With all the messages we’re given in queer culture, it’s hard not to dread getting older. To counteract it, we should embrace elder LGBTs as positive role models
OPINION: Ray O’Neill
Body Shame
They say that there are only two guarantees in life: death and taxes; but the aging process is something else that isn’t just waiting, but is always already happening. Yet our society still carries such anxieties and discomfort around aging.
In traditional Eastern cultures, older people are more valued than their Western counterparts, for their life experience, their wisdom, for what they have done over their lives for a family, a community. In our western cultures, aging is something to be ashamed of, to be denied and repressed, something to be concealed, botoxed, spray-tanned away, or worse yet, shunned, discarded, consigned to a nursing home, or exiled to Jurassic.