One of the pleasures of writing this blog for so many years - more than a dozen so far - is watching how issues affecting elders sometimes get better.

When I began doing this, the general attitude toward old people having sex was “ick” and in fact, nursing, assisted living and other care homes had rules against sex between residents - even, sometimes, married couples.

Those rules have been widely relaxed in recent years, but I recently ran across this report about how such personal rights of residents in some assisted living residences are restricted:

”...these facilities share a mission of providing a homelike environment that emphasizes consumer choice, autonomy, privacy and control” reports Medical News Today of the research done in several care homes in Georgia...

“The study found that staff and administrators affirmed that residents had rights to sexual and intimate behavior, but they provided justifications for exceptions and engaged in strategies that created an environment of surveillance, which discouraged and prevented sexual and intimate behavior.”

Contrast that to a well-known care home in New York City, that has had a rational, life-giving, respectful attitude toward the sexual desires of its residents for more than 20 years. As Bloomberg News reported it in 2013:

”'The nurse was frantic,” as Gruley relates the story. “She’d just seen two elderly people having sex in a room at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, New York. She asked Daniel A. Reingold, then the home’s executive vice president, what she should do.

“'Tiptoe out and close the door so you don’t disturb them,' he told her.

“In 1995, the home adopted a four-page policy - considered the first of its kind - stating that residents 'have the right to seek out and engage in sexual expression,' including 'words, gestures, movements or activities which appear motivated by the desire for sexual gratification.'”

Notwithstanding complications in such a policy that must be addressed for people with varying degrees of cognitive difficulty, having anything less than a policy closely resembling the one at the Hebrew Home not only breaches elders' human rights, it infantilizes them.

It takes a long time for long-held beliefs to change (see civil rights, women's rights, religious bigotry, etc. etc.) and although I can't be sure, reports of repression of sexual activity in assisted living seems to be declining fairly quickly now.

A recent story in The New York Times reveals that the Hebrew Home has further expanded its liberal attitude toward sex among residents:

”The Hebrew Home has stepped up efforts to help residents looking for relationships. Staff members have organized a happy hour and a senior prom, and started a dating service, called G-Date, for Grandparent Date. Currently, about 40 of the 870 residents are involved in a relationship.”

You can read the Hebrew Home's now six-page Residents Sexual Rights policies and procedures here [pdf].

The Hebrew Home has been ahead of many others on the issue of residents' sexual rights but stories like this one about a recently released research study of 6,800 people age 50 to 89, from Coventry University in the U.K., can help change even more minds:

”In our analysis, we took into account many factors that might influence either sexual activity or cognition – age, education, wealth, levels of physical activity, cohabiting status, general health, depression, loneliness and quality of life.

“Even after adjusting for all of these factors statistically, we established that there is indeed an association between sexual activity and higher scores on tests of cognitive function in people over the age of 50 years.”

Obviously, the next question is whether sex improves brain power or vice versa. Either way, it couldn't be a bad thing.

Sometimes it appears that the business and creative communities are ahead of science. There is a growing number of movies about love between old people, including sex scenes. I wrote about some of them last year that you can find it here.

The website Stitch has been helping elders find love - or just companionship and new friends - for two years now, and there is a movie from 2015, The Age of Love, about an evening of speed dating that was held in Rochester, New York, exclusively for people age 70 to 90. As the producers explain:

”Faced with feelings 'even our own kids never ask about,' each dater’s intimate confessions blend with revealing vérité to shed light on the intense and complex feelings that still lurk behind wrinkled skin and thinning hair.”

Here is the trailer:

The Age of Love is not playing in theaters but there is a list of about two dozen screenings in cities throughout the U.S. at the film's website along with a page where you can find out how to host a screening in your area.

Undoubtedly, there are young people who still don't want to know anything at all about old people having sex (ewww!) and that's fine. They will be glad when they're our age that our generation helped make it okay for them to be sexy.