Sex and ageing: Melbourne magazine tackles the last taboo

Matt Holden

With the internet and all, you wouldn't expect to have trouble finding pictures of naked elderly people in a quick Google search – unless you were looking for something other than pornography.

That was the problem facing photographer Alexis Desaulniers-Lea, photo editor of local magazine Archer, which styles itself as "the Australian journal of sexual diversity". The fourth issue of the two-year-old magazine will be launched this week with a focus on sex and ageing.

"When I started searching elderly people and sexuality ... most of it was porn," says Desaulniers-Lea. "I got my sister back in Canada, who's involved in the photography scene, to do some research too. I told her I was struggling to find images of older people, even people who were 40-plus, interacting sexually."

Aleah Chapin's Step, 2012, oil on canvas. Photo: Courtesy Archer magazine

His sister found it just as difficult. Sex and the over-70s is, it seems, a bit of envelope-pushing, even for Archer. This for a magazine that in its first three issues published Christos Tsiolkas'  musings on his dangerous desire for youthful boys, a photo story featuring disability activist Jax-Jacki Brown in a wheelchair "pashing" her girlfriend outside Flinders Street Station, and activist-sex-worker-pornographer Nic Holas  writing about sex-on-premises venues (photographed naked, front-on and well-hung).

But the timing of this latest issue couldn't be better: a new study into the sex lives of elderly Australians by Elite Singles Australia found that many people in their eighth decade are still pretty active, or at least thinking about it: 93 per cent said sex was important in a relationship, and 37 per cent said they wouldn't stay in a sexless relationship.

"The concept of ageing and sexuality in conversation often makes people uncomfortable," says Desaulniers-Lea. "Either people are not interested or older people are not sexually pleasing to the eye for a lot of younger people."

Aleah Chapin's And We Were Birds, 2013, oil on canvas. Photo: Courtesy Archer magazine

She tried commissioning local photographers, but met resistance there, too.

"Even finding photographers who had taken pictures of older people was a struggle," she says. "With people who straight up said 'no' I asked them why, and there was discomfort surrounding being able to direct older subjects or being able to relate.

"It can be a really tricky thing, shooting people in the nude in general, but when they're from a different generation, my assumption is that would be a bit of a struggle."

Cover of the latest Archer magazine on sex and ageing. Photo: Courtesy Archer magazine

Archer's editor, Amy Middleton, says: "For a lot of us our only experience of people over 70 is our grandparents, and there's nothing sexual about your grandparents."

In the end, Desaulniers-Lea found a series of images of naked older couples kissing, holding and caressing each other by a German photographer, Katrin Trautner​. They're clearly of people having sex, but you wouldn't describe them as porn.

One shows the veined and knotty arms of an elderly man embracing the naked torso of an elderly woman from behind. "When I first saw that photograph I immediately felt someone's arms coming around me, and I thought, If that's my first reaction to that type of pose, it makes me want to look at it," she says.

Another, of two naked older men embracing, is on the cover. "I'm trying to figure out if my distributor is going to get mad at me for having two naked bodies on the cover," says Middleton, who has faced controversy over the cover before: issue two showed two teenage boys, one of them topless, reclining on a bed. Several newsagents refused to stock the magazine; others kept copies in a drawer.

"I was a bit surprised because you see 14 or 15-year-old models on magazine covers," says Desaulniers-Lea. "It's fine to have it in commercial advertising, but the minute you put two young boys on a bed, half-clothed, just hanging out … it's shocking."

Middleton says that in showing young people on the cover, she had overlooked concerns about paedophilia. "But one of Archer's aims is to represent young people's sexuality. It'll be really interesting to see what kind of feedback we get on people over 70 as opposed to people under 20.

"I feel profoundly out of touch with censorship, and no one can seem to give me a straight answer on it. They say things like, 'You can't use aroused-appearing bodies.' You'd have to have a rating and a plastic bag."

Archer ranges across the gamut of human sexuality, and not always with a straight face. Among the stories on sex and ageing in issue four are a funny and mildly cringe-inducing reminiscence by Sam Twyford-Moore about holidaying with his nudist grandmother, and a photo-essay on the iconic and elderly New York drag queen Flawless Sabrina. There is also a confronting examination of the sexual rights of people in aged care.

Then there's the series of photo-realistic paintings of naked older women by a young American artist, Aleah Chapin​, which Desaulniers-Lea also turned up in an internet search. They show the women in all their elderly glory – sagging (or missing) breasts, cellulite, varicose veins and wrinkles: nothing like photoshopped, plastic porn bodies.

"I looked at these images, and I don't know if it's a naive 29-year-old talking, but I was really happy. I thought, 'Oh wow, I'm going to look like that one day.' It's very communal and celebratory," says Desaulniers-Lea.

"I have a a thing for texture ... when we were researching photos ... I was zooming in on everything and looking at the skin and the body hair and the wrinkles and the eyes, and I think I realised that within my own sexuality that's a really important thing. When we look at an image we often don't think about touch. So I started paying attention in my own work to how much I love texture and detail.

"I guess the things we were looking at, especially the paintings … there's so much visceral texture in there, and that really turns me on. I just assume other people feel the same."

Archer 4 will be launched on Thursday, June 4 at the Emerging Writers Festival, and will be on sale in newsagents and selected bookshops. See emergingwritersfestival.org.au for details of the launch party.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/sex-and-ageing-melbourne-magazine-tackles-the-last-taboo-20150522-gh7akf.html#ixzz3beu8AgdV