Beyond Age Discrimination Video Program

Panel 2 - GLBT Issues

Phil Duran is the staff attorney for OutFront Minnesota, an advocacy and public policy agency for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Minnesotans and their allies.

Barbara Satin is a transgender activist and a founder of GLBT Generations, a group that works to educate people about the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons as they grow older.

Wally Swan has worked with members of major GLBT senior groups throughout the state, including Minneapolis/St. Paul Prime Timers, a group of mature gay and bisexual men who come together to enjoy social, educational, and recreational activities.

Edited Transcript of Panel 2 (GLBT Issues)

Rondah Kinchlow: We are talking tonight about the availability of services for the GLBT community in Minnesota, whether you are 6 or 60 or older. And I think it's wonderful that we have this panel because we kind of can go that range from the young to the mature. Tell me your role, if you will, Barbara, in this whole discussion. How does your organization play into this? How do you help?

Satin: Our focus is on the aging issues that face GLBT people, particularly when they become dependent on others, where they have need for social services, medical services, whatever. We want to be sure that education is in place and training is in place, that providers understand unique situations that they're going to be dealing with in dealing with GLBT people.

Kinchlow: Now, you're in a unique situation because you're the founder, and what I wonder is, are you an outgrowth of a need, of people sending you notes and letters or discussions saying, "We need to have this," or did you just think, "This is a very good idea"?

Satin: No, we had an actual situation in the church that I belonged to, Spirit of the Lakes United Church of Christ in Minneapolis. We had one of our transgender members go home on a Sunday evening and suffer a stroke, and we realized in the problems that this person faced, having to basically step away from being Gail to going back to being Glen in order to get services, that this was going to be something that not only she had to face but is going to be faced by a lot of transgender people, but also a lot of gay and lesbian and bisexual people as their orientation becomes known. And for many, particularly the currently old, that's an issue that a lot of them don't want it to become known. They've lived their lives pretty much in a stealth situation. But you have a whole new group of people coming through who aren't going to be comfortable with that, because they're out, and they're proud, and caught in the middle are going to be the service providers who, in one case, don't think that there are any GLBT people because we don't have any in our client base, and then all of a sudden, they're going to be faced with people coming in and say, "You know, I'm GLBT, and I'm proud of it, and I expect this kind of service from you."

Kinchlow: Much more to say there, but when you were telling a story about the church member who went home, you were shaking your head, Wally, and tell me about your part of this discussion. Where do you fall in here?

Swan: I'm coming at things from the viewpoint of systemic economic discrimination that's experienced by GLBT people, and what I look at is a survey that was done in 2005 that showed 16% of lesbians and gay men, 5% of bisexuals, reported having experienced employment discrimination. Transgender people have found at least 20%, and as many as 57% have experienced some type of employment discrimination. Now, this is during their career when they're building assets and trying to build up their retirement capability, and what happens as a result of that is that when they get to retirement, typically, the average income of a gay man or lesbian is in the $35,000 to $38,000 range. And the career tracks of people tend to go up together, heterosexuals and gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, but when they get to $50,000, the gay people drop down here, and the heterosexual people keep going up. And the effect of that is that seniors have less of a asset base to build upon, and as a result, gay seniors are more likely to be poor, live alone, have a weaker support system, and women, especially lesbians 65 and older who are twice as likely to be poor than straight women, and you also have gay and lesbian couples trying to get rights, and they're not getting those rights. But about 80% of gay men over 55 are singles, and they are working with a much lower asset base. I've seen estimates as high as 75% of them are living on $17,000 a year or less, which is the Social Security base. So that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about in terms of discrimination.

Kinchlow: I think a lot of times also in this discussion, that's the missing piece that we don't really get to talk too much about because many of us don't know that much about it. But tell me, Phil Duran, what is your part in this whole discussion?

Duran: I'm the legal director for OutFront Minnesota, and OutFront has been existence now for about 22 years, and we're the largest organization in Minnesota working for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender equality. We're most known for our work at the state capitol in St. Paul, but we do work in a number of other contexts as well. We get any number of inquiries—phone calls, letters, emails, what have you—from people who have experienced discrimination. It may be employment discrimination like Wally's talking about, or it may be a situation where an individual has tried to get medical care, for example, and experienced problems related to their sexual orientation or their gender identity or who find themselves in any number of other kinds of specific circumstances. What we try to do is to either connect them with a lawyer in the community who can help them, assuming that there is a legal remedy available to them, or in some cases, we have actively assisted them directly in filing a complaint with either the state Department of Human Rights or one of the local departments of human rights in Minneapolis or St. Paul to try to help find a solution to make this person whole, but hopefully also to educate not only that particular employer or provider, but others about how they are expected to serve or employ, if you will, GLBT people within the structure of Minnesota law.

Kinchlow: I think that's interesting that your cases are not just about representing one client but representing a community and speaking for a community. But have things changed enough to where the GLBT community feels more protected now, feels more represented in Minnesota?

Satin: Absolutely. OutFront can take a lot of the credit for that through the Human Rights Act in 1993. We've had 16 years, actually, of people having protection under the GLBT human rights protection, and that has made a significant difference in the way in which people live their lives and are free to express who they really are, and that's part of the issue that's going to raise a concern for service providers who provide senior services, because they're going to be dealing with a contingent of people who no longer are hiding or isolated. They're out and about, and they want to have services provided to them as who they are.

Kinchlow: But a change in law does not always mean a change in awareness or the level of awareness, but have you been able to see that?

Swan: I mentioned earlier that gays and lesbians experience significant—in double-digit levels of—discrimination. In the states where there is an anti-discrimination law on the books such as Minnesota, there is a decrease of somewhere between 2% and 4%. So you're still in the double digits.

Duran: It's also, I think, important to make the distinction that even though Minnesota has a state law, obviously, that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity —and that was the first in the country, by the way—I think that we can probably all say anecdotally, the experience in the Twin Cities metropolitan area is probably going to be different than the experience in greater Minnesota.

Satin: Oh, absolutely.

Duran: I think what you're saying, Barb, is absolutely right, that you've got this group of people who are coming up and saying, "I expect to be treated thus and such as a GLBT person." And their colleague out in Hibbing or Marshall or something like that, they may not be quite there. They may feel in their community that they don't have the support, even though that law exists, and I think it's important as we have that conversation to recognize that what we may take for granted here in the Cities may not be what plays out in all parts of the state.

Satin: Let me add something to that, because there's another side to the situation going back to Gail—Gail and Glen. It happened a few years ago—the human rights protections were in place —and a lot of people said to Gail, "Well, you were protected. Why didn't you assert your rights?" When you're in a situation where you're dependent on other people for your care, are you going to fight a battle and lose the war? It's a really challenging thing to have to make that decision. So our approach is, rather than have to make that decision, train the providers that they understand what they're facing, and so you don't get to that situation.

Swan: I was going to discuss a little bit the actual experience of trying to take on discrimination like Barbara was suggesting. I've had several experiences, one with a local university that was under the human rights law, back in 1993. In that particular case, my lawyer essentially said, "You have one of the best cases I've ever seen." The Civil Rights Commission said that I had one of the best cases they'd ever seen, and they said, "For $10,000 in legal fees, we will get you your $2,500 job back with a 50% probability that you'll win," because one of the people who was absolutely essential to the testimony was a student who took notes all the way to a search committee and turned them over to me one year and one day later—the human rights law has a one-year frame—because he didn't want to be outed at his university. That's the kind of decisions we have to make all the time. I have had other similar types of experiences.

Kinchlow: How likely is it that you'd have to make that decision in 2009 under those circumstances?

Swan: It's just as likely, because it's a matter of finances and getting a lawyer and how much you have to pay per hour for the lawyer, which runs up in the 180s an hour, something like that, and the $500 fee that you have to pay in advance in order to have the material evaluated, and it can mount up. And if you're retired, do you want to spend that money on that, or do you want to go and try and find another position?

Kinchlow: I guess what I was also thinking about is, is the network out there now? Is there more support out there? You're not out there as an island, but there are people to speak up.

Swan: Oh, yes. I have lots of friends. I was an elected official who was openly gay, and I talk to them and bounce it around, see what they think and that sort of thing, so...

Satin: Yes, but there's a real community, particularly in the Twin Cities, and that's a godsend for those of us who are currently living our lives out. But there is also a large contingent of older GLBT people who haven't found that, who have lived their lives basically isolated. If you take somebody who's now 80 years old, they have lived through some really traumatic times where anybody finding out that they were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender—their lives would just fall apart. That has changed, but for many people, they still live through those experiences, and they haven't found the freedom to be able to be out. Those are, in many cases, the isolated seniors that are having to make tough decisions about, "Well, can I come out and actually go to the doctor and say that I'm a gay man or I'm a lesbian?" Or in the case of a transgender person, where your outward appearance is different from what your anatomy may be. And that's a challenge that medical professionals have to deal with and social service professionals have to deal with.

Kinchlow: The other panel discussion that we had talked a lot about senior citizens in nursing home situations. Are there any unique situations for the gay, lesbian—

Swan: I'd like to give you a few statistics about GLBT seniors that are drawn from the literature. One thing is that GLBT seniors are almost twice as likely to live alone, 67%, than elders in general. 80% have no life partners as opposed to 50% of the general population. 75% of gay men, in one particular study, over 50 are without a partner, while 80% of heterosexual men are known to be married. 20% have no one to call in case of an emergency, as opposed to 2% of the general population. 10% of GLBT seniors believe that social service providers would be sensitive to them as a GLBT senior. That's 10% as opposed to 90% who do not think that. 90% have no children versus 10% of the general population, so they may not have a caregiver available. And there are, of course, no spousal benefits available to people who are in couples. So there are economic issues that come out, and my analysis of the census data since I presented at the White House Council on Aging is, my guess is there are probably around 8,000 gays and lesbians over 55 in Minnesota, somewhere around that number.

I know that in our Prime Timers group, which is a gay seniors group, we probably have reached 500 of those people, because they've either been members or are currently members, and for people who are in our audience who have a friend who—or themselves want to get involved in some type of a senior activity, we do have a web site we set up a couple of years ago that's called glbtseniorsmn.org, and you can just type in "gay seniors Minnesota," and it will usually come up on Google, and then you'll be able to find a couple of different resources that you can go to.

Swan: I'd like to talk a little bit as someone who was just at a GLBT seniors get-together. We had a pool party and buffet and so on, and the discussions we had were kind of all over the place. I was talking to one gentleman who spent quite a while trying to get another job. He finally got a job as a real estate appraiser, but it took him months, and he looked at me, and he says, "It really does have to do with our age. That's what I'm dealing with is the age issue." And a lot of the people in that group—I have seen them, for instance, come to public venues, in tax hearings, pleading for cuts in their taxes because they are on Social Security, they can't pay for their home, that sort of thing. There are a lot of people in our community who are having economic issues, and they're seniors right now, and I know it's always really optimistic to be looking forward to what it's going to be for the boomers and all of that, and I've heard that too many times in our community. The problem is, we have a lot of gays and lesbians who are seniors now who really need the opportunity to get assistance of some type, and that's one of the things we try to do with these groups is at least provide some other people that they can talk to, get some ideas from, and so on, maybe be roommates or whatever.

Satin: If organizations like GLBT Generations—if we do our job correctly and train the service providers, particularly the senior care providers, whether it's social service, health services, whatever it might be, if we do our job right, then those coming up and becoming seniors will have an experience different from what a lot of current old are having, because they will be able to go to a doctor or to a health care professional or to a social service provider who's basically had training around GLBT issues. Hopefully we can put in place some sort of a certification process—our group wants to call it "lavender label,"—so that somebody who's gone through the training, and has basically said publicly that we'll serve GLBT people, can have this lavender label as a way for them to market to the GLBT community. And for the GLBT community to look on a web site and say, "Oh, okay, this community center is a lavender-labeled community center, so I'm obviously going to feel welcome there." Or "this social service provider or this Meals on Wheels facility has gone through the training program and is lavender-labeled, or this doctor is a lavender-labeled provider."

I think there is a growing interest on the part of service providers to understand that that they have a market within the GLBT community. We think there's about 10,000 gay, lesbian, and bisexual here in the Twin Cities who are over 65 and older. That doesn't include transgender, because the study that this comes from didn't include transgender. That's a significant number of people to provide services to, and so a lot of senior care providers are looking at that and saying, "We need to do something around that, either from a marketing standpoint—it's a good market" or, "you know, we have an obligation to extend our services."

Satin: One of the other things that's happened is the fact that there is a training program that's now available for senior care providers that's a collaboration between GLBT Generations and the Metropolitan Area Agency on Aging. It's called Training to Serve, and it's a two-hour or a four-hour training program, and there are a number of senior care providers including home care providers who have said, "You know, we've already done trainings with them." And they are looking for the connection to our community—they really want to reach out and be there for the GLBT community, and I think the more that we can expand that to reach more care providers—

Kinchlow: What would the training consist of, when you're talking about this two-hour training for those who are already service care providers? What's that additional tool that they're going to be learning?

Satin: Some of it's going to be basic GLBT 101. What's sexual orientation? What's gender identity and gender expression? What are the issues particularly that the GLBT community face? What's the isolation all about? What are the ways in which we can make our organization, our service, comfortable for people? What are the things that we need to do, so when we do an application form, we don't just say, "husband, wife"? We put it in terms that are welcoming to the community. When we talk about gender or sex on an application form, we make room for more than just male, female, that there's other opportunities. So those types of sort of basic things. We do a lot of work around scenarios, giving people an opportunity to sit and talk among themselves about situations that would cause some concern—what's the best way to respond to that, and have an opportunity to talk back with the instructor about how to make that effective.

Kinchlow: When you think about where we are in 2009, and you hear the economic figures that you shared with us, and does it seem that we moving in the right direction in Minnesota in terms of acceptance?

Duran: I certainly think so. In fact, as I was listening to Wally and Barbara talk, I was reminded that certainly my background in the local GLBT community I don't think is nearly as long as either of yours, but it seems that just in the past few years, there's been much more attention to the issues of the senior citizens within the GLBT community. We have focused for a number of years on young people, students, and tried to make sure that, for example, the school environment is as healthy and supportive and welcoming as possible. And so now I'm glad to see that that's being balanced out with more attention to folks in the older years as well. I think that the Human Rights Act is both a cause and an effect of social change. It didn't just drop down from the sky. It came because there were communities like Minneapolis and St. Paul and others that had already extended protections in their localities based on sexual orientation and gender identity and helped make it safe, if you will, for the Legislature to take the same step for the state, and then once that law went into effect, organizations like the Department of Human Rights or GLBT Generations can go out, provide training, and really help folks understand what this means and what that means for the services they provide, how they provide them, and so on, and I think it continues that momentum, I feel.

Kinchlow: Could you go as far as to say that Minnesota is a model for other states throughout the United States?

Swan: I would like to add some caveats on that, because I've seen what other states are doing. I've been down to Florida, Fort Lauderdale, where they got an $800,000 grant to have an adult day care center for partners of people that were having problems and that sort of thing. Los Angeles has a $20 million housing project. Boston, Massachusetts, is doing the same. We have something that we're working on that Barbara, of course, and Roger Youngs are working on in terms of housing. But I do want to give you an idea of where GLBT seniors fit within the GLBT community, and for me, the measure is always money, and I base this on the 2004 annual reports. Minnesota AIDS Project, about $4 million in the budget. OutFront Minnesota at that time was $838,000. Gay Men's Chorus was $1.2 million. That's their 2007 budget. And if you roll all our senior organizations in the community together, you get $10,000, okay? That should give you kind of an idea of where we are currently. We do not have the infrastructure in our community that other cities do on senior issues, and I've discussed this with people around the country, and there must be reasons for it, but we do have a lot of people that are working on it, and especially Barbara and Roger Youngs, who have been working so hard on the housing angle. But we really are weak on that infrastructure issue here in the Twin Cities and in the state.

Kinchlow: Where do you see the next chapter of this going? Where's the next part of the debate that we need to focus on?

Satin: I think our focus is going to be on continuing to train senior care providers and to sort of build this sort of coalition of providers who are comfortable and want to serve our community, and I think it's going to be a really growing market. The providers will benefit, but also our senior GLBT people will benefit substantially, because they'll know that there is a place that they can go and be treated respectfully and appropriately and get the care that they need without having to worry about --

Kinchlow: How far away is lavender label, do you think?

Satin: A year, two.

Swan: I wrote a chapter in this new book that's called The Queer Community, and its Continuing the Struggle for Social Justice, and it's about senior issues and about my life and involvement in them. It's available at Rainbow Road. But what I want to say is that —beyond social and recreational, which is where our community has centered since the passage of the Human Rights Law—we really need to move beyond social and recreational to building this infrastructure, the kind of thing that Barbara and the Generations group is doing and Prime Timers is doing. We need to have the kind of support for people that they know they can call. If they've got a problem, they can call someplace, and they can get some help that will be GLBT-sensitive, and I really like that lavender label thing, because I'm getting to the point I may have to look for something like that, and I really want to have it done by then.

Satin: When we started GLBT Generations, one of the first things we started talking about, "Well, we should probably have an assisted living facility for GLBT people. We should probably have a nursing home for GLBT people," and then we came to the realization we don't have the wherewithal to make that happen, and then we looked around and said, there's also all this capacity that is out there that is going empty. Why should we re-create the wheel, rather than go in and try to educate the providers and make space for ourselves within those services? I think that's a really effective way of doing it, and I think that's sort of the typical way in which Minnesotans sort of get things done.

Swan: I guess I'm looking at it, and having been down to Florida, and having had a place down there for quite a while as a co-owner, I was impressed with how obvious the gay senior population is. You can go to restaurants down there that are targeted for gay seniors. It's really hard to find that one up here. And if I had a partner as I did for 24 years anyway, if I had a partner that needed adult day care, where would I go? I have no idea where I would go. That's a service that they have in a state that doesn't even have a human rights law. They do in the Gold Coast, Broward and Palm Beach County and Miami-Dade. They do have that human rights law, and they have lots of problems down there too, but they also have a really good infrastructure of services. It's based around MCC, and some of the churches down there. And the same thing is true in Massachusetts, which does have a law, but they have put together housing for GLBT seniors. Los Angeles has been able to do that—it's not exactly an advanced state, when you look at it comparatively. But in some states, I have a feeling that they are better on the infrastructure issue than we are, and I agree with the idea of trying to assimilate it into various institutions. If I knew when I was 75 years old I could go into an assisted care facility, and I knew it was one that was comfortable —right now, the only indicator I have is that there are eight lesbians in one of the groups, in one of the centers and one gay man, and I know who they are, and I know where I could go if I had to. If that's my indicator of how I find senior services, that's why I prefer the lavender label.

Kinchlow: But you are saying that if you knew at 75 that there was an adult care facility that you could become a resident of, you'd live your life differently.

Swan: I probably would be able to see what the continuum of care is. At my age, I cannot see where the continuum of care is for people that are gay. I really don't know what it is except a couple of friends who tell me, "Well, you could go here, and it's safe there," and that's all we've got.

Kinchlow: Thank you so much for joining us this evening. I've certainly learned a lot and didn't realize the pressing issues facing the GLBT community, so I appreciate your company tonight and the free education too.

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