A Nurturing Place for Gay Seniors

The first federally funded day-care center designed to serve gay and lesbian seniors is expected to open here this summer.

The facility will receive $200,000 annually from the Area Agency on Aging of Broward County, including federal funds allocated under the Older Americans Act.

The center, which will be at Sunshine Cathedral, will care for 20 to 30 people a day, said Edith Lederberg, executive director of the agency.

It will be open to anyone, gay or straight, but organizers are specifically seeking to target what they see as a critical need in Fort Lauderdale’s gay community, one of America’s largest.

“The gay population in Broward is getting older and frailer and was ostracized,” Lederberg said. “There were no projects to meet their needs.”

“Gay seniors have special needs,” said Ron English, 58, a retired entrepreneur and co-chair of Sunserve, a social services agency formed in February 2002 that will operate the facility.

“Most of their lives, they were living in the closet. The gay senior won’t talk about his current partner to others, and may not have children coming to visit. Or if there are children, they came from the first part of his life, before the gay partner.”

More than 3,500 adult day-care centers have been opened across the nation to serve seniors who have some degree of physical or mental impairment.

The centers give support services -- such as meals and therapy -- but they also provide seniors with a daily setting for socializing, which is why an environment where people feel comfortable is important.

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Common Interests

By design or not, most of the centers serve people with common interests or needs.

“A straight person will have a family support system to help him cope with unscheduled life events,” said James J. Lopresti, a licensed mental health counselor for Sunserve. “Gay people don’t have that family support structure.”

“We are trying to help them celebrate the senior years of their lives,” added the Rev. Grant Lynn Ford, pastor of the red-brick-fronted cathedral. “Everyone is looking for community. They want affirmation and to hear someone say, ‘You’re home.’ ”

Beginning in August, plans are to operate the facility for seniors during weekdays in a red-carpeted church hall now used for social functions. Nursing stations and bathrooms accessible to the disabled still must be built, following a prolonged rezoning process that took a year.

“We’ll have Meals on Wheels, and we’re hoping to be a feeding station for the elderly in the neighborhood,” said Ford, 64, whose church is affiliated with the fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, founded in Los Angeles 35 years ago as an outreach to the gay community.

The day-care venture will receive federal money to tend to frail or otherwise needy seniors while their usual caregivers, who may be life partners, spouses, relatives or friends, take time off, Ford said.

According to Jean Quam, director of the University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work, older gays and lesbians in the United States have lived a drastically different life from younger generations, and that should be reflected in the care given them.

“Gays age 75 or 80, or up to 100, were very closeted,” said Quam, an expert on the senior gay population. “It was illegal, or immoral or wrong to be out as a gay person.

“Research shows there are two very different groups of gay or lesbian adults: We have the pre-1969 Stonewall riot groups, and the post-Stonewall riot group. The first group was ostracized and lost their jobs if they were thought to be gay.”

Quam was referring to the event widely held to mark the beginning of the modern gay and lesbian rights movement: the June 27, 1969, police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, that sparked the first gay riot in U.S. history. In the ensuing years, organizations vocally demanding gay and lesbian rights began to spring up all over the country.

However, earlier generations already had learned to be discreet, even secretive, about their sexual orientation, Quam said.

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Respect for Privacy

What these people require as they grow older, she said, “is respect for their privacy, taking into consideration their comfort level in giving personal information to others.”

“These people have had to hide all their lives, whether they are a teacher or a politician,” English said.

In their remaining years, Lopresti said, it is important that such seniors feel appreciated, understood and at ease to be themselves.

The Fort Lauderdale day-care facility may be the leading edge of a national trend. Terry Stone, spokesman for the National Adult Day Services Assn., a McLean, Va.-based professional association, estimated that the country needs 5,400 more day-care centers to serve all Americans. In the next quarter-century, the number of people in the United States over age 65 may double, to more than 70 million.

“The gay and lesbian population’s needs for day care would be similar to those of the rest of the population, but they don’t have the support system that others would typically have,” Stone said. “They don’t have children. Most people are taken care of by an adult child. Gays and lesbians depend on friends and other loved ones.”

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue in Miami contributed to this report.