An Act of Affection was made by the Vietnamese documentary maker Viet Vu. The short documentary can be seen until April 25 as part of the Go Short festival. The film festival is taking place for the tenth time, this year for the first time completely online. An Act of Affection follows Pierre, a Portuguese man. During its first minutes, the film sketches an image of a lonely man in a cluttered environment. Pierre is gay, has little contact with the outside world and is looking for affection that the world does not offer him directly.
Gay elderly in the Netherlands
In the Netherlands, many LGBT elderly also face unique situations and problems. In recent years, Roos Pijpers spoke with a large group of ‘pink elderly’, a nickname gay elderly often use for themselves. She researched how this group's need for care is influenced by their cultural and sexual background. “The social network is very different for many gay elderly”, Pijpers explains. “Many do not have a partner or children. In some cases, they also have a difficult relationship with their families. While heterosexual and cisgender seniors can in many cases rely on voluntary informal care, this group of gay elderly requires professional help much more often.”
The professional caregivers must then be sensitive to the specific wishes and needs of gay elderly. “People in this group are not always prepared to come out, especially to a stranger. These caregivers should not ask ‘Who is your husband?’ or ‘Who is your wife?’ ask, but ‘Who is your partner?’ Neutral language and better understanding help to lower the threshold for these elderly.”
Pijpers wants to emphasise that not all gay elderly in the Netherlands are faced with loneliness and related problems. “Just like straight elderly, every gay elderly story is different. Many gay elderly are satisfied with the life they have led, or are happy that they can come out of the closet at a later point in their life without much trouble. But there are certain unique factors that contribute to the different types of problems experienced by some gay elderly.”
Pink Carpet
Various organisations are now taking steps to acknowledge and deal with this problem. One of the most prominent of these organisations is the Roze Loper (Pink Carpet), which provides official certification to more than one hundred healthcare institutions. To quality for this certification, institutions must have, among other things, nurses who have undergone training to respond more effectively to the specific needs and wishes of gay elderly. But these institutions also show LGBT documentaries for residents to promote discussions and make them accessible.
Pipers: “Such a broad approach is essential to have an effect. At some healthcare institutions, gay-sensitive policy is only temporary. A new manager comes in and wants to make a good impression with an exciting new initiative, but when the enthusiasm wears off, the priority will soon lie elsewhere. There really has to be constant attention for this policy to be effective.”
Annoying neighbours
Of the gay elderly living at home that Pijpers interviewed for her research, 40 percent indicated that they occasionally had unpleasant experiences with neighbours or local residents. This happens, for example, with elderly people who come out as gay after a long heterosexual marriage, and then are suddenly viewed differently by the neighbourhood.
“Such an experience is very subjective, but it can leave its mark. Some elderly are upset even by a mean or dismissive look from a neighbour, while others react stoically to explicit verbal abuse. This makes them less inclined to ask for help in the neighbourhood, which makes them more isolated,” explains Pijpers.
Coronavirus crisis
For lonely gay elderly, the Coronavirus crisis in the past year was a double blow. In many cases, personal contact for the elderly was limited to a handful of immediate family members. Pipers: “Meeting activities organised locally by the COC (a Dutch organisation for LGBT people) came to a standstill, so they could no longer meet with like-minded people. Especially for this group, which cannot always rely on family contact, there was a lot of extra loneliness.”
“In April of last year, at the start of the Coronavirus crisis, one of the respondents in my study died in a care home. The caregivers informed the family, which had previously lost contact with the elderly person. But the friends in the gay community, whom the respondent frequently saw before Corona, were not informed and only heard about the death weeks later, after the funeral. That is of course a rather tragic, extreme example, but I have also seen other respondents become older, sicker and weaker after those lonely first months of the crisis.”
In An Act of Affection, documentary maker Viet Vu primarily keeps his distance from Pierre. Vu asks a few questions via the camera, but the conversation feels rather uncomfortable for the outsider. Towards the end, however, both take a more open attitude, and Vu provides the ‘affection’ from the title and gives Pierre a heartfelt, affectionate hug. Not intimate, but endearing: Pierre seems to feel that he has been seen for who he is, that he can finally relax.
Obviously, such affection is by no means the solution for every elderly person. As an outsider, it can sometimes be difficult to take the first step. “You should certainly not want to force people out of the closet,” Pijpers warns. “Gay people have a long history of being completely or partially in the closet, and they are not always ready to be open about it to the outside world. All you can do is to treat gay elderly like other ageing neighbours: talk to them, see if you can help them, and be open to helping them when you can. Stay in touch, everyone appreciates that."
Win tickets to Go Short
Go Short is the premier festival for short movies in the Netherlands. From April 8, you can see the best recent short films from Europe and the Go Short Awards will be handed out. You can watch all short films from your living room, through the organisation's streaming platform.
You can see 'An Act of Affection' via the Go Short website. Radboud Recharge is raffling off five virtual tickets for the Go Short online platform. This allows you to watch all short movies from the comfort of your home. To participate, email to recharge [at] ru.nl (recharge[at]ru[dot]nl) with the subject 'Go Short' by 15 April at the latest.
Image: still from 'An Act of Affection', by Viet Vu