You survived the raids, the firings and the funerals. You buried half your address book and marched until your feet bled. Now picture a nice young woman at a nursing home telling you that you and your husband might be more comfortable if you said you were brothers.
That's the future we've been handed.
Patrick Mizelle spent decades as an activist. When he and his partner, Edwin Fisher, started thinking about where they'd grow old, he asked the question many of us are afraid to ask out loud. "Have I come this far only to have to go back in the closet and pretend we are brothers?"
He wasn't being dramatic. At one facility, a lesbian couple was reportedly told they'd be more welcome if they posed as sisters. A couple who'd spent a lifetime fighting for the right to say the word "wife" got advised to lie about it to get a room.
Then there's Marsha Wetzel. She was a 68-year-old disabled lesbian who moved into a senior community in Niles, Illinois, in 2014. According to her lawsuit, other residents called her names and physically assaulted her. Lambda Legal had to sue on her behalf to make the place answer for it.
A Justice in Aging report found that only 20% of LGBTQ seniors in long-term care felt comfortable being open about who they are. In a 2011 online survey by advocacy groups, 89% of LGBTQ older adults said people like them can't come out in a nursing home without risking their safety.
The newer numbers aren't much comfort. A report from AARP New York and SAGE found that a third of LGBTQ seniors in New York worry they'll have to go back in the closet to get senior housing or long-term care. Among transgender and gender-nonconforming seniors, it was more than half.
Michael Adams, the head of SAGE, told The 19th that most elder care agencies have no training or policies on treating us decently. "And frankly, those fears are reality-based," he said.
Think about what that means. The generation that invented coming out is being told to go back in, just as they can't get up the stairs on their own.
These are people whose biological families often threw them away. Their chosen families are dying off or getting old themselves. Many of them don't have kids checking in every Sunday. So they end up depending on a stranger to bathe them, feed them and hand them their pills, and they lie awake wondering what that stranger will do when she figures it out.
The 19th told a story that I can't get out of my head. An elderly man who used a walker asked to have the pictures of himself and his partner taken down before a home care attendant's first visit. He couldn't reach some of them, so SAGE sent a volunteer to help him take them down.
Read that again. He'd spent a lifetime with that man, and he asked a volunteer to help him hide the evidence.
Some places do it right. Stonewall House in Brooklyn is a senior residence serving LGBTQ people, with a SAGE center and social workers on site. Resident Howard Grossman lives there with his husband, Bradford. "Now I feel safe, and I have a community and I have people I can reach out to," he said. Demand is so high that applicants go into a lottery.
The same crowd that's trying to erase us from history books doesn't need to do a thing about the rest of these folks. All it has to do is wait for them to get frail.
We got out of the closet once by being loud. We just never figured on having to go back in again from a wheelchair.
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