Reverend Irene Monroe

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Retired gay couple awarded for launching organization supporting LGBTQ+ elders of color

On November 12, Paul Glass and Charles D. Evans of Falmouth were honored with this year’s AARP Andrus Award for Community Service. It’s AARP’s most prestigious and visible state volunteer award for community service. They are the first married and Black gay couple in AARP’s history to receive the award.

AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons,  is one of the largest organizations in the country. With a membership of over 38 million members as of 2018, it focuses on issues affecting Americans over the age of fifty. The AARP Andrus Award for Community Service is an annual awards program developed to honor individuals whose service is a unique and valuable contribution to their community and society, reflecting AARP’s vision and mission.

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“I am beyond honored and grateful for this recognition. I feel we are not put on this earth to exist but to be of service to others and our community,” Evans told LGBTQ Nation. 

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When AARP Massachusetts was looking to honor the state’s top volunteer, Glass and Evans’s names rose to the top. They have made a difference in the lives around them, sharing their knowledge, experience, talent, and skills to enrich the lives of our community. Since childhood, their indefatigable spirit to give back to their community was ingrained in them. 

“Paul and Charles have channeled the many negative experiences they endured into positive, healing, and inspiring volunteer work and leadership,” wrote Barrie Atkin of Swampscott, who nominated the couple. 

“Their signature work co-founding LGBTQ+ Elders of Color in 2013 in Massachusetts was innovative, unusual, and courageous. No such organization existed at that time. In collaboration with the LGBTQ+ Aging Project, they identified the need and turned the need into a reality. They didn’t just co-found the organization along with others. Their continued leadership inspires many others to be involved.” 

People of color are underrepresented and underserved when it comes to aging services and resources. Paul and Charles understand the intersectional challenges and complexities of growing older as African-American gay men.

LGBTQ+ senior communities with multiple identities confront multiple challenges. Their organization, LGBTQ+ Elders of Color, fills the gap missed by Massachusetts LGBTQ+ organizations and local, state, and federal public health systems. Outreach is essential because the challenges facing Black LGBTQ+ seniors intensify with age.

According to Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (Sage) and the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), approximately one-third of LGBTQ+ elders live at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, with 40 percent being Black. 

These seniors often feel more vulnerable, invisible, and isolated by retirement. Historical and ongoing discrimination has created significant lifelong challenges for this demographic: limited wealth and savings, low wages, few labor protections, housing instability, food insecurity, stigma, immigration, HIV status, and higher mortality from treatable conditions. All have contributed to a lack of well-being and a lower quality of life.

By 2050, POC seniors will comprise over 40 percent of the elderly population, and approximately 3 million seniors will identify as LGBTQ+. With this projection, specific cultural and linguistic competence training and nondiscrimination policies are needed to support a rapidly growing demographic group that has experienced a lifetime of health, educational, and economic disparities. 

In 2018, Massachusetts legislators passed “An Act Relative to LGBT Awareness Training for Aging Services Providers” mandating LGBTQ+ cultural awareness training for all state-funded and licensed aging service providers within 12 months of employment. 

The challenges experienced by aging LGBTQ+ people of color can only be remedied by policymakers and aggressive programs invested in expanding care and services specifically targeted to these racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse communities.

These Dapper Dans, as I fondly dubbed them, provide unique and invaluable resources for LGBTQ+ elders of color. Their impact reverberates throughout the Bay State. 

“Since relocating to Massachusetts on Cape Cod in 2002 and our subsequent retirement, we have enriched our lives with stronger connections to the community through outreach and advocacy,” Glass told the audience at the award ceremony. “To some, retirement may mean the opportunity to relax and take it easy. To us, retirement has provided an opportunity to find new ways to help others.”

Without the foundation people like Paul and Charles have laid for LGBTQ+ elders of color, we wouldn’t be the vibrant, visible,  and growing community that we are.

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Kim Burrell Reminds Us How the Black Church Uses, Abuses Gay Christians

Kim Burrell, a Pentecostal preacher and one of black gospel’s darlings, was ousted from an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show this week, sending shock waves through the African-American community.

Burrell and Pharrell Williams were invited to promote their duet, “I See Victory,” from the soundtrack of the inspirational film Hidden Figures. However, Burrell’s homophobic homily about the “perverted homosexual spirit” prompted a tsunami of angry social media posts by African-American entertainers and figures — both LGBTQ and straight — not seen in previous antigay scandals.

The mother of out R&B phenom Frank Ocean, who had a song on his 2016 Blonde album that featured Burrell, condemned the gospel singer’s hatred and asked whether she could be cropped out of her son’s tune. Hidden Figures and Moonlight star Janelle Monáe had a visceral reaction to Burrell’s rant:

“I unequivocally repudiate ANY AND ALL hateful comments against the LGBTQ community,” Monáe wrote on Instagram. “We cannot sit Idly by nor will we speak silently when we are confronted with such violence against members of our community.”

What has always made me shake my head in utter disgust is not only that most African-American gospel church choirs of any note have LGBTQ singers, but that they also actively seek us out as ministers of music.

“The virtuosity of gay singers, musicians, and composers has been the driving force in developing popular gospel choirs — even chart-topping, Grammy-winning acts — that make money for a church, help expand congregations, and raise the profiles of pastors,” NPR reported in its 2012 segment “Blacks, Gays, and the Church: A Complex Relationship.”

Gospel music undeniably has queerness in its roots that not only shaped the genre but continues to give gospel music its enduring vibrancy.

One of the black church’s most influential denominations is the Church of God in Christ, which Burrell belongs to. It is the largest African-American and largest Pentecostal church in the United States. And as the largest black denomination in the country, it is also the loudest in rebuking homosexuality.

With many of the gospel music industry mega-stars coming from the Church of God in Christ, the church’s charismatic worship style shouts to a black gay male queer gospel aesthetic every Sunday. And the church remains conflicted with itself.

Pastor Donnie McClurkin, an über-star in the stratosphere of black gospel music, also belongs to the Church of God in Christ and struggles mightily with his sexual orientation.

“God did not call you to such perversions. Your only hope is Jesus Christ. Were it not for this Jesus I would be a homosexual today. This God is a deliverer,” McClurkin exhorted with fire and brimstone at the the denomination’s 102nd Holy Convocation International Youth Department Worship Service.

A similar message of gay = evil was pushed in Burrell’s half-baked apology, in which she said, “I love you and God loves you but God hates the sin in you and me.”

Burrell’s theological qualifier of “love the sinner but hate the sin” is commonly heard in our churches. This message is deleterious to LGBTQ people of faith on so many levels:

It pimps our talent, yet damns our souls. Our connections and contributions to the larger black religious cosmos are desecrated every time homophobic pronouncements, like Burrell’s, go unchecked in these holy places of worship. The black church becomes an institution on the “down low.” Our silence, shame, and stigma around issues of identity, sexual practices, and the lack of pastoral care to people deemed “outsiders” are factors contributing not only to high-risk sexual behaviors and the transmission of HIV, but also to the silent killers of suicide and homelessness in my community.

The Church of God in Christ cannot deny that the church gets its Jesus dance on and shouts amen to a queer black male aesthetic every Sunday. No one knows this better than Burrell herself.

Interestingly, the Church of God in Christ was formed in 1897 by a group of disfellowshipped Baptists. I wonder if the guys were booted out because they were gay.

REV. IRENE MONROE is a writer and theologian based in Cambridge, Mass.