Sex and Elders: My Eyes! MY EYES!

If picturing elders having sex sickens you, wait until you’re old. (You’ll be glad you can perform at all.) If it stirs your loins, you’re a gerontophiliac, excited by the mature. But whatever excites you, there’s a porn niche for you.

The sex industry — porn, prostitution, paraphernalia, print — generates the largest profits in the world. The pervasive juggernaut makes billions more than Hollywood; more than the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined; more than ABC, CBS, and NBC combined; more than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple, and Netflix combined.

Imagine all this time and money spent working for world peace rather than looking at a piece.

PornHub crunched gay viewing stats discovering “the highest percentage of gay porn viewers is in the South.” Bible Belt busted! A Harvard study concluded Utah had the most porn subscriptions per Internet user. Mormons unmasked!

Search engine PornMD surveyed worldwide user habits. In countries where homosexuality was illegal, gay porn was more popular than straight, exposing, for example, Pakistan, Kenya, staunch Catholic Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Ukraine (recently legislating anti-LGBT censorship laws), and Iran, where, according to its former president, no homosexuals exist because being gay incurs a death sentence.

Hetero, homo, or in between, a porn star’s life isn’t glamorous. They risk vaginal/anal tears, throat hemorrhages, inherent aggressive bruising, prevalent drug use, and STIs including HIV. Performers must pay for expensive, mandatory testing, and unless popular and prolific, don’t make much (in the hundreds, depending on a single scenario). Careers average less than a year, with women undergoing dangerous operations to prolong them — like Elizabeth Starr and her 63 surgeries to correct her banned, life-threatening breast implant pumping her rack to an O-cup. A what? I buy medium-sized tighty-whities and call it a day, but the alphabet soup of brassiere sizes rivals the periodic table. Fill one with two basketballs, that’s an O-cup … I think — I never was good at chemistry.

Health risks afflict sexually active, mature men and women. According to the Center for Disease Control, people over 50 accounted for about 25 percent (288,700) of the estimated 1.2 million people living with HIV infection. In 2013’s nearly 7000 AIDS-related deaths, 37 percent were among people 55 and older, with numbers of men and women of color disproportionately higher.

The shocking increases indicate many older people lack knowledge about HIV prevention and transmission, believe HIV is not their issue, and/or engage multiple partners. Mature women, no longer worried about becoming pregnant, are less likely to use condoms, or know that age-related thinning and dryness of vaginal tissue raise their risk for any STI infection. Women over 50 comprise nearly 10 percent of AIDS cases in the US, tripling over the last decade. Because not every state reports HIV infections, the number of mature women infected is unknown.

I do know education and services are desperately needed to fight the unique stigma elders experience. But also, happily, elders have the potential for more fulfilling sex. Parts of the world judge porn and gay sex as social evils. Regardless, my boyfriend and I, two gay geezers, have found our niche. I’m lucky — and grateful — to be mature.