Sex and the single septuagenarian

HIV and STDs are on the rise among senior citizens. So when it comes to safe sex, it may be time to teach America's old dogs some new tricks.

By Liz Langley

Read more: AIDS, Sex, HIV, Health, STDs, Life

Dec. 4, 2006 | A few years ago there was a popular Pepsi commercial featuring presidential candidate and Viagra spokesman Bob Dole watching Britney Spears dance on TV. At the end of the ad, a dog sitting at Dole's side barks at the set. "Easy, boy," says Dole to the pooch -- though I always thought it was slyly implied that he was actually talking to his own reanimated wiener.

This three-alarm image of the senator erect is uncomfortable on a lot of levels, but the most obvious is that people aren't used to thinking of seniors in a sexual way and aren't in a rush to start. We love to see Grandma and Grandpa running marathons, volunteering and taking tap class. But imagining them doing the mattress mambo is another story.

Senior sexuality is certainly important in Florida, the oldest state in the country, and where, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 17 percent of the population was 65 or over as of July 1, 2005. And those seniors aren't just sitting home playing bridge: In "Sexuality at Midlife and Beyond," a 2004 update to a 1999 AARP survey, more than half of respondents, aged 45 and up, cited sexual activity as a critical part of good relationships and as an important factor in quality of life. Eighty-four percent disagreed or strongly disagreed that "Sex is only for young people" and reported having intimate experiences once a week, ranging from kissing to intercourse. In September of 2006, the CNBC Special Report "Boomer Nation" reported that over-50 singles make up Match.com's fastest-growing demographic. "People are orgasmic well into their 90s," says Sallie Foley, director for the Center for Sexual Health at the University of Michigan Health System, author, and "Modern Love" columnist for the AARP magazine. A sex therapist, Foley recently had a client who experienced her first orgasm at 67.

Of course, lives -- and libidos -- don't end at 50. But a growing concern is that the same parents and grandparents who once scolded their kids for playing outside without coats may not always be covering up where it counts beneath the sheets. According to Tom Liberti, chief of the Bureau of HIV/AIDS for the Florida Department of Health, 16 percent of newly reported HIV cases in 2005 were in people over 50. Numbers on other sexually transmitted diseases don't suggest that they're spreading like wildfire among seniors (though not all STDs are necessarily reported to the DOH). Still, with more older singles than ever, well, you know the sex talk your parents dreaded having with you when you were a kid? Now you might want to have a similar one with them. (Well, want might be taking it a bit far.)

Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs have enabled seniors to have active sex lives longer into their golden years, but those same seniors are typically not targeted with information about safety. "People don't want to think about it," says Jim Campbell, president of the National Association on HIV Over Fifty. It's an attitude he likens to "Everyone else's kid is having sex except mine." Campbell's group recently helped one nursing home establish a room for conjugal visits that couples can reserve like a hotel room. He doesn't want to say which nursing home, though, because talk of sexual matters tends to cause such consternation.

"One of our counselors has a 100-year-old man with HIV," says Jolene Mullins, an early intervention consultant with the Broward County Health Department's Senior HIV Intervention Project. "He's newly diagnosed and how he got it we'll probably never know," though she does say sexual contact is the prime transmission method of the virus in the older population, along with some needle sharing. But consider: Even if he had been infected 25 years ago, it still would have been at age 75.

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Hang onto that thought and now remember how resistant older people can be to new things. I once asked my own mother why she didn't use the microwave and she said, defiantly, "Because I'm too old." If seniors are slow to adapt to cellphones, how about using condoms? In their day they were strictly for birth control -- perhaps the one health concern that seniors, luxuriously, don't have to worry about.

"I never heard the word 'condom' till I don't know when. We whispered the word 'rubber,'" says Jane Fowler, 71. Even now, she jokingly rushes over the word in a phone interview from her Kansas City home. Jane has a sparkling laugh and the sweetest, most Marion Cunningham voice I've ever heard. She was diagnosed with HIV at the age of 55 and eventually co-founded the National Association on HIV Over Fifty, is co-founder and director of HIV Wisdom for Older Women, and works as an HIV/AIDS educator, speaking to groups all across the country.

In 1991 Fowler got a letter from an insurance company she'd applied to for coverage and was shocked to find she had been denied. "My blood had disclosed a significant abnormality," she says, though the letter didn't say what it was. She remembered someone had come by and stuck her finger. "He left with my application and my deposit and my blood and I didn't think any more about it, especially the blood, until I got this letter."

Using datebook diaries that go back to 1958, Fowler was able to trace not just the approximate time she was infected, but the day. After 23 years of marriage, she had unwillingly been divorced, and after awhile she started dating. "I had a few intimacies," she said. "[I wasn't] out there sleeping around ... I didn't fit the stereotype," Fowler explains, and so wasn't the kind of person anyone would figure to test. The man she was seeing when she was infected was someone she had known for a long time. "He is not alive today," she says.

Next page: Schuler holds up a picture of a dress made out of condoms and asks, "Should I wear this to my granddaughter's wedding?"