■ICJâ MAY 6, 2011 •gay&grey. WWW.JUSTOUT.COM It Gets Better, Grandpa Gay & Grey program raises awareness of invisible generation BY AARON SPENCER RE FOR DETAILS ■■KH 16 years young, locally owned, modern & moving forward. “There really is no place like hip.” I laving a closet, hut staying out of it Gay 6c Grey is a multifaceted program. It includes housing efforts, diversity training and social opportunities, among other services. Until January, the program was called FTder Resource Alliance. Friendly House, which runs the program, changed the name. It also adopted the SH A RE (Senior Housing and Retirement Enterprises) housing nonprofit into the program last year. Now, SH A R E has become a housing sub­ committee o f Gay 6c Grey, meant to address the lack of affordable housing for sexual mi­ nority seniors and find LGBTQjfriendly en­ vironments if they must go into senior homes. SH A RE was established in 2001 by partners Mary Beth Brindley and Evelyn Hall. “Evelyn and I actually talked about getting SH A RE together after we had visited a friend who was 15 years older than we were,” recalls 6c Grey is also working on an evaluation pro­ cedure for senior homes. The evaluations, which senior homes will be able to request, will be used to determine which senior homes are LGBTQJriendly, and those homes will be included in a new directory. Getting past the “dirty old man” When Carol French, 69, was still teaching high school English, she attended a program called Rainbow Train, a project out of Seattle that provided training for health care provid­ ers on sensitivity toward LGBTQ_patients. •1APTY DA'. L GUS* MODERN OUWWG TABLES ING CHAIRS, ^ ^ ^ k i U C H E S , RAGE & A C C E flH I When Natasha French’s brother started having children, she was happy for him. But the more she thought about them, the more those newborn babies reminded her of her own mortality. French, who is a lesbian, doesn’t plan to have kids. So when she saw her brother with his children, she considered her parents, who were growing older. Soon, she thought, her parents would need their children to take care o f them. And her brother’s new children, they would take care of him when he’s old. But then she thought, “Who’s going to take care o f me?” French is 34, but she can already catch a glimpse o f a future where no family is around to help her when *she needs it. That future shouldn’t be hard to imagine; examples o f it are everywhere. As many as 10,000 sexual minority seniors live in the Portland metro area, according to program officials behind Gay 6c Grey, an ef­ fort by the nonprofit Friendly House to pro­ vide resources to LG BTQ_ seniors. Program organizers say those seniors are more likely to live alone and without family support than their heterosexual peers. French recently started volunteering for Gay 6c Grey, motivated by her own experience and need to create her own family as she grows older. “Once I found out the program existed, I got really excited about it,” French says. “I al­ ways wanted to help seniors in the Portland queer community hut didn’t know how to go about it.” French’s example is exactly what Gay 6c Grey leaders want. Program officials are try­ ing to raise awareness— this month during the annual Gay 6c Grey expo— of a plight they say is largely invisible to others in the gay population. “In our community, you’ve got to be hot and young and hunky,” says Bruce Meisner, a participant in the program, “and when you get old, you’re just a dirty old man.” Gay 6c Grey is attempting to change that perception. “Younger generations don’t realize how much effort has been put in to pave the way to allow them to walk down the street arm in arm,” says Mya Chamberlin, head of the Gay 6c Grey program. “We need to honor seniors and the work they’ve put in.” “ In o u r c o m m u n ity , y o u ’v e g o t to b e h o t a n d y o u n g a n d h u n k y, a n d A Gay & Grey volunteer makes a sign for Portland Pride 2010. w h e n yo u g e t o ld , y o u ’re ju s t a d irty o ld m a n .” -BRUCE MEISNER That got the ball rolling for what would become Gay 6c Grey’s diversity trainings. If the SH A R E housing program was an at­ tempt to find LGBTQjfriendly places for se­ niors to live, Gay 6c Grey’s diversity trainings seek to create more o f those places. Gay 6c Grey offers these trainings to senior homes, college classes, social service agencies and other groups. Carol French (no relation to Natasha) wrote the curriculum for the trainings, and now that she’s retired, she volunteers three- hour chunks o f her time to present them. Senior homes and other health care envi­ ronments can be intimidating for LGBTQ_ seniors, French says. Senior homes are micro­ cosms, like high schools, and often just as scary. Brindley, 71. Brindley and Hall visited their older friend in a senior home, where the friend told them she had decided to keep her sexual orientation a secret. “You’ve been an L G B T activist,” Brindley remembers saying to her, “Why are you going back into the closet?” Their friend said, “T’m going to spend the rest of my life here, and I don’t want to be ostracized, ” Brindley recalls. So as Brindley and Hall were walking back to their car, Brindley turned to Hall and said, “You know, in 10 years, this could be us. We have to do something.” “And the ‘doing something’ was starting “You know, they’re seniors,” she says. SH A RE," Brindley says. “They’re set in their ways. They’re not even The original idea for SH A R E was to pro­ going to be as open-minded as kids in high vide affordable housing for LGBTQ_scniors, school.” but organizers couldn’t manage to raise The trainings work like this: A presenter enough funds to purchase a building. like French first lays out the lesson. It includes, So today, the housing assessment program for example, information on how partners of operates as a referral service for seniors look­ LGBTQ^seniors are often ignored in health ing for LGBTQT'riendly senior homes. Gay care environments. Other lessons include how