PALM SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA – Assisted living is not in Jim McDivitt’s plans.
The spry and sociable 72-year-old seems to view long-term care in the same vein as jail time.
He’s not alone. The majority of seniors in assisted living were placed there by their children, said John Redford, executive director of Brookdale Mirage Inn in Rancho Mirage. He’s worked in several area senior-care homes.
But McDivitt, like a lot of gay seniors, doesn’t have children.
“I have only one other living relative and that’s my brother and he lives in Florida,” he said. “I’ve got a circle of friends; most of them are my age, or over 60.”
When in need, older adults typically turn first to their partners, then to adult family and finally to other relatives, said Brian DeVries, a gerontology researcher and part-time Palm Springs resident. Outside help, then, is a last resort. But LGBT seniors are less likely to be partnered or have children and may be disconnected from their families.
“The last line of defense for heterosexual people is often the first line for LGBT people,” DeVries said.
The burgeoning field of LGBT aging research shows that senior-care homes can be inhospitable environments for the group that is most likely to need them.
Palm Springs — where as many as half the residents identify as LGBT — can’t be compared to just any city. Still, a 2010 report suggests that some Palm Springs LGBT seniors still feel stigmatized.
“My sort of sense is that the issues aren’t that different,” said DeVries, who analyzed Riverside County Office of Aging research. “If they have that sort of effect here, imagine what it must be like elsewhere.”
In a 2010 survey of 769 gay seniors, family members and care providers across the nation, 43 percent reported cases of mistreatment. More than three-fourths of LGBT survey respondents said they would hide their sexual orientation should they end up in institutional care.
Riverside County ranks ninth in the country in the number of same-sex couples that included a partner over the age of 65, according to census data. In 2007, the Riverside County Office of Aging surveyed 530 LGBT people — the majority from Palm Springs and over the age of 50 — about their perception of services directed to older adults.
DeVries and his team reanalyzed the study’s results for “Out in the Desert,” a paper set to publish in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Homosexuality on LGBT aging. A professor at San Francisco State University, he’s serving as guest editor for the issue as well, which is set to include close to a dozen research papers on LGBT aging. The government doesn’t collect information on sexual identity and the field is young, so comprehensive, national data doesn’t exist.
“If we treat 65 and older as if it’s one group of people, then logically we have to also treat people, say, 30 and younger, as if they’re one group of people,” he said.
The results suggested that with increasing age, respondents felt less comfortable using services that were gay identified.
Jill Gover, director of counseling at the LGBT Community Center of the Desert in Palm Springs, isn’t surprised. She uses the term “pre-Stonewall” to describe that oldest cohort, or those coming of age before the 1969 Stonewall Riots, a series of demonstrations following a police raid at a Greenwich Village gay bar.
They have “residual trauma from intense homophobia and prejudice they experienced that isn’t as potent today,” Gover said. “Not that it doesn’t exist, but it’s changed.”
She heads the center’s “Out and About” program, which provides sensitivity training for local senior- care staff members. In addition to a history lesson in gay rights, the training includes discussion of terms such as gender identity and sexual orientation, and statistics from “Stories from the Field,” the report based on nationwide responses.
Staff members are encouraged to ask questions that aren’t presumptive, such as, “with whom do you share your household?” and “whom do you consider to be family?”
But Gover doesn’t believe Palm Springs seniors experience the types of abuse reported in “Stories from the Field.”
“I think there are plenty of places where it’s very unfriendly and ugly,” she said. “Here it’s more of people just being insensitive; more clueless than just malicious.”
In the “Stories from the Field” survey, 78 percent of LGBT respondents said they felt they either could not or weren’t sure if they could share their sexual orientation and or gender identity with staff of senior care facilities. In the Palm Springs- centric Riverside County survey, a much smaller proportion, about one-quarter, of gay and lesbian respondents said they would be uncomfortable accessing the Office on Aging’s social services because of their sexual orientations.
Redford, the Brookdale Mirage Inn director, said when he was at a Palm Desert senior community about seven years ago, the gay residents weren’t interested in being bused to LGBT events. It didn’t seem to be an issue of fear to him, but a distaste for calling attention to themselves in that way.
“I don’t know that people are really open about it; but I don’t know that they’re hiding it,” he said. “I haven’t heard of anyone being uncomfortable, but then, that generation wouldn’t say.”
At Brookdale, which has sensitivity training annually, he said sexual orientation and gender identity aren’t typically discussed. There’s no cliquishness or animosity, or differentiation among residents at all.
“We’re certainly not having Assisted-living Pride Week,” he said. “And nobody is getting up from the table and going, ‘Well, he’s gay.’”
Should McDivitt and his friends enter care at some point, however, Assisted-living Pride Week may not be out of the cards.
“I have as much right to be there, but you’re right there’s different personalities,” he said, before shifting gears to add, “Hell no. I won’t go back in the closet.
“Either accept me or don’t,” he said. “We’re living in California; we’re living in Palm Springs and it is 2012.”
from The Desert Sun
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Just One Look... # 275
