Aging Well with Hal Kooden "Aging well is not about how to change the society, nor is it about how to love your wrinkles. It’s about how to change your attitudes about aging." by Tim Brookover

Noted gay psychotherapist Harold Kooden, Ph.D., visited town last November to speak at the Houston Lesbian & Gay Community Center on his new book Golden Men: The Power of Gay Midlife. Sixty-four years old, Hal lives and works in New York; he is a clinical psychologist in private practice and a founder of the National Gay and Lesbian Health Foundation. He works extensively with the International Lesbian and Gay Associations and the American Psychological Association. The afternoon before he addressed a crowd of about 50 men at the community center, Hal agreed to sit down for a lunchtime interview. His only request: that we dine on Mexican food.

Hal’s appearance in November inspired the formation of the Hawthorne Men’s Club, which meets on the third Friday of the month at the Houston Lesbian & Gay Community Center (803 Hawthorne) to discuss Hal Kooden’s Golden Men: The Power of Gay Midlife, and continue from there. Still welcoming new members, this group will meet next on Friday, March 16, at 7 p.m.. Call the center at 713/524-3818 for more information.

Tim Brookover: If you would, why don’t you start by giving an overview of your book and how you came to write it?

Hal Kooden: One of the reasons I felt the book had to be written was to get out to the community the message that we needed to contradict the stereotype. So many men had died who would have been very visible role models–men who had been activists, been in the media, who were known. And the community would have been watching them as they aged. You would have had this whole array of active, vibrant, attractive, involved men who were clearly just as vital now as they were [when they were younger] ... and in some ways even more. And from my perspective about 80 to 90 percent of them are all dead. So that was one of the motivations.

The book basically is the culmination of my life, my professional experience, my personal experience, my friendship with all my friends as well as what I had gone through with my aging process–so it is very much a life story. You know, it’s not an ivory tower book about what should be, or would be. And once we started working on it, I had to develop the exercises, because it is a workbook. I make the point that there are books which tell you what you’re supposed to look like if you aged well, but no one says how you do it. That’s the difference. This is a book about how to do it.

There are two main principles underlining the book. The first one is that just like you need to get rid of your internalized homophobia in order to have a positive gay identity, you need to get rid of your internalized ageism in order to age well. It’s a very simple concept. But no one’s ever put it down on paper. So what the book does is establish that as a basic principle, that aging well is not about how to change the society, nor is it about how to love your wrinkles. It’s about how to change your attitudes about aging.

The starting-off point for that is that we’ve already come out once–and in coming out, we’ve learned to put everything we have at risk in order to have honesty as our most important ethic that we live by. So coming out has taught us a lot of things. We have to do the same thing when we reach mid-life, however [each] person defines mid-life. Which is basically looking away from the group you’ve lost support from, and looking to a new group of peers. We did it once, we did it very successfully. We’ll do it again.

How to make that transition ...

Yes. And what I mean by a new group of peers is not a chronological set of peers. By peers, I mean people who accept you for who you are. People who validate you and you validate them–it’s mutual. So age as chronological age has nothing to do with it. In the same way that when you came out as a gay man, it didn’t mean that you now turned your back on the nongay communities, you simply said, I am going to go where I am accepted. And where I am accepted may include nongay people as well, but it’s where you are validated. And you do that again at mid-life, meaning when you no longer feel Oh, I’m young.

I particularly liked that workbook quality of the book and the wonderful case histories you give. For me, those are really useful. It’s putting things into practice. I always enjoy reading how other people have done it or are doing it. There are cases in the book where people could have been happier if they had done it a different way. That’s instructive as well–learning from other people’s mistakes.

When people say they’re invisible, part of my reaction is: Well, look, how much of your invisibility is because you’ve made yourself invisible?

That’s one of the reasons I am so encouraged about the community center here [the Houston Lesbian and Gay Community Center]–that it’s involved with people of all ages. When I talked, for example in Denver, at PrimeTimers, I asked: "How many of you here are involved in the Denver Community Center activities?" Not one. We were like 40 or 50 men. I said when you say you are invisible, what you usually are saying is The person I am attracted to doesn’t look at me. Part of it is ageism, but part of it is because they’ve had nothing to contradict their gaydar. They don’t see men who are older involved actively in community affairs, et cetera.

Also, if you say, Young people don’t look at me, well, why aren’t you looking at men your own age? See, if you can’t look in the mirror and say, I’m attractive, I’d go to bed with me, then that’s where it has to start. I mean, I am not denying ageism at all, but I think we have to deal with our own ageism... .

Right.

You know, we were getting intergenerational dialogues at the conference [the Creating Change conference in Atlanta], and it’s the young men sometimes that will say, I feel I’m invisible. I may be seen as a young man, I may be seen as a piece of meat, but I still feel invisible because I’m not seen. I don’t assume every older man that comes towards me wants to have sex with me. But I don’t feel that they approach me thinking that I’m somebody that can offer something.

That’s true, too.

That’s why the dialogue has to start. I recommend using the book as a way of starting a group. Get a group of men together, and do a chapter a week or a chapter a month and discuss. [The Hawthorne Men’s Group was started at the community center to do just this–see introduction.] Because there is no way you can do the exercises and talk about them without building an intimacy. From that can hopefully begin a movement of gay men starting to talk to each other–not about a topic, you know a business or how to raise money, all of which is valid–but what’s going on with me, how am I dealing with these issues. Because the book is not about just ageism–it’s a book about spirituality, about how to deal with all stages of your life.

You mention the community and AIDS. A number of my friends who were a few years older than I all died within a few years of each other, each around his 40th birthday. So then I missed out on observing some very intimate friends who were just ahead of me, who I could have seen aging. They were very handsome, very gracious, wonderful men.

Great role models.

Fortunately, I have a couple of friends from that group who are still with me, but that was a big blow for a lot of reasons. My best friend, Lamar, had just turned 40 when he died. On the one hand, he wasn’t real thrilled to be 40 because he was attracted to younger men. But he was also very proud of himself for reaching 40 because he had been quite ill. We have lost a whole generation. I think in some ways those of us who are still here may be trying to make it up as we go along more than other generations may have.

Well, I think as open gays, we are–at all ages.

I guess in a sense you’re saying we can make up our own rules, which I think is another great thing about your book. There’s not a "do it this way or don’t do it at all" attitude. Talk a little bit, Hal, about your background.

I was born in Chicago, back in 1936, so I’m 64 now. My family moved to Los Angeles when I was about seven. It was a very bad situation–parents who should have never married, divorced eventually, lot of antagonisms. And I sort of knew I was different, probably when I was 5 or 6, and knew what that difference was about when I was about 8 or 9, and actually started having sex when I was about 10. Then I was arrested when I was 14 for being gay, which clearly changed my life entirely. I left home the day after I turned 18. I had met the man that I wanted to be with. I seduced him. He was 30, and I was 17.

That was a nice story in the book.

So, I left home to live a gay lifestyle. There’s always been a process in my life of knowing it was time to move on, to change.... It’s funny, writing the book changed me. As I said in the afterword, it wasn’t until I sat down and really started working on it that I realized I had gone through the transformational process. I completed, in a sense, that process that I would have expected the reader to go through.

What it also did was give me the strength to just simply end the relationship that I had with my ... I use the word lover and I really shouldn’t because we ended it. I ended the relationship, because really what he wanted was a boyfriend. I wanted a lover. And when push came to shove, I knew either the relationship deepened or it just was over. I wasn’t going to continue it at that level. And I could say it was the first time in my life that I have ever ended a relationship without either moving, having someone else in the wings, or a lot of angst. It was about the relationship. It wasn’t about my life taking another shift.

You asked me about my background. When I left home and moved in with Joe, at that time I was working in a record warehouse, and basically he and his friends convinced me to go to college. I thought I would have flunked out, that I was too stupid. [But] I worked very hard, and I eventually did go back to college and got a scholarship to the University of Chicago,where I found out about this department called human development–you couldn’t divorce what was happening physically to the person from what was happening culturally and politically at every stage of life. The important concept was that development didn’t stop, it continued throughout the lifespan.

Then when I came to New York, I wanted to work in community mental health, and the only programs around were programs that were in the black and Hispanic communities, so that’s what I did for 10 or 12 years. I got into private practice accidentally; I didn’t believe in it because I felt it was too exclusive and too elitist. I think that is one of the reasons why I devoted a lot of time to activism.... I was involved nationally with the gay psychiatry movement and a lot of other things, too.

... That was very much a part of my therapy. In order to have good mental health, I think you have to be connected, connected with doing something where you’re feeling like you’re making the world a better place. I didn’t believe in this kind of thinking where you get into therapy to make you feel good about yourself. You have to do things that you are proud of in order to feel good about yourself.

I think a lot of therapy is sort of verbal masturbation–and a nice way for a lot of therapists to make money. There are times, for example, in my therapy I would tell somebody, Okay, it’s time for you to take a break, get out in the world and have a life. And if there are problems and stuff, okay, in six months we’ll talk about it, but get out there and start having a life. Because a lot of people when they get into therapy put their lives on hold. The same way there are a lot of gay men that I worked with who are always talking about Oh I want a relationship, I want a relationship, I want a relationship, and finally I realized, You have a relationship–it’s with me. So let’s stop that, go out there, and let’s see. And there were times when they were furious. And, interestingly, within five to six months they were in relationships.

That is what my former therapist finally told me. He said, We’re still friends and we’ll still see each other all the time, but it’s time for you to stop coming here on Tuesday evenings–you need to get out there and start working on some of these things we talked about. And he was right, of course. I wasn’t angry, but it was frightening. He was pushing me out of the nest.

I mean on one level, I joke about it, but I saw therapy as sort of a finishing school–teaching men how to socialize, how to be out there in the world, learn that there are rules. You don’t necessarily have to agree with that, but the world is not this mysterious weird place out there. It does have some rules, some of which you can reject, some of which you can learn and use to your own advantage. Or create your own rules. But stop being this sort of floating victim in a world out there.

One of the things I’m trying to get men to look at is: Look at all the choices that you’ve made. Because the more you can see where you’ve made choices in the past, the more you can start moving into the future. See the direction you’re going and make the choice–because we always have a choice, no matter what the situation. And when something happens which we have no control over, we can always choose how we react to it.

At the same time, we need to know that we basically have no control over anything. That’s why the last chapter is about letting go. Letting go of holding on to where we think we should be, where we wanted to be, and kind of taking every moment as an opportunity just to see what’s around. But also, I think to be happy, we need to have fun. [So] to complete the metaphor: Yes, let the river take you wherever it’s taking you, but keep looking at the scenery along the way.

Well, I think a great message in your book is have fun. Have fun in your life, no matter what your age is. Just because you may be 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 doesn’t mean you stop having fun.

Yes, but we are beginning to see some of those people in our community, and I think we need to have them in the community.

And I hope we do.

I think it’s beginning to happen.

Tim Brookover is president of the Houston Lesbian & Gay Community Center. He also serves on the board of governors of the Gulf Coast Archive and Museum of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History. A longtime Houston media maven, Brookover also contributes to My Table, the magazine on dining out in Houston, and One, a new San Francisco-based design magazine and website.