Trans students in Philadelphia have been assured that their correct name and pronouns will always be used, as the city’s school board moves to address issues thrown up by coronavirus.
In Philadelphia, trans students already have the right to be addressed according to their wishes.
After a landmark policy was passed in 2016, trans students in the state are also backed in using the bathroom and playing on the sports team that corresponds to their gender identity — whether or not they have their parents approval or have taken steps to medically transition.
But when coronavirus hit and schools closed, there was a hitch: Google Classroom, the preferred virtual classroom used by Philadelphia schools, was outing students as transgender and publishing their deadnames on virtual registers without their permission.
School officials had said technology wasn’t fixable.
Initially school officials blamed technology and said they were unable to fix the problem.
But deadnaming and misgendering are serious issues for trans youth, as non-binary teacher Maddie Luebbert explained at a school board meeting last month.
“This public display can become a serious threat to a student’s physical, emotional, or mental well-being,” said Luebbert.
“I hope I do not need to explain how vulnerable queer youth are — more likely to be homeless, more likely to face abuse, more likely to be dealing with mental illness, more likely to attempt suicide.”
Trans students speak out against deadnaming.
Elias Musselman, a trans student, also spoke out about the pain of being misgendered by Google Classroom.
“My whole class, who knew me as Eli, suddenly heard my birth name, and I would start having an anxiety attack and crying,” Musselman said.
“Some students don’t get support from their families, and to have support from school is such a big thing,” Musselman added.
To be called a name you don’t want to be called really affects you.
After an outcry from students and teachers, the Philadelphia School District has moved to assure transgender students that their correct name and pronouns will be used consistently going forward.
The move was announced via email to school principals this week and is expected to be presented at a virtual meeting of the school board today.
“We’re at a time where so much is out of our control, but this is something that is in our control,” Fix Lopez said.
“To me, it’s not so much about a name, but an identity.”
A transgender service member in the US Navy has been granted a waiver to present as the correct gender for the first time since Trump’s trans military ban became law.
Trump’s infamous ban came into force in April 2019, almost two full years after the president first announced his intention to exclude all trans people from the military.
The Navy confirmed that a trans service member has been granted a waiver in a statement provided to CNN on Friday (May 15).
“The acting secretary of the Navy has approved a specific request for exemption related to military service by transgender persons and persons with gender dysphoria,” said spokesperson Brittany Stephens.
Stephens said the transgender service member “requested a waiver to serve in their preferred gender”, including “obtaining a gender marker change… and being allowed to adhere to standards associated with their preferred gender, such as uniforms and grooming”.
Transgender people have had a chequered history in the US armed forces. They were prevented from serving until 2016, when the Barack Obama administration put an end to the ban.
In July 2017, Trump announced on Twitter that he intended to ban all trans people from serving in the military.
“After consultation with my generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US military,” he wrote.
“Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”
Trump’s ban means trans people who come out will be discharged.
The legislation was eventually enacted in April of last year – following four failed injunctions — and plunged an estimated 13,700 transgender service members into uncertainty.
Under the law, a trans person who comes out or is outed while serving in the military will be discharged, unless they agree to suppress their identity.
The Navy subsequently announced that service members would be allowed to live in their correct gender while off duty, but the US Naval Academy later said that it would bar trans students from enrolling for 2020.
My phone buzzed the other day with a long missive from a friend to a group Facebook chat we share with my husband and his fiancé. Earlier in the day, he had invited me and my husband over for dinner at their apartment. In the spirit of social distancing, I responded by suggesting maybe we do something outdoors—perhaps a picnic or a walk in the park?
He was furious. He felt like we were avoiding their “COVID germs.” After a series of angry messages, he left the group chat—the digital equivalent of a gauntlet-drop.
I looked at my husband, speechless. Had COVID-19 just caused a different kind of loss, our friendship?
We all manage and respond to risk differently—and with varied emotions. Most of us are becoming well acquainted with the small daily frustrations of encountering people engaging in behaviors once considered perfectly normal but now labeled as risky: shopping for groceries without a mask, walking too closely to others, or coughing without covering your face. But as my friend made clear, we can also find frustration in others we believe are being overprotective or too risk-averse.
As a sociologist who has studied how gay men practice and manage HIV risk, I think a lot about the way diseases shape our behaviors, emotions, and, ultimately, our social worlds. HIV is fundamentally different from COVID-19 in that it cannot be transmitted through casual contact like handshakes or shared Uber rides. Nonetheless, in order to navigate HIV risk, we engage in a similar kind of mental calculus.
Some gay men think the risk of contracting the disease is well worth the potential pleasures of eschewing condoms with a one-night stand. Other gay men recoil at the thought, so wary of HIV that they meticulously practice condom use or even avoid casual sex altogether (indeed, that recoil can at times translate into shame projected onto anyone who doesn’t take the same precautions). As anyone who has spent time cruising for sex online knows well, clashing views on risk and pleasure can lead to plenty of hurt feelings and libidinous disappointment.
HIV and COVID-19 risk can both put distance between us, but the pleasures interrupted are of a different stripe. For HIV, we take risk in search of human connection and sexual pleasure. For COVID-19, even the most ordinary of behaviors have become suddenly risky: sharing a meal, taking a walk, going to a movie. Avoiding COVID-19 is forcing us to deprive ourselves of all the many pleasures of life, both sexual and platonic.
Our new marching orders for our now-COVID-ridden lives seems straightforward enough: avoid gatherings, wear masks in public, wash your hands vigorously. But for most of us, the truth is more complicated. We are faced with a social isolation that hurts. And the promise of connection is not trivial or superfluous: we crave it. We need it.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we’ve all been doing a sort of risk-calculus in our heads these last few weeks. Is it OK to take a walk with my friend? Do we need to wear masks? Should I say yes to the invitation from my parents to come stay with them for a long weekend? For those of us that are single, is dating even possible anymore?
A tipping point in those risk-equations we all have been making these last few weeks is coming. As the loss of human connection and intimacy takes an ever-greater emotional and psychological toll, the potential risk of contracting COVID-19 won’t be enough to keep us away from those we love. For some, especially those suffering from depression, isolation will become unbearable to the point of even becoming deadly.
As restrictions lift and we come out of our isolation, many of our phones will buzz with eager invitations from friends asking to get together and connect—for dinner, a walk, or to get coffee. But we won’t all be ready to take those risks at the same time.
Try not to take it personally. The truth is we are all aching from the pain of isolation. We miss you. And in the words of Queen Elizabeth, I long for the day that “we will meet again.”
Following the death of Aimee Stephens — the transgender woman at the center of a high-profile LGBTQ discrimination case pending before the Supreme Court — a different name appeared in several news articles announcing that she had died Tuesday.
The New York Times, The Associated Press and the Detroit News were among the media outlets that published Stephens’ former legal name, the male name she had used prior to her gender transition in 2013. The publication of her previous name, colloquially referred to as “deadnaming,” drew swift and fierce reaction from LGBTQ rights groups and advocates.
“It serves no purpose of integrity to publish a transgender person’s ‘deadname,’ or former name, as the @nytimes did here in Aimee Stephens’s obituary. This should be immediately revised. Aimee deserves better,” Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ legal organization, tweeted Tuesday evening.
“The Grey Lady should know better than this in 2020,” the National Center for Lesbian Rights tweeted later that night. “Deadnaming and misgendering individuals is wrong, and also sends a message to trans or non-binary people that their existence is not valid.”
Both the Times and the AP amended their articles shortly after.
“An earlier version of this obituary included the name Ms. Stephens was given at birth, which she no longer used. That reference has been removed,” an editor’s note in the Times obituary stated.
Times editor Patrick LaForge also apologized on Twitter and said the incident would lead to updated style guidance.
“The first published version of the article our reporter wrote did not include the name,” LaForge wrote. “It was added later in an honest mistake by editors trying to interpret what we now realize is a confusing style rule for obituaries.”
The AP amended its obituary Wednesday and included the following note: “The story has been edited to remove a former name in accordance with AP Style to use the name by which the person lived and avoid former names unless relevant.”
Lauren Easton, a spokesperson for the news organization, told NBC News that the AP Stylebook was updated in June 2019 to include guidance on deadnaming.
The stylebook, which is influential in guiding the way many U.S. newsrooms write about complex topics, now reads: “Use the name by which a transgender person now lives. Refer to a previous name, sometimes called a deadname, only if relevant to the story.”
“The spirit of the entry is to make NOT printing a person’s deadname the default; to assume a person does not want their deadname used unless they say or you confirm otherwise,” Easton wrote in an email. “And then print it only if it’s newsworthy.”
As of Friday morning, the Detroit News’ article still included Stephens’ former name.
“The reality of trans lives is that we struggle against the interpersonal and systemic beliefs that we are only putting on our genders and that beneath them lies some ‘truth’ of who we really are — and that notion fuels violence and discrimination against members of the trans community,” Strangio, who is transgender, wrote.
“To then write about a woman who is trans and remind the reader of her deadname under the pretense that what she was called at birth is important to understanding who she is today actually evokes the image of a man for readers and contributes to the insidious social understanding that ‘this person claimed to be a woman but was really a man,’” Strangio continued.
In a 2019 op-ed titled “Stuck on how to refer to trans people in the past? The answer is actually really simple,” Parker Molloy, editor at large for Media Matters for America, a progressive nonprofit that monitors the media, argued that in the “overwhelming majority” of instances, “it’s completely unnecessary to draw attention to former names or pronouns.”
“The best way to refer to a trans person — even when discussing their past — is to use whatever name and pronouns that individual currently uses,” Molloy, who is transgender, wrote.
Raquel Willis, a transgender activist, writer and former editor at Out Magazine, said in 2020, there’s not much excuse anymore for continued deadnaming in major publications: “We have to call it what it is: ignorance.”
“As a black woman I liken it — and this might get me into some hot water — but I liken it to a news reporter in the ‘70s saying ‘colored’ instead of ‘black’ or ‘African American,’” Willis said. “Sure, we can extend some grace to you not understanding, but it’s also your job to be aware of the communities you’re reporting on and what language they’re using.”
Something as simple as asking an interviewee which pronouns they use no matter your impression of their gender identity, Willis suggested, goes a long way.
So when, if ever, do transgender advocates think it is relevant and acceptable to use a trans person’s former name in a news article?
Willis said there are some “special cases where you would need to use a name that someone doesn’t currently use.”
“Someone who was a public figure, who people knew as one name, and this was about trying to educate the rest of the public about them changing their names or pronouns,” she explained.
However, once the new name of a public figure — Caitlyn Jenner and Chelsea Manning, for example — “becomes common knowledge, it is unnecessary and disrespectful to continue referring to their old name,” Nick Adams, GLAAD’s director of transgender media and representation, said in an interview with Media Matters last year.
A World Health Organization (WHO) official said society has “come to terms” with HIV, but he missed a glaringly obvious point.
Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies programme, said at a conference Wednesday (May 13) that COVID-19 may “never go away” and referred to the HIV epidemic, which took hold in the 1980s.
“[COVID 19] may become just another endemic virus in our communities and this virus may never go away,” Ryan said.
“HIV has not gone away but we’ve come to terms with the virus and we have found the therapies and we have found the prevention methods, and people don’t feel as scared as they did before, and we’re offering life to people with HIV — long, healthy lives to people with HIV.”
Ryan said he was “not comparing the two diseases” but argued that the trajectory of HIV shows that nobody can predict when the coronavirus will disappear.
While Ryan’s point is important — that a vaccine to the coronavirus may never be found — suggesting that society has “come to terms” with the virus ignores a simple fact.
Not everyone has come to terms with the virus.
The queer community still lives with the scars of the AIDS crisis which took the lives of many, and contributed to rampant homophobia and transphobia in society.
Decades after the AIDS crisis began, there is still a stigma around HIV which means that people living with the virus are subjected to stereotyping, moral judgements, social isolation and healthcare discrimination. There is also the continued misconception that it is an LGBT+ person’s virus, when in fact, anybody can acquire HIV (thought it should be noted that in America, there is a worryingly high rate of new transmissions among queer Black men).
She died at home this morning, according to her brother-in-law John Pedit.
Her case was one of a trio of LGBT+ cases the Supreme Court heard on October 8, which between them could determine whether millions of LGBT+ workers are protected under the US’s most powerful federal workplace anti-discrimination law, or whether it is legal to fire people on the basis of their identity.
In Stephens’ case, the Supreme Court looked at whether trans people are protected from employment discrimination, after she was fired from her funeral-home job two weeks after coming out as trans.
The Supreme Court is due to announce its verdict any day now – making her death all the more tragic.
According to a GoFundMe that was recently set up to financially support Stephens and her wife, she had become so unwell that she was unable to travel for her thrice-weekly “lifesaving” dialysis sessions.
According to the fundraising page, Stephens had also been “struggling” with diabetes and its complications for several years now.
Legal experts have said that her death won’t render the pending Supreme Court moot, as her estate could still recover the damages for the violation of her rights.
Aimee Stephens and Harris Funeral Homes.
Aimee Stephens, 58, worked for Harris Funeral Homes in Detroit, Michigan, for six years.
In July 2013, she informed her boss, Harris Funeral Homes owner Thomas Rost, that she was trans and intended to come to work dressed in clothing worn by women in the three funeral homes he owned.
This meant coming to work wearing a skirt suit or dress.
Two weeks later, Rost handed Stephens a letter that said “this is not going to work”, Stephens told the Associated Press.
Stephens complained to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which agreed to sue the funeral home.
A trial judge ruled against her but then a federal appeals court in Cincinnati sustained her complaint, saying that discrimination on the basis of trans status is sex discrimination.
That appeals court also separately found that she was fired because Rost had sex stereotypes about Stephens’ appearance and dress – in that, she didn’t conform to what he deemed to be female-presenting.
Rost had testified that Stephens coming to work in women’s clothes would be “a distraction that is not appropriate” for grieving families.
Rost appealed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
When the coronavirus lockdown left a group of transgender sex workers in a beach town near Rome without work, they turned to a local Catholic priest for help to buy food.
But his parish’s resources were already stretched by the health crisis so the priest turned to the cardinal known as “the Pope’s Robin Hood” who runs the Vatican charities. He wired money to the parish for them.
“I don’t understand why this is getting so much attention,” Cardinal Konrad Krajewski told Reuters by phone on Thursday. “This is ordinary work for the Church, it’s normal. This is how the Church is a field hospital.“
Krajewski, whose formal title is “papal almoner,” or distributor of alms, said the sex workers most likely were undocumented, making it difficult for them to seek help from Italian state welfare offices.
“Everything is closed. They don’t have any resources. They went to the pastor. They could not have gone to a politician or a parliamentarian. And the pastor came to us.
“They are really in difficulty because sometimes their passports were taken away by the mafia pimps who control them,” he said. “We follow the gospel.”
Cardinal Konrad Krajewski is responsible for carrying out charity in Pope Francis’s name.
Krajewski, at 56, one of the youngest cardinals in the world, said it was what Jesus would have done. And it was not the first time the Polish cardinal has made the news with his sometimes unorthodox ways of distributing the pope’s charities. Last year, he clambered down a manhole, broke a police seal, and re-connected electrical circuit breakers to restore electricity to hundreds of homeless people, many of them immigrants, living in an occupied building in Rome.
Although Krajewski ran afoul of then-Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and his anti-immigrant policies, an Italian newspaper dubbed him “The Pope’s Robin Hood.“
Although he tries to shun the limelight, Krajewski has become a minor celebrity in Rome. Since Pope Francis named him to the Vatican charity post in 2013, he became known for dressing down into simple layman’s clothes at night and bringing food to the city’s homeless in a white van.
He has also opened shelters near the Vatican where the homeless can wash, get haircuts, and receive medical care.
Idaho governor Brad Little, the person responsible for some of America’s most transphobic laws, has appealed to the Supreme Court to avoid paying for a transgender inmate’s gender confirmation surgery.
Little filed a petition after being ordered to provide surgery for 31-year-old Adree Edmo, a trans woman who is being housed in a men’s facility in Idaho.
She is serving 10 years for sexually abusing a 15-year-old boy when she was 22, and is not eligible for parole.
Edmo was diagnosed with gender dysphoria while in prison and her condition has grown so severe that she has reportedly attempted to castrate herself twice.
Denying trans woman surgery ruled ‘cruel and unusual’.
Last year a court of appeals upheld a previous ruling that denying Edmo the surgery constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
But Little is appealing the ruling for a second time as he insists that he “should not have to pay for a procedure that is not medically necessary”.
He has vowed to “vigorously litigate” the ruling by taking it to the country’s highest court after the Ninth Circuit Court refused his request to hear the case for a third time.
“The Ninth Circuit’s decision goes against the text and original meaning of the Eighth Amendment and contradicts more than four decades of Supreme Court precedent,” Little said in a release.
“We will vigorously litigate the Ninth Circuit’s unprecedented ruling at the Supreme Court because the taxpayers of Idaho should not have to pay for a procedure that is not medically necessary.”
The state of Idaho is currently being sued by two human rights organisations thanks to a virulent anti-trans campaign spearheaded by Republican governor Brad Little.
In the midst of a pandemic, the governor signed two laws that campaigners say effectively make transgender people second-class citizens.
The first, HB509, bans transgender people from changing the gender on their birth certificates, flouting a previous a federal court ruling on the issue.
It asserts that the state will prohibit any changes to gender markers and only recognise a so-called “biology-based definition of sex” based on “immutable biological and physiological characteristics, specifically the chromosomes and internal and external reproductive anatomy”.
The second bill, HB500, bans schools and colleges from letting transgender girls from taking part in girls’ sports.
Under the “mean-spirited” law, girls whose sex is “disputed” will be required to subject themselves to invasive testing to show medical evidence of their “internal and external reproductive anatomy”.
In addition, pupils who believe they have been “disadvantaged” by their transgender classmates will be able to sue their schools for damages.
Lyon-Martin Health Services in San Francisco has served the health needs of lesbians, transgender women and other underserved women in the Bay Area since 1979. Named after pioneering lesbian activists Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, the clinic had until recently been seeing 3,000 patients a year for such needs as physical exams, gynecologic services and consultations for gender-affirming surgeries.
Now, however, it is fighting to keep its doors open amid the coronavirus pandemic. Thanks to emergency funding from the city and private donors, it will be able to operate until July 1 without deep cuts to its services — which now include screening for COVID-19 — but its future is uncertain after that.
“The city needs to see how long COVID is going to play out,” J.M. Jaffe, the transgender health manager at Lyon-Martin, told NBC News. “They wanted to do a short-term contract so that we could re-evaluate what the situation will be in two months. I think they were just wary to make a commitment to continue to support us, but we did get kind of like a wink and a nod that they would like to support us to the end of the calendar year.”
Lyon-Martin Health Services is one of over 200 LGBTQ health clinics across the United States that provide affirming and competent care to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer patients. And like Lyon-Martin, a number of these centers are struggling to adjust to — and in some cases survive — the new normal spawned by the global pandemic.
‘A gap of a support network’
Approximately 13 percent lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals in the U.S. reported getting their regular health care from an LGBTQ-centered clinic, according to a 2019 study from UCLA’s Williams Institute. A separate study found nearly 40 percent of transgender people reported having been to an LGBTQ clinic in the previous five years.
“We provide services to a population that may not seek care elsewhere or even if they do seek it elsewhere, they may not get what they need,” Jaffe said.
Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said if some of these clinics do not survive the pandemic, the void will be felt deeply, especially in areas of the country where LGBTQ people face high levels of discrimination.
“It leaves a gap of a support network, but also may not provide another opportunity or option in some communities to get nondiscriminatory care, which is a concern,” she told NBC News.
LGBTQ discrimination in health care is not uncommon. A 2018 studyfrom the liberal Center for American Progress found 8 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer people and 29 percent of transgender people reported that a doctor or health care provider had refused to see them because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The study also found that 9 percent of LGBQ people and 21 percent of trans people reported having a health provider use harsh or abusive language when treating them.
The Callen-Lorde Community Health Center in New York City, the epicenter of the U.S. pandemic, is doing all it can to stay open and provide patient care amid stay-at-home orders and declining revenues.
The COVID-19 crisis has forced the center, which sees over 17,000 patients annually, to pivot to virtual health care and cut a number of services, leading revenues to plummet nearly 60 percent, according to Executive Director Wendy Stark. But with many of their patients not feeling comfortable seeking care elsewhere, Stark said she and her team are “being innovative” to stay open.
“We have lived through traumas and pandemics. We know how to take care of ourselves and each other.”
CALLEN-LORDE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR WENDY STARK
Callen-Lorde is currently helping clients by providing a number of online services, including video visits for primary medical care, behavioral health and counseling, along with legal aid and insurance consultation services by phone. The center’s in-person services include appointments for those who do not have access to smartphones or internet connections, and those who are pre-authorized for in-person visits.
The clinic is also working to protect its own front-line workers, approximately 20 percent of whom contracted the coronavirus, according to Stark. She said regular floor nurses are now “acting as intensive care unit nurses,” and everyone’s “being stretched to their maximum clinical capacity” and “having to learn on the spot.”
“I’m sure, deeply rewarding but also deeply frightening,” she added.
While providing health services, Stark and her team are also applying for “every possible” relief fund or grant available to help make it through the crisis.
“We are shapeshifters,” she said. “We have lived through traumas and pandemics. We know how to take care of ourselves and each other.”
In Philadelphia, the Mazzoni Center, which typically sees over 7,500 patients a year, is also trying to adapt. This has meant a combination of limiting in-person appointments on a case-by-case basis, implementing and expanding its remote health care offerings and finding ways to continue as many community programs as possible online.
Larry Benjamin, a spokesperson for the center, said the clinic has had to furlough some staffers and reduce the hours of others to keep it viable “in the short term”.
The center is still allowing abbreviated in-person appointments for things like HIV services and gender-affirming care, but Benjamin said staffers have been careful to ensure “the risks associated with exposure to the coronavirus” from patients to staff and vice versa don’t outweigh the benefit of in-person visits. Behavioral health services, such as medication management, support groups and counseling services, are being offered exclusively online, as are counseling for COVID-19 stressors. Most community programs have also been moved online, but those that cater to the “most vulnerable clients” and their basic needs, like food and shelter, are still operating in-person, according to Benjamin.
Fenway Health in Boston.Courtesy of Fenway Health
Fenway Health in Boston, which saw 33,500 patients in 2019, has also seen a loss in revenue amid the pandemic, leading it to furlough some staffers and operate at an “unsustainable deficit,” according to Chris Viveiros, a spokesperson for the center. To help weather the storm, he said the center has increased its virtual offerings.
“Some medical patients have chosen to reschedule nonurgent appointments, but we have ramped up our medical telehealth capacity so that we can provide care remotely to patients who don’t require an in-person visit,” he said. “We have also moved our behavioral health and addiction and wellness care to telehealth.”
Fenway Health has also changed its Access Drug User Health program from being held in drop-in centers to having staff visit at-risk people in the community to limit contact.
There have been some drawbacks to Fenway’s remote health services: Some patients are sheltering in place with unsupportive people and have nowhere to privately participate in a video visit, while others may be skeptical of a new platform for accessing health services altogether.
“Many of our community served have a history of medical mistrust and ongoing mistrust of the health care system due to structural discrimination and victimization,” explained Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, director of the Fenway Institute’s National LGBT Health Education Center and Massachusetts General Hospital’s Psychiatry Gender Identity Program.
However, Keuroghlian said there have been some silver linings to Fenway’s new remote offerings. Primarily, many patients are able to access health care from the safety and comfort of their own home without having to venture outside, potentially exposing themselves to anti-LGBTQ abuse — or the coronavirus.
“By and large, I have found it has worked really well,” he said. “I’ve had almost no no-shows in my schedule, and patients are answering the phone very appreciative that we can give them care despite what’s happening.”
Pat and Paulette Martin, both 68, live in Harlem, New York City. They have been together four and a half years and were married in April 2018. “All is well,” said Pat in a recent Zoom call, smiling of the lesbian couple’s time in coronavirus lockdown. “Well, we haven’t murdered each other yet anyway!”
Paulette said the couple was “blessed” to have a courtyard to relax and get some air in and do some gardening. Pat said: “Isolation is the problem. Quite a few of our friends have lost partners, so they are not as blessed as we are. We can still go out. But hearing the constant sirens of ambulances wears on your nerves, it really does. You watch the Doomsday news and it becomes a bit much. That’s the main thing of feeling isolated. You feel so alone.”
The couple—who tell their lockdown stories, along with other LGBTQ seniors below—are among 5,000 New York City seniors who are members of SAGE, the country’s oldest and largest LGBTQ elder advocacy organization, founded in 1978. SAGE is “very actively engaged” with calling 3,000 of its constituents and organizing meal deliveries to those who need them.
“The two major issues facing LGBTQ elders right now are isolation and food,” said Michael Adams, SAGE’s chief executive officer. “Older LGBTQ people have been told they are a high-risk group and to shelter in place. Many can’t go shopping or get food to eat. It’s a complete vicious circle, which for many people feels inescapable at this point. We used to provide a hot meal every day at our center. Now that isn’t available, and people are understandably afraid to go out and do shopping.”
The situation is worse for those on lower incomes, he said, whose local neighborhoods perhaps don’t have a supermarket.
The organization has launched SAGE Connect, a volunteer-run telephone support system to ensure LGBTQ seniors feel connected to the outside world.
“Over and over again, what we’re hearing from them that the person calling them is the only human voice they’re hearing all week, other than what they’re hearing on TV or online,” Adams said. “This is the only human contact that many of them are having. That is a powerful and deeply troubling reality.”
“LGBTQ elders are absolutely suffering and in many ways are at the epicenter of this pandemic, and not just because of their age,” said Adams. “Those with underlying health conditions are at greater risk for COVID-19. HIV leads to compromised immune systems; smoking rates are higher with LGBTQ older adults, which can lead to compromised lungs. Twenty-five percent of the LGBTQ elders SAGE works with don’t have any emergency contact other than SAGE.
“The other major issue is a lot of LGBTQ seniors are already socially isolated,” said Adams. “They don’t have anyone to rely on. Twenty-five percent of the LGBTQ elders SAGE works with don’t have any emergency contact other than SAGE. Being an older LGBTQ person, having underlying health conditions, and being isolated is a huge triple whammy.”
Eleven SAGE members have died since March 16, a SAGE spokesperson said. “Only a handful have been confirmed as COVID-19 related. The others were not able to obtain the test because of the limitations of testing.”
The organization believes that currently “10 or so” members have been told by their health-care provider that they are possibly positive and that they should self-quarantine. The organization has lost contact with some of its constituents who are not answering their phones or responding to emails. SAGE does not know if this is related to COVID-19.
“For many of those getting sick, they’re not getting tested because tests are hard to access and people are afraid to leave their homes to get tested,” said Adams. “It’s hard to know if they have COVID-19 or something else.”
Isolation is particularly acute for LGBTQ seniors, Adams said. “They are four times less likely to be parents than older Americans in general. Whereas most older Americans have adult children, they do not. They are twice as likely to grow old living alone without partners or spouses than older Americans in general. Because of discrimination and bias, LGBTQ elders are more likely to be disassociated from their families of origin than older Americans in general.”
“The traditional family structure is missing for many of our folks,” Adams said. “When folks are younger in the LGBTQ community, they deal with that by forming ‘families of choice.’ But there’s a limitation to that when you’re 75, 80, 90, and it’s harder to form such support networks.”
LGBTQ seniors may not feel safe where they reside in private or public housing, or within the residential care system. Adams said some “go back into the closet” in fear of homophobia and mistreatment by neighbors or nursing staff. “You can understand why,” said Adams. “There is a lot of discrimination still going on.”
I’m used to doing my own thing. This makes me feel isolated in the sense of a lack of activity.
Even in progressive urban centers like New York City, Adams said, LGBTQ seniors may go to a senior center to build new relationships but experience homophobia from other seniors. “At SAGE, they are embraced for who they are,” he added.
Ellen Ensig-Brodsky, who is 87 and lives in New York City, told The Daily Beast: “If you sit alone in a one-room apartment, it’s isolated. I’m still very active. I live in the center of New York City, down the block from MoMA, Carnegie Hall, and Broadway. I’m used to doing my own thing. This makes me feel isolated in the sense of a lack of activity.”
Ensig-Brodsky has a daughter, son, and grandchildren, whom she keeps in touch with by phone, and she is also in regular touch with members of the women’s group she belongs to at SAGE.
“I am fortunate to be speaking to people and feel closer to people perhaps than those who do not have that kind of interaction in this horrible period,” she told The Daily Beast. “If someone is not part of a family group, or a group like the one I’m in at SAGE, I would think it would be extremely lonesome.” (More of Ensig-Brodsky’s story is below.)
At Stonewall House in Brooklyn, New York City’s first LGBTQ senior living residential housing, which opened last year, 100 out of the 145 apartments are occupied, after the full moving-in process was put on hold following the outbreak of the coronavirus. That freeze will remain in place until the city gives the green light. Residents are being cared for by SAGE staff and having their meals delivered.
Being locked down has been tough for the residents, Adams said, especially those who moved to a new neighborhood to be there and are now “basically trapped indoors,” without access to their previous support networks.
SAGE has moved many of the meetings previously held in its New York HQ online. In the first couple of weeks, SAGE hosted a grab-and-go meal distribution at its Seventh Avenue base. But it was deemed too risky, health-wise, to continue, for both staff and clients. Adams has been “heartened” to see the elders supporting each other.
New York City has initiated a home delivery program for older adults, acknowledged Adams, though “several hundred SAGE constituents” were among those who had “fallen through its cracks.” Since then the organization has moved to introduce “a hodgepodge of strategies” to ensure its members are fed. The organization has an affiliates’ network in 30 other American cities doing some version of what it does in New York.
Adams said those people wanting to support LGBTQ seniors could volunteer to help with SAGE’s programs and virtual classes, or simply donate to SAGE. The organization, he said, isn’t in danger of closing but—like so many other advocacy organizations—is facing “very serious financial challenges.”
At a virtual hearing held last week on the coronavirus’ disproportionate impact on communities of color, Adams, speaking about LGBTQ seniors of color and LGBTQ seniors generally, presented eight recommendations to New York City lawmakers.
Among the recommendations was: ensuring virtual support programs received proper funding; that the city and state’s severe budget shortfalls did not affect the care and support of LGBTQ elders; that there should be ongoing financial support of all those services deemed “essential” to LGBTQ elders; that there should be funding of volunteering programs to shop and run errands for older adults; and ensuring the provision of proper internet access for older people.
An executive budget meeting is scheduled for May 21, and then the New York City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio will likely agree on a budget in late June.The thing at the back of your mind is ‘How many years do I have left?’
Adams told The Daily Beast one story of an older lesbian who had fractured her clavicle in the middle of the night and had no one to turn to, and was too frightened of going to the hospital. She went online and figured out how to make a sling. “It shows the isolation but also the resilience many older LGBTQ people have.”
The virus has raised other urgent questions for LGBTQ seniors: the quality, as well as quantity, of the life they have left. Kevin Burns, 71, from Albany, told The Daily Beast: “The thing at the back of your mind is ‘How many years do I have left?’ It’s complicated. In your seventies, you are hoping to do things, because in your eighties you may have to slow down. For the last couple of months, we have lost this time, and we are thinking, ‘How much more time are we going to lose?’”
LGBTQ seniors speak out on life under lockdown
Ellen Ensig-Brodsky: “There is an openness and truthfulness. We know about each other”
For Ellen Ensig-Brodsky, despite the isolation that LGBTQ seniors endure, “in some ways, LGBTQ people share connections that most straight people do not, which is extremely important, especially in periods like this. There is an openness and truthfulness. We know about each other.”
This forging of connections is rooted in history, she said. “Go back 40 years, and it was very different then than it is now. Back then you didn’t say you were gay or lesbian. You hid it, and you met in places that were hidden. My family knows now, and it’s no big deal. But years it ago it would have been. And look at geography. You might feel OK being out in New York City, but not the Midwest.”
Ensig-Brodsky does not have a partner presently, “but my family is made up of ex-partners and we are in touch.” That group of friends includes the surviving wife of a now-deceased ex-husband, whom her children encouraged her to go stay with so both women could have company. Ensig-Brodsky did so for three and a half weeks, then returned to the city.If you reach out, it will give you a sense of connection, and you may be helping someone else.
“I prefer being in back in my own apartment,” she said. “I can dance, listen to music, watch TV. I’m happier here even though I am alone.” It helped, she said, that she was brought up as an only child, reliant on her own company. She goes for walks, does errands, and then—just as she did the day before we spoke—“didn’t get out of my pajamas and stayed in bed all day, nibbling away at all kinds of goodies.”
Ensig-Brodsky laughed. “I was a medical nutritionist, and I have not been following what I preached. I would lose my job if I saw what I was eating!”
She is looking forward to normality returning. “I need a haircut, and a lot of women feel that way. But when will those theater and concert venues be able to open?”
Other older LGBTQ people, Ensig-Brodsky said, should reach out to others by calling or email. “If you reach out, it will give you a sense of connection, and you may be helping someone else. It creates a pathway to the future and shows who’s there for you.”
Pat and Paulette Martin: “We felt it was time for us to take responsibility for ourselves”
Pat and Paulette Martin, who first met at SAGE Harlem, said LGBTQ seniors faced special issues living under lockdown.
“We were told from the beginning that coronavirus especially affected their age group,” said Paulette. “Our immune systems are weaker, the virus attacks organs and blood. So because you’re older you have this worry it’s just going to come and get you. So you isolate.
“Where the older LGBTQ community is not being understood is that we are from a generation where we were attacked for who we were, we didn’t get services or medical care because of our sexuality. You have that experience embedded long before this came along. A lot of people I know feel this.” Right now, speaking to friends face to face via Zoom is important, she said, and better than just phone calls.
Just as SAGE’s Michael Adams said, food is a huge issue, said Paulette, not just because of the difficulty of accessing it and the fear of going to a grocery store. “We give food bank details to as many people as we can. Older people have dietary restrictions, and so even if we are getting fresh food or food parcels or other items, sodium affects blood pressure, or if you have cancer you shouldn’t be eating processed food.
“Older people get very anxious about their medications too,” said Paulette. “Right now, they can’t go out and pick them up, and are relying on others to deliver them. This whole situation is taking away a lot of our independence in a lot of areas, and we are frustrated by that. Going for walks was a form of exercise before this, and now some people feel they can’t do that.”
There are, said Pat, “layers of frustration,” made more acute by being an LGBTQ senior of color, “the triple-edged sword of ‘you’re a person of color, you’re gay or lesbian, and you’re a senior.’ There’s a fear of going out. Will you be accosted? Police are accosting African Americans with masks on because they think we are up to something. Going out is a realistic fear for us.”
Both women are determined to take back, and exercise, power for themselves. They recently set up the Masculine Identified Lesbians of Color Collective, which includes African American, Latino, and a “few white women also.”
“We are coming together as a social justice group,” said Pat. “We feel for a long time we have been pushed to the side. Back in the day, clubs and bars in the 1970s and ’80s were primarily for white lesbians, and if we went we were refused entry or if we were given entry to a free club, all of a sudden there was an admission cost. If you look now, most of the LGBTQ organizations of substance who have money and get all the publicity are headed by white folks. So we came together because we felt it was time for us to take responsibility for ourselves.”
The group, comprising women of all ages, has members from New York, New Jersey, Washington, Chicago, North Carolina, South Carolina, and California.
Pat hopes the older women in the group can be role models for younger women, who may only have male relations—a father, brother, or uncle—to emulate. “A lot of them don’t know how to go to a doctor and say, ‘I’m a lesbian, sleeping with women. This is what I need.’ We need to be role models and teach these younger lesbians about self-care, how to run their own businesses, and share experiences. The buck stops here. We can no longer rely on anyone else to do it. We have to do it for ourselves.” Start every day with a prayer, whatever your spiritual belief is. Then take a shower. Don’t put on pajamas. Put on clothes. Do a skincare routine. Exercise.
Paulette said this was a good time to look at how, as a couple, you can “enrich” your relationship and work on things that are not right in it, in areas like communication and finances. “It’s hard to do,” she admitted, “so set some ground rules. But it’s better to try changing something than staying stuck with old stuff.” The key, said Pat, “was looking at how you can move forward in unity, while remaining individuals.”
To get through this time, Paulette recommended other LGBTQ seniors initiate a routine. “Start every day with a prayer, whatever your spiritual belief is. Then take a shower. Don’t put on pajamas. Put on clothes. Do a skincare routine. Exercise. It’s so important. Have breakfast, coffee, or whatever your morning beverage is. Journal. Read. Turn off the TV news. Reach out to people. Take your eyes off yourself and cast them to someone else.”
Pat added that if you have ever dreamed of doing anything, like running your own business, now is the time to get those plans down on paper. “Create a bucket list. Think about life, not death.”
Kevin Burns: “The virus is cheating us of our remaining time”
Kevin Burns, 71, from Albany, New York, considers himself lucky. He has his own home, and while he lives alone, he feels very connected to a wide circle of friends and family. He has enjoyed Zoom cocktail hours, and his regular trivia quiz group has been meeting the same way. Being at home “hasn’t been a terrible strain.” It’s been good to see familiar faces, albeit virtually.
He is one of the “Vintage Pride” group of those LGBTQ people aged 55 and older belonging to Albany’s Pride Center of the Capital Region. The LGBTQ center is closed now, and Burns knows many people for whom their pot-luck lunches were their only social outlet.
Kevin Burns
He goes to the grocery store roughly once a week, shopping at special senior hours. He misses the gym and hanging out with friends. “Not having those benchmarks in a typical week to look forward to takes quite a mental adjustment. Just as everybody is finding, every Tuesday evening is now like every Friday evening. There’s no difference.”
Having spoken to friends, Burns said the psychological impact of the coronavirus on LGBTQ elders has been pronounced.
“As many years as we hope we have, they are running down, and now we are deprived of what we enjoy doing even if it’s once a week, or whatever the time frame is and whatever the activity is. The virus is cheating us of our remaining time. For me, personally, spring was a time to travel. Not being able to do that is a minor glitch compared to other people’s suffering. But as seniors, we all have things we look forward to. This current situation means we can’t do anything. How long will this go on? How long will older people be told they cannot go out, or do things?”
Burns and his friends presume this spring and summer are now a diary-date tundra. No dinners, no holidays, no Broadway trips, no Tanglewood, no Williamstown Theatre Festival, no trips to the Cape or Maine before the main holiday season begins. “I know this may sound frivolous. I know people are suffering. But these are just the things I did and am missing. I know I am lucky, and am thankful for that.”People talk about the danger of underlying issues. We all have the same underlying issue: It’s age!
“You can watch a DVD and get takeout, sure,” he said. “But when you’re a senior, you’re isolated anyway. Now you’re more so.”
Every senior Burns knows is being scrupulous about wearing a mask and washing hands. He laughed. “People talk about the danger of underlying issues. We all have the same underlying issue: It’s age! It’s kind of infuriating to do what we’re told and then see younger people hanging out together not wearing masks when I go out walking. I’m not making judgments, but are they going into stores, or seeing grandparents afterwards? Please think about those people. I’ve heard them complaining about wearing the masks and saying they can’t breathe in them. Well, wait till you’re 70-something!”
On the other hand, Burns said, it has been heartening to have younger people in his life reaching out to him and doing things to make sure he knew he is included in Zoom chats they are setting up.
Whatever opens up, whenever it opens up, Burns said he and his friends won’t be going anywhere until they feel assured about a vaccine or proper and accessible medical treatment. “If it takes another six months, that’s really tough, but if it means whatever is left of our lives is spent in relative good health, minus COVID, then it’s worth waiting.”
“Reach out and find other people,” Burns advised his fellow LGBTQ seniors. “I had never hosted a Zoom meeting. I didn’t know how to do it. It took a few steps, trial and error, but it paid off for me and my friends because now we can get together. It was a lot easier than I thought. Motivate yourselves to reach out.”
