part 2, The truth about elder care for the LGBT community

“Having worked in the industry as long as I have, I wouldn’t be comfortable living in the retirement communities that are available today,” says Chuck Kerpec, a 30-veteran of the senior living industry.

“Frankly, I’m too far out of the closet and would want to live in a community where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are in the majority and heterosexual people are in the minority,” adds the 56-year-old, who recently left Chicago-based Pathway Senior Living to tackle LGBT issues at Heartland Alliance, Inc., also based in the Windy City.

Considering the current state of senior housing, where most LGBT elders have gone back into the closet (if they had ever stepped out of it in the first place), you might think Kerpec will have to wait awhile before his dream becomes a reality. Not if he has anything to say about it.

“I want to live in a community I help create,” says Kerpec, who is currently eyeing property in Michigan that could be used for such a purpose.

His community wouldn’t be the first, of course—about 25 such communities are in operation today, including Stonewall Communities in Boston, RainbowVision in Santa Fe and Barbary Lane Communities (yes, named after the Tales of the City locale) in Oakland, Calif.—but considering experts expect there will be more than four million LGBT seniors over the age of 55 living in the U.S. by 2017, Kerpec hardly needs to worry that he’ll be entering a flooded market.

“I think there are a lot of people just like me who want to live in their own communities,” he says. “The gay and lesbian seniors of this generation—the ones who are about to enter senior living—were hiding in the closet not so long ago. They kept the secret to themselves, so to speak.”

Baby boomers like Kerpec are a different story.

“Most of us came out when we were younger and aren’t about to be pushed back into the closet when we enter senior living,” he says. “So it just makes sense to me that we would want our own communities, just like there are Catholic or Jewish retirement communities out there.”

Many of the reasons Kerpec wants to create his own LGBT retirement community are the same ones that spurred David Latina to hatch a similar plan nearly five years ago.

Latina says he and business partner Randi Gerson “have known for some time that there’s a need for quality senior housing for LGBT people.”

That fact was highlighted when the pair teamed up to lead the development of San Francisco's LGBT Community Center, which opened its doors in 2002.

“During that process, we learned a lot about the disenfranchised members of our community,” says Latina, who has more than 20 years of experience in housing development. “We knew many disenfranchised segments of the LGBT community were out there, but we couldn’t find them to let them know about the community center and how it could be a resource for them.”

Latina says he and Gerson were particularly interested in reaching out to LGBT seniors, “but we found there was very little connectivity among them—unlike how the straight community is connected to their seniors. There’s a lot of rich social service programming that has been available to straight seniors for a long time but the same can’t be said of LGBT seniors.”

Latina, Gerson and business partner Jeff Dillon hoped to change that by opening Barbary Lane Communities.

“I’ve heard of situations at other communities where, if someone moves in after losing a partner of 50 years, the staff pretends it didn’t happen. Not here,” assures Latina, who says plans are afoot to bring similar communities to San Fransisco, Los Angeles and New York City. “The people living don’t have to turn down the photos on their desks when the housekeeper comes in. They don’t have to worry about being treated with dignity and respect.”

Barbary Lane sounds like the kind of place Renee Mazon and her partner of 25 years would want to live.

Unfortunately, the former activist and the love of her life had to move into a mainstream community 15 years ago due to financial and health concerns—and they’ve been living in the closet ever since.

Mazon and her partner checked out an LGBT community in the southwest a few years ago, the 78-year-old says, “but it just wasn’t an option for us.”

For starters, Mazon couldn’t take the high altitude because she’s hooked up to an oxygen tank 24/7.

An even bigger reason, though, was that “it’s a lot more expensive than where we are now. Here, we can be taken care of through assisted living and nursing care at no additional charge. There, anything above and beyond assisted living came at an additional cost.”

The former cabbie doesn’t expect things to stay that way for long, though.

“I really believe that as more and more baby boomers come into retirement homes or assisted living facilities, all of them will become more gay-friendly. It’s just going to be a natural progression.”