Aging gay: Lesbian and gay seniors flourish in changing times

When Pat Barrington first came out as a lesbian to her mother, the response she got would be shockingly uncommon today. “You’re just like me,” Barrington’s mother told her – “except you’re doing what you want. You’re doing what I always wanted to do.”

In the 1950s, sexual orientation wasn’t mentioned in polite conversation. Barrington hadn’t realized how common it was for a same-sex attracted woman like her mother to be living in a heterosexual marriage – a tradition that had been passed on to Barrington herself.

Only a few years earlier, Barrington, an outspoken, now 77-year-old lesbian in Denver, had been holding down her military husband’s household in North Hollywood, California, raising their daughter.

Barrington got a job in a missile assembly factory, and it was there she met her first lover: A woman who initially asked her out for coffee, and soon introduced her to the bars, where other married women, living “normal” lives by day, could embrace their true, socially-unacceptable selves by night.

Well, sort of.

“In those days you couldn’t even touch each other in the gay bars, because you never knew when the cops were going to raid the bars,” Barrington said. “And if they caught you, they would haul you in. The police would feel up the women in their crotches to see if they were hiding drugs – which we weren’t. It was just to harass us.”

It was a story of lesbian and gay life in cities all across America, from Los Angeles to San Francisco and New York City in the years leading to the Stonewall revolution.

“These kids don’t have a clue what it was like,” says Dennis Dougherty, a 69-year-old self-described “lone wolf” and “sixties vintage” gay rights activist.

“Part of me thinks that’s too bad and part of me thinks it’s good,” Dougherty said. “Because they don’t have to go through the pain of it all. They shouldn’t forget that there was a struggle, but if you talk to an 18-year-old today and ask him about Matthew Shepherd – that was 14 years ago.”

Despite growing up in an era where being gay could land you in jail, Dougherty maintains that he “was never in” the closet. A Vietnam veteran, cancer survivor, philanthropist and Hunter S. Thompson doppelganger – “He was a friend,” Dougherty said of the famous gonzo journalist – Dougherty is a local icon of the gay rights movement and a man Senator Mark Udall referred to as “living proof that one can be a hard-driving and successful businessman and also contribute to causes that are beyond self-interest.”

Over the last half-century, Dougherty has seen attitudes in America shift, from perceptions that LGBT persons were a danger worthy of arrest, to the ability to serve in the military as openly gay. He didn’t only witness the changes: Dougherty was instrumental.

“We had to look out for each other back then. [Anti-gay] Amendment 2 really caused that; and Anita Bryant and her statements. All of those things tended to galvanize people – it was them against us, and we needed to stand hand-to-hand.”

As those whose hard-fought efforts to expand opportunity and freedom for LGBT people of generations-to-come hand their torches off to a new wave of activists, they’ve busied themselves about setting up social and cultural groups for their own generation.

The fear that kept Barrington and her mother closeted was the same fear that many expressed to Barrington years later, when she announced she was moving to Denver.

“Colorado? They’re all a bunch of hicks,” Barrington recounted the concerns. “They’ll kill you!”

Thankfully, this turned out not to be the case, and Barrington is now active with the many social and activist groups for aging lesbians in Denver: Older Lesbians Organizing for Change (OLOC) and Golden Girls, groups that understand the necessity of discussing sexuality, of being public about their lifestyle, hoping to recover from the mindsets that kept so many women of their generation closeted.
She loves going out to dance at Tracks.

“I’m pretty good looking; for an old lady I’m halfway decent,” she said. “Emotionally, I would die if I didn’t stay active.”

For the LGBT youth today – who are growing up with Glee, Gay-Straight Alliances and the unabashed outspokenness of gay sex advice columnist Dan Savage – the idea of staying closeted until age 40 or more may be unthinkable.

But through groups like Colorado Prime Timers, a social club for aging gay men in Denver, LGBT seniors can relate to one another’s struggles – understanding the impulse for secrecy in a way that a post-Will & Grace generation does not.

Bobby Gates knows something about that. As the Prime Timers’ Denver chapter founder, the 71-year-old keeps in touch with the many other gay seniors in Denver. From coffee at Panera Bread to cocktail hour at Charlie’s, Prime Timers has something going on almost every night of the week.

“For a lot of them, they’ve gone beyond having children and now have grandchildren. They didn’t [come out] soon enough and now they feel it’s too late. And they [remain married] for health reasons, insurance reasons – and they take care of each other. It’s what they’ve known for so many years.”

Gates said it’s not uncommon for him to hear one of his fellow gay seniors say, “well, I’m married, I have to be careful.”

It comes as no surprise to Gates that some of these men are not entirely out of the closet.

“There are a surprising number of wives who are very tolerant of their husbands activities with our group and other groups like ours,” he said.

Gates describes the arrangement without any sense of awe; for 22 years he lived it himself as, superficially, a straight husband with a wife and a son, and an active Jehovah’s Witness – a religion that believes homosexuality to be an extension of demonic possession.

“I was never too bashful about it,” Gates says of being gay, “I was in the interior design business, where you could get away with a lot. You could be flamboyant and people would say ‘oh that’s just the decorator in him.'”

Gates used the church as a vehicle to come out of the closet, eventually confessing his nature to a fellow Jehovah’s Witness who was obligated to inform the church elders – leading to Gates’ expulsion from the community and the end of his marriage.

As program coordinator for SAGE of the Rockies, a local resource center for LGBT Seniors, Shari Wilkins is familiar with stories of the elderly coming out late in life.

“He was 86-years-old and just lost his wife of 67 years,” Wilkins remembers a client who came to her a year ago. “He came here to The Center and told me, ‘I’m pretty sure I’m gay and I don’t know what to do about it.’”

When Wilkins asked the man how he’d like to be involved in SAGE, he initially said he was afraid to join a public group, she said.

“After a life lived being told you’re a sinner, you’re a criminal, you’re mentally ill, the fear [of being open] is wired in,” Wilkins said. “It wasn’t that long ago that being gay involved institutionalization. So for GLBT seniors who have lived their whole lives with that, their willingness to be open, to trust that society will care – it’s just not there.”

After caring for her two polio-stricken parents – her mother lived for 14 years in an iron lung – Wilkins saw from an early age how community plays a role in caregiving.

“It created a village, because all of my aunts and uncles and grandparents became a part of [the care],” she said.

After retiring from a career as a public school educator in Aurora, Wilkins helped form SAGE of the Rockies – a local chapter of the 35-year-old national organization – within The Center’s umbrella of LGBT community programs.

“The elders in our community are twice as likely to age alone, but 80 percent of long-term care in the U.S. is provided by family members,” Wilkins said.

Wilkins said LGBT elders, often estranged from biological family, are only half as likely as heterosexual elders to have close relatives to call for help. They’re also about twice as likely to be single, and about three times more likely to be childless.

“A sense of community for people, where we can offer resources of friendship and engagement, is critical,” Wilkins said.

SAGE also provides other services, like medical checkups to those who may have spent a lifetime keeping their sexual orientations secret. After living through the AIDS crisis and a lifetime of threats from homophobic assailants, many gays and lesbians were certain they would not live into their golden years – and many also did not plan for retirement, Wilkins said.

The problem is compounded by LGBT seniors’ lack of access to the benefits of marriage, lending popularity to SAGE’s financial planning classes, Wilkins said.

After two and a half years, SAGE has grown into an essential service for LGBT seniors. The 86-year-old widower who approached Wilkins a year ago, able to only whisper the truth about his orientation, has since then blossomed into a confident artist, marching in the Veterans Contingent at the front of last summer’s Pride parade, Wilkins said.

For the seniors interviewed for this feature, the common response to the question: Is gay culture overly obsessed with youth, is either no, or “yeah, but so is straight culture.”

Either way, they don’t seem to hold resentment toward young people; none of the bitter, you-don’t-have-a-clue finger pointing often indicated in stereotypes of older Americans. The image of the self-absorbed young person dismissing the older person as useless doesn’t ring true to Pat Barrington and Bobby Gates.

And it certainly doesn’t for Corky Blankenship.

Blankenship, 67, was also once married to a woman – but his bride was a self-described lesbian who married a gay man for the practical advantages.

“You didn’t think about it; it was just what you had to do – you had to play the game,” Blankenship remembers.

Blankenship and his wife were married for 10 years, parting ways in the early ’70s after moving to San Francisco – a time and place where an openly-gay lifestyle finally seemed feasible.

But Blankenship soon learned that even inside the world of drugs, long hair and open man-on-man love, there were still games to be played in San Francisco.

A life-long fan of dancing to loud music, Corky Blankenship would let himself go with an abandon that he said frightened the other snobby queens on the dance floor.

“I really feel that music, I really get lost in that beat,” Blankenship said excitedly. Though in the eyes of the image-obsessed disco royalty of San Francisco, Blankenship’s childlike dancing – and his very childlike body; he’s 5-foot-2 – were cause for eye-rolling, Blankenship said.

“They weren’t ready for that. Everyone danced with their hands down – and I felt inhibited by that. And then the song ‘Express Yourself’ would come on and I’d say ‘fuck em.’ They looked down their noses at me.”

Blankenship eventually retreated from the gay scene, keeping traditional hours and selling homemade wind chimes in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Warf. He eventually returned to Denver to care for his ailing mother and help out with the family business, a children’s daycare center.

“Then it was back in the closet again,” Blankenship recalls, noting the attitude toward gays within the childcare system. “It was just family and business for about 23 years – I didn’t really go out at all.”

After his mother died in 1998, Blankenship ventured back into the world, ending up at the Triangle, a now-closed gay bar northeast of Downtown Denver where someone handed him a joint and pointed him toward the dance floor.

“So I started going out dancing once a week,” Blankenship says with a smile, now a few decades older than most clubgoers. Tracks opened a few years later, and going out once a week became three or four times a week.

Now the once-introverted chime-assembler is a social butterfly, hosting pool parties at his home and attracting young admirers on the dance floor with his naturally peculiar moves.

“Back [in the ’70s] I got a lot of negative attitudes – now I get no negativity at all,” Blankenship says.

“[Young people] are happy to see an older gay person who is still vibrant and having fun,” Blankenship said. “People say ‘oh you’re an inspiration.’ But I’m just doing my thing.”