Pamphlets are one of the ways the Ottawa Senior Pride Network is attempting to make seniors’ community centres more inclusive. [Photo ⒸKayla Wemp]

By Kayla Wemp
Aging can be a frightening prospect for anybody. However, for too many older LGBT Canadians across the country, being open about who they are is an even more worrying concept that comes with potentially serious consequences.

“There are LGBT people in long-term care facilities and going to seniors’ centres, but very few of them are ‘out’ at this point because they’re afraid,” says Marie Robertson, community developer at the Ottawa Senior Pride Network. “Given their history, growing up when it was still a criminal offence to be gay in Canada, they’re terrified to come out.”

Robertson says there are anecdotal reports of discrimination against LGBT seniors, like call bells not being answered as quickly. She describes one case of a gay couple with one man in care and one man visiting who were afraid to show affection in front of the other residents.

“They would go into the bathroom just to hold hands.”

The Ottawa Senior Pride Network and similar community-based organizations across the country are trying to make seniors’ communities more welcoming for LGBT seniors by training staff in seniors’ centres and long-term care homes, and changing the language of paperwork to be less heteronormative.

“We look at the posters they have on the walls in long-term care facilities, we look at what literature is available in the lobby. For example, at the Good Companions they now have a rainbow flag hanging in the lobby.”

A rainbow flag hangs in the lobby of the Good Companions Seniors’ Centre in Ottawa. [Photo ⒸKayla Wemp]

Although things may be slowly changing in cities like Ottawa, experts say a lot more needs to be done to make older LGBT people feel welcome in seniors’ communities.

“We need leadership in these settings that can help organizations engage in change-making,” says Shari Brotman, a professor of social work at McGill University specializing in research on the aging LGBT population. “This means training leadership, first to recognize that there are problems in long-term care, ranging from invisibility to discrimination.”

Her colleague, Bill Ryan, agrees. “It was almost impossible, ten years ago, to find any senior lesbian or gay person to talk about their experiences,” says Ryan. “It was even more difficult to find trans and bisexual people over 65. That is changing, and there is now a body of research looking at aging and service needs of bi and trans folks.”

Ryan says it’s time for that research to be applied to seniors’ institutions across the country.

“Both federal and provincial [laws] are clear that discrimination against LGBT elders is illegal. We now need clear directives from ministries, managers, and policy documents that make it clear that LGBT citizens have the right to adapted services.”

Brian de Vries, a gerontologist at San Francisco State University specializing in life-span developmental psychology, particularly as it relates to LGBT people, explains that the history of distrust between the older LGBT community and institutions like the health-care system can make them seem like hostile environments to some.

“There’s a lot of ambivalence there from LGBT older people,” he says. “They grew up in a time when who they were was deemed unhealthy, unsafe, and illegal. So it takes a lot to shed all the assaults that an individual emerges with from that context.”

“Now here they are, late in life, needing to seek medical care from those same agencies that earlier in their life had labelled them as sick and immoral. So that’s really a complex and difficult spot to be.”

V ancouver’s Dean Malone, the director of operations at CareCorp Seniors’ Services and owner and president of Plum Living Support Services, is working on creating services for LGBT seniors’ that focus on building communities. He says that although discrimination does exist in levels of care, the question older LGBT people ask themselves isn’t always if they’re going to receive worse care. Instead, a lot of the time they worry that they will be the only LGBT person in the community.

“No matter how good the care is, there’s always that social isolation. I think what people aren’t talking about is this fear — you’re alone, you’re one amongst many, you’re in a real minority.”

To help resolve some of these concerns, Malone has made changes to policies in his long-term care organization CareCorp through clauses in employment contracts, saying that the organization “values all people” regardless of their background, sexual orientation, or gender identity, as well as by educating the staff.

“They need to know that we’re going to deal with diversity issues right up front.”

To back that up, he says that he’s taken steps to ensure that staff have access to education in order to understand the lived experience of LGBT people. The thing that’s not being done and needs to happen, he says, is educating the residents.

“What are we doing to help people in residential care, who are living with diverse groups, so that they themselves can have educated conversations around diversity issues?” asks Malone.

“It is possible that there are some older adults living in care that never really knew a gay person. Although they might have known the two women that were gym teachers and lived together, no one would have said they were lesbians. They talked about it in a different way, no one had an up-front conversation.”

Through his other organization, Plum Living, Malone is working on the concept of creating an LGBT community for older adults in Vancouver. While he’s learned through the process that a standalone community is not financially feasible at the moment, he says the idea of adapting residential care to focus on meeting the needs of specific groups is an integral change that will need to take place in the future of care for Canada’s aging population.

“I still know that there will be a day when there will be a place for us. What it looks like and where it is, I don’t have the answer yet.”