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HOUSING IS URGED FOR GAY ELDERS
By: Yvonne Abraham
Bostonglobe, October 30, 2001
Gay and lesbian senior citizens in Massachusetts are calling for publicly subsidized elderly housing built specifically for them, saying they face homophobia and are often forced to go back into the closet when they move into traditional elderly complexes and nursing homes.
A report to be released today by a consortium of advocates for the elderly, gays and lesbians, says men and women who came out in the 1970s and 1980s and have lived their lives openly now find themselves increasingly dependent and fearful of revealing their sexual identity. "For people who find themselves in elder housing, whether it's public housing or otherwise, they often feel it's just not safe for them to be out" of the closet, said David
Aronstein, committee member and president of Stonewall Communities, which is seeking a site for a gay and lesbian elderly housing development in Boston.
"There were numbers of examples in the research we did, where people experienced blatant prejudice and discrimination, sometimes by staff and sometimes by other residents," he said.
The study is a pioneering attempt to determine the needs of the area's gay and lesbian elderly. The advocates estimate there are 15,000 gays and lesbians ages 60 and older living in Greater Boston.
The consortium, called the Greater Boston Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Aging Project, recommends a range of measures to accommodate this population, which it says is growing: sensitivity training about homosexuality for those who care for the elderly; a Medicaid waiver to allow gay and lesbian partners to remain in the couple's home when one of them enters a nursing home; a governor's commission on gay and lesbian elders similar to the panel established in the early 1990s on gay and lesbian youth; and efforts to bring gay and lesbian elders together for meals and group activities.
The report does not put a price tag on the initiatives it proposes. But in a time of dwindling state resources, the most expensive of the report's recommendations, the housing initiative, would probably face a steep uphill climb.
Aronstein said he knows of only a few gay-specific housing developments for the elderly in the country, in Florida, Southern California, San Francisco, and New Mexico. He is also proposing his own project, consisting of mostly market-rate housing units for gay elder residents, but he and his partners have yet to find a site and it is years away from completion.
The report drew on a series of focus groups with 25 gays and lesbians aged 55 to 87, with an average age of 67. Some of the participants lived in their own homes or apartments, others in elderly projects. Some residents of the senior housing reported loneliness, coldness from other residents, and nursing staff who did not want to touch them once they became aware of the elders' sexuality.
Disclosing their sexuality to doctors and bureaucrats was difficult for many in the group: Most people assumed that because they are old, they are heterosexual. Some had had bad experiences when they said they were gay or lesbian.
"There's definitely a feeling of tension, and a feeling of just not quite belonging," said Rev. Joyce Crowder, 66, a United Church of Christ minister and a lesbian who lives in subsidized housing in Jamaica Plain and was part of the focus group.
Crowder is openly gay, but she said she knows of several fellow residents who are also gay but who hide that fact from other residents. She said she has had some tense encounters with neighbors who dislike her lifestyle choices, criticized her support for state Senator Cheryl Jacques, a lesbian, in the recent 9th District Congressional primary, and pulled down her posters advertising a film festival for Gay Pride week.
With her health deteriorating, Crowder said she worries that she will soon need to be cared for by visiting nurses, and is concerned that those nurses be "gay or gay-friendly." "I would like for us to have a choice of living with a group of gay and lesbian people," Crowder said. "Or be accepted as individuals in nursing homes."
The report also focused on some unique social challenges faced by gays and lesbians. Some said they felt a growing sense of disconnection from others as they got older, particularly if they had lost partners. They also said the differences between lesbian and heterosexual women blurred with age, making it more difficult to identify other lesbians.
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