LGBTQ+ people more likely to age alone

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Bill Hall, 71, has been fighting for his life for 38 years. These days, he’s feeling worn out.

Hall contracted HIV, the virus that can cause AIDS, in 1986. Since then, he has battled depression, heart disease, diabetes, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, kidney cancer and prostate cancer. This year, Hall has been hospitalized five times with dangerous infections and life-threatening internal bleeding.

But that’s only part of what Hall, a gay man, has dealt with. Hall was born into the Tlingit tribe in a small fishing village in Alaska. He was separated from his family at age 9 and sent to a government boarding school. There, he told me, he endured years of bullying and sexual abuse that “killed my spirit.”

Because of trauma, Hall said, he’s never been able to form an intimate relationship. He lives alone in Seattle and has been on his own throughout his adult life.

“It’s really difficult to maintain a positive attitude when you’re going through so much,” said Hall, who works with Native American community organizations. “You become mentally exhausted.”

It’s a sentiment shared by many older LGBTQ+ adults — most of whom, like Hall, are trying to manage on their own. Some 3 million Americans over age 50 who identify as gay, bisexual or transgender; they’re about twice as likely to be single or living alone compared with their heterosexual counterparts, according to the National Resource Center on LGBT Aging.

This slice of the older population is expanding rapidly. By 2030, the number of LGBTQ+ seniors is expected to double. Many won’t have partners and many won’t have children or grandchildren to help care for them, AARP research indicates.

They face a daunting array of problems, including higher-than-usual rates of anxiety and depression, chronic stress, disability and chronic illnesses such as heart disease, according to numerous research studies. High rates of smoking, alcohol use and drug use — all ways people try to cope with stress — contribute to poor health.

Keep in mind, this generation grew up at a time when every state outlawed same-sex relations and when the American Psychiatric Association identified homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. Many were rejected by their families and their churches when they came out. They endured the horrifying effects of the AIDS crisis.

It’s no wonder that LGBTQ+ seniors often withdraw socially and experience isolation more commonly than other older adults. “There was too much grief, too much anger, too much trauma — too many people were dying,” said Vincent Crisostomo, director of aging services for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. “It was just too much to bear.”

In an AARP survey of 2,200 LGBTQ+ adults 45 or older this year, 48 percent said they felt isolated from others and 45 percent reported lacking companionship. Almost 80 percent reported being concerned about having adequate social support as they grow older.

Embracing aging isn’t easy for anyone, but it can be especially difficult for LGBTQ+ seniors who are long-term HIV survivors like Hall.

Of 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States, about half are over age 50. By 2030, that’s estimated to rise to 70 percent. Christopher Christensen, 72, of Palm Springs, California, has been HIV positive since May 1981 and is deeply involved with local organizations serving HIV survivors. “A lot of people living with HIV never thought they’d grow old — or planned for it — because they thought they would die quickly,” Christensen said.

Jeff Berry is executive director of the Reunion Project, an alliance of long-term HIV survivors. “Here people are who survived the AIDS epidemic, and all these years later their health issues are getting worse and they’re losing their peers again,” Berry said. “And it’s triggering this posttraumatic stress that’s been underlying for many, many years. Yes, it’s part of getting older. But it’s very, very hard.”

Being on their own, without people who understand how the past is informing current challenges, can magnify those difficulties. “Not having access to supports and services that are both LGBTQ-friendly and age-friendly is a real hardship for many,” said Christina DaCosta, chief experience officer at SAGE, the nation’s largest and oldest organization for older LGBTQ+ adults.

Diedra Nottingham, a 74-year-old gay woman, lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Stonewall House, an LGBTQ+-friendly elder housing complex in New York City. “I just don’t trust people,” she said.

When I first spoke to Nottingham in 2022, she described a posttraumatic-stress-type reaction to so many people dying of Covid-19 and the fear of becoming infected. This was a common reaction among older people who are gay, bisexual or transgender and who bear psychological scars from the AIDS epidemic.

When I talked to her in September, Nottingham said she was benefiting from weekly therapy sessions and time spent with a volunteer “friendly visitor” arranged by SAGE. Yet she acknowledged: “I don’t like being by myself all the time the way I am. I’m lonely.”

Donald Bell, a 74-year-old gay Black man who is co-chair of the Illinois Commission on LGBTQ Aging, lives alone in a studio apartment in subsidized LGBTQ+-friendly senior housing in Chicago. He spent 30 years caring for two elderly parents who had serious health issues, while he was also a single father, raising two sons he adopted from a niece.

Bell has very little money, he said, because he left work as a higher education administrator to care for his parents. “The cost of health care bankrupted us,” he said. (According to SAGE, one-third of older LGBTQ+ adults live at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level.) He has hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and nerve damage in his feet. These days, he walks with a cane.

To his great regret, Bell told me, he’s never had a long-term relationship. But he has several good friends in his building and in the city.

“Of course I experience loneliness,” Bell said when we spoke in June. “But the fact that I am a Black man who has lived to 74, that I have not been destroyed, that I have the sanctity of my own life and my own person is a victory and something for which I am grateful.”

Now he wants to be a model to younger gay men and accept aging rather than feeling stuck in the past. “My past is over,” Bell said, “and I must move on.”

What's the date on that article, OP?

Sorry -- I checked -- it's today.

Merry Xmas!

It's so sad that we, as a community, don't emphasize relationships. Adding to this is the deep feeling of shame that being in the closet brings prevents us from being intimate and honest enough with others to form strong partnerships.

I have a feeling the number of single seniors of all orientations is going to dramatically increase in the next few decades. Boomers are really the last generation where people were expected to get married right after school. There are already more single people in middle age than there were a generation ago. Mix in Gen Z's social anxiety disorders and there's no way the number of single adults doesn't multiple rapidly.