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For more information or scheduling
For more information or scheduling
Once upon a time, we roared...
'Out
of the closets
and into the streets'
Elders | Lesbians, Gays, Bi Sexuals, Trans*, Queers, Intersex, Asexuals
Therapy for those 45 years old and up sis!
LGBTQ+ older adults
We face major challenges with social isolation, healthcare discrimination, and housing insecurity.
We experience social isolation and lack of support.
Living Alone/Solo-Agers
We elders are twice as likely to live alone and four times less likely to have children than heterosexual peers.
Chosen family reliance
Nearly 60% of us lack regular companionship, relying heavily on friends or partners.
We face major challenges with social isolation, healthcare discrimination, and housing insecurity.
We experience social isolation and lack of support.
Living Alone/Solo-Agers
We elders are twice as likely to live alone and four times less likely to have children than heterosexual peers.
Chosen family reliance
Nearly 60% of us lack regular companionship, relying heavily on friends or partners.
Be soft.
Do not let the world make you hard.
Do not let pain make you hate.
Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.
-Iain S. Thomas
Healthcare Barriers and Fear of Discrimination
We Avoid care
About 20% of us delay or avoid medical treatment out of fear of mistreatment or discrimination by providers.
Re-closeting
Roughly 70% of us hide our sexual orientation or gender identity when entering skilled nursing facilities or senior care centers to avoid hostility or poor care quality.
Housing Instability and Poverty
Senior housing bias
Nearly half of same-sex older couples experience adverse treatment or discrimination when applying for senior housing
Economic strain
Up to one-third of LGBTQ+ older adults live at or below 200% of the federal poverty line, with higher rates affecting transgender elders and people of color due to lifelong systemic inequities.
Deep Generational Resilience
Exceptional Psychological Resilience
Gerontological studies consistently show that navigating
early-life adversity has given queer elders
high levels of psychological resilience and adaptive coping mechanisms, often leaving us better equipped to handle the general changes of aging.
Pioneering Mutual Aid
LGBTQ+ seniors literally invented modern community care networks during the crisis eras of the 20th century. Today, this tradition lives on through robust 'chosen family' circles and mutual aid networks that provide strong emotional and social support.
LGBTQ+ Affirmative Therapy
This therapeutic approach is recognized as the ethical gold standard of care, actively addressing our unique 'minority stress' as queer individuals. It ensures that therapy functions as a safe harbor, rather than an institution of judgment. It is a supportive orientation that understands the history we each come with and why we may choose to live, couple, or simply be as we are.
I'd love to learn how you're doing these days and discuss your hopes and cares.
Action = Life | Silence = Death
QUEER ELDER | Kristin F. Jones 🐰
Love and Death Are Nothing but a Way of Living: Learning to Transcend
In the late 1980s, I offered my hand to many fellows in exile while living in San Francisco—losing well over 25 friends to the AIDS crisis and to drugs and alcohol, and sadly to suicide.
My full-time job was working on the finance committee for Roberta Achtenberg's campaign. Roberta was the first out lesbian in the state of California to run for office, just eight years after Harvey Milk's assassination. These were bellwether times.
And because campaigns paid little to nothing, I supplemented my income with part-time work as a cook and waiter at Artemis Cafe, while at other times freely lending a helping hand to many a sister during SF's burgeoning lesbian baby boom.
I took the ACT UP action pledge to heart as if staying true to religion, making a fuss around the city every chance I got. We would paw one another, kiss one another, and seductively coax one another against garage doors, under lamp posts, and beside pay phones anytime tour buses rumbled through the Castro, in search of the homosexual specimen doing homosexual things.
At night, I’d couch-surf, not making enough to rent, even modestly. But I had purpose and an unspeakable doggedness. Those days were the rooting of 'family of choice'—when mutual aid and caring networks sprung up everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
By the 1990s, I was back in the City of Angels, no longer doing gay activism full-time, but mostly donating to the Gay & Lesbian Center and amfAR and fundraising for AIDS Walk LA. What was more important to me than directly working for the cause was living as an out lesbian everywhere I went and working in film and television.
I had a simple first floor apartment in West Hollywood on Hacienda Place, minimally furnished, with a second-hand couch, and a Mapplethorpe print titled Ken Moody and Robert Sherman that I was proud to display. The hand-me-down black naugahyde water bed, however, was a whole different story.
Those days felt wide open—spent looking for film work and tossing a frisbee in West Hollywood Park, next to a fledgling spartan coffee shop with baked goods called, The Abbey. Chris Isaak's novel hit "Wicked Game" floated achingly from the radios of passing cars, becoming an artifact of the times, and many a day, I sat in that grass barefoot and grinning, talking to my friend Bill about a chocolate-eyed girl named Lori.
Love and Death Are Nothing but a Way of Living: Learning to Transcend
In the late 1980s, I offered my hand to many fellows in exile while living in San Francisco—losing well over 25 friends to the AIDS crisis and to drugs and alcohol, and sadly to suicide.
My full-time job was working on the finance committee for Roberta Achtenberg's campaign. Roberta was the first out lesbian in the state of California to run for office, just eight years after Harvey Milk's assassination. These were bellwether times.
And because campaigns paid little to nothing, I supplemented my income with part-time work as a cook and waiter at Artemis Cafe, while at other times freely lending a helping hand to many a sister during SF's burgeoning lesbian baby boom.
I took the ACT UP action pledge to heart as if staying true to religion, making a fuss around the city every chance I got. We would paw one another, kiss one another, and seductively coax one another against garage doors, under lamp posts, and beside pay phones anytime tour buses rumbled through the Castro, in search of the homosexual specimen doing homosexual things.
At night, I’d couch-surf, not making enough to rent, even modestly. But I had purpose and an unspeakable doggedness. Those days were the rooting of 'family of choice'—when mutual aid and caring networks sprung up everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
By the 1990s, I was back in the City of Angels, no longer doing gay activism full-time, but mostly donating to the Gay & Lesbian Center and amfAR and fundraising for AIDS Walk LA. What was more important to me than directly working for the cause was living as an out lesbian everywhere I went and working in film and television.
I had a simple first floor apartment in West Hollywood on Hacienda Place, minimally furnished, with a second-hand couch, and a Mapplethorpe print titled Ken Moody and Robert Sherman that I was proud to display. The hand-me-down black naugahyde water bed, however, was a whole different story.
Those days felt wide open—spent looking for film work and tossing a frisbee in West Hollywood Park, next to a fledgling spartan coffee shop with baked goods called, The Abbey. Chris Isaak's novel hit "Wicked Game" floated achingly from the radios of passing cars, becoming an artifact of the times, and many a day, I sat in that grass barefoot and grinning, talking to my friend Bill about a chocolate-eyed girl named Lori.
Ken Moody and Robert Sherman
The Abbey 1991
The turn of the century flipped the proverbial (gay) coin. Very late one night, I was attacked and beaten in a hate crime in my own home in Atwater Village, buried beneath the shrill hate filled howl and intemperate fists of my attacker, trilling "cunt dyke" between punches to my head.
It was life changing.
I dare say that that proverbial gay coin rolled all the way into the temple, as it were, delivering the most terrifying night of my life and me, squarely into the first specialization of Affirmative Psychology in the nation, at Antioch University, established within one year of my arrival.
I don't know a queer elder who has not brushed with history in some important or dangerous way.
Every. Single. One. of us has had some sorta bullshit cast our way.
But, I digress.
For the last 15 years, I have had the honor of being a certified Affirmative therapist, who works in memory of those beautiful lives lost and with whom I had the luck to live among when they roamed. I have also been privileged to work and collaborate with the survivors of those times (like you and me, darling).
Our stories continue—and so personal growth needs to be unmistakable and clear. The hour to redeem a promise for every battle fought is being here.
May every LGBTQIA+ elder stand tall. Pride is something we carry in our bodies, especially from having to beat the odds on a daily basis.
And as to the old saying that 'lesbians are women in comfortable shoes'...well, I've been wearing Birkenstocks since 1979. It was a clue that even my mother picked up on 🤍✌🏽
66 years old and going strong
We belong.
Still shaping what is to come,
with a legacy rooted in resilience.
⛱️
Culturally Competent Care
Kristin F Jones, LMFT
Los Angeles, California