A 70-Year-Old Couple Going Viral For Some Genuinely Sweet Naked Photos Is Something We Should All See Today
BoredPanda – The models in the picture – Gerry, 75, and Darwin, 70 – have been in love with each other for over twenty years, and as you can see, their love looks as strong as ever. The shots were taken by Jade Beall, a photographer from Arizona, and since she uploaded them to her Facebook page they’ve been liked over 34,000 times and shared by more than 18,000 people.
After the pictures went viral, Gerry wrote Jade a beautiful letter. “We wanted to show that wrinkles and aging, sagging body parts are NOT barriers to love unless you let them be,” he wrote. “Like fine wine or good cheese, we are more fully ourselves and more full of Love in our 70’s than we ever were in our 30’s and 40’s.”
To be honest, my first thought for a blog today was not “Let’s get out there and post some naked old people rubbing up against one another” (that’s usually Nate’s beat and I try not to step on other people’s toes). But today is one of those internet days where I feel reflective about the whole exercise. Riggs gave a breakdown of the Alton Sterling and Philando Castile police shootings which you can go and get your facts from. And after you do that, you can come back and we can talk about this couple here captured by photographer Jade Beall.
After watching the videos and reading that blog, if you can, put aside whatever anger and pause whatever racially charged ideas pop up for a second. And look here at the photos of 75-year-old Gerry and 70-year-old Darwin:
Is there a more perfect juxtaposition to the acrimony that goes on online on a day like this? I don’t know much about Gerry and Darwin besides this really touching letter he wrote after the pics first went viral and these photos but to me it’s something so fitting to see and it truly warms my heart on a day where the world just seems like a bummer.
And now I’ll talk from the heart (aka soapbox time but whatever). I’ve worked for Barstool for two and a half years and every day I’m grateful for the opportunity to come in and share some dumb things I think you guys would enjoy seeing, sprinkle in a few jokes, and maybe provide some diversion from people’s days. It’s the job I’m happiest doing. But days like today after a racially and in some ways nationally divisive situation are the least enjoyable part of the job. And it’s not because I’m teeming with white guilt as I’m so often helpfully told. It’s because I genuinely want to believe the best in all of us as a people, that sometimes we can put our shit aside and realize when something is wrong and needs to be fixed. It’s idealistic in a childish way and I know that. But when you work online and particularly for somewhere like Barstool where we touch literal millions of people each day on the site and social media, you see so many opinions, so many of them angry and vocal, it really can make it difficult to keep faith in the process.
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Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were human beings. They were Americans. Their deaths were recorded on video and will be watched by millions of people online today. But for a large section of the population, they’re “the Louisiana shooting” and “the Minnesota shooting,” they’re guys who were asking for it because they had a gun and were dealing with police, somehow issues amongst their race with police means they’re entitled to a lesser right to live and be treated humanely. One may have been a former criminal but one worked at a school and was a father, and that doesn’t matter in terms of how they’ll be judged by some. They’re now fodder to be broken down on video, to critique and search and find reason to somehow attribute their death to anything else besides “Fuck, our country is kind of racist sometimes and we need to fix that.”
So as people of the internet, we can choose to pick apart strawman arguments about “Well he wasn’t a LEGAL gunowner because he was a felon” or “We need to wait to see more angles to fully decide” or you can look at it and realize that regardless of race these are your fellow Americans having their lives taken from them. Instead of fixating on whether someone was legally carrying or not, think about how so many of these guys have died not for their actions, but because of the threat they’re perceived to be because of others. Instead of quoting crime stats, imagine how it would feel to be the one getting pulled over for a broken taillight and knowing there’s at least a fractional chance you might leave in a body bag. Empathy won’t fix everything but struggling to connect the dots to justify another American’s life being taken from them is a much worse, much more cynical attitude to take. When it comes down to it, we’re all in this shit together as a nation and I’d rather be dumb and idealistic and hope we all figure it out to treat each other like humans rather than statistics.
And if not, I’ve got Gerry and Darwin here to give me some hope. It may be a lot of pressure to put on the artistic symbolism of an elderly couple I’ve never met, but at least it’s something.
