The Gero-Punk Project

Part two in a series of essays

By guest Gero-Punk

Pascal Aziz

I am writing to you from The Castro District in San Francisco on Pride weekend. Today, Sunday, July 29^th, 2014, I marched in San Francisco’s Pride Parade with SWANABAQ (Southwest Asian and North African Bay Area Queers), a great organization for Middle Eastern LGBTQ individuals. I have been here since Friday, and I have made some interesting observations about myself, queer culture, and identity politics, in relation to my last post about living with intersectionality and aging on the queer margin. In this essay, I will share some of my experiences being in San Francisco for the weekend, and will use that as my way into further exploring a theory of queering gerontology which was supposed to be this week’s post but will be postponed for later this week.

Writing on queer theory and history while sitting in a cafe in The Castro was for me an experience of deep awe and reverence. After all, this is one of the first queer centers of America, this is where those whom I deem as my forefathers and foremothers by virtue of our shared marginality and queer identity toiled against their oppressors and marched for freedom, ending the historical cycle of brutality and persecution. This is where I, through the lives they lived and sacrifices they made, earned my social liberty, dignity, and right to full citizenship as a queer man living in America.

However, after that moment of awe, and in seeing the festivities of pride in the streets of the city, I must admit I felt a sense of disappointment about and alienation from the ways in which queer culture has been seized by the mainstream and commodified as social capital, a money making space for corporations and the entertainment industry to promote social pretense, irresponsible freedom, and absolute indulgence as what defines being LGBTQ. This was especially evident by the amount of corporate marketing visible in the pride parade and, on the darker side, in the significant substance and alcohol abuse and unsafe promiscuity I witnessed (my problem here is not moral but simply a concern for the health and safety of fellow beings). In fact, the LGBTQ mainstream has become such a confusing space. Through one message it is promoting a progressivist gentrification of the queer identity by asking queers to assimilate into society through marriage and capital, and through another, it is promoting an indulgent and irresponsible image of queerness to support the free market (that isn’t free).

The shock was that this space of safety and human worth that the first openly queer generation had created for us through struggle was being manipulated by the mainstream. It was clearly not a place for the aging to thrive, nor a space for the older to celebrate or be celebrated. It was concerned with younger sexier bodies willing to do silly and unwise things, and even as a twenty-three year-old, I wasn’t about to fully participate.

I enjoyed marching in the parade with our countries’ flags unified and felt it was especially important for making non-white queers visible and creating awareness about the persecution of LGBTQ individuals in the countries from which we come. Also, I was honored to meet individuals whose stories closely intersect mine and with whom I can speak in my mother tongue. However, while doing all that, my impression was that queer lives in the mainstream are consumed by the identity politics of “gay.” Please note that here I am making a separation between having a physical and emotional desire and attraction for the same sex as a universal natural phenomenon in minds and bodies, and what we have culturally constructed from that (e.g. “gay” and all the other associated labels) as a way to socially and politically position individuals in the western world, and create uniformity and power through an organized community.

For such a label, similar to gender, and in a city like San Francisco, there is social demand for a constant and loud identity performativity; a pressure to perform our sexual orientation through a set of identified behaviors, codes, attitudes and views, day after day, and year after year. While this may be the result of an inner desire to be visible, and to be approved of, it was manufactured by a heterosexual society relative to hetero-normative standards and expectations of masculinity and femininity.

As I talked with LGBTQ folks in this city, I heard traces of emptiness, disappointment and despair. This demand to be a certain way, to be the good and right kind of gay, stripped many persons of their agency and their choice and made queer performativity a vicious perpetual cycle that will never end the need to be visible or the hunger for social acceptance, nor will it ever satisfy the mainstream or meet its standards. This and the unfortunate, judgmental, and brutal way I saw LGBTQ individuals treat each other, probably justifies the despair I sensed. Within the current matrix, LGBTQ individuals are declared failures relative to the hetero-normative and the mainstream queer-normative hierarchic culture and find no true comfort in the space they expected to be a safe haven.

Can you imagine aging within such a space?

I am certainly not setting myself apart or defining myself as the antonym, nor am I any better or more righteous than anyone. I am sharing what I witnessed and, perhaps, offering gratitude for the life I have created in Portland, Oregon, my chosen home. Ever since my eyes were opened to how different and diverse we are as LGBTQ individuals, I have realized that as a population we certainly have enough in common to create a political alliance but definitely not enough for a solid foundation that would create community.

In fact, this reality can emancipate my identity as I age, for without the expectations of identity performativity or the constraints of communal codes, I am free to make choices about how I want to present and position myself in the world. This does not mean I am or can always be on the margin, but rather that I have agency to negotiate with the mainstream structure to preserve my freedom when and if I wish to participate in it.

Furthermore, it is a joy to know that I am not alone for I have a family of individuals who, like me, dwell on the margins in their own communities because they have chosen the path of authenticity. It is what makes us positively queer, positively marginalized, and united by virtue of the high price we pay for our dissidence on behalf of emancipation and liberty. We are queer even though we are of all sexual orientations; some may be heterosexual but are not hetero-normative, some gay but refusing to conform to a gay stereotype emphasized in mainstream culture, either through promotion or ridicule. These folks handle me well as I grow, fluctuate, and age. They support my desire to be healthy and sound, even when they do not agree with my choices.

This experience in San Francisco has renewed my commitment and desire to age intentionally. If anything, I have found that as I age, I want to learn the art of practicing agency, both internal agency within the mind and in self-identity, and external agency in navigating and negotiating with social structures, and transgressing these structures when needed. To me, living queerness is an aging path of emancipation from the conformity of static identities and required social and gender performances; it is a path to free oneself from the shackles of identity, approval, and assimilation. It is a refusal to be deceived – by self and by other. Perhaps an appropriate expression of my praxis is the revival of a larger truly queer space that allows individuals to be, one that strategically transgresses against normativity in its subtlest forms and resists the marketing of the queer identity as a capitalist and modernist enterprise.

I hope I can convince more fellow queers to revive the Queer and to age with me in this expansive flexible margin I am learning to sustain.

In my next essay, I will delve more fully into how queer theory can revolutionize our understanding and practicing of aging.

Pascal Aziz was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.  He has a BA in Psychology, a BA in Interdisciplinary studies and a Certificate in Gerontology from Marylhurst University.  His main interest is doing further research in gerontology, as well as participating in senior citizen advocacy. He is looking forward to attending graduate school in the fall of 2014.

I knew I had to do something to save myself but I wasn’t sure what to do. So I decided to take myself on a little adventure to the Oregon coast, on an overnight camping trip at Cape Lookout. In the days leading up to the trip, I heard myself more than once refer to Cape Lookout as “Camp Outlook.”

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My daughter Isobel was on a graduation trip to Washington D.C. with a friend. I felt elated that she’d had this opportunity and we’d been able to make it happen. My plans to go away with my significant person to the coast that week had fallen through at the last minute. I felt disappointed and angry. Spring term had just ended and there was less than one week during which to grade papers and wrap things up from a stressful school year before commencing summer term teaching and projects, as well as getting Isobel prepared for and off to college far away on the East coast. (Yikes.) I felt relieved and exhausted and anxious and disoriented.

I was aware in an abstract way that it might be important to give myself some time and space to properly acknowledge significant transitions in my life, especially that after almost 18 years of living mostly on my own with Isobel things were going to be changing dramatically. I was aware in an embodied but not entirely conceptual way that it might be important for me to contemplate some long overdue, big decisions about my next self and life.

But I felt really stuck and incapable. I felt that my capacity for bouncing back from change, challenge and stress was close to completely depleted. My thoughts had little nuance. My sense of humor had gone on sabbatical without me. I was shocked and dismayed by my mid-life body. Everything pretty much sucked.

I knew I needed the time and space – even if only two days and one night at the coast — for starting the process of getting unstuck, for instigating and practicing the causes and conditions for renewal. I realized that what I yearned most desperately for was a fundamental and major change in perspective.

This might explain why I kept referring to Cape Lookout and “Camp Outlook.”

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Having packed the car with the camping supplies the night before, I got a very early start on the first day of my adventure.  I decided to drive down the coast, starting in Astoria (which means I drove north and then west from Portland, the opposite direction of my ultimate destination). As I drove,  I drank tea and listened to NPR, hoping to catch President Obama’s speech about the chaos in Iraq, but his speech was delayed so at some point I turned off the radio and put on some music: Arcade Fire. It was a shimmering, not-too-hot almost summer day. I saw many creatures on my drive: deer; cows; horses; bald eagles; hawks; various water fowl, humans. When I arrived in Astoria, I worked for a couple of hours at my favorite café, the Blue Scorcher – fantastic cardamom honey latte! — followed by a visit to a bookstore where I bought myself a new journal. Then I headed yet farther south to Seaside, where I procured some crab and shrimps for my camping supper (seafood salad, fireside!). By now it was well past lunch, so I made my way to Bill’s Tavern in Canon Beach, where I graded a couple of papers and indulged myself by imbibing fish and chips. I washed them down with a red ale. Next stop, Camp Outlook!

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 Red-tailed hawk

riding the salty sky.

Tell me there isn’t pleasure in that!

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 Little raindrops are threatening.

I don’t want to leave the campfire for the tent.

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Self-indulgence is subsisting on mimosas and crappy cup o’noodles for an entire day.

Self-care isn’t.

The (ill) logic of self-indulgence is: I already feel awful. What else can I do to feel even worse?

The (well) logic of self-care is: I feel awful. But I may know what to do to feel better. It might take some time, but I’m going to give it a try because I want to be my best self.

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A day or two after I returned from my beach adventure, I had the following nap-dream:

I heard a commotion in my living room and went in to see what the matter was. Isobel was on the couch doing something, not paying attention to me or the commotion. I discovered two black dogs on the floor: one of them was our real-life dog Happy, the other was a neighborhood black dog. I was confused about why this other dog was in our house. Happy kept half-heartedly nipping at it, trying to get it to go away but it was sweet and submissive. I told Happy to stop, that the other black dog was not a threat. I opened the front door and as I was about to gently lead the other black dog outside, there on the pathway to my house was a woman and behind her were six more black dogs of various sorts, but all mid-sized. I told the woman that I had found her dog in my house and didn’t know how she got in. She said maybe the black dog came into my house because I wear glasses. Then I looked at all the other black dogs and remarked that it was odd to have so many black dogs outside my house. They were all standing there smiling and waiting. Isobel seemed nonplussed as did the woman, but I thought it was remarkable and an omen of some sort to have six black dogs outside smiling at me and one happy black dog who had actually found her way in to me.

Part two of a two-part essay

From guest Gero-Punk

G. Wilder

I am one of many caregivers – thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions – who give up hopes, dreams, and desires to become someone’s caregiver. Like me, many caregivers jump into the swirling torrent of caregiving without giving a moment’s thought as to how it may irreversibly impact their own lives. And like me, the majority are women who are going through their own aging journey, with most in their 40s or 50s (State 1). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, female caregivers “spend as much as 50 percent more time providing care than male caregivers” and comprise as much as 75 percent of family caregivers (Craig n.pag.). Researcher Martha Holstein, Ph.D. states that family caregivers are “overwhelmingly female” (227) at 70 percent of all caregivers (230), and that their caregiving [effort] “often lasts for years” (230). She further states that 77 percent of adult children caring for parents are women (230) and that those daughters “shoulder tasks that keep them on call 24 hours a day, with little or no assistance, while sons typically get help from their spouses” (230).[1]

According to Holstein, “Cultural values and assumptions, even ideologies, . . . support women’s primary responsibility for caregiving. These values and assumptions enter into conventional moral understandings of accountabilities and responsibilities. Because they are often internalized and taken as given, they are rarely exposed to analysis” (235). As a result of caregiving demands, women who have jobs and careers are forced to either reduce their work hours or quit working altogether (State 1). Women are expected to just “suck it up” and be nurturers at any cost. For a woman to talk about lost abilities, hopes, and dreams as a result of a multi-year detour into caregiving would be perceived as resentment – a shirking of expected duty and a kind of selfishness.

University of Minnesota Political Science professor Joan C. Tronto writes of the conflict experienced by caregivers: “Conflict seems inherent in care: because there are more needs for care than can ever be met, because caregivers have needs at the same time that they give care to others, there is inevitably conflict within care . . . care is more likely to be filled with inner contradictions, conflict, and frustration than it is to resemble the idealized interactions of romanticized caring” (267-268). These conflicts and frustrations are likely to be internalized by the caregiver and are not easily quantified or qualified. A search of EBSCOhost to examine quality of life issues for female caregivers yields a wealth of papers on the mental and physical impacts of caregiving such as stress, anxiety, depression, and multitudes of physical ailments. What can’t seem to be found are papers that address the loss of dreams – those opportunities that are irretrievably lost due to loss of abilities or opportunities. A search for “caregiver” in the title and “dream” in the body of the text yields 62 results, none of which examines the loss of the caregiver’s life plans and dreams. Clearly there is much work to be done to draw attention to this aspect of caregiving and to develop community-based social supports for those caregivers who lack familial support. Without support systems, caregivers find themselves emotionally isolated and adrift. Such community-based social support models will be the focus of my forthcoming graduate thesis.

Recently I was having a cup of tea with one of my clients and friend, Jean, who is 80 years old. She and I share Welsh heritage and a love of traveling in Wales. I mentioned that I am planning a walking trip up the coast of Wales when I graduate from MAIS in 2016. She became very excited, and I said: “you should come with me!” She brightened and then immediately deflated, saying “I’ll be 82 then . . .” and didn’t finish her sentence. Her husband of over 50 years sitting in the adjacent room has moderate dementia and she is his 24/7 caregiver. Jean’s own life went on hold five years ago and meanwhile the passing years and her increasing age are diminishing the possibility of carrying out postponed dreams.

My own experience resulted in the irreversible loss of some of my dreams and physical abilities. I am not the same person I was when I jumped into the torrent known as 24/7 caregiving eleven years ago. No matter how hard I try, I can’t catch up and I can’t reverse the invisible cost of caregiving. But, today I cleaned up messes – piles of papers covered in dust. The piles have waited for me for years, some since March 2003.

And I just cleaned eleven years of dust off my bicycle . . . and started riding and training horses again. I may not be able to turn back the clock, but I can create new dreams.

If faced with the same situation, would I be my parents’ 24/7 caregiver again? In a heartbeat.

Works Cited

Craig, Sheri Sharareh, and Alfred O. Gottschalck. “The Characteristics of Employed Female Caregivers and their Work Experience History.” census.gov. U.S. Census Bureau, 2014. Web. 8 Jun. 2014.

Holstein, Martha. “Home Care, Women, and Aging.” Mother Time. Ed. Margaret Urban Walker. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999. 227-244. Print.

State of Oregon. Oregon Public Health Division. Oregon Health Authority. “The Health of Caregivers . . . Who Cares?” CD Summary 62.12 (2013):1-2. Print.

Tronto, Joan C. “Segregated Housing as a Moral Problem: An Exercise in Rethinking Ethics.” Mother Time. Ed. Margaret Urban Walker. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999. 261-277. Print.

Note

1. In fairness to my husband, he was overwhelmed caregiving for his own parents while I was caregiving for mine, and we provided much moral support to each other.

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G. Wilder is a native Oregonian and Marylhurst Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies/Gerontology student.  She holds a BS in Social Science/Gerontology from Marylhurst and works as an elder advocate with a look to the future in creating innovative elder social and residential models.