Gary "Buz" Hermes

As LGBT elders, maintaining a positive attitude toward aging and finding ways to continue enjoying a satisfying quality of life is said to have great potential for extending our lifespans … some studies say as much as 7-1/2 years!

Like breathing in and out, Life is constantly seeking to engage us through enjoyment and expression, regardless of our age.  Our interests and our passions are “what floats our cork” as the saying goes.   Each of us is drawn to activities that connect us to ourselves and to our surroundings.  However the way we express and enjoy ourselves may change over time.  The activities we were drawn to in our youth may no longer be as enjoyable or as fulfilling.  We may also have to adapt our activities to reflect anticipated and unexpected age-related changes.  The key is to focus our creativity on finding ways to make sure our interests and passions are adequately satisfied.  Ray and Gloria are inspiring examples.

Ray has always enjoyed nature and in his younger years loved to go tent camping with a group of his gay friends.  Their plans often included strenuous hikes in isolated wilderness areas.  Now in his 70’s, Ray has a heart condition that severely limits his capacity for physical exertion.  While Ray initially found it hard to accept this limitation, he has since found he can continue to fulfill his need to enjoy the outdoors by taking shorter walks with friends on easily accessed trails in nearby nature preserves.  At home Ray is surrounded by the beautiful nature photos he took in his youth and also enjoys watching televised nature programs of all kinds.

Gloria and her lesbian partner used to have a sizable ranch where they enjoyed keeping horses and they often went riding together.  When Gloria’s partner died, she discovered she was no longer able to maintain the ranch on her own and moved to a senior apartment complex closer to the services she now needs.  However Gloria still loves to ride when she feels up to it, so she maintains a horse named Jenny in a stable on the outskirts of town.  Even when she isn’t up to riding, Gloria still enjoys just visiting and grooming Jenny and intends to continue keeping her as she feels this connection to her passion is important to her enjoyment of life.

How are you creating ways to maintain the quality of your life as you age?

Buz Hermes is co-facilitator of the Sonoma Valley LGBT Seniors Group and a former staff member of Spectrum’s Senior Outreach Program.  He is currently a consultant on LGBT aging and can be reached at GaryDHermes@comcast.net or (707) 227-6935.

Empowerment may be an overused word, but it is what got us older LGBT adults through some tough times as we courageously faced a largely homophobic and transphobic culture and creatively carved out a niche for ourselves.   LGBT aging is now our new frontier and empowerment comes from being prepared for any “potholes” we may encounter as we continue our life journey, and of course from fearlessly facing our mortality and preparing for our death.

As Atul Gawande amply illustrates in his best seller Being Mortal, the downside of not being proactive in preparing for health crises and our dying can be prolonged distress and suffering both for ourselves and those we love.   While we may have no control over the when or why of illnesses, accidents and death, we can begin to address the who, where, and how aspects.  The planning process involves many decisions and is not something you just do once; it needs to be revisited periodically as our preferences and circumstances evolve.  Of course, it also involves substantial “paperwork” as our choices need to be recorded to be legal.  The Council on Aging can assist with healthcare and estate planning.

The decisions about how you wish to be treated and under what conditions are complex and it helps to explore the options with someone with whom you are comfortable.  Likewise you may want to share your thoughts about death and how you might wish your assets distributed and your body and your life honored.

The other important decisions, of course, involve choosing those we trust to implement our wishes.  We need someone willing to carry out our health care instructions in the event we are incapable of articulating them ourselves.  We may also wish to have someone appointed to have power of attorney for our finances in the event we are incapacitated so that our bills will continue to get paid.  We also need an estate executor to make sure our after-death instructions are implemented.  If we can’t identify anyone to assume these roles, there are professional fiduciaries who can assume them.

Last but not least, we need to make sure all these people know our wishes and have a copy of our legal planning documents and that someone knows where we keep all of our important papers.  Of course, the list of those records and their locations needs to be updated periodically.  Once these decisions are made and documents are in place, we can enjoy peace of mind knowing that we have acted as empowered LGBT elders.

Buz Hermes is co-facilitator of the Sonoma Valley LGBT Seniors Group and a former staff member of Spectrum’s Senior Outreach Program.  He is currently offering 8-week “Aging Together With Pride” workshops sponsored by Adult and Aging Services for LGBT seniors.  He can be reached at GaryDHermes@comcast.net or (707) 227-6935

We don’t like to think about future needs.  However, the aging journey can sometimes present us with unexpected crises.  Knowing where to turn for help before we need it can lessen our stress and optimize our success in meeting challenges as they arise.

Navigating the Maze:  Our “safety net” of benefits and services is actually more like a “crazy-quilt” of loosely stitched patches   As community needs were identified, a separate non-profit or government agency was formed to meet that specific need.  This agency provides transportation, another agency provides home-delivered meals, and yet another can help with in-home care.  Some agencies serve the entire county, others are limited to local communities.  The Senior Resource Guide for Sonoma County is composed of nearly 80 pages of service providers, each meeting a specific need and each with its own eligibility criteria!

Please obtain a copy of the 2016 Resource Guide (available at your local senior center) and become familiar with its contents (and note that for the first time there is a separate category of listings for LGBTQI resources!!!).  Keep it handy for emergencies such as if you are discharged from the hospital and urgently need home-delivered meals or transportation to your follow-up medical appointments.

Another good place to turn when you need help with a specific need is 2-1-1 provided by the Volunteer Center of Sonoma County.  Just call 2-1-1 or visit www.211sonoma.org.

If you are trying to live on a very tight budget, I encourage you to go on-line to www.benefitscheckup.org.  While you will be asked a lot of questions to determine your eligibility for various benefits, you will not be asked to enter any identifying information and you might be amazed at the many ways you can save on food, utilities, and health costs.

Resistance to Getting Help:  We tend to internalize the values of the culture we were born into.  For many of us, that means we pride ourselves on our independence and self-sufficiency.  Vanity can also keep us from acknowledging our need for help with personal care or from using assistive devices such as hearing aids, canes, walkers and wheelchairs.  Those of us who identify as LGBTQ may have yet another layer of resistance — our fear of how we might be treated by those who provide the services we need.  Fortunately, there has been much work done in Sonoma County on making sure our aging service providers are aware of our history of alienation and sensitive to our concerns.

Buz Hermes is co-facilitator of the Sonoma Valley LGBT Seniors Group and a former staff member of Spectrum’s Senior Outreach Program.  He is currently offering 8-week “Aging Together With Pride” workshops sponsored by Adult and Aging Services for LGBT seniors.  He can be reached at GaryDHermes@comcast.net or (707) 227-6935

Life Review

In his book, A Time To Live, Robert Raines wrote about aging as a time to “consciously reweave the gorgeous tear-stained threads of your colorful life into a fresh tapestry of meaning.”  In one of my college decorative arts classes we studied how tapestries are made.  If you turn a tapestry with a detailed design over, it is an unrecognizable jumble of gaps and loose threads…much like my chaotic life when I look back on it!

What holds the tapestry together are the strong warp threads that run from one end to the other.  The warp threads of our lives are our strengths and talents and those loose threads and gaps, when viewed from the perspective of our later years, often reveal a tapestry of patterns or themes.  Christian de la Huerta identified some life themes that have traditionally been common to LGBT individuals in his book Coming Out Spiritually:   As outsiders, we tend to be more self-reflective.  We are apt to challenge commonly accepted behaviors and norms with activism and humor, to enrich others with our creativity and sensitive to beauty, to express our compassion through service to others, to bridge differences including gender stereotypes, and to be drawn to spiritual exploration and expression.  What have been the themes of your wild and wonderful life?

Life Repair.

One of the most important strategies for reweaving our life tapestries and living our later years with greater serenity is to free ourselves of the shame and blame of resentments and regrets.  Resentments can include anger at having to cope with our culture’s homophobic treatment or at specific family members, friends, partners, employers and others who have hurt us with their actions or attitudes.  Regrets are usually comprised of those things we have done or not done that hurt ourselves or others.  Regrets can also include our “if only’s” — those “paths not taken” and the choices we made that we now may question.

Life repair can be a painful process if not done with deep compassion for yourself.  Hindsight can easily lead to guilt and shame so it is important to remember that all of our life decisions have contributed to our evolving consciousness.

In my next blog, “Anticipating Change,” we will look at how we can begin to plan for some of the unexpected challenges that can accompany aging.

Buz Hermes is co-facilitator of the Sonoma Valley LGBT Seniors Group and a former staff member of Spectrum’s Senior Outreach Program.  He is currently offering 8-week “Aging Together With Pride” workshops sponsored by Adult and Aging Services for LGBT seniors.  He can be reached at GaryDHermes@comcast.net or (707) 227-6935

Cultural Influences:  At the end of my initial blog I mentioned that we would continue exploring optimal aging strategies that would capitalize on our qualities and strengths as LGBT elders.  One of those strategies is to examine how our cultural values and experiences have impacted us and continue to affect us.

Internalized ageism:  Our culture is addicted to staying young.  Age is experienced as a disease, as a failure, as a betrayal of our bodies.  Television and magazines are filled with products guaranteed to restore and maintain the beauty, strength, stamina and sexuality of our younger years.  Instead of being proud of our age, we are flattered when people tell us we don’t look our age.  We gay men are especially prone to internalized ageism.  Many younger gay men have negative stereotypes of older gay men and dread their later years.

Internalized homophobia:  Our culture is only now beginning to relax its strict rules around variations in sexual expression and gender identity and that relaxed attitude is still not yet universally accepted.  Most of us who are older suffered from judgment, discrimination, intimidation and harassment for most of our lifetime.  It was difficult to avoid the impact of the homophobia that engulfed us.  Our sense of self-worth suffered.  Many of us jeopardized our health by drinking too much, experimenting with drugs, or engaging in unsafe sexual behaviors.  We may also have tolerated unhealthy relationships out of low self-esteem or accepted limited career choices out of fear of rejection or even worse consequences.

The good news: The research that is being done on older LGBT adults confirms the negative impact on us of a lifetime of avoiding or combatting our culture’s rampant homophobia.  We continue to be vigilant and cautious in letting others know us fully.  However there is some good news for us as we age.  The research is also finding that the strengths and adaptive strategies that we survivors engaged to tolerate such stress have resulted in an increased capacity for handling the difficult challenges of aging!  We are able to respond to crises and adjust to change with greater resilience!  This is great news as it means that our past challenges have made us stronger and more likely to adjust to whatever changes lay ahead.

In my next blog, “Reweaving Our Life Tapestry,” we will look at how life review and “life repair” can be a strategy for discovering our strengths and freeing ourselves from lingering resentments and regrets.

Buz Hermes is co-facilitator of the Sonoma Valley LGBT Seniors Group and a former staff member of Spectrum’s Senior Outreach Program.  He is currently offering 8-week “Aging Together With Pride” workshops sponsored by Adult and Aging Services for LGBT seniors.  He can be reached at GaryDHermes@comcast.net or (707) 227-6935

This is the first of what I hope will be a forum for older LGBT adults. I hope you will share your thoughts and experiences about aging with me.

As some of you may know, I am passionate about the “conscious aging” movement and eager to share it with my LGBT community. This movement is all about changing “the aging paradigm” in a youth-obsessed culture and exploring how we can better prepare for the challenges and as well as utilize the opportunities afforded by our extended life span.

As part of a project sponsored by Adult and Aging Services and funded by the LGBTQI Giving Circle of Sonoma County, I am currently offering an 8-week series called “Aging Together With Pride!” that is being offered in four Sonoma County locations. In one of the early sessions, I was asked why I felt there was a need to focus on the LGBT community.

“Hidden, isolated, and underserved” is a phrase we often use to describe today’s LGBT seniors. Even though as LGBT seniors we are more at risk for loneliness, depression, disability, HIV/AIDS and alcohol or drug abuse, research shows that LGBT seniors are only 20% as likely as heterosexual elders to access services!

There are a couple of possible explanations. The first is that many of us quickly learned that our survival depended on staying closeted. For much of our lives being homosexual or transgender was a crime, a sin, and a mental illness. Many of us were alienated from our families, lost jobs, were victims of violence, and were incarcerated or institutionalized. We learned to be vigilant and our instinct to hide persists in spite of increasing social acceptance, often preventing us from seeking help when we need it.

The other reason is that individuals and agencies that provide the services we may need are not always sensitive to our history of being marginalized and the effects of our societal scarring. Their assumption is often that we are heterosexual, leaving us to wonder how we might be treated if we “came out” about our sexual orientation or gender identity. Fortunately the grant project also includes cultural competency trainings about these issues that are being provided to Sonoma County aging service providers by my former Spectrum colleague Nancy Flaxman.

Future blogs will explore optimal aging strategies that capitalize on our qualities and strengths as LGBT elders.

Buz Hermes is co-facilitator of the Sonoma Valley LGBT Seniors Group and a former staff member of Spectrum’s Senior Outreach Program. He has also provided supportive programs for caregivers of persons affected by HIV and AIDS and has been a coordinator of services for low-income seniors. He can be reached at GaryDHermes@comcast.net.