for all,” and sharply towards an expression of the personal and psychological effects of legislation like Prop 8 on the LGBT community and its supporters.

In the words of Anne Cheng, the image transforms the marginalized individual from a “subject of grievance” to a “subject of grief.” Grievance is the process of redressing social exclusion through legal or political means: the right to your day in court. Grief is the traumatic, interior experience of denigration that accompanies marginality: the sense of shame you live with every day on account of your social class, race, or sexual orientation.

As an example, Cheng cites the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which famously desegregated public schools. In the majority opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection under the law was interpreted as an inadequate basis on which to rule. Instead, the opinion argued that segregating schoolchildren “solely because of race generates a feeling of inferiority…that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”

Grievance: Prop 8 Protestors Demanding Equality

Cheng posits that we are “comfortable with the language of grievance, but not with the language of grief.” I think we often fail to distinguish between the two. A recent New York Times article on the children of same-sex couples was accompanied by a photo of Los Angeles mother Dawn Berg and her 5-year old AJ. In the photo, Dawn’s picket sign reads, “I am profoundly hurt. You took away my child’s rights.” By addressing her personal pain in the language of her son’s rights, Dawn invites the criticism that her “selfish” insistence on a fatherless household harms her child in ways that Proposition 8 prevents.

Imagine if the sign read: “He is profoundly hurt. You took away my child’s mother.” Empathy relies on an understanding of somebody else’s grief, whether or not you agree with their particular political grievance. This is not to say that we should sensationalize the experience of trauma or instrumentally inject children into the conversation whenever convenient. But if we’re serious about social change, it is necessary to create designs that examine the consequences of marginalization on a human scale. Our work should not merely address the political injustices wrought by discriminatory laws: it should register the sense of loss inflicted on those who suffer them.

Dawn Berg and her son AJ

It is naive to overestimate the effect of graphic design on the shaping of social perceptions. Most people don’t look at a poster and suddenly decide that they’re going to support gay marriage after a lifetime of steadfast opposition. Political and moral convictions run deep, and it is dangerous to assume that people are going to repudiate their beliefs simply because we tell them to. However, I think it is an even greater disservice to society to pretend that graphic design does nothing to continually define and redefine the visual and cultural milieu we are immersed in every day.

Take, for example, Nick Ut’s iconic photo of the naked, Vietnamese girl fleeing from the bombing of her village by South Vietnamese forces, the napalm incinerating her skin, her mouth wide open in silent terror. The photo is credited with helping change US public opinion about the war. Even for those of us that encountered it in our high school history textbooks, the photo is burned into our cultural consciousness — a horrific reminder of the suffering of innocents amidst conditions of conflict. The visceral reaction we have to images like Ut’s comes from a recognition of shared humanity — one that transcends national boundaries and political persuasions.

Nick Ut’s photo of the bombing of Trang Bang

Just as design can be used to express the traumatic repercussions of social crises, it can also be employed to promulgate ideologies of hate and intolerance. In January of last year, University of Illinois college student Firas Alkateeb posted an image of Barack Obama retouched to look like the Heath Ledger-era Joker on his Flickr page. It has since been anonymously adapted into a poster captioned with the word “socialism” that has surfaced in major metropolitan areas including Los Angeles.

The design is disturbing. Never mind that socialism and the Joker’s anarchism have very little to do with each other. The poster paints Obama white with deep red gashes along his cheeks. I’m sure that Alkateeb was just trying to “Jokerize” the president, but it is hard to ignore the racial subversion at work in the design, regardless of whether or not its creator had any racist intent. True, there have been equally as damning portraits of George W. Bush-as-Hitler, but the Obama-Joker image damages the credibility of a country that has struggled to decouple itself from a history of slavery and racial subjugation.

We need to fight back. The recent release of the promotional poster for Lee Daniels’ film “Precious” does exactly that. The title character is an obese, illiterate, black teenager pregnant with her second child. The design for the poster renders Precious in stark black, red, and white paint, her face entirely blacked out. The only sign of an identity is an ironic piece of bling around her neck. The design manages to capture the pain that accompanies racialized stigma and shame. It forces its audience to confront the reality that judging someone on the basis of their appearance alone degrades them to a status that is less than human. It illustrates the grief of a community that still struggles against the effects of institutionalized and internalized racism.

The “Jokerized” Barack Obama

Promotional poster for the movie “Precious”

Can we apply the same logic in the battle against homophobia? Unlike race, sexual orientation is usually invisible. One of the deepest difficulties LGBT people face is the task of coming out to friends and family. Here, I think we have a lot to learn from Lady Gaga. It is easy to ridicule her for creating indulgent, histrionic performance art that features over-the-top costumes and campy dancing. But in her most serious performances, she is externalizing a certain freakishness experienced by all people who have to hide some portion of themselves that mainstream society deems aberrant or even perverse.

At the American Music Awards, she performed a song about her father’s drinking entitled “Speechless.” After breaking a glass box containing a burning piano, she proceeds to smash liquor bottles while singing impassionedly about the experience of almost losing her father to heart complications as a result of his alcoholism. This personal narrative about her father coincides with a greater narrative about the need to confront “speechlessness” with honesty — to exorcise the sense of self-hate and fearfulness that shrouds stigmatized people in silence and shame.

In the interest of pre-empting criticism that this post is all talk and no walk, I agree with those who believe that actions speak louder than words. As a gay man, I have endured unrealized but serious threats that once prevented me from being honest with even those closest to me. Silence, I thought, was preferable to fear. I have since realized that they are the same. Two years ago, I decided to design a poster for the National Day of Silence observance at Princeton. I appear on the poster covering my own mouth, the word “FAG” burned onto the back of my hand. The image depicts both my silence and the need to break it. Feel free to disagree with me as to whether I deserve the right to marry. But don’t you dare tell me that I don’t have a say.

Lady Gaga at the American Music Awards

Poster for the National Day of Silence

It is easy to be cynical about this approach. Design is not an automatic panacea for all of society’s problems. When faced with a tragedy like the one in Haiti, it feels like we can do very little other than donate our time, money, and manpower to the relief effort. Every time I turn on the news, there are reports of people struggling to survive in the aftermath of the disaster and of the uncountable dead whose bodies are decomposing in the streets. Designing a poster does not change that reality. But we need some way of confronting the ignoramuses who claim that Haitians are getting what they deserve for making a deal with the devil.

Silence is not an option.

Most of us will never experience the pain those families are going through. But for many of us, designing a poster or sending a donation is an emotional expression of our relationship with the hundreds of thousands of human lives destroyed or injured as a result of the earthquake. It is our private means of grieving with their families. It is our affirmation of a common humanity. I hold no illusions that design by itself will easily remediate society’s injustices and tragedies. But through our efforts, we can raise continued awareness, funds, and empathy for those who are suffering. That is the least we can do.

But how do you describe an experience so haunting that words profane it? Memories so profound that remembering wounds you?

Some things are too sacred.

Suffice it to say that I spent every day in a beautiful city with the person I love most. A gallery of pictures here, and my favorites below.

City lights burning in the distance

I’ve spent the last several hours frantically rebooking my journey, which will now involve a coach to Dover, a ferry from Dover to Calais, and a train from Calais to Paris. Total travel time is estimated to be around 11 hours, and it’s going to cost just as much for the one-way trip as my original roundtrip ticket cost on the Eurostar. WTF. I hate undeserved chaos.

I’m trying to tell myself to remain calm and to be grateful that I wasn’t trapped in the Chunnel for half a day without food and water, but I feel really frustrated. The coach to Dover leaves London’s Victoria terminal at 7AM, so I’m not going to get any sleep. I feel like I should just try to write about some of what’s happened over the last weeks and (hopefully) work my way out of this mood.

The cold, wet London winter

The last several weeks have largely been devoted to developing interview methods for my project on aging and sexuality and conducting a few pilot interviews to generate preliminary insights. Things have been going well, luckily, and I’ve managed to produce a preliminary report that I’m quite proud of. This last week, I presented my findings thus far to my colleagues and external reviewers at the Helen Hamlyn Centre, as well as to our project partners at Age UK. Everybody has been very supportive, and I’m really looking forward to returning to the research in January after the holidays.

While I’ve certainly discovered a lot about older people’s sexuality in the last several months, the single most interesting insight I’ve gained from the research thus far is that priorities shift with age, but needs do not. This quote from a 57-year old female respondent about her changing relationship with her husband illustrates this point well:

“In terms of sexual activity, that diminishes, unfortunately, because he’s also got health problems. He takes medication now that doesn’t help his sexual functions. That has changed. I think for him, that’s more of a regret than for me. Probably to men it’s more important. He’s still very demonstrative. He’s not always attacking, but if I’m sitting there he’ll hold my hand or he’ll put his arm around me or kiss me or something. It’s about being intimate. Not necessarily the act. It’s more about the cuddling and the touching and the holding.”

An interview with one of my respondents

An exercise we developed to assess older people’s intimate needs

For this respondent, emotional intimacy is far more important for her relationship with her husband than sexual intercourse. This idea was consistent throughout her responses: she indicated that one possible reason for the increase in STI’s among the over 50’s population might be attributed to sexual risk-taking resulting from a combination of poor sex education and the unsatisfied need for physical and emotional affection among older people who have been recently divorced or widowed.

A second respondent I interviewed, a 75-year old single female, confirmed these ideas. Susan hasn’t been in a relationship for a while and actually values her independence. She noted that if Mr. Wonderful came along, she’d certainly have sex with him, but that that’s not a priority for her right now: she doesn’t want to go back to doing someone else’s laundry. This however, doesn’t mean that she no longer needs companionship and affection; in fact, the need for closeness only increases with age:

“I think we all need affection and interaction. I think we all need physical contact. My mother was on her way to some form of dementia. We’d always been a very huggy, tactile family. She got to a point where she wasn’t really much letting me kiss her. Nobody put a hand on her bare skin any more, and I think she – I think we all need that. I thought: ‘Papa’s dead, I’m not giving her hugs any more. She’s got a carer looking after her, but that’s a different kind of relationship.’ What I arranged to do was set up appointments with an aromatherapy masseur, and my mother loved it.”

The Helen Hamlyn Crew at the RCA Christmas Party

We as human beings are constantly striving to reconcile this set of seemingly contradictory interests. On the one hand, we value our independence: from a young age, we try to assert ourselves as self-sufficient individuals in command of our own destinies. As we age and lose a sense of control over our own bodies, the fear seems to be that we lose a sense of place in the world. On the other hand, we are governed by a need for companionship and intimacy: as children, we need to be cared for and long for physical displays of affection. This doesn’t really seem to change with age.

Early last week, I was walking home from work in the blistering cold after a long, exhausting day. I happened upon an older woman sitting outside a bakery, trying desperately to get up off her seat. She was clearly in pain, wincing and crying as she tried to prop herself up onto her precarious wooden cane. I asked her if she needed help, and she shook her head no. As I walked away, she motioned for me to come back and grasped my arm with her wrinkled hand, holding on with all the strength she had left.

As we inched along the 500-yard journey towards her home, I found out that Pamela had been stranded outside after she’d spent the entire day getting to the bakery. Between gasps of “Oh Mother” and “Can I make it?”, she relayed that she was 99 years old and lived alone. She had carers, but she didn’t want to spend the time she had left with them. We crept along slowly, pausing every two steps so that Pamela could recover. She told me repeatedly that I should just let her walk on her own: “Just get me to that next lamppost. I can go the rest of the way.” It was clear that her dignity was very important to her, but I refused to leave her, afraid that she would collapse if left to herself.

The doorstep of Pamela’s home

We eventually got her home after about 2 hours. She told me that her carer would come to see her in the morning. I didn’t realize until I’d gotten home myself that my hands were stiff from the cold, and that the arm Pamela had held onto was sore from her grip. I began to think about why Pamela walked all that way on her own to begin with, even though she knew that her body was too frail to withstand the journey. There’s a certain sense of pride at being able to do the things you’ve always done the way you’ve always done them. This is why we are so easily wounded when we feel helpless to control our own fate.

It’s been a few hours now from the time I began this entry. I’ve calmed down somewhat. I’m still peeved at having to endure an unexpected turn of events, but I’m grateful that I’m going to be able to spend Christmas in Paris with Waqas. In many ways, Pamela had it right that life is about getting to the next lamppost, and that in our times of need, we need to hold onto whatever we’re given and to keep walking, even if it hurts our pride.

I’ve always been sympathetic to Christianity but very often skeptical of its seeming convenience. In the first grade, one of our recess monitors — a very dear older woman whose name eludes me — convinced me that the angels would celebrate if I would just accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I remember asking her whether it was all so simple, and if somebody who was evil throughout his entire life could simply accept Christ on his deathbed and receive the promise of heaven. She told me that God loves all His children, and that it’s our responsibility to love each other in kind.

I trusted her. To some extent, I still do. Though I have since grown wary of the Church’s dogma, I still believe fiercely in the strength of human compassion. And I believe that we will ultimately be judged not on the merit of our personal accomplishments but on the quality of our contribution to other people’s lives. Still, I have spent the last several years consumed with doubt. Why is there so much injustice and prejudice if God so loves the world?

Fireworks on Remembrance Day

If it weren’t for the project I’m working on in the Helen Hamlyn Centre, I would never have given much thought to the level of prejudice our society holds towards older people. We tend to think of older adults as dependent and senile, refusing to acknowledge them as whole human beings with needs for physical and emotional intimacy. The little graphic design that exists regarding older people’s sexuality is either patronizing or fetishistic.

Ageism originates from our refusal to understand older people on their own terms. Nick Lalaguna, my contact at our charity partner Age UK put it thusly: “We don’t hate older people. We hate when older people strive to live the same lives as younger people.” As a result, we organize sexuality and age into separate spheres that are hostile to each other, associating sex with youth and potency, and age with death and decrepitness.

Dr. Stacy Lindau, a researcher at the University of Chicago that I’ve been corresponding with, has told me that we need to conceive of a sexuality that is ageless. We need a new way of understanding older people as human beings, and sexuality as an essential part of human life at any age. In terms of design, the campaign we are creating will take a more inclusive and holistic approach to older people’s sexuality. Instead of focusing narrowly on STI prevention, we will promote older people’s ability to make informed decisions about their sex lives — free of violence, coercion, disease, and misinformation.

Recontextualizing phrases from an over-50′s sex guide

Quick type exploration using the WHO definition of sexual health

My job over the next few months is to create a preliminary piece of design that speaks to this approach by collaborating with a few older respondents. I’ve been working with Catherine, a fellow designer, to devise a set of interview questions as well as an exercise in which our respondents will collage together images, objects, and taglines related to sexual health. The hope is that we’ll take whatever design that comes out of that collaboration to the condom manufacturer Durex, presenting them with a strategy to open up a market for the over-50′s by distributing a positive, informed message about older people’s sexuality to the general public.

To be honest, this all sounds incredibly ambitious and overwhelming. My supervisors and our project partner have been optimistic and supportive about the work I’ve done thus far, but I often fear that a project of this magnitude is beyond my abilities. Despite this, I’m finding ways to put my self-worth issues aside and to focus on the task at hand. For whatever reason, I’ve developed a stronger sense of faith in my work over the last several weeks and am beginning to understand the importance of self-belief.

I think I am gaining confidence by working with the tutors and other students in the Communication Art & Design course: I am inspired by their seriousness of purpose, and the critical advice they’ve been giving me has been helping me stay afloat despite my relative ignorance about the design process. I’m especially grateful for my friend Joe, who is always willing to make time to help me with my work despite his own deadlines. It’s that kind of generosity, I think, that makes me thankful that I chose to come to the RCA.

Setting off sparklers on Remembrance Day

Late-night carnival in Victoria Park

On Friday, I visited my friend and fellow Princeton alum Deepa at Oxford. As we caught up on each other’s lives and reminisced about home, the conversation turned towards considerations of faith. We talked about the possibility that true spirituality doesn’t have to lie inside the strict confines of organized religion, and that faiths as seemingly irreconcilable as Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity share a lot in common when it comes to ideas about compassion.

The next morning, we walked through this enormous, empty field called Port Meadow in the neighboring town of Jericho. I was captivated by the beauty of the English countryside. As we trekked through the rain-soaked grass, I was reminded of similar journeys I had made several years ago through the Maharashtran countryside the summer I studied to be a yoga teacher in India.

I distinctly recall getting lost without an umbrella in the heaviness of the monsoon rains. I remember being overwhelmed by a feeling that my soul was cleansed, however temporarily, of fear and desire, of worry and sadness. As we walked along the Thames through that field in Oxfordshire, I felt that sense of peace return, almost as if it had been there all along.

Walking across Port Meadow

An abandoned abbey once occupied by nuns

Inside one of the college’s sanctuaries

Later that day, I found out that a close friend of mine had suffered a second cardiac arrest. Though Grayson and I haven’t been in touch over the last few years, we shared a lot of each other’s company during high school, mostly over our mutual love for musical theater. When our school put on My Fair Lady, I played the sidekick Jamie to his Alfred P. Doolittle. In Damn Yankees, I was Old Joe to his Young Joe. In many ways, however, we were opposites. He was a steadfast Christian, and I a devout skeptic. He had a deep and abiding interest in war and war games that I could never really understand. We respected each other’s values but rarely agreed on any major political issues.

Whether he knew it or not, Grayson was one of my best friends — one of the reasons I made it through those lonely, self-loathing years. He and his mother Regina would always be ready with hugs after the myriad choir performances that my parents were never able to attend. The love and humanity that they showed me gave me something to believe in. Grayson’s father Brant is keeping a blog updating family and friends about his condition. I check it every few hours fearing the worst but hopeful for news of his recovery.

I don’t know whether it helps, but I am praying for Grayson and his family.