Gay and gray.

Every week at happy hour, Mildred watches the bleached-blond woman at her senior residence hotel in San Francisco as she dances with the men--only the men. And every week Mildred ponders the same scenario. "I wonder what it would be like," she says," to tap the man on the shoulder and say to her, `May I have this dance?'" She smiles at the image. She knows she will never do it, but Mildred very much wants to meet other gay people at her new home and wishes she could do more than fantasize. She knows they live there. She just doesn't know who they are or how to meet them.

Mildred has had to make a lot of adjustments in the past few years. "I've lost my eyesight," she says. "I can't drive a car. I can't play my music. Now I can't walk." On top of everything else, since moving from her apartment into the residence hotel, she has had to learn to socialize in a foreign culture: that of the straight world.

It isn't as if Mildred is accustomed to being completely open. Out of long habit, she asks that both her last name and the name of the place she lives be withheld for this story. But it isn't as if she's led a completely closeted life either. Mildred has been aware she's a lesbian since long before Stonewall or gay liberation. And she has always lived her life quietly in the bosom of the lesbian community. She's never known anything else. "I've chosen my friends," she says, "and I've always gone in a circle of lesbians."

Now, at 84, she's being asked to change--to curb the way she might reach out to touch someone in conversation, to catch her words at the lunch table before she betrays herself with reminiscences of a past relationship, to resort to subtle hints and sideways glances directed at those she suspects of being in "the club." It all makes the transition rougher. "I'm literally trying to find a new way of life," she sighs, "and it's difficult. Very difficult."

It's also wrong, says Mary Thorndal, executive director of an ambitious organization she cofounded in Southern California with her partner, Veronica St. Claire. The Gay and Lesbian Association of Retiring Persons, which announced its formation May 5, aims to be the gay version of the American Association of Retired Persons. Says Thorndal: "It would be horrible if we had to go back in the closet when we got vulnerable and old."

But that is just what is happening. Lacking institutions formed specifically to serve , them, many elderly gays and lesbians have felt they had no other choice but to find housing in heterosexual institutions where, more often than not, they feel they must hide who they are.

Thorndal and St. Claire hope to change that. In the short term GLARP aims to provide information and business benefits for its members, such as discounts on insurance, cellular telephones, even caskets. But a cornerstone of its long-term plan is to facilitate development of retirement homes specifically for lesbians and gay men.

"Gays and lesbians want to live together and want to enjoy each other--like Jews do, like Armenians do," Thorndal says. "We like each other's company." She reports that one developer is already interested in building a retirement home. Whether others will follow--and whether gays and lesbians themselves are ready to deal head-on with the issue--is a question that has not yet been answered.

But at least there is synergy surrounding the issue. Senior Action in a Gay Environment, a New York City-based organization, also is looking into providing housing for older gay men and lesbians. Terry Kaelber, director of SAGE's retirement project, is convinced that both the gay community, with its experience organizing around social and health care issues such as the AIDS epidemic, and mainstream developers, who see the profit potential in aging gay and lesbian baby boomers, are ready.

And the sooner institutions are built, the better off the community will be, according to a new survey of gay men and lesbians conducted by SAGE. Of about 200 respondents over the age of 65, a full 66% reported living alone. That's double the rate of the general population, says Kaelber. What's more, when SAGE asked the respondents who would take care of them if they became very sick or disabled, more than 70% indicated one of three choices: a nonrelative, a health care worker, or no one at all.

In other words, not only do elderly gay people more often live alone, but they also lack support from friends and especially from family, Kaelber says. Lesbians and gays often face issues that straight seniors don't confront as frequently, such as being shunned by their families, living in isolation with partners, and tending to have fewer children, if any.

All that adds up to a smaller support circle. And, Kaelber says, "all the research says the health and well-being of people as they age is very much tied to their support network and their relationships with people. Community becomes very important when you get older. It's no accident that religious groups are usually behind the development of care facilities. Gays and lesbians need to develop similar facilities. They need to move into a facility where there's assistance. They need to move into a facility where they can find friends, or, at the very least, they need to move into a gay-friendly facility."

In light of another statistic, the financial motivation to build such facilities already exists: Eighty-seven percent of respondents to SAGE's survey said they'd be interested in moving into a gay retirement facility. That's the kind of information developers need if they're going to sink money into a project. "I don't think it even occurred to mainstream providers that there would be a market," Kaelber says. But there is, and he's determined to prove it.

Others have not found the road to development so smooth, however. Just ask B.J. Miller of Berkeley, Calif. Miller attempted to start up a private retirement facility on her own after she and her partner realized there was no way they could continue their relationship, either in or out of the closet, at the institution they had planned to join.

Miller did research on cooperative housing and spent years trying to find the right kind of building. But she encountered several problems: an appropriate site was hard to find, banks were reluctant to extend a loan to a group of elderly lesbians, and the law seemed to offer no options for locking in deeds so that the property would remain lesbian housing in perpetuity.

Just as daunting was the task of achieving consensus among those interested in the project on such issues as whether to allow bisexual women to live there and whether to allow male visitors, Miller says. Including gay men in the mix was never a consideration.

In the end the obstacles proved to be insurmountable, and five years later Miller has a list of 60 women interested in moving in--but no housing site. Now she doubt it will be built at all, and she's in GLARP's corner. "I would love to have them do it, but good luck to them," she says. "I hope they can solve the problems that we found were almost insoluble."

Miller acknowledges, however, that the financial and legal hurdles probably would be less burdensome for a professional developer working on a plan for a facility serving both men and women. She adds that she'd consider moving into such a facility, though she'd prefer to live with only lesbians: "My desire to have a gay-friendly retirement home might outweigh my desire for segregation."

The idea of moving into an institution in which they would be identified as openly gay is itself frightening for many older gays and lesbians, including some of those who long for the companionship of their own kind. Such a person is Mildred, who says she's always lived a discreet life and that she isn't about to change now. "I don't think it's necessary to have a place that's labeled that way because you immediately make enemies," she says. "You start controversy. I'm too old for that." Thorndal and Kaelber concede there are many like Mildred, but they believe there are many more who would jump at the chance to move into a gay-identified facility.

Others raise different concerns. Shevy Healey, a 75-year-old retired clinical psychologist, thinks it's unhealthy to segregate people--gay or straight--by age. Healey is a resident of the Pueblo, a "women-friendly" community of mobile homes and recreational vehicles in Apache Junction, Ariz., that is open to people of all ages, though most residents are retired. "There is a crying need for old people, gay and lesbian, to feel safe and secure and supported," Healey says. "And anyone who's working toward that needs to be supported. But I just want to caution them not to make the same mistakes heterosexuals are making. It's an antihuman model. Everybody wants community. We need to talk about the best way of achieving that."

Gay author Malcolm Boyd, who writes a column for Modem Maturity, AARP's magazine, agrees. Boyd recalls his mother's death, just ten days shy of her 99th birthday, earlier this year. "At 95 she fell and broke her hip, and it was necessary to go into a convalescent hospital," he says. "I learned a lot more than I wanted to. When you go in there, you're a number. Everything else about you--certainly your sexual orientation--becomes a fairly negligible fact in the way people see you. She was `24C'--the room and the bed."

Boyd believes that gays and lesbians could do it better. "There could be this humor, this laughter, this common understanding," he says. "That would be quite different from the kind of nursing home I've seen."

First, however, gays and lesbians must come to terms with their own ageism, which is especially rampant in gay-male culture, Boyd says. "The gay community is not enamored of the concept of `old,'" says Phyllis Lyon, who together with her partner, Del Martin, founded what is believed to e the nation's first lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, in San Francisco in 1955. "We have been trying to get `old' issues on the agendas of gay and lesbian organizations, and it has not been easy."

Boyd has hope that it will change because it must. "I am accusing gays and lesbians of not being aware enough in this area," he says. "The first thing is, be aware. Then be less selfish. No one else is going to do this for us. We've got to take care of ourselves and our own."