Gay, gray and black: a Brooklyn organization helps elderly lesbians and gays find each other and stay out of the closet in the golden years.

I grew up in Brooklyn. When I was in high school in the 1950s, I always knew I was a lesbian. I can't tell you when I first knew; I've always known. In high school, I met other lesbians. When we talked about being gay around other people, we always talked in code. African-American code is "one of the children," like "so and so is one of the children," or we'd say a person was "in the life." Of course, you have to realize, too, in those days that just wearing pants signified that you were gay or crazy. If you did anything that was out of the gender norm, everybody was aware of it immediately.

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I was a gender bender. I wanted to wear pants. But my mother wanted a daughter who had little tea parties. I used to wear pinafores and Shirley Temple curls and little Mary Jane shoes. That's what my mother wanted, so any time I deviated from that she had a fit; nobody could understand it. One time I bought a pair of jeans, and I wore them home so she wouldn't make me take them back.

I used to hang out at the gay clubs in New York's West Village. At the bars, there certainly were older [lesbians], but I didn't think about older people. We had a fine life--and by that I mean we knew people in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens. You could go to two or three dances in one night. One of the things about being so closeted is that we were in a special club. And the special club had its own life.

Struggling with Secrecy 

When my friend Tootsie was taken away to a nursing home, well, I had seen things like that happen many times. I'd seen people die and the family come and ship the body down South or whatever--never even had a funeral or went to a funeral.

The family that reaches out is very, very rare in my experience. You have people whose families are not openly against them, but once that person dies the family takes that opportunity to "set things right." I've been to numerous funerals where the family now takes this opportunity to put the person in this dress they wanted them to wear. It's totally negating. But at the same time, these are the things that provoke me to make older lesbians and gays visible and be considered as a community.

For many African-American gays, when we get older, so little is available to us. We may have lied to get into an apartment, because we couldn't be truthful about who our family was. When we owned property, maybe we had all the properties in one person's name because the other person was receiving benefits so she could get health coverage. We know that the property belongs to both of them, but if anything were to happen, we would have no way of proving it.

We're learning now. We need to be able to get married, but we're learning to protect ourselves. My partner and I, we've been together for 17 years, and we bought a house. We have a survivorship deed. That's one protection you can count on. If one of us dies, the surviving partner owns the rest of the house. When you have tenancy in common, though, then my heirs are entitled to half the house, and that's what has happened to so many people, causing them to be homeless. Very often, especially with women, the property could only be in one person's name. The other person may not be able to put the property in their name, because maybe they're getting welfare benefits, disability benefits or TANF.

In the African-American community, especially in the lesbian and gay community, we have survived by secrecy. So we're not willing to tell anybody anything. It's like they say, "What goes on in this house, stays in this house." Many of us have raised children that we didn't have legal papers for and tried to get housing where we had more people than we could put on that paper. So we are kind of used to living like that. And that becomes a big detriment in our older years. Many couples are still going around saying that they're sisters.

Ending the Isolation

When we started the GRIOT Circle 10 years ago in Brooklyn, our vision was to have an organization of seniors doing for ourselves. We wanted to help each other stay in contact and find services. About 70 or 80 people came to the first meeting and talked about what they would like to see.

We came up with the Buddy-2-Buddy program. You're a buddy to this other person, and they're a buddy to you--it's like a reciprocal arrangement. We decided to do it this way because people wanted to help, but nobody wants to feel as if they need help. That's typical in the African-American community, especially the older community. We're the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" people. We don't see ourselves as needing help. That's when we came up with Buddy-2-Buddy.

We have many Buddy success stories. We had one woman whose partner of 47 years died, and she was living by herself and saw our ad in the Pride paper. She started coming around. This woman has turned out to be a social butterfly, and now she has a lover. She's 80-something and has a lover who's in her 50s. On the other hand, we have had women like an 80-year-old member who asked us not to send any more mail. Her family of origin is taking care of her, and she doesn't want them to know she's a lesbian. This happened with a couple of members. We let them know that we're here, and we're willing to help them. We're trying to be culturally sensitive, and we assure people that their privacy will be respected.

GRIOT Circle is mostly women because the leadership is women. We have a man who has been the program director for two years, and now we have much more men, but it's still mostly women. Most of our older men are dead. Practically every single man I used to hang out with at the club Starlight is dead. If there are two of them living, I don't even know who they are. All died from AIDS.

Reaching Out for Help

About three years ago, I found out I had breast cancer, which metastasized to my bones. That's very challenging in that I have to go to doctors often now. Knowing that I'm living with a terminal illness is challenging. I went through radiation; I didn't have chemo. I had a lumpectomy. It was extremely hard. I was devastated.

I was always the person that takes care of other people. I know how people feel when they used to take care of themselves and others, and now they have to reach out and ask for help. It's devastating. My partner Janyce and I had a long talk, and then some of my friends were like, "You're going to have to accept help."

Well, at least, now I can say I feel like I've earned the right to dress the way I want. So, that's an important difference. Certainly, it is much more acceptable for a woman to wear pants today than when I was I kid. But I always wear men's clothes, so when I go shopping that's always a treat. And trying to fit this short old lady body into men's clothes is challenging. I like Century 21, and I have another place that has a lot of stylish clothes. I like going to regular places, but it's an older, wider body now.

Regina Shavers is executive director of the GRIOT Circle in Brooklyn.

By Regina Shavers as told to Daisy Hernandez