On “The Golden Girls,” the central characters were conspicuously disconnected from their descendants. The bonds that mattered weren’t the vertical ones, linking the Golden Girls to other generations, but the horizontal ones, linking them to one another. The show’s memorable theme song, “Thank You for Being a Friend,” commends older women for supporting each other, not their grandchildren.

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On “The Golden Girls,” the central characters were conspicuously disconnected from their descendants. The bonds that mattered weren’t the vertical ones, linking the Golden Girls to other generations, but the horizontal ones, linking them to one another. The show’s memorable theme song, “Thank You for Being a Friend,” commends older women for supporting each other, not their grandchildren.
The sexuality of the characters was also subversive, Daniel Immerwahr writes. At the height of the AIDS crisis, they lived in a chosen family and had nonmarital, nonreproductive sex of the sort that society found discomfiting. Unsurprisingly, the show gained a queer following. A performer who played Dorothy in a long-running San Francisco drag tribute explained the allure: “Four strong female characters with questionable fashion sense who sit around and talk about sex over cheesecake? Any gay man can relate.”
For all the show’s high spirits, there was “a sadness at its core,” James Chappel writes in his new book, “Golden Years.” Retirement communities, sitcoms, the A.A.R.P., and the Gray Panthers all promised that “active” seniors could work, love, play, travel, and raise hell better than anyone. This ebullience, however, required keeping bleak thoughts at bay. Friendship aside, the Golden Girls had moved in together because they were aging and had lost husbands. “It may not be too long,” Rue McClanahan’s Blanche observes in a rare moment of introspection, “before we’re elderly ourselves.”
Read Immerwahr on how “The Golden Girls” reframed senior life: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/PlcFH0

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