Aging gay population fuels new housing market

updated 5:01 p.m. ET June 11, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO - Like other gay men in their golden years, Jack Norris and Seymour Sirota had heard the horror stories.

An elderly lesbian couple is housed on separate floors of a nursing home and kept from seeing each other. A gay retired college professor feels compelled to keep his sexual orientation a secret after his roommate at an assisted living facility asks to be transferred.

“I thought, ‘We are not going to be in that situation,”’ the 67-year-old Norris says crisply. “This is not going to happen to us in our final days.”

That’s how the two New Yorkers, partners for 14 years, landed at Rainbow Vision, a just-completed senior community in Santa Fe, N.M. From the private dining room named after Truman Capote to the cabaret where '60s teen icon Lesley “It’s My Party” Gore was scheduled to appear this weekend, everything about the 146-unit retirement village was designed with the comfort of graying gays and lesbians in mind.

As the generation of gay men and lesbians who came out in the 1960s and '70s reaches retirement age, about a dozen specialized senior developments across the country are either up and running or in the works.

In such senior-heavy locales as California, Arizona and Florida, as well as less traditionally gay-friendly places like North Carolina and Texas, builders have found a market in a segment of the gay population that worries getting old will mean going back in the closet.

“In a retirement community, you want to be with people of like minds and like interests, whether it’s a golf community or a religious community,” said Bonnie McGowan, who is spearheading Birds of a Feather, a second gay senior complex in New Mexico. “Until I feel safe walking down the street holding a woman’s hand ... and not feel like I’m going to offend even one person, there is a need for this.”

Besides personal safety, specialists in gay aging issues offer other reasons why the so-called Stonewall Generation, named for the 1969 New York riots that marked the beginning of the modern gay movement, needs and craves places of its own to retire.

Among them are the years of stigma and isolation many gays who are over 50 experienced, that may have left them estranged from their families, financially insecure and childless.

“There is a real sense of disenfranchisement and also a sense of independence, of ‘I don’t want to be dependent on family, I want to be dependent on community,”’ said Judy Dlugacz, founder of the San Francisco-based lesbian travel company Olivia Cruises and Resorts.

Olivia is currently scouting land in the Palm Springs area for what Dlugacz hopes will be the first of several high-end resort communities geared toward mature lesbians who are looking either for a vacation home or a place to retire.

Joy Silver, developer of Rainbow Vision, also plans to expand to Palm Springs, a desert community already popular with gay tourists.

“Back in the day, we could identify each other because the only place to be gay was a gay bar,” said Silver, who views her Santa Fe property as somewhere for baby boomer gays to live their later years as residents of a majority.

“Now, we have more options and we may be more out, but it’s still going to be hard to find friends or partners,” she said. “It doesn’t help to live in a gay-friendly community without any other gay people.”

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