We’ve blogged about gayby boomers and gay aging issues quite a few times lately. Recent stories in Newsweek and The New York Times have helped to boost interest and engagement in important questions about how we deal with aging and related issues in our community and what resources there are for us now and in the future. This is a topic of particular interest to me, and I thought I’d use this opportunity to go back to our friend (and former client) Joy Silver of RainbowVision Properties to get a new perspective on this always-significant communications issue.
As we get ready for the Thanksgiving holiday, I found Joy’s thoughts about creating a Family of Choice really interesting – isn’t that we do in our daily lives, to some extent? Joy’s insight and experience is not only interesting, but immensely helpful to anyone thinking about communicating to gayby boomers and their older counterparts.
What follows is Part One of our two-part conversation with Joy. Today’s conversation focuses on the evolution of RainbowVision’s business and the challenges of communicating on aging issues. Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at messaging and future trends.
Ben Finzel: Your property in Santa Fe has been open for a few years now. How is it going? What has surprised you about how your business has evolved in the past few years?
Joy Silver: We officially opened in June of 2006 in Santa Fe NM, with ribbon cutting that included elected officials like Gov. Bill Richardson, and Santa Fe Mayor David Coss. Interestingly, the Santa Fe GLBT community has shown interest in having their blood relatives and loved ones live with us in The Castro, which is our Assisted Living. What surprises other people, although we expected this to be true, is the range of ages our members make up. The youngest is 44 and the oldest is 96. We see our population doing great advance planning for their futures – we get requests for information from people in their 30’s and 40’s. RainbowVision Santa Fe is an open and inclusive GLBT- majority community. We do encourage our allies to consider us as we believe a diverse community is the most interesting. We are a living laboratory, and our community members serve as an onsite focus group. We have benefited from the input of our members as to all aspects of living: wellness, physical fitness, dining, and events. What we have learned, and continue to learn, will be incorporated into our future communities as well.
There are a number of things that surprised me about our evolution. Let me mention the top two. The first is that community as an ideal, and learning/acquiring the skills to live in community, are two very different things. Many people want to live in community, but don’t know how to make this happen in reality. Our generation – that is Baby Boomers – have grown up with ideas like “rebel against authority” and “be radically opposed to things” rather than with the idea of, and skill to, negotiate in order to be part of. How a community defines itself becomes the bigger issue. We can say that there are essentially two ways community usually comes together. A group of people may become a “community” by uniting against something, or they may unite by coming together for the good of something. How both of these things might be accomplished in a way that accomplishes a forward momentum is then a question of how much skill a community has acquired or developed. Our members’ committees work with the residents to define needs, desires and wants. They are self governing and have learned to work with many, many different voices.
The second “surprise” is that I learned there are many more configurations of gender and orientation than I would have ever imagined! Some of our members are coming out for the first time at the age of 70 and beyond. One member felt so comfortable at RainbowVision that he is making the gender reassignment decision he has needed to, but couldn’t for fear of repercussion. Our allied members are unanimously supportive of each and every GLBT resident and their differences: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, pre- and post-op, queens and kings, femme, butch, etc. One of our allies makes it a point to have her own personal education dates with our members; she wants to know the proper language and the best way to talk with us so she does not offend! On the other side, some of our more senior LGBT members had initial fears about living with allies, based upon negative life experiences. These personal biases have also been overcome as we all live and learn together.
Of course, we are aware of the current economic storms and how this affects current and future members. While the downturn has been exceedingly sharp, we are in a favorable position of offering a literal and figurative shelter from the storm. We have seen a great deal of interest from people who no longer wish to live in vulnerable weather areas like the Gulf coast states and we talk to people who are very concerned about their future. It is clear to us that when weathering the economic and/or environmental storms, community seems to become even more important. Establishing a trusted family by choice circle to face life’s challenges holds a lot of meaning for not only our GLBT population, but, it seems, for the mainstream boomer population as well.
Ben Finzel: Newsweek recently ran a feature story on the challenges of aging in the gay community and The New York Times followed-up last week with a story on SAGE and their new campaign. As our society changes, what have you seen in the ways in which our community perceives aging?
Joy Silver: You have probably noticed that I use the word population to differentiate from the concept of community.
It seems that a more appropriate description of people who are in the minority due to orientation or gender would be population, as this would include everyone within this minority. Community, as I now have come to understand it, not only supposes proximity in daily living, but indicates some kind of developmental process shared by those involved. The interaction of members in community is more similar to that of family groups that share life experiences together. The GLBT family of choice community seems to have established the trend for what the mainstream baby boomer generation is currently beginning to experience.
The choosing of family, rather than the reliance on family of blood, certainly influences the perception of aging. The refusal to accept challenges as a result of aging I think is historically new. This means that the trend is to see aging challenges as things we have the power to overcome or change for the better. There is a willingness to make those lifestyle changes, and that willingness goes hand in hand with the idea of “staying young”. Conversely, there is the idea that “old age” is something to avoid in any or all forms. It becomes scary to think that we may experience becoming dependent and powerless – especially for the boomer generation brought up on concepts like of “Born To Be Wild” or “Forever Young”. Older generations of GLBT’s – “the matures” , not having family of blood necessarily due to earlier intolerance of gender and orientation have always created Families of Choice – and this historically goes back to gay societies formed, usually, around art and literary groups.
A downside for needing to stay “Forever Young” is that we could, and sometimes do, lose the connection we could have within our population that would help provide a cohesive history, thereby empowering us to advance our rights at a faster pace. We may become out of touch with our history if we can’t accept those among our population, and in our communities, who may be what we see as “old” simply because we can’t handle getting old ourselves. It is important to understand how we got to where we are today. Not only can we learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past, but we cheat ourselves out energy and inspiration to find the Promised Land of full civil rights, simply because we may be afraid of aging, and of those who we define as “old”.
RainbowVision, in its intergenerational living (remember there are at least three generations from the age of 44 through 96) provides an environment to creatively work together to solve many of those deeper issues on a micro level of how we are all related, and how develop the skills and compassion for becoming Family of Choice.
Ben Finzel: Thanks Joy. I look forward to continuing this fascinating conversation tomorrow.
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