June

A challenge to notions about aging

Film is an homage to the founder of Golden Threads

by Kaizaad Kotwal

Aging in America is undoubtedly a doubleedged sword. Modern advances in medicine and technology have helped humans live longer. Yet, this extension of life expectancy has not been augmented or paralleled by an enhancement in the quality of life.

For many seniors, the golden years are anything but. In fact, abandonment by family, sterile and patronizing nursing homes, and assembly-line health care make the promised Midas touch of the golden years merely a myth, if not a downright lie.

Couple the baggage of aging with the battles of gender and sexual orientation and a whole new Pandora's box is opened. Aging women face even more challenges than elderly men. The Hollywood cliché that a man's aging makes him dignified and a woman's aging makes her, well, old, is a societal truth. What happens when this woman is a lesbian?

Christine Burton is living testament to the fact that all these clichés and preconceived notions about aging and gender and sexuality can and must be challenged and eventually eradicated.

A former horse farmer, actress, businesswoman, college teacher and nun, Burton launched Golden Threads a global networking service for mid-life and older lesbians-at the age of 80 with the motto "You're never too old to love or be loved."

At 72, Burton was living in upstate New York and becoming lonely. She got a slap in the face when she tried to join a lesbian networking service. They sent her back a note which said, “Have you made a mistake about your date of birth? Nobody wants to meet lesbians older than 50.”

Caught in this newly invigorated knowledge of her mortality, Winer puts it this way, "I was depressed. And I was depressed that I was depressed." Until that crisis, Winer had considered herself above preoccupations with age. She felt that to be afraid of aging and the changes in one's beauty and strength that

Winer explained, “is what challenged me." This challenge led Winer to launch production in ten days in order to film the annual celebration of Golden Threads. Making the film "profoundly changed" Winer because "it challenged me to blast through my

self-pity."

FRANCIS REID

Karen Eaton is not only Winer's co-producer on the film, but they have been life partners for the last sixteen years. They met when Winer was working on her film Rate It X, a hard look at sexism in America. Eaton came to see the film to see if she was going to make a donation and "it was love at first sight" according to the both of them.

Watching Winer go through her midlife crisis cast Eaton in her traditional role of the "cock-eyed optimist." Eaton explained, "I'm always like, ‘Oh wow, look, there's some crumbs left' or 'Oh, at least the other tires aren't flat.'"

With her glass-is-halffull attitude, Eaton gave Winer "small lectures of how great things are, and I saw how Christine's energy could set a house on fire, and I hoped that Christine's attitude would change Lucy."

It did. They went to Provincetown to film a reunion of Golden Threads. Watching and filming these women who had come there with the common bonds of being mid-life and old and lesbian, began to transform Winer and Burton. But, much like the uncertainties of old age, Winer's newfound confidence and optimism were dealt a harsh and sudden blow when Burton suffered a massive stroke less than 24 hours after the Provincetown weekend came to a close.

Filmmaker Lucy Winer with Golden Threads founder Christie Burton, right.

Lucy Winer and Karen Eaton have made a film about Burton, when she began to transform not only her life but the lives of innumerable women the world over. At the age of 45, Winer was gripped by a shattering midlife crisis.

"I have never been a cheerful person," Winer says with a slight laugh, “and when I hit 45 it occurred to me that if I was lucky enough to go on living, I was going to grow old. I had always known that, but suddenly this knowledge became unbearable."

come with age were the domain of those more shallow than herself. If nothing else, Winer's midlife crisis proved to her that she too was vulnerable to these very same fears of mortality and aging.

It was at this tumultuous time that Winer "bumped into Christine Burton just by chance." Winer saw Burton moving and shaking things.

"Seeing her out there really kicking butt,"

Eaton said that this event tossed "Lucy into an abyss." Winer's anguish was exacerbated and her pre-filming fears had after all come true. Aging was indeed a dark place and Burton's stroke confirmed this for Weiner. Wading through this whirlpool, Continued on page 13

EMILY HUBLEY

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