Participants at a recent Philadelphia Trans-Health Conference panel on trans aging got a firsthand preview of some of the topics that will be addressed in an upcoming documentary from a first-time Philadelphia filmmaker.
Joe Ippolito’s “Growing Old Gracefully” will explore the myriad issues facing transgender people as they approach their twilight years, with a focus on five elders from the Philadelphia region, as well as a wealth of supporting interviews.
The film — which Ippolito conceived of shortly after he turned 40 and began talking with fellow trans people about feeling unprepared to grow older — is about to enter its post-production phase, with an estimated release date next spring.
Ippolito, a licensed clinical social worker and counseling professor, currently has about 50 hours of video footage that he and his editor will cut to make the finished product about an hour-and-a-half.
The project has been supported by a $2,500 Art and Change grant from Leeway Foundation, and Ippolito has also been funding the work from his own pocket.
The five elders highlighted in the film all took part in the PTHC panel discussion, relating the experiences they shared on film.
Ippolito said the subjects run the gamut in age, race, identity, class and other factors, but all illustrate the pressures and fears of aging in the transgender community.
“None of the five people felt prepared for growing older,” Ippolito said, noting that some of the subjects are grappling with finances or with a lack of social support. “All of them are not as emotionally prepared as they would like to be for aging and, while there are various reasons for that, the biggest factors relate back to their transgender identity — whether they transitioned later in life and that delayed them preparing for growing older, or whether they put so much energy into being activists for the trans community that they didn’t focus enough on their own experience.”
The five subjects — Jaci Adams, Miss Major, Jamison Green, Josephine Paulovic and Bill Coghill — are joined in their testimonials by interviews with experts in the health and legal fields, trans activists and representatives of aging groups like Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders.
While the film is not meant as a historical reviewe, Ippolito said it sheds light on the vast changes the community has undergone.
Among the stories he collected were Miss Major’s account of her participation at the Stonewall Riots, the personal experience of one of the first known transmen to undergo lower-bottom surgery in the nation, and one activist’s recounting of the effort to seek social support with the dawn of the digital age — including when AOL banned a chat room he joined because its title included the word “transsexual.”
While trans history will come into play in the film, it will focus largely on the future.
Ippolito said he hopes it can motivate trans — and LGB — people to educate themselves about planning for their own later years.
“We’ll be presenting information about legal issues and financial issues and offering recommendations on steps to help make the whole process a little easier,” the filmmaker said. “I hope that younger folks see this and start to really think about preparing, because it happens so quickly. You just get to that age all of a sudden and look back and think, Wait, what happened here?”
Ippolito plans to bring that message to the masses through film festivals and other viewing engagements, and intends to transform the film into a multimedia interactive project.
He has launched a website for the effort and is populating a blog with stories about transgender-aging topics and his own interviews with transgender subjects. Early next year he plans to launch an oral-history component, through which trans community members can submit their own stories to the site, with the ultimate goal of presenting all of the blog entries and video submissions in a multimedia installation in late 2013.
For more information, visit www.transgenderaging.com.
Jen Colletta can be reached at jen@epgn.com.
