The Boy in You

My mom and I have always had a strange relationship. For better or worse, I’ve inherited many of her qualities: perfectionism, sensitivity, impulsiveness, impatience. We also share a fierce sense of heart — the courage to press on regardless of how stacked the odds are against us.

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.”