Sunset Sin

By day they loaf in a reverie of sun, and then at night, heedless of moral convention, the unmarried couples bed down together, "living in sin," as they stuffily used to say.

These are not the casual young. They are thousands of elderly couples living out their lives in the sunny, ramshackle old-age ghettos of Florida or Arizona or Southern California. Widows and widowers, they come together for companionship, but frequently dare not marry because if they were a legal couple their Social Security payments would be reduced. So, often to the unaccustomed moralistic dismay of their children, the elderly go "unchurched" and endure the mailman's smirks.

To relieve at least this one indignity of old age, Connecticut Congressman Robert H. Steele has proposed what is now erringly called the "Steele Senility Sex bill," which would allow the same Social Security payments to married and unmarried alike. Not all of the elderly sinners would rush to the church, of course. Says a cranky septuagenarian named Charlie, who has been living with a woman named Mary for five years in the seedy South Beach area of Miami: "I was burned once. I want to know what the hell a woman's like before I marry again."

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