A discussion on aging in the LGBT community

Lambda Legal held a panel discussion at Resource Center on Wednesday evening, Nov. 23, called “Reinforcing the Safety Net: Economic Insecurity and LGBT Elders,” with panelists discussing a variety of issues affecting LGBT seniors.

Karen Loewy, Lambda Legal’s senior counsel and senior strategist based in New York, and Geron Gadd, senior attorney for AARP Foundation litigation based in Washington, D.C., were among the panelists.

Gadd said AARP has 900,000 members who identify as LGBT, and panelist Robert Emery, a founder of Coalition for Aging LGBT, said there are 200,000 LGBT elders in the four-county DFW area.

Silver Pride founder Portia Cantrell said her members often feel invisible and like “We don’t matter.”

Many LGBTQ seniors didn’t build a retirement income and have few resources they can access if they aren’t HIV-positive. Cantrell said it was even worse for those in nursing homes.

For those in long-term relationships, years of lost benefits put them behind peers who are opposite-sex couples who have been allowed to marry, Emery noted. And Loewy added that LGBT seniors are more likely to live alone and not have children to help care for them, and they may be cut off from other family relationships.

“A lifetime of discrimination compounds itself,” she said.

University of North Texas researcher Bart Poche pointed out that racial discrimination compounds the issues for LGBT elderly who are black or Latinx, and that women, who often earn less than men, face additional challenges.

Panel members offered a variety of solutions. Lambda Legal is helping through its impact litigation. For example, a case in Illinois involving a woman in a nursing home who was bullied when staff and other residents learned she was lesbian had a positive outcome in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and is not being appealed to the Supreme Court. In that ruling, the court held that the nursing home was responsible when they knew this treatment was taking place and did nothing to stop it.

Locally, Jonathan Thunderword of Black Trans Advocacy talked about his group’s annual convention and the culture it’s developed of younger trans members adopting older members with an ethic of “We’re all in this together.”

Silver Pride is providing activities as well as meals for its members. Meals are cooked by retired chefs who are group members with food mostly donated by some of the group’s more well-off members who are there more for the comeraderie.

LGBT Coalition for Aging LGBT released a 78-page guide to assisted living facilities in the DFW area and is providing training for those and other senior services that would like to be LGBT-culturally competent. This year, the guide will also include home healthcare facilities.

The video of the discussion is available online here and below.

— David Taffet

— David Taffet