My choir, which sings all sorts of music from the Bach Passions to ‘Let’s Do It’, had just held a concert in a London church. The principal piece was a very unusual Mass, called Mass in Blue, by the contemporary composer Will Todd.
This is shaped like a Mass (and the text is in Latin, e.g. Kyrie and Sanctus), but it is definitely jazz. It conveys – at different points – the contemplativeness, the excitement and the sensuousness associated with jazz. I highly recommend the piece if you like that sort of music.
And, just as jazz has some of the sexiest music to be found on this earth, it has some very sexy jazz passages, particularly during the Credo sung by the soprano soloist.
By chance, I saw and approached the soloist after the concert, while people were straightening up and preparing to leave. I complimented her both on her very wonderful singing and her general ‘presence’ (hard to define, but you know it when you see it). She thanked me and then noted, “I found it hard to give it the appropriate raunch in a church.”
I smiled and sympathised. I had heard her sing this Mass previously in a concert hall, where the atmosphere was presumably much less inhibiting, and it was thrilling. It had been harder to hear the subtleties of the performance while being a member of the choir.
I would have chatted longer, but I needed to get home.
Churches and sex
Reflecting on this conversation later, I pondered whether being in a church inhibits any sense of sexuality more generally. Having not been raised to the Christian faith – nor any faith, I might add – I see everything from the outside.
It must surely be the case that, for most people – or, perhaps, most Christian people – thoughts about sex and thoughts about religion (or God, the Church or anything related) sit in different compartments of the brain. Yes, sexual intercourse is said to be a ‘sacrament of marriage’, but this pertains primarily to procreation, I believe, and not in any way to the more lustful aspects of the activity.
Doubtless, many PhDs have been written on the issue of Christianity and its attitude to sex, but I have not read them. I work mainly on the basis of logic. If God is supposed to have given mankind all things good and pleasurable, it must be right and good to pursue them within reason. Singing in a church is surely ‘within reason’.
But people’s emotional reactions have little to do with logic. I must admit that I can readily understand the reluctance to give full flow to raunchiness in the confines of a church.
Talking about sexuality
I then began to wonder whether this singer had any idea that I was 81. Most people don’t talk to us old people this way. We’re not supposed to know about ‘raunch’. We have, it is widely believed, ‘finished with all that’. And presumably forgotten about it as well.
Perhaps I was just the first person with whom she could unburden this thought. Perhaps, as my husband said, I have a very matter-of-fact look about me, so that people feel they don’t need to censor what they say. It was in any case quite dark in the church. And, of course, she had just performed – and the last thing on her mind would have been my age.
I was very pleased that she did discuss it. I like the word ‘raunch’ (normally used as ‘raunchy’) which has a rather onomatopoeic quality. It conveys something very earthy about sex – nothing to do with love or procreation but just the hard lasciviousness rarely discussed in polite conversation.
And why, I then wondered, do many people assume we know nothing about sex or its more earthy aspects? Yes, perhaps traditionally, it was something that old people had given up a long time ago (but who knows?). And perhaps it isn’t quite seemly to imagine old people ‘at it’, but what is seemly and what is real are two very different things, as we all know well.
Perhaps I am wrong in my assumptions about what people think. It’s not the topic of much discussion, even among old people themselves. I do know that some years ago, a group of researchers, while planning a study on patterns of sexual activity, proposed age 50 as a possible cut-off point. “But how will anyone aged 50 remember?” one colleague is reported to have asked.
I guess we are all different, but I was very pleased to learn that a study on orgasms had chosen age 82 as the appropriate cut-off.
But even if we are not actually engaged in sexual activity in our later years, we can remember. I was a very proficient horse rider at the age of 14 (due to regular attendance at a summer camp) and, although I have hardly ever ridden since, I can remember very well the joy of the activity. The smell of the horses, the wonderful anticipation when you mounted a horse, the slightly wild pleasure of a good gallop.
Some of us have memories of raunch. Some of us have more up-to-date experience on which to draw.
In any case, there’s a lot more in the heads of many old men and women than their slippers.
Thank you for writing this. Would have loved to hear the real raunch. My lover of 25.5 years just turned 80. I've been thinking that his Protestant upbringing did much to bring shame to his mind about sex that isn't church consecrated. He married twice and wasn't about to do it again. I never thought marriage was a good deal. I heard two erotic writers two weeks ago and one said that there is a big market for older people who want to know about what is going on in other older people's sex lives. There was an episode in the now defunct NEW AMSTERDAM in which an old folk's home has to be shut down due to an STD outbreak. https://www.nerdsandbeyond.com/2022/05/20/new-amsterdam-recap-season-4-episode-21-castles-made-of-sand/ It was hysterical. I just now saw some people were disturbed by a medical show bringing up a sexual issue. OMG. What is this world coming to? I watched the 2000 movie The House of Mirth again this week. The crap women have had to exhibit to be respectable is such crap, and yet the double standards still exist. I'm almost 64. I hope to write about just how alive an 80 year old man can still be!!!
Lauren’s Sex Ed Class
An elder care facility in the area gets shut down leading to New Amsterdam having to take in its patients. Max questions them taking them all in and it’s explained that all the other hospitals in the area turned them down and New Amsterdam doesn’t have a medical director to make a choice on the matter.
Lauren goes through all the patients and splits them between doctors depending on the care they could be receiving but aren’t. All of them can’t be in the ED, so she moves as many as possible. Lauren bugs Max about being the medical director or at least acting in the interim role between doing this. Max declines but agrees to help her under the guise of a concerned citizen.
When checking all the elderly home patients out and placing them, Lauren learns one of them has an STD. She tells Lauren that she thought she had strep throat and lists other people that also have the same symptoms. After learning this, she needs to ask and check other patients from the home to see how far the STD spread and to get them treatment as it’s curable.
She runs into a patient that is offended by Lauren asking her and swears she hasn’t had sex but later almost dies from symptoms of the STD. When questioned on why she lied, she explains that the way she was raised, you don’t talk about sex, and people who had sex out of wedlock were made fun of. Even in the care home, they were, which raised concern for Lauren.
Lauren gathers all the patients from the nursing home and runs through safe sex practices. She starts answering questions the patients have. They have a good time while doing it. Lauren makes it fun so the patients want to engage in it all. Her patient from before asks a question to Lauren’s surprise.
For goodness’ sake, we may be old after 60/70/80+…., but we’re not dead!