Once upon a time, before men could openly have male lovers or wear pink dresses on the streets and before women could embrace the terms lesbian and dyke with pride and strength, repression, discretion and secrecy were the bases of homosexual life and interaction.
The prefix “homo” was either used in anthropology lectures at school tagged on to “sapien” or “erectus,” or written on milk cartons. “Queer,” “queen,” “dyke” and “butch” had not even brushed the lips of the mainstream American vernacular and pride parades were only held for veterans and blossom queens. Talk about sexuality and relationships was left behind doctors’ doors and murmurs of homosexuality drifted around psychiatrists’ offices as a topic of mental illness.
During this time, boys who found John Wayne attractive and girls who paid closer attention to Ethel and Lucy than to Fred and Ricky had to deal with their conflicted feelings and learn to conceal them.
“I remember having my eyes glued to the television set watching the old cowboy and Indian westerns and thinking, I need to get me one of those cowboys,” says Tamara Ching, 54, who was born a man but is now living as a post-op transgender woman. “I wanted to be that person who was tied up with rope and rescued by cowboys and who rode off into the sunset.”
Children then were raised in a society that asserted its normalcy partly in the belief that men and women were to marry the opposite sex, have kids and continue the process. Anything going against this cycle was considered deviant, abnormal and destructive. Even if children never heard these instructions in such direct terms, the social environment made it difficult for anyone to go against the tide.
“There was no such thing as a queer resource center at school or a gay men’s group for Asian Pacific Americans when I was growing up in Hawai’i in the 1950s,” recalls 53-year-old Tom Yee. “I remember that there were like two to three gay spots for tourists in Honolulu to hang out and cruise, but among the APA community in Honolulu, homosexuality was never discussed. I never even heard the word mentioned.”
Yee, 53, who left his home in Honolulu in 1973 to live in Washington, D.C., took care of his partner of 12 years and watched him die of AIDS in 1984.
Like Yee, many who grew up in this generation never came out to their families and remained in the closet to their immediate relatives and friends, sometimes in contrived marriages and families.
Today it is estimated that the gay, lesbian and bisexual senior (65 and older) population in the United States ranges from one million to 2.8 million individuals, with two million to six million gay, lesbian and bisexual seniors by the year 2030, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Institute (NGLTF) in Washington, D.C. There is no national data available on transgender people in the United States, thus undercounting the full lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) population.
“Aunties” Speak up
Along with these numbers comes the need to address the specific healthcare issues of the older LGBT community, including securing financial stability when they retire and equal access to the nation’s health-care system.
“Now is the time where we need to focus on the elder LGBT population because it’s a rapidly growing demographic block in our nations, as is the general elder population,” says Sean Cahill, policy director of NGLTF and based in New York. “A lot of these LGBT seniors grew up and navigated through the world keeping their sexuality a secret. But many of them came out in the 1960s and 1970s and don’t want to go back into the closet.”
Trinity Ordona, 52, associate director for the Lesbian Health Research Center (LHRD) at UCSF and research fellow with the Institute for Health and Aging, says the aging population specifically among APA lesbians is small, since many never came out and either got married or remained single “aunties.”
“The issues that affect APA lesbians who are 50-plus are not going to be that evident since our numbers are so small,” says Ordona, who’s Filipina American and a lesbian. “It was difficult for APA elder lesbians to come out back in the 1960s because of culture and traditions. And now these women in their 50s and 60s, who are the unattached daughters and single, have to take care of their parents. It has fallen on their shoulders to take care of aging parents and themselves, by themselves.”
For many LGBTs entering their twilight years, invisibility has once again returned in their lives. Having had to hide their true sexual preferences until the 1960s at least, elder LGBTs often feel invisible in a youth-centric community whose focus, especially among gay males, is on physical appearance and fitness.
Dion Wong, 60, co-coordinator of a 35-plus group at San Francisco-based Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA), says men who have reached middle age find themselves isolated among a community dominated by youth. He stresses the importance of a social support group, since many of these men are estranged from their families.
“Older gay males have different needs and problems, so we decided to form a separate group,” says Wong, who came out of the closet when he was in his 30s. “The GAPA 35-plus group focuses on such issues as health, retirement, real estate investments, making sure men set up a self-sustainable financial situation when they reach an older age. We also talk about how to deal with family issues, because a lot of APA people don’t come out to their families and it gets harder as they get older.”
In 1991, Crystal Jang, frustrated with the lack of mature lesbian groups in San Francisco, banded together with other APA lesbians and founded Older Asian Sisters in Solidarity (OASIS), a social group targeted at lesbians over the age of 35.
“We’d been talking about it for a long time and it had been on our minds,” says Jang, who is now 56 years old. “A lot of the bars in the Bay Area were geared toward younger lesbians and we just felt that there weren’t gathering places or venues for women our age to meet other women.”
What began as a lunch get-together with 16 people grew into an organization with more than 100 members. Every year, the group saw its participants grow as word got out that such an organization existed. Jang says the group has been on hiatus for the past couple of years because organizers now want to focus on forming a network for APA lesbians 50 and over.
“We’re getting older, and our needs, though somewhat similar to when we were younger, have also expanded to include many health issues such as safer sex, menopause and osteoporosis,” she says. “At our past workshops, we would hold safe sex demonstrations with dental dams and condoms and talk about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. I mean, many of these women, who were older, had never talked openly about safe sex, which applies to lesbian women too.”
OASIS is now a part of Asian Pacific Islander Queer Women and Transgender Coalition (APIQWTC), which Jang and Ordona co-founded in 1999. APIQWTC is an umbrella organization covering Japanese, Filipina, Singaporean, Malaysian, South Asian and Vietnamese lesbian and transgender groups in the bay area.
“Many of the women who came to the group meetings were still closeted and some were married, so we heard a lot of stories of pain,” Jang says. “They didn’t have a choice and didn’t have as much freedom as the younger generation of lesbians do.”
Road from Stonewall
The present elder LGBT population came of age in an era when tolerance was practically non-existent, where men and women concealed their homosexuality with marriage and kids, where forced conformity and suppressed feelings were the norm and sometimes the only option.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that homosexuality emerged as a budding social awareness and a rising political movement. The Stonewall riots in New York were a watershed moment that, for many, crystallized the underpinnings of the modern gay liberation movement.
On June 28, 1969, New York Police Department officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar with a heavy gay clientele in Greenwich Village. It was the second time that week that police had targeted the bar as well as others for the illegal sale of alcohol. As police rounded up the nearly 200 patrons of the bar, tensions rose and riots ensued on that hot summer night with officers detaining drag queens, transgenders and bar employees while others were free to go.
Marion Abdullah, 67, was living in New York at the time of the riots, but forced herself not to look at the newspaper headlines or the evening news.
“I paid no attention to that stuff,” says Abdullah, who was 33 in 1969. “I never liked it, and tried to distance myself from things that had to do with gays and lesbians. I wasn’t an activist at that time.”
Abdullah was born in New York in 1936 and spent most of her childhood in lower Manhattan near Delancey Street. Her father was from Java and was half Indonesian, half Dutch, while her mother was part black and part white.
“Because my father was here illegally, on his naturalization papers it said that he was Filipino so he could stay in the United States and join the army,” says Abdullah. “And my mom hung out with a lot of Puerto Ricans, so my brother, sister and I thought that we were Puerto Rican for a time.”
Being hapa and living in an ethnically diverse community contributed to Abdullah’s identity crisis, as well as her coming to terms with the fact that she was a lesbian.
Her parents separated when she was very little, and she and her siblings went to live with her mother, who later abandoned them to their father, whom they hardly knew. Abdullah is a survivor of sexual abuse, an alcoholic mother and a father who was a compulsive gambler.
“When I was 10, and my sister was 11, my dad made us spend time with men whom he owed money,” says Abdullah in a subdued and cracked voice. “This was constant abuse, and it lasted for four years. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
She went to Washington, D.C. and reunited with her mother. There, she graduated from high school and when she found herself unemployed, decided to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). She served for three years, spending two years in Okinawa, Japan.
It was in the army at the age of 18 that Abdullah realized that she was a lesbian.
“I found myself attracted to the women there, and eventually had a relationship with a woman I had met in the corps,” Abdullah says. “I guess I always knew I was, but I had just pushed it to the back of my head.”
But when she got out of the army, Abdullah decided that she wanted to live a straight life. She moved back to New York and found a job working at Macy’s, where she met her future husband.
“I wanted to be straight because I thought lesbians were horrid and my mom was a lesbian and she was horrid,” says Abdullah.
The fact that her mom was a lesbian became clear to Abdullah at an early age. Perhaps it was because her mother was always dressed in men’s clothing, or because of the many female partners who stood hip-to-hip with her mother. Since the word “lesbian” didn’t exist back in the 1940s, Abdullah’s mother would make up names for her string of female friends and direct her children to address them as “aunties.”
“My mom was a lesbian and you had to be quiet about it,” says Abdullah. “We would make up stories and say that the women were my mom’s relatives who came to live with us in New York. She was very rarely single.”
Abdullah eventually got married and had two daughters. She confided in her husband that she was a lesbian, and in 1970 separated from him and moved to El Sobrante, Calif. with her two daughters.
“My husband said he always suspected that I was lesbian,” says Abdullah. “He wasn’t angry or shocked and he told me that it was okay. He is a very patient and understanding man, and I’m still friends with him today.”
She waited another 15 years to tell her two daughters. She had been fighting a publicized sexual harassment lawsuit with her work, and didn’t want her daughters to find out that she was a lesbian from reading the newspapers. Her youngest daughter, who lives in Southern California, fully accepted her mom’s sexuality, while her eldest grew to accept Abdullah as a lesbian but still has trouble talking about homosexuality.
“I accept myself more today than any other time in my life,” says Abdullah, who now lives with her dog, Dobie, in El Sobrante. “Life is so much better when I’m not hiding or dodging. There’s so much more freedom as a lesbian than in the closet.”
Internalized Homophobia
Although Jang is a fifth-generation Chinese American, it was still difficult for her be open to her family about her sexuality. She grew up in Chinatown and remembers her uncle’s shrimp shop on 809 Sacramento St., AsianWeek’s present location.
At 13, she knew she was a lesbian because she developed a huge crush on a girl classmate and carried her picture around wherever she went.
“I wrote her a note and told her that I knew what ‘homosexual’ meant because I had gone to the library to look up ‘homosexual’ in the Kinsey Reports, and I cited some of the information in my letter to her,” says Jang, 56. “But she showed my letter to the whole school and it was a backlash. I had my first sense of homophobia with kids. I was so naïve then, and I never, ever talked about it again.”
Jang went back in the closet during high school, dated boys and was engaged to be married. However, having been at college during the formative years of the civil rights and feminist movements in the late 1960s, Jang attached herself to the growing activism and began to feel the confidence she needed to come out.
“I had to break off my engagement because it just wasn’t what I wanted, and I wanted freedom,” she says. “So I took my fiancée to a gay bar and sort of said, ‘Guess what?’ He was not happy about.”
Jang says she had no APA lesbian role models when she was in her 20s, and had mainly white girlfriends.
“There was this internalized homophobia among APA lesbians,” says Jang. “If you went into a gay bar and you saw another Asian, you’d go to opposite ends of the bar. APA lesbians never talked to one another, because we never knew if we knew one another’s families and we didn’t want it to spread around Chinatown that so-and-so is gay or a lesbian.”
Jang came out to her parents in 1974. Her mom burst into tears, and her father said that he had known already and began to list all of Jang’s lesbian friends.
It took a while for Jang’s family to accept her as a lesbian, and it wasn’t until she became a mother that she was able to erase some of the barriers that kept her from being close with her family.
Jang adopted an 8-month-old baby girl, Cameron, from Asia seven years ago.
“I always wanted a child, so I made a promise to myself that before I turned 50, I was going to adopt a child,” says Jang, who is raising Cameron with her partner of eight years. “Having Cameron really made a difference in my life. She brought in the involvement of grandparents and uncles and cousins.”
Jang, who has been a San Francisco public school teacher for 33 years, says she and her partner always meet with principals and teachers beforehand to let them know that Cameron has lesbian parents, making sure that her daughter has a safe and enjoyable time at school.
Three-and-a-half Girls
Kevin Lee, co-chair of Asian Pacific Islander Queers United for Action (AQUA) in Washington, D.C., says most gay APA males who are 50-plus never had the opportunity to confront their sexual orientation because of a family obligation to carry on the family name. Moreover, APA families tend not to discuss sexuality because it’s considered a taboo subject.
“They live with this secret all their lives and have wives and kids and many just live with this until they pass on,” he says. “It’s very sad and I wish some families could be more accepting.”
Benjie Aquino, 51, who had a commitment ceremony with Wong last year after having dated for eight years, knew he was gay in high school. Aquino was born in the Philippines and forced to appear straight: He dated girls, married and had a daughter, now 17.
“At the time, I married for the purpose of my family,” says Aquino, who came to the United States in 1986. “I told my daughter when she was in high school that I was having an affair with a man because I had divorced her mother already. She wasn’t upset at all and she wanted to know everything. She told me to go ahead and follow my feelings. She’s my life.”
His mother and relatives on her side supported Aquino and his coming out but it was not the case with his father. Aquino said it was very hard for his father to accept homosexuality.
“But when I had the commitment ceremony with Dion, everyone from my dad’s side of the family came and made sure that everything went well,” Aquino says, who celebrated his one-year-anniversary with Wong last Sunday. “There are six children in my family, three boys and three girls, and now there are three-and-a-half girls.”
Aquino, a nurse who cares for elder LGBTs, says he is now content with who he is and isn’t afraid to be his own person. He and Wong enjoy a loving and honest relationship with plenty of laughter and affection.
“Dion and I are happy together, but I do think about us getting old,” he says. “Dion is 60, and I just have this fear that as we get older and as my diabetes worsens, will he be able to nurse me and take care of me? Or what if I get sick along the way?”
Missing Elders
Ignorance of AIDS and attitudes of invincibility took the lives of many in the first generation of “out-of-the-closet” gay men who would have formed a larger and more visible senior population.
In 1982, when news began to surface about a gay cancer spreading rapidly among males living in San Francisco, Kek Tee Lim was 30 years old and enjoying the attention and drinks he received from white men at gay bars who found his small-framed body attractive and sensual.
“It was like east meets west,” says Lim, now 51. “I was so surprised that they thought I was beautiful. I had plenty of relationships and lovers back in the 1970s and 1980s.”
It was because of one of those relationships that Lim is now living with AIDS. Lim was diagnosed with the virus in 1989 after going in to get a check-up because many of his close friends were dying.
“When I first heard the news that I tested positive, I broke down and blacked out,” Lim says. “It was a very dramatic reaction and traumatic experience. It felt as though someone had handed me a death sentence and I thought I was going to die right away. To this day, I don’t know when I got it or who gave it to me.”
Over the past 14 years, Lim has changed his lifestyle and turned to art and sculpting as a form of therapy. He’s living day-to-day with a positive outlook on life, one that he hopes will help him live a little bit longer, with the help of AZT and a healthy exercise and diet regimen.
“I don’t want to have secrets anymore and I don’t want to lie about my health,” he says. “I have no problem in letting people know that I have AIDS and I am happy with my life and not worried. If people don’t accept me or think negatively of me, that’s their problem. They don’t have to be around me.”
Lim has been diagnosed with what is known as wasting syndrome as a result of AIDS. It means he will gradually lose all motor skills. He is sticking to a monitored resistance weights workout and hopes to defer the onset of this debilitating condition.
“I started to love my body even though I am considered old,” says Lim. “When I was younger, I was ashamed of my body, but now I don’t take anything for granted and am happy that I’m still alive today.”
A Survivor
Francis Allen Pang, 54, was able to dodge the AIDS virus, but not without contracting a number of STDs after years of unprotected sex and anonymous bedmates. Pang has lived as Tamara Ching for the past 27 years as a transgender female.
“I’ve always felt that there was a female spirit inside of me, and knew I wasn’t a male, and that this was in my soul,” says Ching, who began hormone therapy in 1977 to begin a transition into being female. “I dressed up in my sister’s dress and played with doll houses and batons.”
For 25 years, Ching walked the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans and Chicago as a transgender prostitute, with up to nine Johns in one night. By day she worked for the federal government, but by night, she ruled Leavenworth, O’Farrell and Ellis streets, better known as the “Ho Stroll.”
“Prostitution empowered me and helped build up my self-esteem, contrary to what others tell you,” Ching says. “It helped me financially and supported my drug addiction too.”
In 1967, Ching’s drug addiction included a buffet of LSD, marijuana, mescaline, mushrooms and “bennies,” or Benzedrine, uppers that fueled her long nights of partying and prostitution.
“It was like taking a vacation and never having to go on a plane,” says Ching, who penned her last name Ching because kids would tease her about being APA with taunts of “Ching, chong, chang, chang.”
Born and raised in San Francisco, Ching is of Chinese, Hawaiian and German descent. Her mother was a first generation Chinese American and was married to an abusive husband. Together with her two older brothers and younger sister, Ching watched her mother drink herself to sleep after being beaten by her father.
“My childhood wasn’t too good,” says Ching. “I was molested by a family friend when I was around 3 or 4. I look at old photos of me and I feel sorry for him, because no child should ever, ever have to go through what I did.”
She finally quit prostitution in 1993, after it began taking a toll on her body.
“I decided to quit cold turkey,” says Ching. “I quit drugs and prostitution together. I’ve got and had so many STDs, that I was a regular at clinics getting my penicillin. My body told me that I couldn’t do this anymore and that if I didn’t stop doing this, I was going to be dead.”
Ching has been clean and sober for 10 years and currently works at the Southeast Asian Community Center educating APA trangenders about HIV and AIDS prevention and helping transgender prostitutes access healthcare and services.
“I’m a survivor and I try to empower other people and educate others,” says Ching. She also sits on the Transgender Task Force of the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Advisory Committee to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. “I can’t tell people what to do, but I try to set examples and options so the girls at least will know what’s out there. There’s very, very few of us who are over 50.”
A New Isolation
Marcy Adelman, a psychologist and president of Openhouse, a nonprofit working to build housing for LGBT elders, says elder LGBTs have a high rate of depression and suicide because of loneliness and a feeling of not belonging.
“It’s hard for these seniors to associate with the younger generations because they’ve had such different experiences with growing up gay,” she says. “It’s so important that we address these needs and make sure that there’s proper healthcare and services for this growing community.”
But Cahill says most of the federal programs designed to assist senior Americans aren’t accessible or friendly to LGBT elders.
“Most of these LGBT seniors can’t be openly gay if they stay at convalescent homes because there’s still a strong sense of homophobia among many healthcare workers and nursing home administrators,” says Cahill. “These seniors don’t have a strong family network and many of these gay men don’t have kids, so they’re less likely to receive caregiving. They have to rely on friends as their primary caregivers but many pass on with old age.”
As a result, many live a life of isolation, with friends disappearing and the fear of returning to a closeted environment after living as openly LGBT for years. Cahill says there is an urgent need for affordable nursing homes for low-income LGBT seniors, homes with culturally sensitive staff and commitment to a gay-friendly environment.
Cahill adds that federal programs such as social security, Medicaid and tax laws discriminate against LGBT seniors.
“The services don’t work for LGBT seniors because they don’t have the same family support system as heterosexual elders,” says Cahill. “To add to that, the state fails to recognize their same-sex families.”
Widows and widowers benefit from Social Security checks, but surviving same-sex life partners aren’t included, which costs LGBT seniors an estimated $124 million per year in unattainable benefits, according to a report by NGLTF.
When a married spouse enters a nursing home and passes away, Medicaid protects his or her assets and allows for the remaining spouse to live in their home until he or she dies. This sort of protection, however, is not offered for same-sex partners.
“Then you have the tax and pensions, which discriminate against same-sex partners,” Cahill says. “And hospital or nursing home visitation rights, where same-sex life partners are unable to be with their loved ones or make critical decisions because they aren’t recognized by the state as being married or a blood relative.”
Cahill and other proponents of equal treatment for LGBT seniors are hoping the growing awareness of the elder LGBT community will shed light on the changes that need to be made in current government policies.
For many elder LGBTs, the years of homophobia they endured have been ingrained into their minds and memories. Many are still unable to shake this and are afraid to come out for fear of retribution, but more and more, many are seeing their age as a cause for activism and change.
“A lot of young people don’t know the history of the LGBT movement and the changes that have occurred over the past 30 and 40 years,” says Abdullah, who was the 2002 recipient of the Pat Bond Old Dyke Award for her activism in the LGBT elder community. “It’s important to learn the history and learn where you came from and how everything came about. I want to see the young and the old come together and connect so we can learn from one another, and maybe that way, we won’t be so isolated from one another.”