September 1992
PAGE 9 Q-Notes
First U.S. gay/lesbian conference on
aging hits homophobia, agism
by Amanda Bauer
“Lesbians and gay men have been blazing
trails in anti-oppression activism for decades.
We recognize agism as another hurdle in our
lives,” said Del Martin, coauthor of Lesbian!
Woman (20th Anniversary revised edition,
1991, Volcano Press, Volcano, Calif.).
Martin, who said she is 71, spoke during
the keynote session at the first national con
ference of its kind, “Diversity with a Differ
ence: Serving 3 Million Aging Gays and
Lesbians.” The American Society on Aging
(ASA) conference, at San Francisco’s Nikko
Hotel, hosted a larger-than-expected crowd
of 250.
Martin said that aging fosters new fears for
older gay men and lesbians. For example,
many worry that if their sexual persuasion
becomes known while they are in a nursing
home, the institution could refuse them care
or even “drug those of us who are able enough
to challenge the status quo.”
Because aging gays and
lesbians have survived
and remained
independent, they have
less fear of and greater
respect for aging.
She spoke about some of the struggles
gays and lesbians of her generation have had
to survive: McCarthyism, purges of homo
sexuals from the U.S. State Department and
the armed services, police raids on gay bars
and private parties, and police harassment
and brutality.
“Those of us who have reached old age—
in or out of the closet—are survivors,” Martin
said.
She said despite many successes in the
fight against homophobia, discrimination still
exists in many places. “If our society were not
so lesbophobic, lonely old widows might find
satisfaction in a woman-to-woman relation
ship,” she said. Martin cited figures from the
Older Women ’s League showing that women
make up 85 % of all surviving spouses over 65
and 80% of the elderly who live alone. These
are the women who face death and dying
alone.
Martin also mentioned the legal challenges
homosexual couples face. While updating
her will, she and her partner found that eight
legal documents were necessary to cover
property protections and allocations that are
taken for granted by married couples.
Morris Kight, founder of the Gay and
Lesbian Community Services Center
(GLCSC) in Los Angeles, said that 20 years
ago he felt that gay and lesbian persons needed
a social services agency sensitive to their
needs, because they were “the most
underserved part of society.”
In 1971 Kight’s group overcame numer
ous obstacles, such as Internal Revenue Ser
vice resistance to granting them nonprofit
status, and established the nation’s first and
largest social service center for gay and les
bian persons.
The GLCSC eventually outgrew its first
building and recently moved into a five-story
site—formerly occupied by the IRS. “And
we own it,” he declared.
Marcia Freedman, author of Exile in the
Promised Land, an account of her role in
Israel’s feminist movement during the 1970s,
said that although “diversity has become the
buzzword of the aging world, when the issue
of gay and lesbian aging comes up, we are not
included” in the list of minority groups.
Freedman, who is the ASA’s director of
public information and marketing, said that
older gays and lesbians “have a lot to teach
the heterosexual world about aging success
fully.”
She said because aging gays and lesbians
have survived and remained independent,
they have less fear of and greater respect for
aging. Also, because many have been es
tranged from their families for decades, they
are used to forming innovative mutual sup
port systems.
Shevy Healey, a founding member of the
OldLesbian Organizing Committee, based in
Houston, Tex., said that agism undermines
the individualism of all elders and creates “a
common agenda for all old people.” A high
priority is “getting professionals not to define
us but to listen as we define ourselves.”
She emphasized, “When professionals,
regardless of their area of expertise, attempt
to structure their interactions as experts rather
than equals, they dismiss rather than em
power.”
Healey pointed out that in our culture old
age is “medicalized,” viewed as a condition
requiring professional treatment rather than
as a naturtd and valuable part of the life cycle.
“This means that problems of daily living
become categorized as medical problems,”
she said.
She expressed Lustration with a system
that overmedicates, undertreats and dismisses
old people and said she is dismayed that the
old are being pitted against the young in
prpposals to ration health-care.
Older people should be included as paid
researchers—starting in the planning and
design stages—and as staff members of so
cial service programs or as faculty at confer
ences and seminars. She declared, “We are
the only experts on aging.”
One way of promoting social change,
Healey believes, is by developing
intergenerational communities rather than
housing segregated by age and sexual orien
tation. “Building intergenerational commu
nities is a task for lesbians and gays of all
ages,” she said.
Kate Dyer, former legislative assistant for
Massachusetts’ openly gay Democratic con
gressman, Gerry E. Studds, stressed that ag
ing gay men and lesbians can make public
policy responsive to issues involving them by
becoming visible and being heard in the po
litical mainstream.
Dyer, who is now pursuing a law degree,
said that older gays and lesbians can take the
lead in advocacy against both homophobia
and agism, “because old people vote and
everyone knows it.”
Co-sponsoring the event with ASA were
the National Association for Lesbian and Gay
Gerontology and San Francisco’s Coalition
of Agencies Serving the Elderly. For infor
mation about audio cassettes of the 11 ses
sions, contact Conference Audio Services,
806 Lombard St., San Francisco, CA 94133;
(415) 775-TAPE.
This article is reprinted with permission
from Aging Today, the newspaper of the
American Society on Aging.
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