part 1, The truth about elder care for the LGBT community

Renee Mazon, 78, has had quite a life. Although the no-nonsense New York native started things off a bit traditionally—she was married for 16 years and raised two kids—life took a decidedly different turn when she came out of the closet. A few good examples: The former cabbie participated in protests that followed the Stonewall riots and attended an early meeting of the group that would later become PFLAG.

Mazon was forced to fold up her rainbow flags and riot gear and put them back in the closet, however, when she and her partner of 25 years entered a retirement community 15 years ago.

When the pair first moved into the community, they shared a studio while awaiting a larger space.

“When we were in that situation, half the people wouldn’t speak to us,” Mazon recalls.

She eventually moved into her own apartment in the same building.

“I couldn’t take it,” Mazon says. “Once we lived in separate places, everybody recognized us.”

It was a painful lesson learned for both women.

“We sit with other couples all the time and they talk about their relationships, but we don’t—and we’ve been together for 25 years,” Mazon says. “That’s not easy for me. To me, silence equals death.”

Unfortunately, Mazon’s experience doesn’t seem to be all that unusual for LGBT seniors in retirement communities, assisted living facilities and nursing homes.

“There’s still a lot of discrimination going on” in senior housing, says Micki Cianciosi, vice president of operations for Oakland, Calif.-based Barbary Lane Senior Communities, a 46-unit operation that bills itself as “a place where every letter of LGBT (and their straight friends, of course) can live life to the fullest and love without boundaries”.

Cianciosi, a 10-year veteran of the senior living industry, says many such communities “are not embracing or open. When LGBT seniors show up, there is no real push to see what can be done to make them comfortable, what can be done to make sure it’s the right fit for them. Absolutely zero thought is put into it”.

David Latina, founder and president of Barbary Lane Senior Communities, has had similar experiences within the senior living industry.

“What statistics show and what we’ve heard from people who come on tours of our community is that most LGBT seniors encounter what they identify as ‘culturally incompetent formal care settings'."

“They’re treated as if they’re heterosexual,” explains Latina, who has more than 20 years of experience in housing development and helped build San Francisco's LGBT Community Center, which opened its doors in 2002. “There’s not a lot of outward, blatant discrimination, as far as I know, but there are no accommodations made to keep people connected to their communities or to identify them as who they are.”

Latina says ignorance and a lack of sensitivity on the part of those running such facilities are to blame. As an example: A study released by New York City-based Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE) in 2000 found that just 13 percent of long-term care facilities discuss sensitivity to sexual orientation while training staff. Yet 25 percent of those same facilities said they knew they had LGBT residents.

Comparatively, religious and ‘cultural’ sensitivity training were found to be provided at 65 and 71 percent of senior communities, respectively.

“There’s a huge disconnect,” Latina says. “Many communities simply aren’t reaching out to this segment of the population.”

That kind of mindset has led to the creation of environments where many LGBT seniors are afraid to come out of the closet—and their caregivers are unaware they exist.

“For the current generation of LGBT seniors, it can sometimes be difficult for them to be their own advocates,” says SAGE Executive Director Michael Adams. “We’re talking about people who came of age in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, when it was extraordinarily difficult to assume a gay identity. For some people, to take that on late in life is overwhelming.”

Adds Steven David, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in geropsychology-neuropsychology at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. “These people have had their independence pulled out from underneath them, and then you add to that the uncertainty many of them have about whether or not the facility they are in is gay-friendly. It makes a lot of them keep quiet, which in turn keeps a lot of management and staff from realizing gay seniors are in their midst."

“A lot of these people are not only scared about being accepted if they come out as LGBT, but are scared of being abused,” David adds. “They’re fragile and vulnerable and they don’t know if the people taking care of them will approve of who they are.”

Unfortunately, Chuck Kerpec, who is gay, has worked in the senior living industry for over 30 years... and he doesn’t expect mainstream providers to change their tune any time soon.

“I don’t think they’re concerned about it, to tell you the truth,” says Kerpec, who recently left Chicago-based Pathway Senior Living to tackle LGBT issues at Heartland Alliance, Inc., also based in the Windy City. “There are plenty of LGBT seniors in their communities now, but they don’t know about them because they’re hiding in the closet."

The next generation isn’t going to be like that, though, and how are these communities going to deal with that—or even attract LGBT people? They won’t even consider such communities if they don’t seem supportive.”