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Most mornings, the seniors at the Beth Abraham Center in Far Rockaway are making arts and crafts or playing bingo. Today, they're learning the proper way to slip on a condom. Teacher Betty DeBaptiste holds an oversized rubber model above her head.
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Betty DeBaptiste: You roll it down, okay?…. There's supposed to be a little out-pouch here. So you roll it down. They come in different sizes …
Senior: Yes they do!
One of those in the audience today is Gladys Morehead. She's 78 years old and says it's a myth that old people stop having sex.
ACT: Gladys Morehead: If you hot, go on and get it. That's the way I see it. When I want some, I get it. [laughs]
The city spent about a million dollars in the last year bringing HIV education to senior centers like this one in all five boroughs. And for good reason. About 15 percent of all those who contract HIV each year are over the age of 50. Health advocates say that older people worry less about getting pregnant, so they don't use condoms as often. And many of them tend to think AIDS is a young person's disease, which often leads to riskier sex.
ACT: Ed Shaw: You can be frisky, but don't be risky! [laughs]
Ed Shaw is one the many New Yorkers who now teach seniors across the city about safe sex. He tells the ladies he's exactly the kind of guy they should be worried about. He's muscular, healthy and looks a lot younger than his 66 years. But Shaw has been living with AIDS for almost two decades. He once stunned a group of women with that news.
ACT: Ed Shaw: They just couldn't believe it, because I'm there, looking like the average athlete, you know. And then this other lady, "Mister, mister, you know if you didn't have that thing, I'd take you home with me right now." And I said, "Lord, have mercy."
Shaw reminds them that there are more men like him all over New York and the nation. He's a member of the first generation of seniors who have been kept alive by antiretrovirals long enough to grow old with HIV. In the next decade, experts say a majority of people with HIV in New York City will be over 50. Shaw says many will look as healthy as he does, but won't necessarily take responsibility for their condition. Shaw himself continued having unprotected sex in the 80s after learning he contracted HIV by sharing needles.
ACT: Ed Shaw: There was no information, no education. That's why I'm such a zealot now, trying to get this information to the community. And not just to the seniors. I wish there was some way that I could speak on top of the mountain.
Shaw's mountain right now is the New York Association on HIV Over 50, which he chairs. [Post some meeting sound here?] The group pushes for health policy reform and educational programs for seniors. For Shaw, living longer has meant he's been given more time to advocate and teach. His extra years have been healthy and happy ones. But for others, aging with AIDS has been painful. Sixty-two-year-old Al Derry has spent the last two decades living with medical complications and social isolation. And he hasn't stopped mourning the love of his life.
ACT: Al Derry: Michael and I met at a bar, back in 1981. This person comes in and walks over to me, and says, boy, you look tremendous, you look great. And gives me a kiss. And it was like an electric shock….
Within a year, Derry had moved into an apartment with his partner. Six years later, they were both diagnosed with HIV. It was 1986. Derry's partner got sick first, and died in less than a year. Derry knew his turn was next.
ACT: Al Derry: At that point, I thought well, I'm going to get sick and die like everybody else. And I thought that for many years. I mean, many years. As soon as I got a cold, I thought, oh, well, this is it.
Derry, who's part Navajo, part African-American, developed full-blown AIDS in 1992. He's been taking antiretrovirals for more than a decade. He now thinks he'll live longer than his father, who died at 73.
ACT: Al Derry: Thirty years later, and I'm still here …. Why am I still alive? Maybe that's the reason, to tell people that I'm still alive. That it's possible to be alive with these medications, to be alive with this disease.
But Derry says there are tradeoffs aging with a virus that's supposed kill him. He says he's growing older faster than his HIV-negative peers. Arthritis quickly progressed from his toes to his knees the last few years. His legs suffer from neuropathy, a condition that causes tingling so painful, he often can't walk. And then there are the pills - [PILL SOUND] - pills for HIV, for pain, for his rising blood pressure. Derry keeps a list of his drugs in his wallet.
ACT: Al Derry: [reads from the list.] Fade under but keep running under…
Steve Karpiak is a doctor at AIDS Community Research Initiative of America. He says medical researchers like him are only just beginning to explore how HIV-positive people grow old.
ACT: Dr. Steve Karpiak: Now comes arthritis, osteoporosis, hypertension, cardiovascular issues, etc., etc. How are they going to manage those diseases? How is the medical establishment going to address the interactions of drugs?
Derry also takes a list of antidepressants. Karpiak says many seniors with AIDS suffer from the psychological toll of living with a stigmatized disease that has killed off many of their loved ones.
ACT: Dr. Steve Karpiak: The problem with this population is that they are isolated, socially isolated. They show high rates of depressive symptomotology. And they have high rates of loneliness.
Almost 70 percent of older people with AIDS live alone. Derry's one of them. When he stopped working in 1995, he slumped into a depression. For the next decade, he rarely left his apartment, except to go to the grocery store.
ACT: Al Derry: And once in awhile, I would get up the nerve to go to a bar and hang out, but that wasn't that often. You feel that you're older, you feel that you're out of place when you go to the bars. All you see is young people.
Soon, he stopped going to bars. But a little over a year ago, Derry finally found a way out of his isolation. It's an organization for other gay seniors in Queens, called SAGE. Now, stopping by the small one-room clubhouse in Jackson Heights is a weekly ritual, where he plays cards and sings old Broadway tunes with his new friends.
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MUSIC (Sage 2nd Visit, Part 4, 24:50): Men singing…
Richie Ryan: This is an audition for Broadway. Come on, let's see you go. [laughs…] [Fade under…]
That's Richie Ryan. He's 72, and most agree he's the clown of the group.
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Richie Ryan: Actually, I'm really shy.
Old guy: How can you be shy? You're a drag queen.
Richie Ryan: I swear to God, I'm not kidding you.
Old guy: You should see him in drag…
Derry says this is the closest group of friends he's had since his partner died twenty years ago, though very few of them knew that he had AIDS. But today, Derry wanted to explain to his friends why he was being interviewed by a reporter. Minutes before, he told them he had HIV.
ACT: Al Derry: I've never done anything like this before. I've never come out to a whole community.
Derry was surprised no one even blinked. He says he's always held back because he thinks older adults stigmatize AIDS more than younger people do. Richie Ryan agrees, and says that many seniors have a hard time discussing AIDS because his generation learned to avoid talking about diseases.
ACT: Richie Ryan: When I was growing up, when someone had cancer, you didn't say the big C. Because that meant, oh my God, they're going to die.
Derry says that not being able to talk about AIDS makes the illness more isolating for people like him. And as HIV-positive people live longer and healthier lives with new drugs, Derry worries that others are forgetting how dangerous the disease still is. His friends agree.
ACT: Al Derry: It's something that's disappeared. People don't talk about it anymore.
ACT: Richie Ryan: I talked to some younger people who aren't diagnosed with HIV and they bareback. They've told me that. And I look at them and I say, "Are you crazy? In this day and age?"
Derry seems genuinely happy surrounded by his friends here. He says for the first time in years, people call whenever he gets sick. He says he's found a new family.
ACT: Al Derry: It's comfortable. The people are comfortable. It's like home. [Fade singing in background…]
Ailsa Chang, Columbia Radio News.
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[Singing] "How I loved you…."
Richie Ryan: Ah, that was wonderful. I got goosebumps all over my body….