Inside a home for LGBTQ elders
NEW YORK — She was a teenager growing up in Queens when her mother kicked her out of the house for having a girlfriend. It was the 1960s, and being gay was “taboo,” Diedra Nottingham remembered. With nowhere to turn, she wound up sleeping in parks and hallways.
Over the years, Nottingham, now 71, struggled to maintain stable housing, sometimes living with friends or relatives, sometimes in a women’s shelter. Epileptic seizures kept her from holding a steady job, hampering her ability to pay rent.
Weary of the harassment she faced in shelters and single-room occupancy housing, she met a social worker who put her in touch with SAGE, a New York advocacy group for LGBTQ older adults.
In 2020, Nottingham settled into a new one-bedroom apartment in Stonewall House, the group’s LGBTQ-friendly housing development in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. “There are people like me in this building,” she said.
Aging in New York is not easy. Many older residents have little to no savings and a limited budget to pay for food, health care and shelter. Fears of discrimination can complicate matters for aging LGBTQ Americans, many of whom lived through a time when being open about their orientation could lead to physical violence, arrest or getting fired from a job.
In a 2018 survey of adults age 45 and older who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, 34 percent said they were worried they would have to hide their identity to gain access to suitable housing, according to AARP.
“LGBTQ folks are much more likely to grow old single” because many never married or had children, said Michael Adams, CEO of SAGE. “What we have seen historically is that elders have been forgotten, and they don’t have the support they need.”
SAGE was founded in 1978 to help address those challenges in three ways: support for elders, training for caregivers and advocacy of public policy. Over the years, it has grown to a staff of more than 100 and a $15 million annual budget, Adams said, but the mission is still the same: “to lift up and honor and celebrate the elder pioneers of the LGBTQ community.”
In recent years, affordable housing has become a priority for the organization, which opened the 145-unit Stonewall House in December 2019. Last March, it opened Crotona Senior Residences in the Bronx, which has 83 apartments. For Nottingham and other residents, the timing has proved crucial. After plunging in the pandemic, rents in New York are once again climbing to new heights, pushing many out of apartments they can no longer afford. Basic necessities are soaring as inflation hits its fastest pace in more than 40 years.
At Stonewall House and Crotona Senior Residences, roughly one-third of the apartments are set aside for formerly homeless adults, and potential tenants go through a screening process to meet income requirements, Adams said.
“People are just on the edge and need a little support that comes in the form of permanent housing,” he said. “A building like this allows people to get on the right side of that margin.”
SAGE has also created senior community centers at the two buildings. Anyone older than 60 can stop by to eat a meal, join a book club or take a dance class.
At Stonewall House, about a 10-minute walk from downtown Brooklyn, visitors to the community center are greeted with a bulletin board that displays the history of the Stonewall uprising in 1969 in Greenwich Village, which is considered the start of the gay rights movement in the United States. The center has weekly movies, field trips and special events: Pink and blue balloons left over from a recent Transgender Day of Visibility celebration floated listlessly in a corner of one of the multipurpose rooms.
In the cafeteria on a recent morning, Barbara Abrams, a 77-year-old who identifies as LGBTQ , dined on pancakes, bacon and apple juice. She walks 20 minutes from her home every weekday for breakfast and stays at the center until 5 p.m. “This means that much to me,” she said. “I made friends here.”
At the next table, Howard Grossman, 66, had just arrived. “It’s a nice gathering,” he said. “I look forward to it every morning.” Afterward, he returned to the one-bedroom apartment he shares upstairs with his husband, Brad Smith, 61, a night owl who gets up too late to join the “breakfast club,” as Grossman put it.
Their one-bedroom apartment is crowded with papers, boxes and tchotchkes. An oversize cabinet stuffed with Lladró figurines and china teacups dominated the living room. But their home has a view of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, as well as the Empire State Building in the distance, which Grossman painted in an art class downstairs. And it offered a welcoming community for an aging gay couple with few resources.
“This building and this concept has become a nurturing community,” said Grossman, who joined the community center’s walking club.