Gay-friendly senior housing, half-century-old idea

[w8liftinglady]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/26/BUPQ1K1S4F.DTL


The concept of gay-friendly senior housing is more than half a century old, although it's only come to fruition in the past decade.

"Very early in the movement for LGBT rights in the United States, people already had the dream of having a place to grow old in safety and security, and a recognition that gay and lesbian elders were vulnerable and may not be welcome in the existing traditional institutions of support for older adults," said Gerard Koskovich, a self-described queer historian, journalist and curator at the GLBT History Museum.

As far back as 1956, One Magazine, the first national publication of what was then called the "homophile movement," wrote about a gay church in Los Angeles, the Church of One Brotherhood, which had an ambitious program including plans - which didn't happen - to build senior housing for gay older adults, according to Koskovich.

In the 1970s, the concept moved forward with plans to create gay senior housing in a couple of different parts of the country, "notably a proposal to turn a semi-ghost town in Nevada into a kind of Sun City for gay and lesbian elders," he said. Those plans, too, didn't come to pass.

[Smarmie Doofus]

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