Gays and Aging Issues

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Aging Issues can be Tougher on Gays

 

(CNN) -- Last Christmas, Missouri State Highway Patrol Cpl. Dennis Engelhard was putting flares near a minor accident on a snowy road in Eureka when he was hit by a car and killed.

 

"I'd had a premonition about it," said Kelly Glossip, 43, Engelhard's domestic partner of 15 years.

 

The openly gay couple had discussed what might happen if Engelhard were to die in Missouri, a state that does not recognize same-sex partnerships, he said.

 

"He had faith in the system and told me not to worry about it," Glossip said from his home in suburban St. Louis.

 

But now Glossip, who works only part time in a billing office because of back problems and who supports his 17-year-old son, is worried and angry.

 

The state would have given a pension to the wife of any officer killed on the job but has no such provision for domestic partners, Glossip said.

 

"I'm basically on my own," he said.

 

Denny Meyer, 63, knows all about being on his own. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1968 to pay his country back for welcoming his parents, both Holocaust survivors, after World War II.

 

He stayed 10 years and loved it but remained in the closet until after he was discharged.

 

After a career in New York, where he was open about his sexuality, "I started to get old," he said. "I'm an old 63 because of bad luck with cancer and this and that."

 

Living alone on a limited income, with no close relatives, he was accepted to live in a senior citizens' home in the borough of Queens but turned it down.

 

"I'm used to being out, so the idea of going into senior housing in a straight environment is horrifying," he said. "I knew that I would have to go completely back in the closet."

 

Though aging is tough for everyone, it tends to be tougher for people who are gay, according to a report presented Wednesday at the annual conference of the National Council on Aging and the American Society on Aging in Chicago, Illinois.

 

According to the report, Improving the Lives of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Older Adults, issues that disproportionately affect LGBT older adults include stigma, isolation and unequal treatment. Together, they translate into their being poorer and sicker and having fewer opportunities for social and community engagement than do their heterosexual peers, according to the report.

 

Many older LGBTs' financial woes can be traced to the fact that discrimination was legal during their working lives, which often meant thinner paychecks, limited access to health care, fewer chances to build pensions and smaller Social Security payments, the report said.

 

For example, lesbian couples' Social Security benefits are typically 31.5 percent smaller and gay couples' benefits are 17.8 percent smaller than are those of heterosexual couples, the report said, citing a 2009 study.

 

Family members provide about 80 percent of long-term care in the United States, but that's not the case with LGBT elders, since they are more likely to be single, childless and estranged from their biological families, said the report.

 

Instead, many of them wind up relying on friends and the community, so-called families of choice, it said.

 

And that's just the beginning, according to the report, which cited "official policies, laws and institutional regulations" that offer same-sex partners few of the resources afforded to spouses and biological family members.

 

That's largely because those laws, programs and services either don't acknowledge or don't protect the partners of LGBTs or because they don't address the stigma and discrimination that result in worse treatment of LGBT elders, it said.

 

The report cited a 2001 study by the U.S. Administration on Aging that found LGBT elderly are only a fifth as likely as heterosexuals to use such services as senior centers, housing assistance, meal programs, food stamps and other entitlements.

 

"There's a whole labyrinth of challenges and pitfalls for same-sex couples and LGBTs in general," said Michael Adams, the executive director of Services & Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Elders, who helped write the report.

 

The report cited these other inequalities: