Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community: The Impact of Homophobia and Transphobia (International Perspectives on Aging, 37) 3031333160, 9783031333163

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International Perspectives on Aging  37 Series Editors: Jason L. Powell, Sheying Chen

Claire Robson Jen Marchbank Gloria Gutman Makaela Prentice

Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community The Impact of Homophobia and Transphobia

International Perspectives on Aging Volume 37

Series Editors Jason L. Powell, Department of Social and Political Science, University of Chester, Chester, UK Sheying Chen, Department of Public Administration, Pace University, New York, NY, USA

The study of aging is continuing to increase rapidly across multiple disciplines. This wide-ranging series on International Perspectives on Aging provides readers with much-needed comprehensive texts and critical perspectives on the latest research, policy, and practical developments. Both aging and globalization have become a reality of our times, yet a systematic effort of a global magnitude to address aging is yet to be seen. The series bridges the gaps in the literature and provides cutting-­ edge debate on new and traditional areas of comparative aging, all from an international perspective. More specifically, this book series on International Perspectives on Aging puts the spotlight on international and comparative studies of aging.

Claire Robson • Jen Marchbank Gloria Gutman • Makaela Prentice

Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community The Impact of Homophobia and Transphobia

Claire Robson Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC, Canada

Jen Marchbank Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC, Canada

Gloria Gutman Gerontology Department and Research Centre Simon Fraser University Vancouver, BC, Canada

Makaela Prentice Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC, Canada

ISSN 2197-5841     ISSN 2197-585X (electronic) International Perspectives on Aging ISBN 978-3-031-33316-3    ISBN 978-3-031-33317-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0 This work was supported by New Horizons Foundation © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For those who suffer in silence

Foreword

The Indigo Project shines a light on challenges that are faced by the aging LGBTQ community. As we look at the aging demographic around the world, this work is as timely as it is thought provoking. This book reminds us that while everyone will face issues as they age, members of the LGBTQ community face added obstacles. Some of these obstacles are a reflection of the compounding emotional effect from past trauma and abuse on an individual while others are found in the remnants from a time when the LGBTQ community was explicitly marginalized by our healthcare system. Through the pages of this book, nine people tell their stories. Each story is unique; however, a common thread that binds them is the collective history of living through an era where their rights were suppressed, their love was criminalized, their families disowned them, and society as whole was blind to its collective complicity in what would be viewed today as abhorrent treatment of an entire group of people based on their sexual identity or orientation. While this experience affected people differently, it left no one unscarred, and as you read through the pages you will find these scars run deep and remain well into old age. The risk factors for abuse and neglect as we grow older are well known. The potential to experience abuse and neglect increases if we live alone, have no adult children, are lower income, have chronic health conditions. This book reminds us that these risk factors are all amplified in the LGBTQ community. Layering onto this is a healthcare system that has advanced over the last 50 years in its acceptance and treatment of the LGBTQ community but has not reached the level of integration necessary for all members of the LGBTQ community to feel confident they will not be judged or discriminated against. As we read the lived experience of older members of the LGBTQ community, it is clear why, given the history of trauma and abuse suffered, it is understandable that there is a residual fear that the care they might need as they age will not be available to them simply because of their sexual identity or gender orientation. Undoubtedly the response from the healthcare system will be to highlight the changes over the years, the policies and training in place all aimed at making the hospital, the care home, and homecare a welcoming experience for all, regardless of their sexual orientation or identification. While it is true vii

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Foreword

that much progress has been made, the two arguments advanced very eloquently in the book are: firstly, we have reduced but not eradicated discrimination, and secondly, the fear of the mistreatment is as significant for some as the mistreatment itself. While it can be difficult to read these stories and be reminded of how the law and society treated members of the LGBTQ community in the past, one can also find admiration for the resilience of so many. After a long and exhaustive battle, the weary warrior is ready for some care and comfort. I hope they find it. Seniors’ Advocate for the Province of British Columbia  Isobel McKenzie Victoria, BC, Canada

Preface

This book is the product of several happy accidents. The first was an invitation to Dr. Gloria Gutman and myself (Dr. Claire Robson) from CBC Radio host Stephen Quinn to take part in a panel about some of the challenges facing queer elders. The two of us had not met before but found that we had much in common, including a focus on participatory action research. Shortly afterwards, Gloria was awarded a grant from the BC Council to Reduce Elder Abuse (CREA) to conduct research into elder abuse in the LGBTQ community. As she searched for a local researcher with strong ties to the queer elderly community in Vancouver, Gloria thought of me and invited me to help her design the project. Though I’d been advocating for queer elders for years, I had not thought much about the topic of elder abuse, but at that time, coauthor Dr. Jen Marchbank was working with a queer youth group, and I was working with queer elders. Given the paucity of opportunities for queer youth and elders to meet, we had brought them together to write and stage a theatrical show. Flushed with success, we were ready for a new venture, and here, as if by magic, was the funding, and what seemed to be a worthy cause. The members of our intergenerational team educated themselves about elder abuse and then designed a series of informational posters and wrote, filmed, produced, and edited three videos about how elder abuse might look in our community (available at https://www.sfu.ca/lgbteol/lgbt-elder-abuse-2.html). Once the materials were made available, we began to receive numerous requests for workshops, presentations, and publications. It seemed that our project was timely in terms of dawning awareness of the issue. One such request was for a chapter in Amanda Phelan’s (2020) book, Advances in Elder Abuse Research. Gloria, Jen, and I worked together on the chapter, and I was responsible for its final submission. After I proofed the final words and hit send, I leaned back in my office chair with a sense of relief that the work was done. At the same time, the last words I had typed (see below) reminded me of the need for further work, and of the direction that this might take. Over 15 years ago, Brotman and her colleagues stated an urgent need to create more equitable, open, and supportive environments for LGBT elders (Brotman et al. ix

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2003, p. 199) including the recognition of homophobia as a form of elder abuse for this community. At the time of writing, we do not believe that their call has been adequately answered. More research is needed to determine the extent of LGBT elder abuse in its various forms, by individual partners, caregivers, and family members, and by institutions. Much more action is required to address it through appropriate initiatives, such as targeted training for health and social service providers and police, and the adaptation of policies and procedures to make elder abuse services more LGBT friendly. It is essential that LGBT individuals, communities, and organizations be regarded as essential partners in processes of institutional change, and that their voices are heard, recognized and celebrated. Gutman et al., in Phelan, (2020), p. 162. At the time of writing that chapter, no one had conducted a series of formal, structured interviews with subjects who identified as Gender and Sexual Minorities (GSM) and had experienced abuse in their elder years.1 It struck me that it was one thing to look at straws in the wind – indications that GSM seniors were at greater risk for abuse and that most certainly, we needed to follow up to discover the extent of the problem, most likely through a large national study. At the same time, it seemed clear to me that someone needed to find and interview survivors, something our research team could usefully undertake. Disability activists have generated the slogan nothing about us without us. We wrote this book in the belief that it was time for GSM survivors of elder abuse – those with lived experience – to speak about their experiences, to be heard, and to become activists and advocates for their own cause. We expect it to be of value to a broad range of readers, including healthcare and social services providers and their clients, members of the queer community, those working with the elderly, and academics, including emerging scholars. We wish to acknowledge our community partner, QMUNITY, and their funders, New Horizons for Seniors (federal funding) and the Vancouver Foundation. Our special thanks go to Dr. Jane Traies for her generosity in sharing advice and information about her methods of co-creating narratives based on interview transcripts with participants. Above all, we acknowledge our participants. Their courage and resilience have paved the way for others to come forward and shed light on an issue that has historically been hidden under layers of shame and stigma. All narratives contained in this book are published with their consent. Burnaby, BC, Canada  Claire Robson

 An exception is provided by Westwood’s (2018) article, which does contain some direct quotations from survivors. 1

Contents

1

Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 Definitions����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1.1 Definitions of Elder Abuse����������������������������������������������������    1 1.1.2 Definition of Gender and Sexual Minorities������������������������    2 1.1.3 The Silent Generation ����������������������������������������������������������    2 1.2 Background ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 1.3 The Indigo Project����������������������������������������������������������������������������    4 1.3.1 Raising Awareness of Elder Abuse in the LGBT Community ��������������������������������������������������������������������������    4 1.3.2 The Indigo Project Goals������������������������������������������������������    4 1.4 About the Book ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    5 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    5

2

 The Indigo Project, Methodology ����������������������������������������������������������    7 2.1 Project Goals������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    7 2.2 Participatory Action Research����������������������������������������������������������    8 2.3 Narrative Inquiry������������������������������������������������������������������������������    8 2.4 Ethics Review�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    8 2.5 Partnership with QMUNITY������������������������������������������������������������    9 2.6 Funding ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   10 2.7 Recruitment��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   10 2.8 Participants����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   11 2.8.1 Demographics ����������������������������������������������������������������������   12 2.9 Data Gathering����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   12 2.10 Constructing the Narratives��������������������������������������������������������������   13 2.11 Counselling Support�������������������������������������������������������������������������   14 2.12 Limitations����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   15 2.13 Further Research ������������������������������������������������������������������������������   15 2.14 Analysis��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   15 2.15 Discussion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   16 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   16 xi

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3

Historical Context������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   17 3.1 Canadian Landscape Today��������������������������������������������������������������   18 3.2 The Cold War Purge��������������������������������������������������������������������������   19 3.3 Klippert v The Queen and Bill C-150����������������������������������������������   21 3.4 We Demand��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   22 3.5 Bathhouse Raids��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   23 3.5.1 HIV/AIDS ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   25 3.6 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   26 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   26

4

Literature Review������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   29 4.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   29 4.2 A Lifetime of Victimization��������������������������������������������������������������   30 4.3 Risk Factors��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   30 4.4 Characteristics of GSM Elder Abuse������������������������������������������������   31 4.5 GSM Elders Within the Healthcare System��������������������������������������   33 4.6 Intimate Partner Violence Among GSM Elders��������������������������������   35 4.7 Barriers to Help-Seeking������������������������������������������������������������������   36 4.8 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   37 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   37

5

 Matthew’s Story: Residential Care��������������������������������������������������������   41 5.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   41 5.2 A Whirlwind of Homophobia ����������������������������������������������������������   42 5.2.1 Discussion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   44 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   46

6

 Michele’s Story: Residential Care����������������������������������������������������������   47 6.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   47 6.2 Being Gay Put a Target on My Back������������������������������������������������   47 6.3 Discussion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   57 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   59

7

 Trudy’s Story: In Home Care ����������������������������������������������������������������   61 7.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   61 7.2 It Started Very, Very Young That I Felt Other������������������������������������   61 7.2.1 Discussion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   68 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   70

8

 Jackie’s Story: In Home Care ����������������������������������������������������������������   71 8.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   71 8.1.1 Just Call Me an Old Butch����������������������������������������������������   71 8.2 Discussion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   75

9

Joseph’s Story: Partner Abuse����������������������������������������������������������������   77 9.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 9.1.1 They Didn’t Have a Fucking Clue����������������������������������������   77 9.2 Discussion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   87 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   89

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10 Pam’s Story: Partner Abuse��������������������������������������������������������������������   91 10.1 Introduction to Pam’s Story������������������������������������������������������������   91 10.1.1 I’ll Pay the Rent����������������������������������������������������������������   91 10.2 Discussion ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   98 Reference ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   99 11 Eleven  Flygirl’s Story: Abuse by Other Lesbians ��������������������������������  101 11.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  101 11.1.1 It’s Our Dirty Secret����������������������������������������������������������  101 11.2 Discussion ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  107 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  108 12 Twelve  Grace’s Story: Spiritual Abuse��������������������������������������������������  111 12.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  111 12.1.1 I Am Gay and That Is Good����������������������������������������������  111 12.2 Discussion ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  117 13 Candace’s  Story: Systemic Cultural Oppression����������������������������������  119 13.1 Introduction to Candace’s Story������������������������������������������������������  119 13.1.1 I Spent So Much of That Time Suppressing Anything in That Direction, Just to Try and Keep Myself Safe��������������������������������������������������������  119 13.2 Discussion ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  125 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  127 14 Interview  with Courtney Dieckbrader: Seniors’ Program Specialist at QMUNITY����������������������������������������������������������  129 15 Interview  with Devan Cecelia Christian: Individual Counselor and Peer Group Facilitator for Indigo Survivors ��������������  139 16 Analysis and Discussion��������������������������������������������������������������������������  151 16.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  151 16.2 Similarities in Elder Abuse ������������������������������������������������������������  151 16.3 Differences in Elder Abuse ������������������������������������������������������������  152 16.3.1 Systemic Cultural Violence ����������������������������������������������  153 16.4 Organizational Violence������������������������������������������������������������������  154 16.4.1 Health Care������������������������������������������������������������������������  154 16.4.2 AIDS����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  155 16.4.3 Trans Health Care��������������������������������������������������������������  155 16.4.4 Residential and in Home Support Systems ����������������������  155 16.4.5 Faith Communities������������������������������������������������������������  156 16.5 Homophobia and Transphobia – A Spectrum ��������������������������������  157 16.5.1 Overt Homophobia������������������������������������������������������������  157 16.5.2 Covert Homophobia and Transphobia������������������������������  158 16.5.3 Assumption of Heterosexuality ����������������������������������������  158 16.5.4 Internalized Homophobia and Transphobia����������������������  159 16.5.5 Second Hand Homophobia and Transphobia��������������������  159

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16.6 Additional Risk Factors for GSM Individuals��������������������������������  160 16.6.1 Multiplicity of Risk Factors����������������������������������������������  160 16.7 Other Considerations����������������������������������������������������������������������  161 16.7.1 Minority Status������������������������������������������������������������������  161 16.7.2 Keeping Up Appearances��������������������������������������������������  162 16.7.3 Support Systems����������������������������������������������������������������  162 16.8 Recommendations��������������������������������������������������������������������������  165 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  167 Appendices��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  169

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Types, context and nature of abuse reported by study participants��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 12 Table 16.1 Health conditions reported by study participants����������������������������� 160 Table 16.2 Sense of dislocation reported by study participants������������������������� 161 Table 16.3 Histories of trauma reported by participants������������������������������������ 161

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Systemic discrimination against LGBTQ communities has had a lasting impact on GSM seniors, as they have faced a lifetime of systemic discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender identities. Consequently, many LGBTQ seniors live, or have lived, in secrecy, hiding their identities and intimate relationships. This discrimination, particularly within the healthcare system, has led many LGBTQ seniors to lack trust in mainstream health care providers and to be hesitant to disclose unless specifically asked. Aging Out: QMUNITY Report, 2014, p. 2.

1.1 Definitions 1.1.1 Definitions of Elder Abuse The definition we began with in the Indigo Project comes from the National Initiative for Care of the Elderly (NICE), which defines elder abuse as the “mistreatment of older adults…within a trust relationship” (NICE, 2015) including both actions and behaviors or lack thereof. NICE lists five main forms of elder abuse: physical, emotional/psychological, financial/material, sexual, and neglect – all of which may be experienced by both GSM and non-GSM victims. These definitions are by no means absolute. Concerning the GSM population, Westwood (2018) notes that the abuse of older GSM people can be seen as having three sub-categories: (1) elder abuse of those who are LGBT, (2) homo/transphobic abuse of LGBT persons who are also older and (3) homo/transphobic abuse of people because they are both older and LGBT.  Importantly, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (Hall et al., 2016, p. 28) adds disruption of social health to its definition of harm, as it suggests that “disruptions of social health may include damaged or severed social bonds, relationships, or social ties, loss of social identities, social positions and social roles, or loss of access to vital social resources, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_1

1

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1 Introduction

networks, and institutions.” Clearly, this is of particular relevance to GSM participants, many of whom, as we shall demonstrate, have felt alienated from their families and communities for most of their lives. As Oakley (2013) has pointed out, the term ‘spiritual abuse’ is another recent addition to the literature, though defining it has been highly problematic and little consensus has been achieved. In this volume, we use a working definition offered by Matthews (2019), who suggests that spiritual abuse “cuts us off from spirit so that we don’t live in it or from it.” We return to these definitions in Chapter Sixteen, as we discuss their capacity to fully address the experiences of our GSM participants.

1.1.2 Definition of Gender and Sexual Minorities The acknowledgement and inclusion of experiences and identifications ignored by terms such as gay and lesbian, queer, or LGBT, have led to considerable debate about terminology within the queer and trans community. As queer theorists and activists continue to think about these terms, they are being expanded and reconsidered in a process of evolution that aims for maximum inclusion. In recent years, the acronym LGBTQ2SIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning/Queer, TwoSpirit, Intersex, Asexual) has emerged in Canada. Though the acronym is inclusive, it is unwieldy and can be off putting for those outside the community, who fear making a mistake and giving offence. Similarly, the word queer is simple and inclusive, but many in the GSM community, particularly in the older age group, have difficult memories of being assaulted with the word used as a pejorative, and many in the heterosexual and cisgender community fear that using it might be offensive to older adults. In the interests of brevity and simplicity, we have chosen to use the phrase Gender and Sexual Minorities (GSM) in this book, unless citing the work of others. We are aware, however, that this umbrella acronym, though inclusive, can serve to conflate the experiences of a range of individuals with very different needs, backgrounds and circumstances. For instance, lesbians report greater financial barriers to healthcare than gay men and are more likely to be partnered (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2013). Bisexual women are at higher risk than lesbians for mental distress and poor mental health (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2013). Further, ‘ambiguity around inclusion of gender diverse people can create further barriers and anxiety about accessing support’ (SafeLives, 2018, p. 36). Trans women in particular may be concerned about such issues as to whether a women’s shelter will accept them, or how they will be treated there.

1.1.3 The Silent Generation Elders who identify as members of gender and sexual minorities (GSM) have been variously known as Gen Silent, the Silent Generation, or the Invisible Generation (Goldsen et al., 2022), since they have lived through times when homosexual and

1.2 Background

3

trans identifications were criminalized and pathologized and being ‘out and proud’ was not a viable option for many. Historically, queer elders have survived major oppression, including incarceration, conversion therapy, banishment from their churches and families, social exclusion, physical violence, loss of jobs, housing, and custody of their children, as well as more insidious oppression and systemic cultural violence in the form of quotidian ridicule, shaming, and subjection to microaggressions. This history of marginalization has in turn led to feelings of shame, self-stigma, and low self-esteem (Dong et al., 2018; Kaufman & Raphael, 1996)  – feelings that can only be compounded by the prospects of the increased dependence and physical decline that routinely accompany aging. As BC’s seniors’ advocate notes in her Forward to this collection, “While this experience affected people differently, it left no one unscarred.”

1.2 Background It has been argued that GSM elders are at significantly greater risk for abuse by those they might expect to trust than their heterosexual agemates. Firstly, the health impacts of lengthy exposure to discrimination have created a vortex of those risk factors for abuse typically identified in the elder abuse literature (Pillemer et  al., 2016). For example, GSM elders are less likely to be married and have children or to find their children supportive if they do have them (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2013). They are more likely to live alone, as well as to feel lonely. They are at increased risk of mental illness (Brotman et al., 2003; Cabaj & Stein 1996), more likely to be depressed, to be disabled (Fredriksen-Goldsen et  al., 2013), to have experienced various forms of trauma, and to have abused drugs and alcohol more than their heterosexual counterparts (Choi & Meyer, 2016). They are also at greater financial risk, because of discriminatory access to legal and social programs and lifetime disparity in earnings (Choi & Meyer, 2016). Secondly, as Westwood (2018, pp. 3-4) has pointed out “the abuse of older people involves at its heart, an imbalance of power relations.” Since elder abuse is about the misuse of power, its prime targets tend to be those who might be easily convinced that they are ‘less-than.’ As Cook-Daniels (2017) has also suggested, “the history of social and interpersonal discrimination, violence, and trauma that LGBT elders have experienced simply adds to the ways in which they can be threatened or manipulated by abusers” (p. 543). Historically, the research into elder abuse has been conducted within the largely data driven, positivist discipline of Gerontology, which has tended to position the abuse of elders as a physical or medical ‘problem,’ and which has conflated all ages and categories of people over the age of 55, paying insufficient attention to minorities and their sociocultural context (Harbison, 2016). According to Cook-Daniels (2017), “specific studies of elder abuse in the GSM community are “practically non-existent” (p.543). These deficits are all the more troubling in light of Harrison and Riggs’s (2006) suggestion that elder abuse is one of the most urgent issues to be addressed in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex population.

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1.3 The Indigo Project This book addresses these gaps as it offers and analyzes nine first-hand accounts written by GSM survivors of abuse – the first to be published, at the time of writing. These stories were gathered in The Indigo Project, an innovative research study conducted as a partnership between QMUNITY, BC’s resource centre for queer, trans and two spirit people, and the authors, who are all researchers from Simon Fraser University, whose main campus is in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

1.3.1 Raising Awareness of Elder Abuse in the LGBT Community As just noted, The Indigo Project builds upon an earlier project conducted by the same authors: Raising Awareness of Elder Abuse in the LGBT Community: An Intergenerational Arts Project (Robson et al., 2018; Marchbank et al., 2023), funded by the BC Council to Reduce Elder Abuse (CREA). In this earlier project, GSM youth and elders from two community arts groups collaborated on the production of posters and videos that offered information and resources about elder abuse in the LGBT population (available at https://www.sfu.ca/lgbteol/lgbt-­elder-­abuse-­2.html). Further information about this project can be found in Phelan’s book, Advances in Elder Abuse Research: Practice, Legislation and Policy (2020), also published by Springer. As they conducted this first project and began a comprehensive literature review (see Chapter Three), the authors became aware of the paucity of research on the topic of elder abuse as it impacts GSM elders, and particularly, the absence of the voices and stories of those with lived experiences of abuse.

1.3.2 The Indigo Project Goals The goals of The Indigo Project were as follows: 1. To find GSM survivors of elder abuse and publish their stories as part of an anthology 2. To offer the participants mental health supports during the retelling of traumatic events - a safe and sustainable space for healing and advocacy 3. To further raise awareness of the issue of elder abuse in the GSM community 4. To think about how elder abuse might look different, and the same, in the GSM community, as compared with heteronormative individuals and relationships Raising Awareness of Elder Abuse in the LGBT community was the first project in Canada to shed light on the underreported phenomenon of elder abuse in the GSM community. Clearly, there is a pressing need for large-scale national quantitative

References

5

studies, in order to examine our suspicion that abuse is more prevalent in the GSM population. At the same time, as noted above, the next step in our own research was to find survivors willing to speak about the abuse they had experienced. It was our hope that a deep dive into subjective experiences of abuse would help us to better understand the conditions in which it occurs in the GSM population, highlight some of the differences and similarities among GSM survivors and their heterosexual counterparts, and to support healing, understanding, and a sense of agency for survivors (both our study’s participants, and those who might read their stories in future).

1.4 About the Book Chapter Two details our methodology, in particular, our partnership with QMUNITY, the impact of the counselling support and peer support group provided by QMUNITY, and the process of collecting and presenting data through a recursive process of interviews and revisions to the narratives as they emerged. In Chapter Three, we discuss in more depth some of the cultural differences and social perspectives that have influenced the GSM population, and also, the historic theoretical context of discussions with regard to elder abuse. Chapter Four offers a review of the current literature as it pertains to elder abuse in the GSM community. Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 offer the narratives of survivors. These are grouped in pairs. We begin with two accounts of mistreatment in residential care (Chaps. 5 and 6), followed by two accounts in in-home care settings (Chaps. 7 and 8). These are followed by two accounts of partner abuse (Chaps. 9 and 10). Chapter 11 is an account of mistreatment within and by the lesbian community. Chapter 12 concerns the spiritual abuse experienced by a devout Christian, and Chap. 13, the impact of transphobia and homophobia on a transexual individual who remained closeted for 70  years. Chapters 14 and 15 are transcripts of interviews conducted with Courtney Diekbrader, QMUNITY’s seniors’ specialist, and Devan Cecelia Christian, the counsellor for participants in The Indigo Project. Chapter 16 offers analysis and discussion of the narratives, as well as recommendations for practitioners and for future research.

References Brotman, S., Ryan, B., & Cormier, R. (2003). The health and social service needs of gay and lesbian elders and their families in Canada. The Gerontologist, 43(2), 192–202. https://doi. org/10.1093/geront/43.2.192 Choi, S. K., & Meyer, I. H. (2016). LGBT aging: A review of research findings, needs, and policy implications. The Williams Institute. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp ­content/uploads/ LGBT-aging-Aug-2016.Pd.

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Cook-Daniels, L. (2017). Coping with abuse inside the family and out: LGBT and/or male victims of elder abuse. In X. Dong (Ed.), Elder abuse: Research, practice and policy (pp. 541–553). Springer. Dong, X., Yang, J., Peng, L., Pang, M., Zhang, Z., Rao, J., Wang, H., & Chen, X. (2018). HIV related stigma and discrimination amongst health care providers. BMC Public Health, 18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-­018-­5654-­8 Fredriksen-Goldsen, K.  I., Kim, H.-J., Barkan, S.  E., Muraco, A., & Hoy-Ellis, C.  P. (2013). Health disparities among lesbian, gay, and bisexual older adults: Results from a population-­ based study. American Journal of Public Health, 103(10), 1802–1809. https://doi.org/10.2105/ AJPH.2012.301110 Goldsen, K. F., Jen, S., Clark, T., Kim, H. J., Jung, H., & Goldsen, J. (2022). Historical and generational forces in the iridescent life course of bisexual women, men, and gender diverse older adults. Sexualities, 25(1–2), 132–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460720947313 Hall, J., Karch, D., & Crosby, A. (2016). Elder abuse surveillance: Uniform definitions and recommended core data elements. Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/ violenceprevention/pdf/ea_book_revised_2016.pdf Harrison, J., & Riggs, D.  W. (2006). Editorial: LGBTI ageing. Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, 2, 42–43. Kaufman, G., & Raphael, L. (1996). Coming out of shame. Doubleday. Matthews, A. (2019, May 11). When is it spiritual abuse? It’s probably not what you think. Psychology today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/traversing-­the-­inner-­ terrain/201905/when-­is-­it-­spiritual-­abuse march 13th, 2023 National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly (NICE). (2015). Defining and measuring elder abuse. http://www.nicenet.ca/tools-­dmea-­defining-­and-­measuring-­elder-­abuse Oakley, L. (2013). What is spiritual abuse? In L. Oakley & K. Kinmond (Eds.), Breaking the silence on spiritual abuse (pp. 7–22). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282873_2 Pillemer, K., Burnes, D., Riffin, C., & Lachs, M. S. (2016). Elder abuse: Global situation, risk factors, and prevention strategies. The Gerontologist, 56(Suppl 2), S194–S205. https://doi. org/10.1093/geront/gnw004 Robson, C., Gutman, G., Marchbank, J., & Blair, K. (2018). Raising awareness of elder abuse in the LGBT community: An intergenerational arts project. Language and Literacy, 20(3), 46–66. SafeLives. (2018). SafeLives Annual Impact report. https://safelives.org.uk/sites/default/files/ resources/SafeLives%20Annual%20Impact%20report%202018-­19-­web.pdf Westwood, S. (2018). Abuse and older lesbian, gay bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people: A commentary and research agenda. Journal of Elder Abuse & Neglect, 31(2), 97–114. https://doi. org/10.1080/08946566.2018.1543624

Chapter 2

The Indigo Project, Methodology

Dawn Stirs. Early morning quiet. Stillness. Silence. The ground is trembling. The earth is weak. Streams trickle through the soil. The cave opens. Soft light and gentle breezes filter through long hidden spaces. The dream child awakens. The dark, angry, violent guardian is gone, for now. Flowers bud and blossom in emerging Spring. Poem sent by Grace after her first interview

2.1 Project Goals As noted in the preface, the goals co-created by the research team built upon those of our previous project, Raising Awareness of Elder Abuse in the LGBT Community. They were as follows: 1. To find queer and trans survivors of elder abuse and publish their stories as part of an anthology. 2. To offer the participants mental health supports during the retelling of traumatic events - a safe and sustainable space for healing and advocacy. 3. To further raise awareness of the issue of elder abuse in the GSM community. 4. To think about how elder abuse might look different, and the same, in the GSM community, as compared with heterosexual individuals and relationships.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_2

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2.2 Participatory Action Research One of the central aims of the Indigo Project was to give voice to survivors of GSM elder abuse, to celebrate those voices, and to see survivors as essential partners in processes of institutional change. For this reason, it is a classic example of participatory action research. Chevalier and Buckles (2013) emphasize the need for action and reflection by members of the community affected by the research, in the belief that knowledge is best understood by those with lived experience of the conditions in which it was created. As our literature review (see Chap. 3) indicates, we found that no interviews had been conducted at that time with GSM survivors of elder abuse (or if they had, they had not been published). We felt that it was high time to reach out to survivors and record their stories in full. As the disability community has put it, Nothing about us without us.

2.3 Narrative Inquiry Though we have long suspected that GSM elders may experience abuse differently, we have not had concrete evidence, or gained nuanced understanding, of how such abuse plays out in reality. Such research could, of course, be conducted in numerous ways. In this project, we focused on assembling survivor narratives for a number of reasons. Firstly, the stories we tell ourselves have much to reveal, not only about our own identities, but about the social, political, and domestic structures we have inhabited, and continue to inhabit. We felt that the stories produced in the research might offer insight into the conditions, both individual and societal, in which abuse occurs. Secondly, telling our stories can be both healing and informative (Robson, 2021). The poem by Grace that introduces this chapter was sent as a kind of ‘thank you note’ to Robson immediately after Grace’s first interview and speaks to the experience of lightness and relief that it gave her. Other participants also reported their appreciation of the opportunity to tell their stories without interruption, and to an attentive listener. Thirdly, our methodology gave us the opportunity to work alongside and with our participants and to be guided by them in processes of coevolution. Rather than placing an emphasis on extracting data quickly, the team sought to engage participants in sociable forms of two-way dialogue between researchers and participants (Sinha & Back, 2014).

2.4 Ethics Review The ethics involved in the Indigo Project were complex, given that our participants might be retraumatized by recounting their histories and revictimized if their confidentiality were to be breached. For this reason, we built in an extra level of

2.5  Partnership with QMUNITY

9

permissions just before the manuscript was submitted to our publisher. Though this was not required by our ethics board, we felt that it would encourage trust. Our instincts were justified – as it turned out, two participants baulked at this final stage, and required extra reassurance and support before they felt able to sign releases. As you will see, some of the abuse occurred in in-home and residential care managed by established and powerful organizations (at least one of which is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with some of its ex-clients). Other incidences of abuse occurred within romantic/sexual relationships, with real possibilities of the abusive partners seeking vengeance for disclosure. One participant criticizes her GSM community, and another, various church organizations. Retribution was a real possibility and greatly feared by most of our participants. An institutional ethics review was conducted by Simon Fraser University, and the team followed all of its recommendations, which included a detailed and lengthy consent form, and a predesigned set of interview questions (see Appendix 1). As well, the team made every effort to disguise the identities of both perpetrators and victims, by using pseudonyms and by changing many of the details of the narratives, including the geographical location and personal details of the events and individuals mentioned in the survivor narratives.

2.5 Partnership with QMUNITY While researchers from Simon Fraser University led the project, we also established a partnership with a Vancouver based non-profit, QMUNITY, BC’s Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Resource Centre. QMUNITY has been exceptionally conscious of the need to support old and older queers and has a member of staff designated as the seniors’ program specialist, dedicated to the provision of programming, resources, and information of particular relevance to seniors. We wanted to work with QMUNITY for several other reasons. Most importantly, we believed that it was vital to support survivors through the difficult processes of disclosure, and QMUNITY arranged and funded free individual trauma counselling for all our participants who wished it, as well as free membership in an ongoing peer support group facilitated by the same trained trauma counselor. Secondly, one of our goals was to create a sustainable community that might continue working towards greater visibility and agency after the end of the research project. We hoped that QMUNITY might take up this challenge, as indeed it has (see Chap. 16), since it has found additional funding to make the Indigo Peer Support Group a permanent feature of its programming. Finally, we hoped that QMUNITY would help with recruiting participants, since the organization is generally trusted by the GSM community in BC and has a province-wide network.

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2.6 Funding QMUNITY applied for, and received two small grants to support their involvement in the Indigo Project, one from New Horizons for Seniors, and one from the Vancouver Foundation. 90% of these funds were used to pay for counselling services, and the rest to cover the extra administrative load imposed by the project.

2.7 Recruitment Recruitment was a known challenge going into the project. Despite the success of our earlier study in terms of outreach to various organizations across British Columbia, no individual ever disclosed to us that they had experienced abuse, a situation we found remarkable in the light of our previous experiences of participatory action research conducted in the GSM community, during which individuals readily identified with descriptors such as ‘old’, ‘poor’, ‘disabled’, ‘depressed’, or ‘isolated’ (all known risk factors for elderly abuse). In previous projects conducted by members of the research team, for instance, one conducted on end of life issues (de Vries et al., 2019; Pang et al., 2019), people often approached us after our presentations to share their experiences and concerns; however, this was not the case in either the Raising Awareness Project, which toured extensively, or the Indigo Project, and we suspect that this was because of the many levels of shame and stigma our participants would need to overcome in order to disclose their histories of abuse, let alone discuss them at great length and in detail. Identifiers that triggered stigma included being old, being female, being male, and/or trans or nonbinary, and at the same time, identifying as being a member of the GSM community. Adding being abused to this list was experienced as daunting and humiliating, as participants were forced to admit that life choices made in the face of opposition, prejudice, and discrimination had led to less-than-perfect outcomes. Of course, other layers of shame exist around class, race, and ethnicity. These did not emerge in our data, because our participants all identified as Caucasian, and most were financially stable. Knowing that finding participants might be difficult, we spent a great deal of time ‘branding’ the project before we issued a call for participants. The project name seemed important, as it would be the first thing to catch the eye in our publicity. Rightly or wrongly, we chose not to lead with the word ‘abuse’ in our title, imagining that participants might not wish to be identified purely in terms of their victimhood. Indeed, our first title was the Indigo Survivors’ Project, but one putative participant said that she was highly uncomfortable being identified by the term ‘survivor’, and so we dropped that word. Instead, we chose the term Indigo Project, which we felt was neutral, but still spoke to the invisibility of elder abuse within the GSM community, which has tended to concentrate on the brighter, more positive end of the rainbow - the oranges, reds and yellows of Pride, rather than the blues and

2.8 Participants

11

greens of sadness and hidden ‘bruises’ (whether psychic or physical). Purple is, as many readers may know, also the colour associated with elder abuse, and worn (as clothing or ribbons) on such occasions as World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. A graphic designer from QMUNITY designed an eye-catching flyer, suitable for social media posts and emails. Meanwhile, both the research team and staff at QMUNITY searched for social media platforms and sites that focussed on the issues of GSM elders, Indigenous elders, and people of colour, and also those that focussed on elder abuse in general. We compiled contact information for a long list of organizations that we contacted for help with promotion (see Appendix 2) and recruited community consultants who would review our materials, promote the project through their own networks, and lend it credibility. They included a First Nation (FN) gay man, a lesbian woman of colour, a well-known nonbinary queer activist, and a lawyer in the Department of Justice who is of FN ancestry and is currently working on issues of diversity and inclusion within the Department.

2.8 Participants We began promoting the project widely in January 2022, through emails, phone calls to key stakeholders, and repeated social media posts. We also met with the BC Seniors Advocate, Isobel Mackenzie, to enlist her help in promoting the project in the province. Our publicity included an invitation to two informational sessions organized by QMUNITY and available on Zoom in March, 2022. It was agreed that in order not to overwhelm attendees, only Robson should attend from the research team, accompanied by Courtney Diekbrader from QMUNITY, and a trans elder participant from the first research project (Robson et al., 2018) who could speak to her experiences there and hopefully provide a reassuring presence. We were disappointed, but not surprised, when no one attended, despite the considerable efforts we had made. In the end, all nine eventual participants were recruited through individual personal connections. Four reached us as a direct result of efforts on the ground by Courtney Diekbrader, the QMUNITY seniors’ programming specialist, who had known that some of her existing clients had experienced abuse in their senior years but had hitherto found it a challenge to convince them to come forward. Eventually, Diekbrader persuaded four of them to at least attend the second information session, which they did. Fortunately, they gave their consent to participate in the study shortly afterwards. Four more participants were found through the personal and professional networks of the research team, in all cases through direct personal outreach. One responded to a social media post. Seven of the nine respondents expressed significant hesitations and concerns about speaking out.

2  The Indigo Project, Methodology

12

2.8.1 Demographics Our participants comprise two gay men, two transexual women, and five lesbians, all aged 60 and over. The types of abuse and context they report include abuse and neglect in long term care, abuse in in-home care, financial abuse by partners, partner violence, and spiritual abuse. See Table 2.1 (below).

2.9 Data Gathering In order to establish trust, continuity and confidentiality, it was decided that Robson should conduct all the interviews. As well as being a researcher, Robson is an experienced editor and writing coach, who specializes in helping novice writers share their life stories (Robson, 2021), so she had relevant skills. The interviews were conducted and recorded on Zoom, and transcribed through an online transcription service. The videos of the original interviews were then destroyed, in the interest of confidentiality, and in accordance with that requirement by our university’s ethics board. We decided that the first interview should give participants the chance to establish trust with Robson and to find out more about the research  – specifically to Table 2.1  Types, context and nature of abuse reported by study participants Type of abuse Sexual abuse Neglect

Emotional/ psychological abuse

Financial abuse

Physical abuse

Spiritual abuse

Context In home care In home care In home care Residential care

Nature of abuse Inappropriate touching Refusal to provide care Failure to recognize sexual orientation and provide appropriate care Refusal to provide appropriate care Refusal to provide appropriate care Intimate Death threats partnership Harassment Residential care Manipulative and controlling behaviour Intimate partnership Intimate Theft of money from shared business partnership Control over pension and shared Intimate finances partnership Theft of medical equipment Lesbian community Residential care Overprescribed & unapproved medication Rough handling Faith Ostracism and rejection communities

Pseudonym Trudy Trudy Jackie Michele Matthew Joseph Michele Pam

Joseph Pam Flygirl

Michele

Grace

2.10  Constructing the Narratives

13

address the concerns several had expressed with regard to safety and confidentiality. We did this in the expectation that our participants might need information about the research, and time and space to decide whether or not to proceed. Accordingly, Robson began each interview by letting the participant know that we would not be getting into their stories; rather, this was an ‘intake interview’, merely providing an opportunity for participants to ask questions and find out more about the research. Within a few minutes, all but one of the participants (who had grave concerns about retribution), began to spontaneously recount the story of their abuse. Typically, they continued talking with great animation, for at least an hour and a half, sometimes longer. Robson’s role shifted quickly from that of a conveyor of information to that of active listener, as she displayed continued interest, made empathetic remarks, or asked the occasional clarifying question. Here is an extract from Robson’s fieldnotes. “Though I did glance (as unobtrusively as possible) at my prepared questions to ensure that we were covering the necessary ground, on the whole, I listened to and encouraged what can only be described as an outpouring. Several participants followed up with further thoughts and insights after the interview, with emails that began thusly ‘It has just occurred to me…’ or ‘a couple of things have come to mind.’ One participant sent me (unsolicited) a poem she wrote to capture the process of being interviewed, and I believe it speaks better than I can to the experience” (Field notes, Robson, June 2022). The poem by Grace that Robson referenced here appears at the beginning of this chapter.

2.10 Constructing the Narratives Drawing upon the methodology used by Traeis (2018) to produce a text about UK lesbians, Robson reorganized and edited down the raw transcripts, getting rid of repetitions and less relevant material. Though she used only words from the transcripts (in other words, deleting words but not adding any), this was nonetheless a subjective process to a large extent. The decision to radically edit the interview transcripts in this way (reducing them by 50% or more) was adopted in order to provide future readers with accounts that were engaging, clear, and accessible, thus working towards our third goal: to further raise awareness of the issue of elder abuse in the GSM community. We wanted the book to be read not only by academics, who might be used to reading raw transcript data, but by organizations providing services to elders, and individuals who identified within the GSM spectrum, who might not be as familiar with academic texts or as used to reading them. Robson sent each participant the narrative that resulted, letting them know that this draft would serve as a focus for the second interview and that we welcomed further refinements, such as adding new material, correcting information, adding new insights, or even rejecting the initial draft completely and either repeating the first interview, or writing their own accounts (an option taken up by one participant, Grace (see Chap. 11). The second interviews were productive in this regard, as

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Robson and the participants worked through the narratives together line by line to revise them. Once again, participants often contacted Robson after the second interview to add new ideas, insights, or events that had occurred to them as they reflected upon the material and the second interview. The text of each narrative was then finalized and approved by each of the participants. It is worth noting here that we accepted all participants who asked to be included in the Indigo Project and recorded their stories as told, without reservation or any attempt on our part to alter or amend the narratives except to tighten them, as discussed above. Given the paucity of opportunities to recount what had happened to them, and our commitment to hearing the voices of survivors, we felt that this was only ethical. That said, before the interviews were conducted, we informed all participants that we did not know whether or not their stories would be included in the final text. As it turned out, we felt that all the stories had something important to tell us about how GSM individuals have navigated systemic cultural violence or abuse by trusted individuals and/or institutions.

2.11 Counselling Support Throughout the entire process, all participants were informed that they had access to free professional counselling provided by an experienced trauma counsellor hired for this purpose by QMUNITY. At least four participants revealed to Robson during the course of the project that they had availed themselves of this opportunity (the fact of their participation remained confidential unless they voluntarily disclose it). The QMUNITY counsellor reported that the impact of telling their stories during the interviews was beneficial, in terms of healing, but also difficult at times: Some people really were quite shocked on how impactful their stories actually were hitting them as they were doing the interview. They weren’t quite prepared for the emotional impact that that was having (see Chap. 14 for the full interview with the counsellor). The same four participants participated in a peer support group established and funded by QMUNITY and initially facilitated by the same counsellor. Again, all participants were offered this opportunity, though interestingly only those who had received individual counselling and had been recruited through QMUNITY availed themselves of it – a point we shall return to in our discussion (see Chap. 16). The group met weekly for 9 weeks. After this first cycle, which had been budgeted for through the grants, QMUNITY decided to make the group a permanent program within their organization. They were successful in finding the necessary funding, and the group continues to meet at the time of writing, facilitated by a newly appointed counsellor.

2.14 Analysis

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2.12 Limitations 1. Our data represents a small sample and thus does not lend itself to the construction of broad conclusions. 2. Though editing down the interview transcripts made the narratives more cogent and engaging, it also opened them to researcher bias. 3. Our participants do not include any who identify as First Nation or People of Colour, despite our efforts to recruit them. 4. The experiences of our participants do not fall neatly into the categories of abuse as traditionally defined in the literature (physical, psychological/emotional, sexual, financial, and neglect). We shall return to this issue in our final chapter.

2.13 Further Research Our suggestions for future research are covered in more detail in Chap. 15, but they include broader sampling, opportunities for survivors to engage in more extended writing practices, and specific outreach to racial and ethnic minorities. We will also suggest that when it comes to considering elder abuse in a GSM context, the existing categories of abuse might usefully be re-examined and possibly expanded.

2.14 Analysis In terms of analysis, we drew upon Meretoja’s (2017) work on narrative hermeneutics. Meretoja describes personal narratives as “culturally mediated practices of (re) interpreting experience” as she questions the established dichotomy between “living and telling” (p.9). She points out that the distinction is highly permeable. We begin to understand our experiences more clearly as we narrate them to others, developing what she calls “narrative agency” (p.12). Since our lives have been mediated through cultural narratives, Meretoja argues that telling our stories can help us understand how these social assumptions have impacted our lives. This was an important consideration for our participants, who had all lived through times of prevailing homophobic and transphobic sentiments (see Chap. 3) and all reported that these conditions had impacted them greatly. Meretoja suggests that when storytelling becomes a social and not purely individual activity (as it did in our project), it can become an activity of reorientation, engagement, and sense-making, in which stories are revised, social structures are challenged, and new possibilities for action and understanding emerge. As the research team read and reread both the full interview transcripts and the shorter narratives (offered here as Chaps. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13), a number

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of themes emerged from the data. We will present and expand upon these in the final chapter.

2.15 Discussion Given that few studies have specifically been conducted with GSM elders, and none have focussed on garnering extended first-hand accounts, our team had no examples of methodologies that had been successful or appropriate in this regard. In hindsight, we believe that our approach had considerable merit. It has provided important insights into understanding the cultural impact of cultural violence and has also lent narrative agency to participants, while supporting them through the re-­ traumatization inherent in recounting difficult stories. QMUNITY’s ongoing support group can be expected to attract more participants going forward and to continue to both raise awareness and serve the needs of future survivors. We conclude by acknowledging the courage and wisdom of our participants. They have taught us a great deal – not only about elder abuse in the GSM community, but also about how further research focussed on this issue might best be conducted.

References Chevalier, J. M., & Buckles, D. J. (2013). Participatory action research: Theory and methods for engaged inquiry. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351033268 de Vries, B., Gutman, G., Humble, Á., Gahagan, J., Chamberland, L., Aubert, P., Fast, J., & Mock, S. (2019). End-of-Life preparations among LGBT older canadian adults: The missing conversations. International Journal of Aging & Human Development, 88(4), 358–379. https://doi. org/10.1177/0091415019836738 Meretoja, H. (2017). The ethics of storytelling: Narrative hermeneutics, history, and the possible. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190649364.001.0001 Pang, C., Gutman, G., & de Vries, B. (2019). Later life care planning and concerns of transgender older adults in Canada. The International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 89(1), 39–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/0091415019843520 Robson, C. (2021). Writing beyond recognition: Queer restorying for social change. Myers Education Press. Robson, C., Gutman, G., Marchbank, J., & Blair, K. (2018). Raising awareness of elder abuse in the LGBT community: An intergenerational arts project. Language and Literacy, 20(3), 46–66. Sinha, S., & Back, L. (2014). Making methods sociable: Dialogue, ethics and authorship in qualitative research. Qualitative Research, 14(4), 473–487. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1468794113490717 Traeis, J. (2018). Now you see me: Lesbian life stories. Tollington Press.

Chapter 3

Historical Context

The people who share their narratives in this book have lived through periods of discrimination and oppression, and their lived experience has been shaped by that background. Writing of life as a lesbian activist in the early 1980s, Woodsworth notes: We had to push hard to create safe public spaces for ourselves. We had no legal rights and laws that imprisoned many of us in mental institutions. Our children were taken from us. We were treated as criminals, as crazies, as perverted. We were beaten up, raped and killed. We were shunned. We were women to be feared by other women and men. To be seen, to look like or act like or talk about lesbians meant we stood out. (Woodsworth, 2017, p. 57)

Likewise, in their graphic essay, Morrow and Fletcher (2017, p. 50) also note that ‘many people were in hospital for the ‘disease of homosexuality’ and many were incarcerated for homosexual acts. Such incarcerations were not benign care, but included combinations of ECG and drugs that often caused memory loss (Sudhues, 2018). Writing of his own experience of psychiatric treatment for being gay, Hewitt (2018, p. 76) notes, “I certainly didn’t consider myself as having a mental illness, but back in the mid-80s if you wanted help to accept yourself as being gay, you had to sign yourself over to professional help” and judgement. Living through the twentieth century was a time of societal disdain for GSM people at best and outright hostility and persecution at worst. However, it was also a time where people found each other in lesbian drop ins (Rennie, 2017); in cottages and cruising areas of public parks; at select household parties amongst other places. That said, this was not always easy. When I moved to Edmonton, I was looking for a community, I could not find anything or anyone. …It was one cold, dark winter and I remember wandering down the street desperately trying to find anything that resembled a gay community. I had no luck at all. I forget how I eventually found it, but there was a place called Club 70 … It was hidden in the basement of a Chinese Restaurant. You could never tell it was a club. It was too dangerous. (Raymond Koehler, cited in Marchbank et al., 2019)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_3

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3  Historical Context Once you know some people, you know what’s going on and word travels by the grape vine. One or two bars that were catering to lesbians were where a lot of women went. The other place was getting involved with different organisations, like I worked for the women’s health collective, that wasn’t necessarily lesbian but there were lesbians there. (Pat Hogan, Unpublished Interview for Marchbank et al., 2019)

Those who lived through these times can tell stories of family rejection; losing (or being banned) from certain employments (Cole, 2018); of childhood bullying (Yoder, 2018); of police purges and homophobic victimisation not only been left uninvestigated (Ablowitz, 2017) but encouraged; of the fear of losing one’s children (Woodsworth, 2017); the stigma of AIDS (Cole, 2018; Hewitt, 2018; Kearse, 2018); and, of harmful psychiatric ‘treatments’ (Hewitt, 2018; Sudhues, 2018). Not all these histories are formally written academic accounts; some are fictionalised narratives, others oral histories, some are known from correspondence found by others, some from deliberately curated archives. This chapter offers up an incomplete history of queer oppression and struggles in Canada to provide a background to the lives of the stories told here (though this is not to say that these oppressions were all unique to Canada). As such, this chapter aims to provide examples of the overt repression and microaggressions experienced by Canadian GSM in the twentieth century to date. This is not to say that our respondents necessarily experienced all of these directly, but to illustrate the general milieu in which their lives were lived. The following quotes are just two examples of what this entailed: When you grow up in a society that first of all you are invisible, so you think you are the only one. There are no gay characters on TV or in popular culture, in books, they just don’t exist or if they do exist it is very coded language, so you can’t even see it. Then there were people who were actively telling you that you were horrible, despicable whatever. (Michael Davis, cited in Marchbank et al., 2019) Homosexuals in Toronto continue to make the public washrooms at High Park a rendezvous despite the unusually large number of sex deviates arrested there recently. In fact, conditions have become so bad that two plainclothes-men have been assigned specially to watch the place…. [they] have not laboured in vain either, judging by their bag of homosexuals since they first took up their daily 8-hour vigil in the lavatories. (Justice Weekly, April 9, 1955, p.3)

3.1 Canadian Landscape Today Along with growing numbers of sexual minorities around the world, lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgendered, transvestite, and transsexual people in Canada have concluded that they have needed to seek the assistance of the legal system in order to disrupt the vast systems of official homophobia and heterosexual privilege built into the foundations of Canadian culture. (Lahey, 1999, p.4)

The struggle to create societal change was often done through the legal system with varying degrees of success. When Jim Egan, a well-established gay activist, applied

3.2  The Cold War Purge

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for pension rights for his partner Jack Nesbitt, he was denied. The case ended up at the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled in 1995, ‘that lesbians and gay men were protected by the Charter of Rights, [however] the court simultaneously eviscerated that protection by saying the government had the right to discriminate anyway’ (findlay, 2018, para. 1). This was due to the fact that when the Constitution had been amended in 1982, grounds for protection did not include sexual orientation nor gender identity (findlay, 2018). However, this did not stop legal and social challenges, and today, the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) ranks Canada’s provisions for GSM persons as ‘broad protection’ (https://ilga.org), a position second only to those countries with protections included in their constitutions. As such, Canadian citizens do enjoy a number of protections such as: • legal adoption rights (1995); • Civil Marriage (2005); • the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1995) and in the Canadian Human Rights Act (1996); • equal benefits and obligations as heterosexual couples (2000); • equal immigration rights for partners (2002); • inclusion of ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression’ in the Human Rights Act (2017); • a consistent age of consent for all (2019); and • a ban on conversion therapy (2011) In addition, since 1993, gays and lesbians (and more recently non-binary and agender) have been able to apply for refugee status on the basis of their fears of persecution in their countries of origin. The political and social landscape in Canada has also experienced great changes – the first openly gay MP, Svend Robinson, came out in 1988, and since then a number of GSM politicians have successfully run for office, including Canada and Ontario’s first openly lesbian provincial Premier, Kathleen Wynne (2013–2018). Further, in 2001 former Prime Minister Joe Clark served as Grand Marshall for the Calgary Pride parade (CBC, 2001) and in 2016, current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau began his practice in marching with various Pride parades, the first Prime Minister to do so. However, these victories have been hard fought, and oppression and repression have been a significant aspect of Canada’s history – though so too has resistance (Cole et al., 2017; Gentile et al., 2016; Kinsman, 2012).

3.2 The Cold War Purge While we may view modern Canada as a forward-thinking, progressive nation, we can’t forget our past, during which the state orchestrated a culture of stigma and fear around GSM communities and in doing so, destroyed people’s lives. The Purge lasted decades and

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3  Historical Context will forever remain a tragic act of discrimination suffered by Canadian citizens at the hands of their own government. What resulted was nothing short of a witch-hunt. Justin Trudeau, November 28, 2017.

These were the words of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau given as part of his official apology for what has become known as ‘The Purge.’ From the end of the Second World War, the west was concerned about the perceived threat created by the Soviet Union. In the USA, UK, and Canada, state security agencies were fearful of Communist infiltration of government and military services. As sex between men was a criminal offence (with the law extended to women in 1953), those seeking same-sex relationships risked arrest, and as there was no human rights protection in regards to sexuality, this also involved the risk of losing their jobs, homes, and families. Gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals were all thought to be fearful of being revealed as homosexuals who might then be vulnerable to blackmail to keep their secrets and thereby might betray Canada to foreign agents. It was posited that those who participated in same-sex relationships suffered from a ‘character weakness’ that made them vulnerable. Homosexuals along with “political subversives and foreign spies” were considered “legitimate targets of investigation” (Robinson & Kimmel, 1994, p. 320). As Mackenzie (2022, p. 196) argues, although the policies behind these security concerns began with questions of loyalty to the state, these had, by the mid 1950s, given way to the “perception of threat and anxiety about sexual nonconformity among western security services.” In consequence, the “1950s and the early 1960s were years of the social construction of homosexuality as a national, social and sexual danger in Canada” (Kinsman, 1995, p.137). The branch empowered to enact this Purge was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) security service who “acted zealously and committed significant resources to removing from the public service those who did not conform to orthodox heterosexuality” (Mackenzie, 2022, p.191). This zeal not only focused on civil servants and later the armed forces, but also included those who were named by those under interrogation to keep their jobs, security clearance, and dignity. Kinsman (2012) details that his respondents frequently reported that the RCMP consistently asked those under investigation for the names of their friends and hung out with gay men trying to make friends and find out about parties, at which public servants mentioned were photographed. Once confirmed as a homosexual, a person would either be purged from their military or civil service position or demoted. By the late 1960s, the RCMP held over 9000 files concerning homosexuality with only one third of them involving government employees (Kinsman, 2012; Robinson & Kimmel, 1994). As Trudeau stated “the very thing Canadian officials feared – the blackmail of LGBTQ2 employees – was happening. But it wasn’t at the hands of our adversaries; it was at the hands of our own government” (Trudeau, Nov 28, 2017). Clearly, this method of identifying homosexuals was neither efficient nor scientific, so the government sponsored research into creating a device to ‘measure homosexuality’ This research was led by Robert Wake, a professor at Carlton University. Wake created a means of measuring people’s pupil movements when

3.3  Klippert v The Queen and Bill C-150

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exposed to erotic images, and it was dubbed the ‘fruit machine’ (‘fruit’ being a pejorative term for ‘gay’) (Kinsman, 2012; Robinson & Kimmel, 1994). This scientific investigation also used word association and sweat responses (Kinsman, 1995, 2012). Despite several years of work on this project, many in the RCMP were not in favour of testing it for fear of being mistakenly analysed as a homosexual (Kinsman, 2012). Eventually this machine and methodology were abandoned. In 1969, Bill C150 was passed which amongst other things (e.g., permitting abortion under tight health conditions) partially decriminalised homosexuality, in accordance with Pierre Trudeau’s famous statement, “Frankly, the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation … what’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code,” though what is more often quoted is, “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” (CBC, 2018). Despite these advances, The Purge continued, with the RCMP turning to focus on its own ranks (Kinsman, 1995). It was not until Michelle Douglas successfully challenged her dishonorable discharge from the Army that the practice officially stopped (CBC, 2005). When the story of the purging of state employees broke in April 1992, then PM Brian Mulroney denounced it as “one of the greatest outrages and violations of human rights” (cited in Robinson & Kimmel, 1994, p. 320). It was to take until 2017 for the official apology to be made.

3.3 Klippert v The Queen and Bill C-150 Everett George Klippert was the last Canadian imprisoned for being gay (Bird, 2017); he had been incarcerated on June 24th, 1965, for a period of 3 years, after telling RCMP (during an arson investigation) that he had consensual sex with men (Bird, 2017). He was interviewed by two psychiatrists, who both stated that he was a kind and gentle man of no threat to anyone, but they also concluded that he would continue sexual relationships with other men (Bird, 2017). As such, in 1966 he was determined to be a dangerous sexual offender and was incarcerated indefinitely (Chambers, 2010).1 It was the combination of this case, the 1948 Kinsey Report, and the British Wolfenden Report (1957) that, according to Chambers (2010, p. 249), “tipped the balance in favor of a more secular analysis of homosexuality” rather than a moral judgement. In 1967, following the suggestion of New Democrat Tommy Douglas that Canada should establish a commission such as the British Wolfenden Committee (Chambers, 2010), the Justice Minister at that time, Pierre Trudeau, began his attempts to modernise the Criminal Code of Canada. Douglas was aiming to have similar recommendations to the Wolfenden Report, and Pierre Trudeau saw a chance to create “a separation between morality and law so that the latter can perform its

 Klippert had to wait until 1971, 2 years after Bill C150, to be freed. He died in 1996 and a full pardon was granted posthumously in 2016. 1

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primary function: the protection of citizens from harm in order that they experience a maximum of freedom” (Chambers, 2010, p. 255). This culminated in 1969 as Bill C150, which decriminalised sexual acts between two adults over the age of 21 in private; however, the presence of a third person made the activity public, and therefore illegal. As Kinsman observed Bill C150: … was actually a limited and partial decriminalization. What is not often remembered is that the 1969 reform instituted a new form of public/private policing of queer sex. This led to an escalation of sexual policing including the pre-Olympic repression and clean-up campaigns in Montreal and Ottawa during 1975–1976, as well as the bath raids using bawdy house laws across Canada in the later 1970s and 1980s. (Kinsman, 2010, para. 4)

Bill C150 has been much lauded in the canon of Canadian history as the legalisation of homosexuality, but as noted above, this was in fact a much more restricted reform. Also, it was not just the product of politicians, but also the work of many activists, as Donna Dykeman recalls: … there was so much work that went on before that step by community groups and activists to achieve decrim (sic). It wasn’t one politician, one move and everything is fine, because in no way does decriminalisation mean human rights achievement … and of course, once decrim happened, the work had to continue on very many levels. (Donna Dykeman cited in Marchbank et al., 2019)

As symbolic as Bill C150 was, it did not immediately change much. In Beyond 1969: An Intergenerational Oral History (Marchbank et  al., 2019),2 respondents noted the following: “I think the stigma of being homosexual was still there after the decriminalisation” Pat Hogan “Decriminalisation did nothing for me…[the] Criminal Code change allowed us to identify ourselves, but not be protected” Michael “So, did I know the Prime Minister’s statement was important? Yes. Did it change our lives overnight? No, absolutely not.” Ellen Woodsworth

3.4 We Demand Given the limitations of Bill C150 and the continuation of discrimination, activism continued. Of particular note was the gathering on August 28, 1971, the second anniversary of the passing of Bill C150 on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in support of the campaign We Demand/Nous Demandons. We Demand was a 13-page document protesting continued discrimination and demanding, not asking, for changes in

 Beyond 1969: An Intergenerational Oral History was a project run by Jen Marchbank in Spring 2019. Local activists were interviewed by undergraduate students from SFU and the material gathered was shared with two 2SLGBTQSIA+ youth groups in Surrey, BC. The result was a public display for Surrey City Hall and City Libraries. The peripatetic tour was curtailed by COVID. 2

3.5  Bathhouse Raids

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public policy and laws in relation to homosexuality. This was expressed in the speech made by Charles C. Hill on behalf of Toronto Gay Action: We’re here today to assert our rights and make our demands. We’re no longer willing to quietly give thanks for a few crumbs begrudgingly given us by our own government. We’re here to demand full equality. … We’re here to demand them as equal citizens on our own terms. (Toronto Gay Action papers).

Speeches were also given by George Hislop and Pat Murphy of the Community Homophile Association of Toronto and by Pierre Masson of Montreal’s Front de libération homosexual amongst others (The Body Politic, 1971). Despite the pouring rain, around a hundred people marched on Parliament Hill, with a solidarity rally held at the Vancouver courthouse organised by the Gay Alliance Toward Equality (GATE) (Toronto Gay Action papers). Several demands were made, including the removal of the terms “gross indecency” and “indecent act” from the Criminal Code; removal of these ‘offenses’ as ground for labelling someone a dangerous sexual offender; a uniform age of consent for all; removal of the ban on homosexuals in immigration legislation; equal employment rights; amendments to the Divorce Act to remove gay sex as a grounds for divorce and equality for child custody; right to serve in the military; right to know if there was a RCMP policy to root out homosexuals, and if so, to immediately desist and have all public officials work to use their resources to change attitudes towards homosexuality (Toronto Gay Action papers). We Demand did not have any immediate success. Ed Jackson, reflecting on the Fortieth Anniversary, noted that he did not realise the significance of the event until he wrote a historical piece on it in 1981. In 2011, he recognized that “not all of the demands were realized,” but he attributed that to the vague nature of some of the requests for systemic change. “More or less, though, the main demands have all been met,” he said (DiMera, 2011, p. 13).

3.5 Bathhouse Raids “Every Friday and Saturday night, it was a guarantee that the police would raid the bar at least once a night [The Melody Room in Toronto, 1960s]. When the police would raid, the guy at the bottom of the stairs would flick a switch so that the lights would come on upstairs. And by the time the cops had thundered upstairs everyone had stopped dancing. Dancing cheek to cheek with a member of the same sex was illegal whether it was male or female. If the police did not catch any two people of the same sex showing affection, they would look for anyone without an ID and arrest them.” (Phil Collins, cited in Marchbank et al., 2019).

Raids such as those described above were frequent in the social spaces where many GSM people assembled. Great care was taken to ensure personal safety. Arrest would mean exposure, which could lead to publication of names, loss of employment, and even loss of accommodation. The partial decriminalisation of

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homosexuality in 1969 did nothing to protect homosexuals, for the ‘bawdy house laws,’ which criminalised group sex (amongst many other behaviours), were still in effect. However, later raids also had the effect of galvanising the Gay Rights movement. The Toronto Police Morality Squad executed a pre-dawn raid on Barracks Bathhouse on 9th December 1978. They aggressively pushed their way past the door attendant, kicked down doors to private rooms, forcibly opened locked desk drawers, and scattered receipts, accounts, and business records to be trampled underfoot. The police unceremoniously herded attendees in various stages of undress, reportedly subjecting them to threatening and insulting comments accompanied by some shoves and kicks. (Nash, 2014, p. 83)

Less known about than the later raids of four bathhouses in Toronto in 1981; these raids on the Barracks were argued at the time to be an attack on “an important community institutional space, such that an attack on this particular space should be viewed as an attack on the community as a whole” (Nash, 2014, p. 99). Nash (ibid) contends that the alliance between certain gay community members and the private owners of a commercial bathhouse eventually developed into a nascent ‘gay village.’ It also led to the formation of the Right to Privacy Committee (RTPC). According to de Groot (2019, p. 204), the “RTPC included an eclectic mix of gay liberationists, liberals, and capitalists who disagreed on many things but concurred that Canada’s bawdy house laws were outdated and unjust.” These laws dated back to the nineteenth century and had not been repealed by Bill C150. The defence the RTPC adopted was to challenge the constitutionality of the charges laid against those arrested (de Groot, 2019) asking, for instance, what exactly was an act of indecency? Legal arguments were made all the way to the Supreme Court, which determined that the charges were constitutional, leading to a new trial in March 1981. However, before this trail could start new, larger raids occurred, known as ‘Operation Soap.’ Operation Soap began as a several months’ long observation of bathhouse activities by undercover police officers. The officers were looking for evidence of any form of group sex and “acts of gross indecency.” Having found their evidence, the police then planned their raids. Around 200 officers were dispatched with warrants for four gay bathhouses on 5 February, 1981 (de Groot, 2019). The officers were reported to have been derogatory and physically violent, some even making comments that they wished the showers were hooked up to poison gas or that the venue would catch fire (de Groot, 2019). Rather than accept keys to doors and lockers, the police smashed the properties, causing thousands of dollars in damages (de Groot, 2019). The local GSM community did not accept these raids quietly; instead, they were rapid in their response  – a mass demonstration. Flyers were quickly printed and posted, and the next night, demonstrators gathered to march to the police division responsible for the raids. What resulted was the largest GSM demonstration in Canada with over 3000 protesters involved, with many “chaotic scuffles between demonstrators and police throughout the night” (de Groot, 2019, p. 205). The newly revitalised RTPC became involved a little later, holding community consultations

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on how to respond. The response was a second, larger, demonstration on February, 20th, 1981 (de Groot, 2019). Of course, as well as demonstrations (sometimes referred to as Canada’s ‘Stonewall’), there were legal cases to defend. The RTPC focused this time on fund-­ raising for a defence fund for those charged with attending the bathhouses (de Groot, 2019), which encouraged many men to fight their cases. Eventually, of the 266 charged, 230 were acquitted, some due to poor identification information and some due to claims to have been present for legal reasons such as using the saunas (de Groot, 2019). These acts of police oppression were experienced negatively, especially by those charged; however, the actions of thousands of people willing to demonstrate against the raids was powerful. When the bathhouse raids hit, we were under attack. The response was universal, said Dennis Findlay, president of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. Not just within the gay community and the lesbian community but the straight community also went, ‘What is going on here? That is an utter invasion of people’s privacy. …It was a game changer for many individuals within the community — to realize no, we’re not taking this shit anymore. (Cited in Gollom, 2016).

3.5.1 HIV/AIDS “Remember the ‘shame’ of AIDS?” (Cole, 2018, p.  50) Cole recalled being told after finding out that she had just cared for the partner of a world-famous architect who was too ashamed to even speak his partner’s name. Such was the fear of AIDS.  This fear was a terror greater than homophobia  – though that certainly abounded with talk of the ‘gay disease.’ Even children with AIDS were persecuted and banned from attending school (MacNeil, 1985). In one case, the home of three haemophiliac brothers was burned down (Esper, 1987). Although these latter examples occurred in the USA, that did not mean Canada was exempt from hatred. In British Columbia during the 1980s, the “provincial government consisted of a lot of ultra-right wing, religious, hypocrites who wanted to segregate the men infected and quarantine them on Dead Man’s Island in Stanley Park” (Hewitt, 2018, p. 72). Some doctors refused to treat patients (Brammer, 2018), whilst dentists wore hazmat suites to treat gay men (assuming they all had AIDS) (Marchbank, personal reflection). Palliative care training “gave scant attention to AIDS which at that time was considered a scary almost unmentionable topic” (Cole, 2018, p. 47). AIDS did not just scare professionals and the general public, it also scared the gay community, as Hewitt (2018, p.72) recalled “frail bodies of young men wasting away to a look far beyond their years was frightening.” Before the AIDS crisis, the movement for lesbian and gay rights was not cohesive, as both gay and straight men held misogynistic attitudes (Faderman, 2015) and many lesbians were separatist. However, in the 1980s, that “changed seriously” (Faderman, as cited in Brekke, 2017, para. 4). “Lesbians felt it was ‘no time for

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animosity’, and gay men realized ‘these are our sisters and we need to work with them’” (Brekke, 2017, unpaginated, citing Faderman). Lesbians also took over leadership and provided community kitchens, food banks, and individualised medical care (Brammer, 2018; Brekke, 2017; Cole, 2018). As such, in Canada and beyond, the community became unified in a way it had not been before, allowing for spaces of resistance and resilience.

3.6 Conclusion There’s a lot more GSM history to write, but this chapter was never about being encyclopedic. Rather, it illustrates some of the events our respondents lived through, whether they were experienced directly or from afar. Many were exceedingly negative and harmful. However, some were also glimmers of hope and led to acts of resistance individually, as a community, legally and politically. It is clear that despite these resistances, constant overt aggressions, and covert microaggression did occur, and the effect of these on some were acquiescence and the belief that this is ‘just what it is like to be GSM,’ whilst others resisted and continue to do so.

References Ablowitz, M. (2017). Jean, the boy-girl, 1976. In C. Robson, K. Blair, & J. Marchbank (Eds.), Basically queer: An intergenerational introduction to LGBTQA2S+ lives (pp. 177–179). Peter Lang Publishers. Bird, H. (2017, November 28). Everett Klippert: The last Canadian to go to jail simply for being gay. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/everett-­klippert-­lgbt-­apology-­1.4422190 Brammer, J. P. (2018, August 23). These lesbian medical professionals cared for AIDS patients in the ’80s. Them. https://www.them.us/story/quiet-­heroes-­doc Brekke, K. (2017, April 4). How le 3wtbians’ role in the AIDS crisis brought gay men and women together. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/aids-­crisislesbians_n_5616867ae4b0e66 ad4c6a7c4 CBC. (2001, June 10). Clark leads gay parade in Calgary. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/clark leads-­gay-­pride-­parade-­in-­calgary-­1.262648 CBC. (2005). The current, May 9. CBC. (2018, June 21). No place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. https://www.cbc.ca/ archives/no-­place-­for-­the-­state-­in-­the-­bedrooms-­of-­the-­nation 1.4681298 Chambers, S. (2010). Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Bill C-150: A rational approach to homosexual acts, 1968-69. Journal of Homosexuality, 57(2), 249–266. Cole, C. (2018). That’s what friends are for. In K.  Kearse (Ed.), Sharing our journeys: Queer elders tell their stories (pp. 47–56). Filidh Publishing. Cole, C., Innes, V., & Woodsworth, E. (2017). Introduction to the history of the queer movement. In C. Robson, K. Blair, & J. Marchbank (Eds.), Basically queer: An intergenerational introduction to LGBTQA2S+ lives (pp. 41–45). Peter Lang Publishers. De Groot, S. (2019). Bathhouse raids, Toronto 1981. In H. Chaing, A. Arondekar, M. Epprecht, J. Evans, R. G. Forman, & H. Al-Samman (Eds.), Global encyclopedia of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, & queer history (Vol. 1, pp. 202–208). GALE EBooks.

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DiMera, M. (2011, August 25). We demand: 40 years later. XTRA! https://xtramagazine.com/ power/we-demand-6480 Esper, G. (1987, September 20). Arcadias’ AIDS children: Florida town shuns ill boys tries to rebuild image. Los Angeles Times. Faderman, L. (2015). The gay revolution: The story of the struggle. Simon & Schuster. findlay, b. (2018, June 16). Remembering the impact of Egan v. Canada. The Star. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/opinion/2018/06/16/remembering-­the-­impact-­of-­egan-­v-­canada.html Gentile, P., Kinsman, G., & Rankin, L. P. (Eds.). (2016). We still demand!: Redefining resistance in sex and gender struggles. UBC Press. Gollom, M. (2016, June 22). Toronto bathhouse raids: How the arrests galvanized the gay community. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/bathhouse-­raids-­toronto­police-­gay-­community-­arrests-­apology-­1.3645926 Hewitt, C. (2018). When life hands you lemons. In K. Kearse (Ed.), Sharing our journeys: Queer elders tell their stories (pp. 71–80). Filidh Publishing. Kearse, R. (Ed.). (2018). Sharing our journeys: Queer elders tell their stories. Filidh Publishing. Kinsman, G. (1995). “Character weaknesses” and “fruit machines”: Towards an analysis of the anti-homosexual security campaign in the Canadian civil service. Labour/Le Travail, 35, 133–161. Kinsman, G. (2010). Queer liberation: The social organization of forgetting and the resistance of remembering. Canadian Dimension, 44(4). https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/ queer-­liberation-­the-­social-­organization-­of-­forgetting-­and-­the-­resistance-­o Kinsman, G. (2012). The Canadian cold war on queers: Sexual regulation and resistance. In M. FitzGerald & S. Rayter (Eds.), Queerly Canadian: An introductory reader in sexuality studies (pp. 65–80). Canadian Scholars. Lahey, K.  A. (1999). Are we ‘persons’ yet?: Law and sexuality in Canada. University of Toronto Press. Mackenzie, H. (2022). The straight and narrow path: Policy direction and oversight of the gay purges in Canada. British Journal of Canadian Studies, 34(2), 189–216. MacNeil, C.M. (1985, August 31). A school bars door to youth with AIDS. Kokomo Tribune. Magistrates are not helping police rounding up High Park sex deviates. (1955, April 9). Justice Weekly. Marchbank, J., Gutman, G., & Narayan, S. (2019). Beyond 1969: An intergenerational oral history. Public Educational Display. Morrow, B., & Fletcher, J. (2017). Homophobic homo. In C. Robson, K. Blair, & J. Marchbank (Eds.), Basically queer: An intergenerational introduction to LGBTQA2S+ lives (pp. 49–52). Peter Lang Publishers. Nash, C. J. (2014). Consuming sexual liberation: Gay business, politics, and Toronto’s barracks bathhouse raids. Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes, 48(1), 82–105. Rennie, R. (2017). The drop-in. In C. Robson, K. Blair, & J. Marchbank (Eds.), Basically queer: An intergenerational introduction to LGBTQA2S+ lives (pp. 99–101). Peter Lang Publishers. Robinson, D. J., & Kimmel, D. (1994). The queer career of homosexual security vetting in cold war Canada. The Canadian Historical Review, 75(3), 319–345. Sudhues, K. (2018). A life folded in thirds. In K. Kearse (Ed.), Sharing our journeys: Queer elders tell their stories (pp. 35–45). Filidh Publishing. Trudeau, J. (2017). Remarks by prime minister Justin Trudeau to apologize to LGBTQ2 Canadians. https://pm.gc.ca/en/news/speeches/2017/11/28/remarks-­p rime-­m inister-­j ustin-­t rudeau-­ apologize-­lgbtq2-­canadians Woodsworth, E. (2017). Standing out and standing up as lesbian feminists. In C. Robson, K. Blair, & J. Marchbank (Eds.), Basically queer: An intergenerational introduction to LGBTQA2S+ lives (pp. 56–58). Peter Lang Publishers. Yoder, M. (2018). There’s no place like home. In K. Kearse (Ed.), Sharing our journeys: Queer elders tell their stories (pp. 95–104). Filidh Publishing.

Chapter 4

Literature Review

4.1 Introduction Although studies on the topic of abuse among GSM elders are rare, there is some evidence to suggest that elder abuse manifests more frequently and differently within the GSM community compared with mainstream populations. For example, in a recent analysis of data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging, Gutman et al. (2022) report prevalence rates for psychological, physical and financial elder abuse of 8.8%, 1.3% and 1.3% (overall 10.0%) for heterosexuals and 10.5%, 1.9% and 5.2% (overall 12.0%) among LGB participants. As noted earlier in this volume, Westwood (2018) argues that GSM elders are at greater risk of encountering both traditional elder abuse and GSM-related abuse as they age. Indeed, GSM-related abuse has been characterized as an ‘add-on’ feature of victimization among older adults, as it can occur simultaneously with other forms of elder abuse (Balsam & D’Augelli, 2006, p. 112). Although older GSM adults are likely to have encountered homophobic abuse throughout their lives, such abuse may become more difficult to negotiate as an individual ages (Westwood, 2018). There is also a fear among some GSM seniors that their perceived frailty and vulnerability may make them preferred targets for those wishing to perpetrate homophobic abuse (Bloemen et al., 2019). Literature further suggests that GSM-related abuse among older people can take forms which do not fit the traditional definition of elder abuse, such as ostracism by family members and inadequate treatment from medical professionals (Bloemen et  al., 2019). GSM elders in one study argued that the definition of elder abuse should be expanded to include harassment by a trusted person or institution based on sexual orientation, as they felt this would force institutions such as long-term care facilities to respond more promptly to discrimination against gay and lesbian residents (Brotman et al., 2003). Simultaneously, certain aspects of GSM culture, particularly gay male culture, can be erroneously interpreted as elder abuse by social workers and other social service professionals. For example, Morrissey © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_4

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(2010) points out that older gay men may sometimes attempt to make connections with younger male members of the community, which may lead social service professionals to assume these elders are being exploited within these relationships.

4.2 A Lifetime of Victimization Many GSM elders have endured extensive victimization throughout their lifetimes. D’Augelli and Grossman (2001) examined the lifetime victimization of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals aged 60 and above. In all, 63% of participants reported experiencing verbal abuse, 29% were threatened with violence, 11% had objects thrown at them, 16% had been physical attacked, 12% had been threatened with weapons, 7% had been sexually assaulted and 29% had been threatened with the exposure of their sexuality. Men were more often physically attacked and threatened than women (D’Augelli & Grossman, 2001). Additionally, 19% of respondents reported encountering discrimination in the workplace, and 7% reported encountering discrimination in housing (D’Augelli & Grossman, 2001). A separate study by Fredriksen-Goldsen et al. (2011) found that 82% of older GSM adults who responded to their survey reported experiencing victimization at least once, with 64% reporting experiencing it at least three times over their lifetime. The most common forms of victimization were verbal abuse (68%), threats of physical violence (43%), being harassed by police (27%) and being threatened with having their sexuality exposed (23%). 19% of respondents had been physically assaulted at one point in their lives, 14% had been threatened with a weapon, and 11% had been sexually assaulted (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2011). This history of victimization, combined with the hostile historical context in which these elders grew up (see Chap. 2), represents a form of systemic harm inflicted upon the GSM community. GSM elders may experience abuse and victimization differently from their cisgender and heterosexual peers because they live in a society that has historically disparaged their relationships and identities (Balsam & D’Augelli, 2006).

4.3 Risk Factors Despite a paucity of literature on the topic, it is known that GSM elders may be more at risk of being abused than their heterosexual and cisgender peers. One of the specific risk factors for elder abuse within the GSM community is isolation. 53% of LGBT elders in one study reported feeling isolated, with transgender older adults reporting even higher levels of loneliness than their cisgender peers (Fredriksen-­ Goldsen et al., 2011). This may be due to the historical trend of medical professionals instructing transgender individuals to divorce their spouses and move to a new area to start a new life as their chosen gender identity (Choi & Meyer, 2016). Other

4.4  Characteristics of GSM Elder Abuse

31

reasons for heightened isolation among GSM older adults include a higher likelihood of being childless and being estranged from one’s family of origin (Chan & Silverio, 2021; Choi & Meyer, 2016; Czaja et al., 2016;). These factors can increase an individual’s risk of elder abuse, as social isolation makes it more likely that GSM elders will have to rely on resources outside of their family for care, including longterm care facilities where they may be exposed to abuse and discrimination (Teaster & Sokan, 2016). High levels of isolation among both GSM older adults and their caregivers can also increase the risk of elder abuse due to the extra stress placed on caregivers (Balsam & D’Augelli, 2006). Additionally, in relation to partner abuse, perpetrators may believe they can get away with abusing their same-sex partners who are isolated because there is no one around to witness and report the abuse (Cook-Daniels, 2017). It has been speculated that ageism within the GSM community may also contribute to an increased risk of encountering elder abuse. Elders of all sexualities and genders encounter ageism; yet, several studies have noted that the GSM community (particularly the gay male community) places significant value on youth and beauty, thus making it difficult for older GSM individuals to connect with their community (Balsam & D’Augelli, 2006; Brotman et al., 2003). Additionally, since sexuality is an important part of gay male culture, the fact that older people are often seen as asexual may produce a challenge to queer men’s identities (Morrissey, 2010). The presence of such ageism within the GSM community may lead some older gay men to have decreased self-worth, thus making them more likely to choose abusive partners (Balsam & D’Augelli, 2006). Due to a lack of equivalent studies, it is difficult to determine whether this pattern applies to other subgroups within the GSM community.

4.4 Characteristics of GSM Elder Abuse Only a few studies have collected data on the prevalence of elder abuse among GSM older adults. The most comprehensive of these is a study by Grossman et al. (2014), which examined rates of caregiver abuse in lesbian, gay and bisexual adults aged 60+. The authors found that 22.1% of those surveyed had been exposed to at least one form of elder abuse (physical, emotional, verbal, sexual, financial, or neglect). Additionally, 25.7% of participants reported knowing another GSM older adult who had encountered at least one of these forms of elder abuse at the hands of a caregiver. Among participants in Grossman’s study, emotional, verbal and financial harm were the most common forms of elder abuse encountered, while sexual abuse was the least common (Grossman et al., 2014). A study by Fredriksen-Goldsen et al. (2011) also collected data on verbal and physical abuse among older GSM adults, finding that 7% of their participants had experienced verbal abuse from a partner, family member or friend within the past year, while 3% of their participants had experienced physical abuse. Verbal abuse was most common among bisexual women and transgender older adults, while

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physical abuse was most common among bisexual men (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2011). The same study by Fredriksen-Goldsen et al. (2011) found that 3% of GSM elder respondents reported experiencing neglect at least 3 days in the past week. Bisexual women were more likely to experience neglect than lesbian older adults, and transgender older adults were more likely to experience neglect than cisgender adults. Finally, a study of GSM seniors residing in New York State collected data on rates of neglect and financial abuse within this population, finding that 8.3% of respondents had experienced neglect as a result of homophobia, while 8.9% had experienced financial exploitation or blackmail (Frazer, 2009). With regards to Canada specifically, the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) has produced some information on the prevalence of elder abuse among LGB older adults. The prevalence of psychological, physical and financial elder abuse among LGB participants in the CLSA was 12%, compared to 10% among heterosexual participants (Gutman et al., under review). Psychological abuse was the most common form of abuse, followed by financial abuse, with physical abuse being the least common. While psychological and financial abuse had the highest prevalence among lesbian and bisexual women, physical abuse was more common among gay and bisexual men. Overall, lesbian and bisexual women experienced the highest rates of elder abuse, with a prevalence of 18.1% (Gutman et  al., under review). In an additional study using data from the CLSA’s COVID-19 Survey, Gutman et al. (2022) used experiences of increased verbal or physical conflict as a proxy for elder abuse, finding that gay and bisexual older men were more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to report an increase in this type of conflict during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the lack of data on GSM elder abuse, there is very little information on rates of abuse among specific subgroups within the GSM community. Transgender older adults in particular are nearly invisible within research on elder abuse. In cases where these elders are included in literature on elder abuse, information on their experiences has traditionally been based on speculation and extrapolation based upon research on gay and lesbian elders, as well as data on younger transgender individuals (Cook-Daniels, 1997). Yet, studies show that transgender elders are more likely than their cisgender peers to report having experienced abuse or neglect, as well as self-neglect (Cook-Daniels & munson, 2010; Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2011). Indeed, one study on trans elders found that 27.3% of older trans respondents, the majority of whom were in their fifties, stated they had self-neglected more than once (Cook-Daniels & munson, 2010). This was noted by the authors as surprising, considering self-neglect is typically only found in adults who are much older and frailer. Within the same study, 64.8% of older transgender respondents reported encountering emotional or psychological abuse more than once, and 30.9% reported encountering health care discrimination more than once. The majority of these respondents felt that the abuse they encountered could be attributed to anti-­ transgender prejudice (Cook-Daniels & munson, 2010). Bisexual older adults are similarly under researched within the elder abuse field, and are nearly always grouped in with their gay and lesbian peers (Balsam & D’Augelli, 2006; Choi & Meyer, 2016). For instance, Cook-Daniels (1997)

4.5  GSM Elders Within the Healthcare System

33

considers bisexuals as gay male or lesbian for the purposes of their chapter on GSM elder abuse, and states that a bisexual person’s identity is only likely to increase their risk of elder abuse if they are engaged in a same-sex relationship. In other cases, bisexuals are excluded completely from studies on GSM aging. Yet, as Choi and Meyer (2016) point out, bisexual older adults may actually experience additional stressors due to facing stigmatization from both the heterosexual and GSM communities. Indeed, survey data indicates that rates of physical and verbal abuse may be higher among bisexuals than gays and lesbians. Specifically, older bisexual men reported higher rates of physical abuse than older gay men, while both older bisexual women and bisexual men reported higher rates of verbal abuse than either gay men or lesbians (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2011). Additionally, older bisexual women were more likely to experience neglect than lesbian older adults. These findings indicate that the experiences of bisexuals in relation to elder abuse are likely worth considering independently of the gay and lesbian community; for now, however, there is a major gap in research in this area. Outside of abuse perpetrated against GSM older adults by others, there is also some evidence to suggest that GSM older adults are more likely to experience self-­ neglect than their heterosexual and cisgender peers. Cook-Daniels (1997) has suggested this may be due to a lack of self-esteem among GSM elders caused by internalized homophobia/transphobia. Furthermore, GSM older adults may be less willing to permit someone to enter their home and provide care, due to both fears of encountering discrimination and a history of hiding their private lives from others. Jackie provides a strong example (see Chap. 8). These factors may make GSM elders less likely to seek home care services, thus resulting in higher levels of self-­ neglect within this population (Cook-Daniels, 1997). The small amount of data we have on rates of self-neglect within the elderly GSM community seems to support this theory, as 62.8% of gay, bisexual and lesbian elders surveyed in Grossman et al. (2014) reported experiencing self-neglect.

4.5 GSM Elders Within the Healthcare System A particular issue for GSM elders involves discrimination within the healthcare system. 13% of Fredriksen-Goldsen et  al.’s (2011) older adult sample reported being denied healthcare or being provided with inferior healthcare due to their GSM status. This was even more common among transgender individuals, with 40% reporting encountering inferior healthcare or being denied healthcare due to their gender identity. In another study, 25% of older lesbians interviewed for the study had encountered homophobia from home healthcare workers (Butler, 2017). Furthermore, many older GSM participants in the Bloemen et  al. (2019) study reported previously experiencing discrimination from medical practitioners, ranging from discriminatory comments to subpar care. Others had not directly experienced mistreatment from medical professionals but feared they 1 day would. This is not surprising, considering GSM individuals have been found to have a distrust of

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4  Literature Review

the healthcare system due to the medical profession’s history of marginalizing and oppressing the GSM community (Brotman et al., 2003). Due to this distrust, GSM elders are often reluctant to disclose their sexual orientation or gender identity to medical professionals (Bloemen et  al., 2019; Brotman et  al., 2003; Czaja et  al., 2016; SAGE & MAP, 2010). This can affect a GSM older adult’s willingness to report their experiences of abuse to a medical practitioner, as the elder may fear having their sexuality exposed and encountering further abuse at the hands of the healthcare system (Bloemen et al., 2019). Among GSM older adults, elder abuse within institutional environments, such as long-term care facilities, assisted living, or retirement communities, is a significant concern. In particular, many older GSM adults fear encountering neglect or abuse at the hands of long-term care staff should they be open about their GSM status (National Senior Citizens Law Center, 2011; Stein et al., 2010). Older GSM adults also express fear of being discriminated against by fellow residents within long-­ term care (National Senior Citizens Law Center, 2011; Stein et al., 2010). This leads many lesbian, gay and bisexual older adults to feel that they will be forced to go back into the closet should they enter a congregate setting, as they encounter discrimination from staff or other residents (Brotman et al., 2003; Caceres et al., 2020; Leyerzapf et al., 2018; National Seniors Citizens Law Center, 2011; SAGE & MAP, 2010; Stein et al., 2010). This is often not an option for transgender older adults, whose physical bodies may contradict the gender identity they present with. This may make these individuals more vulnerable to abuse at the hands of staff within healthcare environments and assisted living facilities who provide medical or personal care (Choi & Meyer, 2016). As a result, many transgender elders fear being placed in long-term care or resist moving to assisted living. Specific concerns of trans elders include the possibility of being placed in a sex-segregated unit that does not match their gender identity or being denied their hormones (Cook-Daniels, 2006). Actual data on GSM elder abuse within long-term facilities is somewhat scarce. In one survey, 44% of older GSM respondents reported encountering mistreatment within a long-term care environment (National Senior Citizens Law Center, 2011). Instances of mistreatment were most commonly verbal or physical harassment from other residents, followed by being refused admission to or being abruptly discharged from the facility. Instances of physical and verbal harassment from staff were also reported, including several respondents who reported being told by staff that they were going to hell due to their sexual orientation or gender identity (National Senior Citizens Law Center, 2011). Participants in a Dutch study similarly reported encountering verbal harassment and ostracism at the hands of fellow long-term care residents (Leyerzapf et al., 2018). The same study also records instances of stigmatizing and homophobic humour from staff, which can be understood as a form of microaggression. Homophobic microaggressions are a particular concern within long-term care facilities; for example, one study recounts an instance of a gay man who was deeply hurt when his fellow male residents acted insulted when they were mistaken as being gay (Bonifas, 2016). The same article describes incidents of verbal

4.6  Intimate Partner Violence Among GSM Elders

35

harassment and the usage of homophobic slurs by residents within long-term care. Outside of causing emotional and mental distress, discrimination within long-term care can cause a GSM older adult to become increasingly isolated. Fear of encountering harassment may prevent a GSM older adult from having a same-sex partner or GSM friend visit them at their facility, while simultaneously causing the elder to withdraw from social activities within their nursing home (SAGE & MAP, 2010).

4.6 Intimate Partner Violence Among GSM Elders Cook-Daniels (2017) notes several features of partner abuse among elders that are specific to GSM couples. One is the ability of an abuser to blackmail a GSM elder by threatening to expose their sexuality or gender identity to others. This is noted throughout the literature as a specific feature of GSM elder abuse, as scholars agree that the threat of exposing a partner’s GSM status can be used to maintain control in an abusive relationship (Cook-Daniels, 1997; Gurm et al., 2020; Morrissey, 2010; Westwood, 2018). The threat of being outed is particularly salient in old age, as an older GSM person may fear being exposed to the health care and social service providers they rely on for care (Westwood, 2018). Abusive healthcare workers may also use this to their advantage; Cook-Daniels (1997) notes an instance where a home healthcare worker threatened to expose their gay client’s sexuality should he report them for inferior care. Another quality of GSM elder abuse is the ability of an abuser to gain control of a victim’s finances, as some GSM couples may put their assets under one name to avoid raising suspicion (Cook-Daniels, 2017). In cases where the couple is unmarried, it may be especially difficult for a victim who leaves their partner to retrieve money that is rightfully theirs. Due to a lack of children and estrangement from family members, a GSM victim of abuse may be easier to isolate, allowing abuse to continue unnoticed (Cook-Daniels, 2017). Additionally, a victim of GSM elder abuse may fear reporting their partner for abuse due to the stereotype that GSM elders end up single and alone; GSM victims of partner abuse may fear that they will never find love again should they leave their partner, an assumption that is often confirmed by ageism within the GSM community (Cook-Daniels, 2017). Finally, internalized homophobia or transphobia may lead the victim to believe that an abusive relationship is the best they can expect, or simply what they deserve (Cook-­ Daniels, 2017). Teaster and Sokan (2016, p. 348) similarly argue that exposure to societal homophobia, isolation, reluctance to seek help, low self-esteem, and a fear of having their sexuality exposed or being placed in a long-term care facility can create a “perfect storm” of risk factors for partner abuse in some GSM elders.

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4.7 Barriers to Help-Seeking GSM older adults who are being abused may experience more barriers when attempting to seek help than their heterosexual and cisgender peers. Cook-Daniels (2017) identifies several barriers to help-seeking that may be encountered by GSM elders who are in abusive relationships. For one, an abuser may emphasize the authorities’ anti-GSM prejudice, telling the person no one will believe them because they are GSM. Additionally, victims may fear that if they come forward, they will be sent to a long-term care facility where they will face even worse abuse (Cook-­Daniels, 2017); indeed, a lack of housing and care provision options was a reason why older GSM participants in the Bloemen et al. (2019) study stated they may choose not to report abuse. In addition, many GSM elders pride themselves on self-­reliance, and may be hesitant to rely on others for help. This is particularly salient in the case of older lesbians, who often place significant value on selfsufficiency (Cook-Daniels, 2017). Finally, the victim may not want to expose their abuser, who may also be GSM, to discriminatory treatment from the authorities. Several studies have identified additional barriers to help-seeking within the GSM community. For example, abusive same-sex partners may threaten to disclose their partner’s sexual orientation to others if they try to find help (Balsam & D’Augelli, 2006). Additionally, some victims may resist disclosing partner violence out of a fear of confirming negative stereotypes about GSM people, or may fear disrupting their social network by reporting abuse, especially if this network is small (Balsam & D’Augelli, 2006). Bloemen et al. (2019) also point out that denial is an important coping mechanism for many elders who are abused; by reporting the abuse, a GSM older adult is no longer able to deny the abuse and is forced to acknowledge that they have been victimized. Male and transgender victims of abuse face additional barriers to help-seeking due to difficulties encountered when trying to access helplines or domestic violence shelters (Cook-Daniels, 2017). These services are often restricted to use by women, and transgender people and gay men may not be welcome in these environments (Balsam & D’Augelli, 2006). Additionally, some service providers may not be trained to deal with instances of GSM elder abuse and may even expose the individual’s sexuality to family members or friends accidentally (Bloemen et al., 2019; Morrissey, 2010). As a result of these factors, GSM people may avoid accessing domestic violence services out of a fear of having their sexuality exposed and encountering discrimination (Balsam & D’Augelli, 2006; Cook-Daniels, 1997). If help-seeking involves the police, GSM elders may be especially reluctant to report abuse, considering the history of police brutality against the gay and lesbian community. For example, many older adult participants in the Bloemen et al. (2019) study expressed a readiness to reach out for help should they encounter abuse, but some reported discomfort reaching out to law enforcement and other service providers such as medical professionals. The reluctance to seek help from medical

References

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providers may be attributed to the history of medicalization of homosexuality, particularly the timespan when homosexuality was considered a mental illness by the healthcare system (Bloemen et al., 2019).

4.8 Conclusion Within elder abuse research, GSM older adults remain a largely invisible population. Due to a lack of data on elder abuse among GSM elders, much of the research that exists on this topic is speculative. Where data does exist, it is almost exclusively quantitative; with the exception of Westwood (2018), no studies within this chapter contained quotes from participants regarding their experiences of elder abuse. Additionally, much of the work done on the topic of GSM elder abuse treats the GSM community as a uniform entity, with little examination of how abuse may manifest for different subgroups within the community. Overall, there is a need to examine firsthand experiences of elder abuse within the GSM community to gain a greater understanding of how abuse manifests in the lives of GSM elders of different sexualities and genders.

References Balsam, K.  F., & D’Augelli, A.  R. (2006). The victimization of older LGBT adults: Patterns, impact and implications for intervention. In D. Kimmel, T. Rose, & S. David (Eds.), Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender aging: Research and clinical perspectives (pp.  110–130). Columbia University Press. Bloemen, E. M., Rosen, T., LoFaso, V. M., Lasky, A., Church, S., Hall, P., Weber, T., & Clark, S. (2019). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender older adults’ experiences with elder abuse and neglect. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 67(11), 2338–2345. https://doi. org/10.1111/jgs.16101 Bonifas, R. P. (2016). The prevalence of elder bullying and impact on LGBT elders. In D. A. Harley & P. B. Teaster (Eds.), Handbook of LGBT elders: An interdisciplinary approach to principles, practices, and policies (pp. 3593–3374). Springer. Brotman, S., Ryan, B., & Cormier, R. (2003). The health and social service needs of gay and lesbian elders and their families in Canada. The Gerontologist, 43(2), 192–202. https://doi. org/10.1093/geront/43.2.192 Butler, S. S. (2017). Older lesbians’ experiences with home care: Varying levels of disclosure and discrimination. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, 29(4), 378–398. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/10538720.2017.1365673 Caceres, B. A., Travers, J., Primiano, J. E., Luscombe, R. E., & Dorsen, C. (2020). Provider and LGBT individuals’ perspectives on LGBT issues in long-term care: A systematic review. The Gerontologist, 60(3), e169–e183. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnz012 Chan, C.  D., & Silverio, N. (2021). Issues for LGBTQ elderly. In K.  L. Nadal & M.  R. Scharrón del Río (Eds.), Queer psychology (pp.  237–255). Springer. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­74146-­4_13

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Choi, S. K., & Meyer, I. H. (2016). LGBT aging: A review of research findings, needs, and policy implications. The Williams Institute. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp content/uploads/ LGBT-­Aging-­Aug-­2016.pdf Cook-Daniels, L. (1997). Lesbian, gay male, bisexual and transgendered elders: Elder abuse and neglect issues. Journal of Elder Abuse & Neglect, 9(2), 35–49. https://doi.org/10.1300/ J084v09n02_04 Cook-Daniels, L. (2006). Trans aging. In D. Kimmel, T. Rose, & S. David (Eds.), Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender aging: Research and clinical perspectives (pp.  20–35). Columbia University Press. Cook-Daniels, L. (2017). Coping with abuse inside the family and out: LGBT and/or male victims of elder abuse. In X. Dong (Ed.), Elder abuse: Research, practice and policy (pp. 541–553). Springer International Publishing. Cook-Daniels, L., & munson, m. (2010). Sexual violence, elder abuse, and sexuality of transgender adults, age 50+: Results of three surveys. Journal of GLBT Family Studies, 6(2), 142–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/15504281003705238 Czaja, S.  J., Sabbag, S., Lee, C.  C., Schulz, R., Lang, S., Vlahovic, T., Jaret, A., & Thurston, C. (2016). Concerns about aging and caregiving among middle-aged and older lesbian and gay adults. Aging & Mental Health, 20(11), 1107–1118. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360786 3.2015.1072795 D’Augelli, A. R., & Grossman, A. H. (2001). Disclosure of sexual orientation, victimization, and mental health among lesbian, gay and bisexual older adults. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 16(10), 1008–1027. https://doi.org/10.1177/088626001016010003 Frazer, S. (2009). LGBT health and human services needs in New York State. Empire State Pride Agenda Foundation. https://www.lgbtagingcenter.org/resources/pdfs/LGBT%20Health%20 and%20Human%20Services%20Needs%20in%20New%20York%20State.pdf Fredriksen-Goldsen, K. I., Kim, H.-J., Emlet, C. A., Muraco, A., Erosheva, E. A., Hoy-Ellis, C. P., Goldsen, J., & Petry, H. (2011). The aging and health report: Disparities and resilience among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender older adults. Institute for Multigenerational Health. https://doi.org/10.1037/e561402013-­001 Grossman, A.  H., Frank, J.  A., Graziano, M.  J., Narozniak, D.  R., Mendelson, G., El Hassan, D., & Patouhas, E. S. (2014). Domestic harm and neglect among lesbian, gay, and bisexual older adults. Journal of Homosexuality, 61(12), 1649–1666. https://doi.org/10.1080/0091836 9.2014.951216 Gurm, B., Salgado, G., Marchbank, J., & Early, S. (2020). Making sense of a global pandemic: Relationship violence & working together towards a violence free society. Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Gutman, G., Karbakhsh, M., & Stewart, H. G. (2022). Abuse of marginalized older adults during COVID-19. Proxy findings from the Canadian longitudinal study on aging. GeroPsych. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1024/1662-­9647/a000301. Gutman, G., Karbakhsh, M., & Stewart, H. G. (under review). Sexual orientation and risk for elder abuse: Findings from the Canadian longitudinal study on aging. LGBT Health. Leyerzapf, H., Visse, M., De Beer, A., & Abma, T. A. (2018). Gay-friendly elderly care: Creating space for sexual diversity in residential care by challenging the hetero norm. Ageing and Society, 38(2), 352–377. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X16001045 Morrissey, C. (2010). Abuse of lesbian, gay, transgender, and bisexual elders. In G. Gutman & C. Spencer (Eds.), Aging, ageism and abuse (pp. 45–51). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-­ 0-­12-­381508-­8.00004-­7 National Senior Citizens Law Center. (2011). LGBT older adults in long-term care facilities: Stories from the field. https://www.lgbtagingcenter.org/resources/pdfs/NSCLC_LGBT_report.pdf SAGE (Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Elders) and Movement Advancement Project. (2010). Improving the lives of LGBT older adults. https://www.lgbtagingcenter.org/resources/pdfs/ImprovingtheLivesofLGBTOlderAdultsull.pdf

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Stein, G. L., Beckerman, N. L., & Sherman, P. A. (2010). Lesbian and gay elders and long-term care: Identifying the unique psychosocial perspectives and challenges. Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 53(5), 421–435. https://doi.org/10.1080/01634372.2010.496478 Teaster, P.  B., & Sokan, A.  E. (2016). Mistreatment and victimization of LGBT elders. In D. A. Harley & P. B. Teaster (Eds.), Handbook of LGBT elders: An interdisciplinary approach to principles, practices, and policies (pp. 343–358). Springer. Westwood, S. (2018). Abuse and older lesbian, gay bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people: A commentary and research agenda. Journal of Elder Abuse & Neglect, 31(2), 97–114. https://doi. org/10.1080/08946566.2018.1543624

Chapter 5

Matthew’s Story: Residential Care

5.1 Introduction Matthew’s story is one of two (the other is Jackie’s, see Chap. 8) written by a person other than the victim. In both cases, the victim of the abuse is now deceased and unable to talk about what happened. We include these ‘second hand’ narratives because we considered it important to represent the voices of those who were too infirm to report or protest abuse and neglect. Matthew and Doug were married in 2008. In 2018, Matthew, who was 87 years old at the time, was admitted to residential care after he collapsed three times in 5 h. Matthew’s story is an all too familiar chronicle of neglect and mistreatment. Armstrong (2009) revealed a system in crisis, as many nursing homes and seniors’ homes reported staffing shortages, absenteeism, and excessive overtime. These problems had existed for some time; for instance, they were flagged by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in May, 2009. They were brought to public attention during the COVID-19 epidemic of 2021, during which a disproportionate number of elders in residential care died (43% of all deaths). Skeldon and Jenkins (2022) suggest that in addition to these problems “Hetero- and CIS normative language and attitudes have been reported in…care contexts and can put LGBTQ+ people in the uncomfortable position of having to either disclose their gender/sexuality, or stay silent, which may feel like lying or hiding.”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_5

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5.2 A Whirlwind of Homophobia In 2018, my husband Matthew collapsed. His blood pressure was 67/33 and he was put into a medical coma. I arranged for him to be cared for in a residential care home run by a for-profit organization. It was not cheap, and so I hoped and expected that he would be well cared for. Matthew suffered from diabetes and the very beginnings of dementia. He was a veteran who served in Korea and had killed many men in battle. He suffered from PTSD as a result. I was surprised to be given no intake interview or orientation to the routines or organization of the facility, nor any kind of formal introduction to the staff. Matthew also received no information on his daily routine, such as meal times. The visiting hours were not explained to either of us, nor any expectations for doctor visits, daily care, bathing, or medication plans. I gave them the original copy of Matthew’s Power of Attorney, which was almost immediately lost, and was never found. The loss was treated very lightly, and I remembered feeling that perhaps the staff felt, ‘They’re gay, so it doesn’t matter.’ Imagine my shock when I was called into my very first meeting, with 12 administrators, without any briefing or warning, 6 weeks after Matthew was admitted. I was completely horrified when the General Manager of the facility, no less, said, out of the blue, “Aren’t we ignoring the elephant in the room? Matthew is a racist, a misogynist, and a bigot.” I was so stunned that I couldn’t speak for a while. I served 33 years with Foreign Affairs, and am pretty used to reading a room, and as I looked around, it seemed to me that others at the meeting were also shocked. Indeed, one of the administrators present at that meeting told me much later that she had been very upset on our behalf. I defended Matthew as best I could, pointing out that he had been arrested in Alabama for protesting for civil rights, so was hardly a racist, and that he wasn’t a misogynist either, since he came from a family that included many women, and that he still had a warm and close relationship with his ex-wife. My gut told me that this attack was caused by a whirlwind of homophobia – part of a deliberate plan to get us out of there, though no-one made explicitly homophobic comments. We were the only same sex couple in the care home at that time, and though there were a few gay men on the staff, I noticed that they all disappeared within months. The other explanation might be that Matthew had reacted badly to being put in care, and/or his incipient dementia had worsened, but I saw no signs of this myself, and surely the staff would have made some allowances for an elderly veteran with PTSD and the beginnings of dementia? He couldn’t have been the first elderly resident who failed to respond appropriately. Also, why had I not been informed of these incidents as soon as they occurred? Why did the GM wait until a large meeting, at which only five of the staff had met Matthew. How was this confrontation helpful? I visited Matthew every single day, typically arriving at 7.30 am and staying until 7 pm, with a break for lunch. Because I was there so much, I began to notice some

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disturbing trends. Many times, his lunch tray was not removed by 3 pm and he was still sitting up in bed. The uncleared meal tray was not in itself a problem, but it indicated that he had not received attention. He should have had his diaper changed and been laid back in bed to rest. If I asked why this had happened, I’d be told that they were ‘understaffed today’ - a situation that seemed to be ongoing. The facility was eventually taken over by the local health authority. They cleaned and repainted, but the standard of care did not improve. The quality of the food was poor. A man in the next room fell frequently and lay on the floor unattended for long periods. I reported this on several occasions, but in the end, the staff told me to stop bothering to tell them. Matthew was given orange juice with breakfast every morning, although he was diabetic. In one instance, Matthew did not receive a shower for 9 weeks, during hot sticky weather in a room that lacked air conditioning. The administration’s first response to complaints was that they were understaffed. Their second line of defense was to blame the patient. I was horrified by the treatment of a gentleman in his late nineties. This was a man who had fought at D Day in 1944. Whenever I saw him, he was shifting in his wheelchair and seemed to be suffering from severe discomfort. I learned later that although the facility had Roho cushions that would have made him more comfortable, they were kept in storage and not used until much later. Meanwhile, this war hero suffered from an untreated bedsore, and finally died of sepsis, just before Remembrance Day. I learned this when his daughter indignantly disclosed it at a meeting for all families, some months later. COVID came along, and all visits were forbidden. Though this was in accordance with ministerial guidelines, Matthew was not told why I had stopped visiting, nor were any of the other residents. I recall the confusion and terror some of the residents experienced when their daughters or sons didn’t arrive as expected. They were told nothing. I did not see Matthew face-to-face for 110 days. In the end, I couldn’t leave Matthew there. Instead, I bought everything he would need to die at home, and I hired home visitors and health care providers. When he first came home, he showed clear evidence of being neglected, including a blizzard of dead skin and dandruff which responded in only a few weeks to daily application of skin lotion. He died at home just over a year later. There is currently a class action lawsuit under way against the parent company and owners of the residential care facility. As I reflect on these events, there are some recommendations I would make for the industry. 1. Increased payment for caregivers. The staff at XXXX were paid less than those at other facilities and were at the point of strike action. 2. Cross provincial certification and testing/assessment of care. Certainly, as I have indicated above, there was general neglect of many patients in this facility. On the whole, the staff did their best under very challenging circumstances, and the failures were, in my view, mainly those of the management and the administrators. For instance, there were no clear instructions given to the staff with

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regard to tasks that must be done (such as diaper changing and administration of medications) and tasks that were optional. I also think about the times we older gay men have lived through, and especially, the profound impact of the AIDS epidemic 40 years ago. From 1990 until 1994, I worked for AIDS community hospice in LA.  It was emotionally exhausting, and it gave me a deep mistrust of the health care system, and the way that people in the straight world can treat us. I remember a day in 1993, when a sweet young man, only 24 years old, was deathly ill and calling out for his mother. I called her up and told her how sick he was. I told her that he was asking for her, and that our organization would pay for her airfare and hotel so that she could comfort him. “My pastor told me that I should disown him,” she replied. We called her back sometime later to see what she wanted us to do with his remains, and again, she refused to be involved. We took his ashes out to sea, along with many others abandoned by their family and society, with any pastor or priest who would agree to come – usually from the gay church - and poured them into the sea with our blessing. The effects of the AIDS pandemic still linger. I lost so many friends I stopped counting at 30. I never recovered those friends, and I think there are many others like me whose social lives were irrevocably damaged, and whose psyches are still impacted by survivors’ guilt, grief, loss, and rejection. I do visit a support group for older gay men, but I note how many of them just sit there, uninvolved and detached, uninterested in the ways that gay politics are moving forward. In addition to the general dysfunction of this long-term care facility, I do believe that homophobia was at work, though it was never explicitly spoken of or named. How else can the early, immediate and very public attack on Matthew be explained if it wasn’t homophobia? When I took Matthew home, we must have passed every single staff member and administrator as we headed to the elevator, and not one single person acknowledged us or said goodbye.

5.2.1 Discussion Sadly, Matthew’s story is not unusual. Accounts of neglect and mistreatment in residential care homes, regardless of gender or sexual orientations, are all too familiar at the time of writing, and as Doug himself points out, other residents in the facility were similarly neglected. What is interesting and different about Doug’s story is his gut sense that homophobia was at work, as well as incompetence and understaffing. Early in Doug’s interview, he told Robson that he believed that the attack on Matthew’s character “was caused by a whirlwind of homophobia - part of a deliberate plan to get us out of there.” In later interviews, Robson returned to this comment, asking him to clarify the statement. As we talked, it seemed that solid evidence of homophobia must be considered slight. Doug noticed that several gay male staff disappeared after a few months. He

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also pointed out that he and Matthew were the only single sex couple that he knew of in the facility. The disappearance of gay male staff could be purely coincidental, rather than the result of deliberately homophobic hiring and firing policies, or a homophobic environment. The fact that Matthew and Doug were the only (out) same sex couple in the facility is not unusual, and does not necessarily suggest that they were discriminated against. Nonetheless, it is difficult to explain away the attack made on Matthew’s character 6 weeks after his arrival – an act of active hostility rather than casual neglect. Calling him out as “a racist, a misogynist, and a bigot” with over ten staff present seems unhelpful, unwarranted, and damaging to both Doug and Matthew’s trust in the facility. Even if Matthew were all those things, it is not uncommon for elderly clients, especially those like Matthew with dementia, to express such views (Bursack, 2022). As Doug points out, “surely the staff would have made some allowances for an elderly veteran with PTSD and the beginnings of dementia?” We suggest that Doug and Matthew’s experience might be considered typical for GSM individuals, in that Doug suspects that homophobia was at work, but could never prove it. In the twenty-first century, and in a liberal country such as Canada, most people are sharply aware that hate speech and discrimination are illegal. Though it would be imprudent to discriminate explicitly and openly, this does not mean that homophobia and transphobia have disappeared, though they may have gone underground. As Nadal et al. (2011, p. 235) have reported, homophobia and transphobia have “transformed from an overt form to a more covert form; these types of discrimination have been labeled as microaggressions.” We suggest that Doug’s experience of a ‘gut sense’ of discrimination on the grounds of their same sex status is common for many GSM individuals and merits further research and analysis. Such covert discrimination is hard to combat, but arguably, quite pervasive (the next narrative, by Michele, offers a similar example). For victims of abuse, these suspicions can lead to self-doubt, frustration, and hypervigilance, as victims question others’ motives and their own sense of reality. Arguably, after living in a heteronormative culture over a long life, many GSM elders have also developed a keen and accurate awareness of unspoken hostility and prejudice. Also, early exposure to discrimination by health care professionals comes into play. Later in his narrative, Doug references the AIDS epidemic and the way that worked to erode his trust in the health care system: “It was emotionally exhausting, and it gave me a deep mistrust of the health care system, and the way that people in the straight world can treat us.” In a sense, a double-edged sword hangs over GSM individuals, particularly the Silent Generation who have lived through times of oppression and discrimination. We are highly aware of and sensitive to discrimination, yet our very sensitivity calls our testimony into question.

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References Armstrong, P. (2009). Long term care problems: Both residents and care providers denied fair treatment. More, better-paid staff key to improved long-term care. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. https://policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/long-­term-­care-­problems Bursack, C. B. (2022). Outrageous things people with dementia say and how to respond. Aging Care. https://www.agingcare.com/articles/things-­people-­with-­dementia-­say-­155103.htm Nadal, K. L., Issa, M., Leon, J., Meterko, V., Wideman, M., & Wong, Y. (2011). Sexual orientation microaggressions: “Death by a thousand cuts” for lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth. Journal of LGBT Youth, 8(3), 234–259. https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2011.584204 Skeldon, L., & Jenkins, S. (2022). Experiences and attitudes of the LGBTQ+ community on care/nursing homes. Journal of Homosexuality, 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/0091836 9.2022.2086751

Chapter 6

Michele’s Story: Residential Care

6.1 Introduction Michele was 64 years old at the time of her interviews. She was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), sometimes known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, in 2012 when she was in her mid-fifties. At the time the incidents described below occurred, Michele had so little muscle function that she used an electric wheelchair, was unable to communicate except through typing into her iPad, and unable to perform simple functions such as turning over in bed. As a retired nurse, Michele was aware of standard procedures around care giving, administration of medication, and reporting abuse.

6.2 Being Gay Put a Target on My Back My parents followed the tenet, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” My father dealt out most of the physical abuse. After a particularly bad beating when I was 11, the school noticed the bruises and talked to my mother. I was very embarrassed and in big trouble at home. I remember telling my mother that if my father beat me again, I would go to the Child Welfare Office, even though I didn’t know where that was or what that meant. I was sent to live for my grandmother for periods of time. It was an oasis. I was a kid who liked to be outdoors, where I could fish, pick berries, and explore. I played with the boys in the neighbourhood. When I skated or played hockey, my parents set limits. I was still allowed to play street hockey and baseball, but I had to respect gender divisions around sports, dress, and behaviour. I was expected to make ‘female’ career choices. Though I was aware I didn’t want to date boys, I didn’t think too much about my sexual orientation. I was asked to high school © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_6

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parties and dances by boys, but always avoided those encounters by making excuses - I had to get up early for practice, or I had to study. I was called a nerd. I was not offended. Being a nerd felt comfortable. I did wonder what was wrong with me. When I went to university for my undergrad, I did have boyfriends, mixing my social life with excess alcohol. I went to grad school in 1979, and it was there that I found my first girlfriend. We met as teammates on a university sports team. I wasn’t out because I was so afraid of the stigma of being gay. I saw others being bullied and I didn’t want to go through that. I was diagnosed with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neuron disease), a rare disease that affects 300 BC residents. ALS is a disease that gradually paralyzes people because the brain is no longer able to communicate with most of the muscles of the body. Over time, as the muscles atrophy, someone living with ALS will lose the ability to walk, swallow, and eventually breathe. There is no cure for ALS, and 80% of people who contract the disease die within 2–5 years. In 2019, I was admitted to an extended care facility. I was no longer able to speak, or turn myself over in bed, though my mind was, and is, fully intact. I was in the facility for just over 2 years. Most of the words in this narrative have been taken from the many emails I sent during the events described. I kept careful records and copies of all correspondences. In other cases, I have typed my recollections out carefully and very slowly. A 20 s spoken phrase or question takes 3 min to type and that’s eight times as long as it would take someone who can speak. I have also been helped in this writing process by a good friend who was a staunch ally and advocate during my stay in extended care. She went through this entire process with me, and I have been able to crosscheck all the facts and recollections chronicled here in this narrative. All of the events described were also fully documented with the nursing college in Vancouver during their investigation of my complaints. Despite the fact that it is a struggle to tell my story, I am determined to do so. For one thing, my recent experiences have left me fearful for anyone considering facility care. The level of everyday neglect and abuse is built into the system. It’s accepted that residents have one bath a week. It’s accepted that residents have little or no control of their individual care. As far as my sexual orientation is concerned, I was always out with staff and residents (or their family members). For instance, whenever I was asked a question about my relationship status, such as, “Are you married?” I would reply, “My wife died four years ago.” It’s up to me to be true to myself. If that results in a negative response, that’s not my responsibility. But it did become a problem in an environment where I was completely dependent on those people. The staff – usually the care staff - quite often told jokes about queer people, or made negative comments. For instance, one of the staff said of one of my friends and allies, “He’s a Gay,” with an expression of distaste. I do think that being gay put a target on my back. For instance, at one point, when I complained about a male aide’s neglect of me, he claimed that it was because I hated all men.

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Although their express homophobia wasn’t overt, and mixed with other phobias, including ageism, misogyny, and ableism, I did form judgments of my own. It was a poisonous environment. By way of example, I have added a photograph I took in May, 2020. This woman was indigenous (she has since died) and had a lot of pain. Because she was calling out so often, she became a resident whom staff would bully and ridicule. This is an example of the sorts of antics the care aide staff would pull during the pandemic. This resident had these demeaning ears placed on her head many times. Other residents had garish, girlish makeup applied, or inappropriate hairdos. The ones that were subjected to this disrespect were usually those perceived as being disruptive. During the last year of my stay, I felt so uncomfortable that I limited my exposure to this homophobic, racist, unprofessional, and hostile culture and stayed in my room, only going to the dining room for breakfast. This of course meant that I didn’t see the ongoing abuse of other residents. My physical abuse by staff began almost immediately after I was admitted. I am not sure when I started dreading certain care staff being assigned to me. It was an insidious awareness. Suddenly, almost without trying, I could calculate the shift rotation in my mind and figure out approximately when I would have a certain staff member. I would prepare myself. I went to a counsellor, but then COVID-19 hit. He didn’t do zoom, and if that changed at any time, he did not contact me to tell me so. In any case, counselling is extremely difficult given I have to type every response. My evening routine at the facility was as follows: I had my meds in my chair between 8 and 9 pm. Some time later, the care aide would transfer me to bed, put on my BiPAP breathing mask (as the last thing in the routine), close the door and say goodnight. In the morning, the mask was removed, and I was transferred to my chair, where again, medications were given. One day, one of the nurses asked to speak with me. She disclosed that she had been giving me five strong laxatives when I had asked for only one or two. (I received all medication through a Jpeg tube, so I was unable to monitor doses.) This had led to terrible side effects  – violent abdominal cramping and painful bowel movements – but at the time, I had not known why. I was very upset to hear this and said, “You cannot give me medications like that. I am competent, and when I refuse five, you can’t give me five!” “Actually, I can,” she said. “It’s a doctor’s order – one to five. It’s at the discretion of the nurse and you needed five. I was using my judgment, and I was only acting in your best interests.” It turned out that what had prompted this disclosure was that an Interdisciplinary Rounds 3-month Case Review was about to begin in a few minutes. In preparation, I had written out a list of questions and comments (I will remind the reader that I am unable to speak) and the bowel regimen was an article of concern listed there. Obviously, I was concerned about the side effects that I had experienced, and so I had mentioned them. I had already been clear, in writing in readiness for the review, that I wanted a proper bowel routine, fruit lax at breakfast, and a fibre based laxative PRN (pro re nata or whenever necessary). This was obvious to me, as a nurse

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myself. I believe that this overdosing was cruel and deliberate. She wanted me to know that she was in control, not me. At the very least, it was a serious issue of her failure to seek my consent. The case review began shortly after, and right after that, I had lunch with my medical representative and told her about my conversation with the nurse. My representative immediately telephoned the Resident Care Coordinator of my floor, who requested that we visit her immediately to give further details. As it turned out, the nurse had already talked to the Resident Care Coordinator and relayed her version of events, again, presumably to forestall any inquiry. The coordinator was, however, concerned, and said that she would report the incident to the building manager. The building manager came to see me immediately. She didn’t seem to understand the importance of consent, but rather, just viewed the incident as a mistake in terms of the laxatives administered. She did say, however, that there would be an investigation. I asked her to run a medical audit for all patients on the unit, but the Manager refused, and limited the audit to the laxatives I had received since arrival. The results of the audit showed that the same nurse had given me five laxatives at once on three separate occasions. On every occasion, it had been without my knowledge or consent and on each occasion, the consequences were painful and distressing. There was no follow up. Two months later, I requested an update. I was told that the investigation had taken place, and the nurse in question had claimed that the BiPAP breathing machine made it difficult for her to understand my speech. This was entirely untrue, because in all cases, I receive medications before I am put into bed and the mask is fitted. The incident was closed, without any fair solution, but things were to get far worse. I began to notice a big change in the way a lot of the staff interacted with me. They avoided eye contact, and stopped their usual friendly chit chat. Several of them seemed outright angry with me. I mentioned to a staff member that it seemed some of the staff were angry with me. She confirmed my suspicion and said that she had noticed that too. I asked if it had to do with the nurse I had complained about and she said that it was. She had overheard lots of gossip about it. Apparently, the nurse who had overdosed me was telling the other staff that she might lose her job. I understood that. Clearly, she was seeking support from her peers. However, the upshot for me was that the staff thought that I was riding this nurse unfairly and they were angry with me. The nurse had lied, framing the issue as a simple med error and blaming me because she claimed that I had the BiPAP machine on and she simply misunderstood my difficult speech. Given my meds are given when I’m up in my chair, even her lies were faulty. This situation was not handled well. Having her continue working on the unit and turning the staff against me with misinformation and lies sent an underlying message that she had done nothing wrong - that it was a personal conflict between her and I. As far as I know, this nurse received no supervision or support in her practice. I understood that and was willing to talk through the situation. She needed to understand the nature and inviolability of patient consent. A patient always has the right to refuse treatment; these are set standards of nursing practice.

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Life became very uncomfortable. The person I spoke to said that the staff were all talking about it. I didn’t discuss anything in detail with my informant, as I respect confidentiality. Apparently, nobody else did. My advocate suggested to the Resident Care Coordinator that we all meet to clear the air. I wanted to get the truth out and resolve things, so I readily agreed. The nurse was clearly running scared, but my intentions were never to have her fired. I felt that in a meeting, the truth would speak for itself. Some people might still be angry, but that would be fine with me. The nurse was making a bigger and deeper hole for herself and was looking very harried and stressed. And I too was feeling very stressed and isolated. Nobody needs this kind of stress. The meeting never happened, and the staff became increasingly hostile, even those who had been friendly in the past. For example, I was on a zoom which ended late and I rang the bell at 2:45. I needed to pee badly and knew I couldn’t wait till 3:30 when evening shift staff were available. I looked for my aide, who had always been friendly and pleasant to me before, to put me on the toilet, but she refused. I then asked two other aides and a nurse for assistance. They all refused. At 2:50, my aide, and another aide, came out of the staff room fully dressed in street clothes, ready to leave 10 min before their shift ended. I asked her to put me on the toilet, and she said I should have called earlier. I started getting upset and said “It’s not even 3pm!” She relented angrily and said “Hurry up!” She put me on the toilet and left. I sat there, helpless, until 3.30 when the evening shift arrived and finally rescued me. That’s the way it worked there. The same four or five staff would line up in the hallway 20–30 min before their shift ended, ready to leave and unready to respond to our needs except by telling us to wait for the next shift. I reported this to management on two occasions, but was ignored. The next day the aide who had done this to me wouldn’t even say hello. That week I had several mysterious and inexplicable early morning knocks at my door. The first shift I had with the aide who had stranded me on the toilet was a morning shift, and things seemed to be going ok. When she was doing peri care, I politely asked for lotion on my coccyx, which was painful. She refused, saying, “You don’t need it.” I started crying, and she became angry. “Why are you crying? I didn’t do anything to you!” I said I needed cream on my crack, and told her she was being mean. She was getting more and more angry. I immediately talked to the Resident Care Coordinator and told her exactly what happened. Since then, this aide refused to help me and ignored me like I wasn’t there. At breakfast one morning, she passed by my table and looked at me. I said good morning, but she looked away and walked past. A few minutes later she was going in the opposite direction and pointedly said good morning to someone else. Now she was visibly angry. At lunch time, I spoke to the social worker and with her support, decided I would deal with it by talking to the aide. The social worker did offer to speak to her instead,

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but I said “No. I’ll talk to my advocate.” I did express my concern that it was the weekend and so the Resident Care Coordinator would be unavailable to moderate or intervene. At 2:40, I spoke to a nurse about the hostility. She asked if I wanted her to talk with the aide, and I said yes. She went into the hall at 2:45. Nothing happened. No one came to talk with me. I felt an escalation of pressure. Saturday morning, the door opened and someone came in the room and rattled the commode. It was dark. When I could see the clock much later, it was 7 am. On the same day, I asked the nurse if she had had the chance to talk to the aide. She had not. She said she would talk to her that day. I never found out the outcome. What did happen was more early morning door knocking, for no purpose. Sunday morning, around 6:45, there were three sharp raps. Monday morning at 6:40, three sharp knocks. At 6:45 I rang the bell and asked the night aide who had knocked on my door. She said that she hadn’t seen anyone. I asked if the ‘problem’ aide was working, she said she wasn’t. I believe the early knocking at my door was with the deliberate intention of waking me early. During the night, I was scheduled to be turned on at 1st rounds, 3 am, and 5 am. When in a side lying position, I have a large cushion between my thighs. I have a lot of hip pain when on my side. One Saturday night, during the night shift, the aides came around 11:30 for the first turn. I woke up around 2:30 in pain and waited to be turned at 3 am. As 3 am passed, I assumed the staff were busy and continued to wait. Sometime after 4 am, I rang the call bell. In about 10 min, the aides responded - one on each side of the bed. The taller, older one asked if I wanted to be turned. I nodded. She seemed to be in charge, I’ll call her aide #1. She pulled the bedspread down to my thighs and grabbed the bottom sheet and pulled. it up to start the turn. The weight of the blankets prevented my lower legs from turning with my hips. This caused extreme knee pain. I tried shouting “Stop! No! No!” Since I cannot speak clearly, I gestured to remove the blankets. She clearly didn’t understand and was getting angry. I pointed to the bright yellow sign above the bed: I NEED MY IPAD TO COMMUNICATE. PLEASE SIT ME UP AND GIVE ME MY IPAD AND LAP PILLOW WHEN I’M IN BED. As I was desperately trying to point at the sign, Aide #1 was deliberating yanking the bottom sheet with more and more force. I kept rolling back, because my legs were facing the opposite direction. Then she began roughly shoving me with her hands on my shoulders to prevent me from rolling back. The other aide interjected. “You need the iPad?” I nodded. She pointed out the sign out to the aide #1, who had been getting angry and roughly flipping me, further injuring my knee. Aide #2 gave me the iPad. I typed, “My legs are caught in the blankets.” Aide#1 pulled the blankets down, turned me, quickly pulled up the bedspread and said, “Alright now? Go to sleep,” and headed for the door. I gestured come back while saying No! and typed, “The Roho cushion goes between my thighs.” This is a mat that prevents chafing and keeps me comfortable. She pulled down the

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bedspread again, grabbed my ankle and pulled my leg up like calf roping at the rodeo. She lifted my leg painfully high while the other aide #2 positioned the cushion. I looked at the clock on the wall before the light went off. It was 4:40 am. At 5:30 am I woke again with pain in my right hip and knee. I did not want to ring the bell for fear of another round of rough treatment. I recognized this particular aide, Aide #1, from past encounters. She is rough and impatient. When she works nights, she does one turn, and doesn’t return all night. She doesn’t work frequently, so I assume she is employed as a casual. I reported this incident to the R.N. on Sunday afternoon, as I was afraid the same aide would be on the night shift again. My advocate also reported it to one of the institution’s executive directors - email transcript follows: Below are some issues, not appropriately resolved. All issues have been communicated, documented and discussed with Admin. • Incident with nurse giving medication, WITHOUT CLIENT CONSENT, with ensuing untoward effects. • Incident with care aide roughly turning Michele at night, with R.N. observing and NOT intervening. Michele believes this should have been reported to RCMP.  Michele did all the appropriate follow up with the College as Admin refused to. • Repeated incidents at night of staff (often casual), but not always, not reading the sign on Michele’s bed or neck stating that she needs time, splints removed, to be positioned upright with iPad before she can communicate. • Ongoing lost laundry. Admin has a responsibility to provide a contracted service. • Stoma infection not being given appropriate nursing care. • Male staff entering shower room while Michele is bathing (in spite of sign on door “occupied”) • Toenail trimming going unattended for 14 weeks! These are by no means all of the issues that Helen has experienced. Here’s an email sent at around the same date from another of my friends to the Resident Care Coordinator. Hi XXXX, When I visited Michele today, she seemed subdued. Just before I was to leave, she shared with me that a pair of pants and a pair of socks had gone missing from her laundry. She had reported it immediately to the laundry lady but, as you know, other items have gone missing in the past and none has ever been returned. This was the first time, ever, that I’ve seen Michele cry. It was just TOO frustrating! She is now short of pants and will have to get another pair, but that is almost beside the point. This is just wrong, and she has done all she can about it, repeatedly. So, I am writing to ask if there is anything that her advocate and I can do. My one idea is to get hold of the contractor and threaten to name-and-shame him. (I could

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start small and build a campaign as necessary.) If you have any other ideas, please let me know. We really don’t want to stand by and watch this keep happening. Sincerely, XXXXX The noise and confusion in my ward was another ongoing issue. Here is an extract from an email I sent to the Resident Care Coordinator. Complex dementia residents with difficult behaviours deserve to have appropriate specialized dementia care. There are several very specialized facilities designed specifically for this purpose. Staff are specially trained in handling the more complex behaviours often associated with dementia. Those living with complex health conditions also deserve to live in an appropriate therapeutic environment. The effects of the constant outbursts, trays of food flying off the tables, cannot be ignored. The resident who screams HELP for long periods - day, evening and night triggers an autonomic response in any human being. It’s similar to yelling FIRE. Two staff that I know of have slipped and fallen resulting in being unavailable on WCB for extended periods this year. Both of those incidents were directly related to a resident throwing her glass deliberately on the floor. One agitated behaviour feeds another, and soon the behaviours are out of control. The noise in the dining room is too loud at mealtimes. This past Sunday the TV was blaring with a football game nobody was watching, one resident was yelling HELP and screaming periodically, four nurses were using the pill crushers (there has be a less intrusive method), another resident screamed intermittently and yelled SHUT UP. Another noisy resident circled the dining room making loud unintelligible sounds. It didn’t surprise me at lunch when the trays started being thrown on the dining room floor. These disruptive behaviours are destructive to the mental health of the majority residents in the facility. These are difficult situations to manage and even more difficult to be living in. Please take these concerns to heart and try to solve this situation. Again, there was no resolution. The facility’s doctor suggested I take sedation at night. My problem was not an inability to sleep. It was being woken up repeatedly during the night. I was exhausted and depressed. I cried every day in my room, where I isolated myself and didn’t take part in recreational activities, such as painting. I experienced suicidal ideation and twice asked nurses for a psychiatric consult. My requests were ignored. It was suggested I move from the facility. This solution did not address the problem, put the onus on me, and only served to hide or mask the real problem. Here is an email on this issue sent by another patient at the facility. I’m just letting you know that I’m really getting tired of listening to Freda yelling and crying, of Janice screaming at anything, throwing trays of food etc. and hitting people and Alan’s yelling until late in the night. As a matter of fact, I know there’s places that take seniors who are difficult to deal with. I’d like to know why those 3 people are still here? If it’s money, I’m sure there’s enough people on your waiting list! I know that this is a matter that probably can’t go on the agenda with names but

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I know several people, including families, who would like to know why they are here. They disrupt sleep, conversations and a calm overall ambience. Living here is worse than living in a hospital with mental illnesses. I know, I’ve lived in a few. Please give us an answer regarding them. Finally, I will relate an incident that could have cost me my life. I was in bed Friday morning, around 11 am reading email. I found one particularly funny and started laughing. Shortly after, I started choking. My aide came in the door and saw that my face was turning blue and he asked the nurse who was involved in the medication overdose (steps from my door), to assist. She refused and told him to find the nurse assigned to me. In the meantime, I found the bed remote and raised the head of the bed and was eventually able to clear the secretions. The aide alerted the Resident Care Coordinator who was in the hallway and offered me assistance. I was present when the aide spoke with my nurse expressing his concerns about the nurse who refused to help me. Before this happened, I had no confidence that this particular nurse would assist me should I need a nurse urgently. Since this incident, I had a sense of dread and anxiety around her ability to act professionally and exercise appropriate judgement in emergency situations involving my wellbeing. Here is an email I sent to my MLA, which sums up the frustration, fear, and suffering I endured during my stay at the facility. Dear Honourable Minister I am writing as a constituent of Vancouver Quadra. I have resided at XXXXXXXX Extended Care since April 3, 2019. Long term residential settings in BC are not different then the reports coming from Ontario. Many of the incidents reported by the military recently happen here every day. People at risk of aspiration being fed in poor body positions where aspiration is happening (evidenced by choking/coughing). People left in soiled conditions for long periods. We are provided one quick shower a week. If there isn’t enough staff, showers are deemed not essential and are skipped. Non regulated staff, care aides do the majority of the care with residents, unsupervised. They have little knowledge and training to care for the complexities seen in today’s residences. When the staff act out or accidentally harm a resident, the incidents go unreported. I have witnessed physical, psychological and verbal abuse by staff upon residents, and I have been subject to physical and emotional abuse. I’ve grown to accept the abuse as part of life living in residential care. My only surprise is people seem to be unaware of the everyday realities people like myself are experiencing. Ask their families. Ask the residents. Maybe a national inquiry? Throwing more money at the hiring unregulated, non-professional staff is not going to solve the systemic problems and culture of residential care settings. People in long term care have no voice. Following the established lines of communication to make a complaint has little effect in my experience. For example, I have reported an incident to the nurse, no resolution; then report to the Resident Care Coordinator, no resolution; report a concern to the building manager, several issues receive no resolution. And the majority of residents have lost their cognitive

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abilities to make their concerns known. Thankfully I am cognitively intact, but have complex health problems related to a fatal neuromuscular disease. I am very afraid to die here. For the first time in my Illness (2011) I am seriously considering M.A.I.D. to avoid being subject to the indignities of being cared for in the manner I witness regularly living in a residential care setting. I encourage you and your government to examine the complexities of residential care settings at a microscopic level. Putting more money into hiring under skilled, unregulated workers won’t solve the problems I’ve described. It will help with macro problems like hygiene, laundry service, food services which is definitely needing attention. Please consider developing or adoptIng a different National model of care in an effort to change the culture inside residential care settings for seniors. Develop an effective strategy to monitor the care delivered within the walls of “care homes” and a way people to report their experiences so conditions can improve. Yours Respectfully Resident of XXXXXXXX My MLA never responded. I think it is clear from this narrative, and from the recommendations I made, that my mistreatment and physical abuse in this institution stemmed primarily from a number of structural weaknesses in the institution. The nurses were overworked, and day-to-day care resided in the hands of untrained and unregulated aides who had way too much power, as a result. The complaints process was deeply flawed, in that although a system was in place to receive complaints, the follow up was poor to nonexistent. All that said, I do believe that homophobia contributed to this situation, in that it reinforced the mindset of my chief abuser, and gave her added permission to make me suffer for daring to complain. I remember the AIDS epidemic, and the ways in which gay men were sidelined, marginalized, and mistreated. I have always been tough – I had some Teflon for the slurs and aggressions that LGBTQ people endure on a daily basis, but being unable to move, or to speak up, made me more vulnerable. Having my complaints ignored removed my power and stripped away my Teflon. I belong to a strong community of queer friends and allies, several of whom supported me through this dark time. Fighting injustice through the AIDS era, and fights for CPP, gay marriage and spousal rights has made us tough and unbreakable. But the closet is still a dark place, and homophobia is alive and well, even though it is not always spoken out loud. Do I feel differently about myself? Yes. I thought I was unbreakable before. Have my experiences in extended care affected my life? Yes. During my last 6 months at this facility, I wasn’t sleeping well. I was isolating in my room. I was anxious. I often cried in my room. I considered M.A.I.D. (medical assistance in dying). At one point, I considered suicide. I am feeling better now I am back in the community and in my own apartment, but generally, I avoid talking about my experience, since it brings up a flood of

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overwhelming sadness. And hopelessness that the system is too broken to fix. I fear that at some point, I will need a similar living situation. I did tell my friends about my experiences, but I think it’s hard for them to hear about it. Sometimes I think they believe that I am exaggerating. However, I did not anticipate these experiences, and the things I saw still make me sad when I think about them. If I were to change one thing, it would be to install security cameras in every room so these events can be caught on camera. After all, we don’t blink an eye about putting cameras in daycares. Facilities house far more frail elderly from different backgrounds, with little or no support. Another thing I would change is the required qualifications for care aides. They receive little training and there is no official body that regulates their professional practice. If a nurse ever stood up to them – Watch Out! There weren’t enough nurses, so the care aides stepped into the power vacuum, and there was very little leadership from either the nurses, or management.

6.3 Discussion At first glance, Michele’s story is similar to that told by Doug about Matthew’s experiences, in that each narrative describes abuse and neglect during time spent in residential care, and in each case, the participant felt that homophobia played a part. It is worth noting that, like Doug, Michele also recalls the AIDS epidemic, and “the ways in which gay men were sidelined, marginalized, and mistreated.” In Michele’s case, however, the story is recounted first hand by a mentally alert participant who clearly understood what was happening to her, because of her nursing background, and reported it appropriately and frequently. Once again, Michele acknowledges that the neglect she experienced was due in large part to “a number of structural weaknesses in the institution.” She notes that “the nurses were overworked and day-to-day care resided in the hands of untrained and unregulated aides who had way too much power, as a result. The complaints process was deeply flawed.” That said, she also argues that “homophobia contributed to this situation, in that it reinforced the mindset of my chief abuser, and gave her added permission to make me suffer for daring to complain.” Michele reports that harsh jokes and negative comments about GSM people were common, that one of her gay male friends was spoken about in a negative way, and that she was accused by one of the staff of “hating all men.” The following photograph of a First Nation elder being made to wear bunny ears is a chilling testament to extreme and overt insensitivity to the rights of those perceived as ‘other.’

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It does seem that Michele was subjected to a ruthless campaign of bullying. It is hard to imagine that administering five strong laxatives (instead of two) on three occasions, without Michele’s knowledge or consent, and with disastrous and explosive consequences, was a mere mistake. The US National Centre for Injury Prevention and Control (Hall et al., 2016, p. 32) includes in its definition of physical abuse the inappropriate use of medications “in a way that causes bodily injury, physical pain, functional impairment, extreme distress, or death” and adds that this may involve “the use of prescribed drugs as well as those for which a prescription has not been provided. Examples include but are not limited to: administration of medication for the correct indication but at doses that are too high or too low; over-­ medication.” We remind our readers that Michelle was unable to visit the bathroom without assistance, which was often not forthcoming or timely. Once Michele had complained to superiors about this aide, who she felt was targeting her, she was shunned by other staff, woken unnecessarily early by mysterious knocking, handled roughly, ignored when she needed help, and deliberately left stranded on the toilet. Most egregiously, she was ignored when choking and turning blue in the face, by the very aide who had generated Michele’s complaint. As Michele points out, this was potentially a life-threatening situation. Though homophobia (and likely also racism, sexism, and classism) can be difficult to identify for certain, particularly when other factors, such as understaffing, are concerned, the authors feel that Michele has built a strong case to argue that it was indeed at play in her situation. As Michele puts it, “homophobia is alive and well, even though it is not always spoken out loud.” We shall take the significance of this up in our conclusions, as we consider whether or not this kind of homophobia should be regarded as a separate form of abuse, as some researchers have suggested (Brotman et al., 2003), or merely the cause of abuse that can adequately be described by the existing categories, (in this case, physical and emotional abuse and neglect).

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Finally, Michele’s story is one of several in this anthology that describes an early sense of difference, gender nonconformity and same sex attraction, and experiences of abuse in early childhood in terms of the beatings administered, mainly by her father. Since so many of the narratives we have gathered in this volume report similar childhood circumstances, we will reserve discussion until our final chapter. A final codicil: As we were writing this discussion section, Robson received the following email from Michele (February 8th, 2023): FYI, the support the project provided (counselling and peer support) has given me the hutzpah to get up the nerve to file an incident report with the RCMP (about the physical abuse in residential care). In a second email, she reports that her current in-home caregiver “almost quit” after attending a GSM event (Honouring Our Elders), a decision she describes as “cultural differences truncating my fun.”

References Brotman, S., Ryan, C., & Cormier, R. (2003). The health and social service needs of gay and lesbian elders and their families in Canada. The Gerontologist, 43(2), 192–202. https://doi. org/10.1093/geront/43.2.192 Hall, J., Karch, D. L., & Crosby, A. (2016). Elder abuse surveillance: Uniform definitions and recommended core data elements. Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc. gov/violenceprevention/pdf/ea_book_revised_2016.pdf

Chapter 7

Trudy’s Story: In Home Care

7.1 Introduction Trudy was 69 years old when she was interviewed, and she identifies as a bisexual trans woman. Living with chronic ME, she had limited mobility and relied upon in-home care aides for assistance with the activities of daily life. She transitioned at the age of 26, at a time when this surgery was not freely available and many seeking it needed to travel to other countries, or find ‘underground’ doctors.

7.2  It Started Very, Very Young That I Felt Other It started very, very young that I felt other. When I was about 3 years old, my parents were friends with a couple where the woman was a little person. And they had a son, my age, also a little person. I remember being at this lady’s house. She had a Tiki bar - I guess it was a fashion in the 50 s. I see myself playing on the floor there. I don’t see the boy in my memory, but I do remember how he often scared me. And weirdly, I have remembered one particular conversation all my life. The woman was telling my mom, “My son - he’s such a little monkey. He’s climbing up on the refrigerator. He climbed on this Tiki sign up here. He’s climbing everywhere. He climbs up the curtains. He’s always doing something!” I felt awful because I wasn’t like that. Those kinds of boys scared me because they were rough. They liked to break things and they preyed upon failure. He was born a typical boy and I wasn’t, so I was scared – already - at the really young age of three. I felt like I was letting my parents down, because I just wasn’t that kind of boy. I was a free spirit in a way, however. One thing I liked to do was disrobe. I recall being naked in the woods and coming home with my underwear in my little cart. I © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_7

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got hell for that! In grade 2 I had to have my tonsils out. All the doctors talked to me about was sports. They asked me who my favourite hockey player was, for instance, and I didn’t know. I was worried that I was failing as a boy, because I hated sports. I was terrified that they would find this out. They were all men, and I was failing to be a proper boy. Later on, when I was in my forties and had transitioned, my parents said, “Well. We knew you were different when you were two, because we would teach you how to throw and you always threw like a girl. You always did that. We tried to beat it out of you.” There was no regret or guilt in my mother’s voice. She thought she was doing the right thing. So they knew already and they made me feel that I wasn’t normal, that I wasn’t like everybody else, even when I was very, very young, it was made very clear for me that I was strange. It goes back a long, long way. When I was five, we moved back to Canada and lived in Montreal. They put me in a French school, but I didn’t speak French at the time, since I’d been raised in the US. I only wanted to play with the girls. I didn’t like being with the boys; they were too rough and they called me names. I started to think about suicide. I knew that little skull and crossbones on a bottle meant poison, and I saw that iodine was sold in little glass bottles like that. It cost 11 cents and so I saved up my pennies, and I would go to the pharmacy and buy iodine. There was an empty lot not far from my house, and I dug a hole under a rock and started hiding the bottles in there. I think I had only accumulated two when one day I decided, This is it! I’m going to kill myself! I took a sip. And of course, it was horrible, but not deadly. My mouth turned all yellow. My mom was not a sympathetic person. Her whole life she told everyone that she was not meant to be a mother, and she was right - she should never have had kids. She was never a mommy. Often, I’d come home from school crying. One time, I was hiding from people in a spot I’d found under the porch. I’d brought a book and I was reading, when my mum came out and started talking over the fence with a neighbour. I heard her just destroy me by talking about what a disappointment I was – always crying. My mother would mock me constantly. She always mocked me. There was no place that I felt comfortable, either at school or at home. Quebec in those days was super Catholic, and they brought us once a month to confession. I had to confess all the time that I was a failure as a human, that I was attracted to boys, and that I masturbated. I had a lot of confessions and a lot of mea culpas and penances to do, but nobody ever suggested any kind of help or counseling. I just wanted to die. When I was around 14, I started going to gay bars. The bar I went to happened to be a leather bar. It was the only one I could find, though I was never into that scene. The guys left me alone on the whole, which was fine. I did talk to two guys who were from rival gangs (Hell’s Angels and Devil’s Disciples) and secretly dating. In those days, you had to be 21 to go to a bar. I had to be home by midnight, and downtown was a good hour away, so I had to leave by 11 pm. I didn’t get much of a nightlife, but it was just the fact of going there – being there when the bar was just opening and watching the people come in. I didn’t drink alcohol. I had enough

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money to buy one coke and that was it. I appreciated being around people who were weird, like me. Later, I celebrated high school graduation in the drag club upstairs. I didn’t identify with drag queens at that point. I felt no sense of fellowship. I also went to some lesbian bars later on, but the butch femme vibe put me off. I didn’t identify either way. I don’t know what happened. I was squeaky clean. I didn’t take drugs. I didn’t drink alcohol, but I was going to gay bars and things, and eventually the federal police came to our house and told my parents that I was a prostitute, that I was taking drugs, selling drugs, that I was homosexual and going to bars underage. I don’t know how they found out. Now the last two accusations were true, but the rest were not. The cops searched my bedroom and all they found were earrings that I had bought for my mother. They held them up as evidence. I was sent to a psychiatric unit in Montreal. I didn’t know at the time but learned later on that at the time I was there, they were were being paid by the CIA to do tests on using psychedelics on psychiatric patients. Once I was admitted, I was brought into a big room with cameras. Four doctors stood in front of me, and I was told there was a whole bunch more watching. I was interviewed by a total Doctor Freud type, complete with a full German accent. At one point, I was sitting down, nervous and scared with my hands in my crotch. He started to attack me for the position of my hands, saying “Your penis is too small. Is that what you’re saying? Your penis is not big enough to be manly!” It was horrible. Every adult seemed to want to destroy me – the police, the doctors, my parents. I would end up being sent to see a therapist attached to the psych unit twice a week until I was 18, for therapy to get the gay and the trans out. Of course, they didn’t say trans in those days. They would say to get the fairy out of me. My name before I transitioned was Larry, and my peers would call me Larry, the fairy. That’s what was written on the desks at school. I was embarrassed when my parents came to school. I’d be afraid they’d be sitting at a desk with Larry the fairy written on it everywhere. They treated me as a gay man at the institution, and that’s what I thought I was. That was what I’d been called - well, not gay, but a fag and what have you, so that is something that I thought that might be the answer to my uncertainty around my gender and sexual identity. Later I found that I didn’t fit that label, but at that time, I identified as a gay male. I couldn’t stop being feminine, however much I tried, so the therapist there would say things like, “You’ve got to express your anger. Be more like your father.” At that time, I was living in an apartment with three other gay guys who were going to university, and I made a hole in the wall, because that’s what the shrink had told me to do. She had told me to walk around and act really natural. So I shaved my head, dressed in big army boots and tried to drink beer and smash things and be angry and get in fights, because she said, “If you project that, people will project it back to you, and you’ll believe it.” Language is so important. It’s only a couple years ago that I learned about microaggressions and I realized that’s what had been happening to me all my life - microaggressions. But I didn’t have the word for it, and in the same way, the word trans

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was not on my radar. Somehow, I knew about Christine Jorgensen, the first famous trans woman in the United States. I think maybe she had been on a late-night TV show. I don’t think I watched it back then, but I knew of her, so I knew it was possible, but I thought she was one person on the whole planet and her path was not something I could choose. At the time, I was very interested, and I talked to a few people, but no, everybody shot me down. At that time, I had heard they were doing the operation in Morocco. It was like a little tidbit that was stuck in my brain, and it was really playing on me. I also snuck into a movie theatre to watch a movie called Let Me Die a Woman. Of course, if I mentioned these things, people didn’t take me seriously and shrugged it off. I was coming off a seven-year relationship with a woman, and I was trying to deny my queer identity, at least to others. And so again, I shut down, though the inner turmoil continued inside. Finally, I talked to a guy that I knew was a gay guy but also a pastor. And I sat down with him one day, and I said, “Do you know anything about trans sexuality?” Right away, he said to me, “Why? Do you think you’re one?” Right away it was like, Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I felt it was the beginning. But I hadn’t expected that I’d have to talk about myself that day, so it was also shocking. And then I tried everything. I went to an English hospital who were doing evaluations, and also English doctors. I went to all these different places, telling them I was trans and being denied by all of them. They would ask, “Do you cross dress?” When I said I didn’t, they said, “Well, you’re not trans you know.” And I was saying, “But I am. I am trans.” I was going to see an endocrinologist who was refusing to give me hormones. But finally, he asked me if I would like to meet one of his patients. Pamela transitioned 10 years before me and through her I found out about a doctor in New York. I went down in May, dressed as a guy, and changed into a skirt in the bus station. Then I tied up my long hair, put on a little lipstick and went to see him. I told him I had been living as a woman for the last 2 years because I knew that was something you’re supposed to say. “You have the money?” he asked. I told him that I did. “Do you have a signed note from a psychiatrist?” “No,” I said. “You know, in Montreal, it’s very Catholic.” He said, “No problem. I’ll have somebody sign the paper for you here.” He was kind of not above board, this doctor. He was very shady. So that’s what happened. I worked as a man up till the last day of school, June 30, which was a Friday that year. Saturday, I plucked and tweezed. Sunday, I took the plane down to New York, got to Yonkers and was operated upon on the Monday morning. Nobody was there for me; I went alone. My parents and girlfriend insisted on driving me to the airport, but only because it was one last chance for the three of them to talk me out of it. My father was saying, “No one will ever love you. No one will ever desire you. Nobody will want to be with you.” My girlfriend had made me move out when she realized that this was happening. She kept all my things except for the clothes on my back. I was living in a furnished

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studio in the poorest part of town when I went down for the surgery and this was what I came back to. Full summer, big heat. And I had an infection down there. I was just sitting in the bathtub trying to disinfect everything, but flies were congregating around me. It was just disgusting. I thought I was going to die. I had nothing to eat. It was really bad. Really, really bad. I was 26. I had to borrow a lot of money for the operation, and my girlfriend had co-signed with me for my loan even though she was dead against it, which was big of her. I was working in a prison for delinquent boys at the time. I had hoped it would toughen me up, but clearly it didn’t, because the director kept telling me that I butterflied around the students too much – that I was too effeminate. One day, just a few days before my operation, the bank had still not approved the loan that would pay for it. I was sitting around the school waiting for them to call when another teacher came by and said, “What are you doing? School is over now. The whole year is over.” “I’m going to go and have a sex change,” I said. “What will you do for work next year?” he asked. I said, “I’ll go and work as a waitress.” At that moment, the director of the school walked in, and the teacher said, “I want to introduce you to our new teacher next year.” The director was puzzled. “Who?” he asked. “Miss Fellini here.” The director, who already thought I was too faggotty, now knew about it, but it turned out well in the end, because he contacted the school board, and, as it turned out, they owned a property that was a prison for teenage girls and transferred me there. It was kind of humbling. The teachers were pretty much against me, but most of the girls were pretty okay. They thought it was cool. They’re delinquent girls. They’re tough. Yeah, yeah. Rule Breakers, all of them. When I turned 50, I got myalgic encephalomyelitis or ME. It’s a neurological illness that affects my whole body - my immune system, everything. And that just put me in bed, dead, flat out. It’s been that way for the last 20 years. Just to be able to take part in this interview, I have to be in a special reclining chair that has my feet above the iPad, just so that the blood will flow through my brain so I can talk better. I have a blanket here and a ceiling fan in case I start getting warm. I have to do that every time I do a zoom call. I have to have my heartburn medication to hand. It’s complicated getting old. My sister is a lesbian. And my cousin that lives next door she’s also a lesbian. She was 4 years older than me, so I had two tomboys in my family. Every Christmas they’d give out presents for the kids, and for me it was most like boy stuff: hockey gear, an air rifle, a baseball bat. When we’d get home, I’d give all my stuff to my cousins and they gave me their girl toys. They didn’t want anything to do with coloring books, or little fancy dresses, or dolls. My sister and my cousin were sporty girls; they were on the softball team and all that. Girls have a much easier time. I’ve

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never heard, you know, anybody in the neighbourhood call them deviant or lesbians; they were just tomboys. Effeminate boys were not acceptable. Trans women also get worse than trans men because they don’t know what to do with a man who’s effeminate, or transitions to female. They don’t know how to handle that. A woman becoming a man, that’s much more acceptable. It’s a male oriented society, a woman wanting to become a man or a tomboy is good because it’s aspiring to be above oneself, but if you’re an effeminate man or boy, then you’re suspect. When I came back to work as a female teacher, all of a sudden, my views were less important. I really noticed how my status had gone down to zero. I experienced abuse as an older adult at the hands of several in-home care staff beginning in my 60 s. What I need from the in-home care workers is to help me into the shower, wash my hair and wash my back, then go away and close the curtain, so that I can wash everything else. It’s hard for me to raise my hands to wash my hair, but all the ‘down there’ parts are handled. When I come out, I only need help to make sure I don’t fall because I get shaky when I’m tired. But this one lady, she would always be waiting there. The minute I started drying myself between my legs, she would run and put her hand between my legs and start rubbing. She never touched my skin; it was always through the towel. And she would smile at me in a weird way - a strange little smile - and I don’t know what she meant. I didn’t know why she was doing it. I said to her on several occasions, “No! No! No! No!” but it had no impact. Finally, I called the office. I didn’t tell the person on the phone, the dispatcher, what she was doing. I didn’t want to ruin her career, and I didn’t know why she was doing it, so I just said, “Could you please not send her?” Not only did they carry on sending her, but they told her that I had complained, and they sent her sister along with her. They both got really mad at me, and the service became horrible. There was another lady that I had, who told me all the time about how her and her sisters would go down to places where they knew they were gay people and laugh at them on street corners. They’d go to Seattle; they’d go down to San Francisco; they’d go to Vancouver and they just loved laughing at gay guys and lesbians. It shook me up, and I thought that telling me was intentionally cruel. Then there was another lady who just came in really mad at me. She was a veiled woman, a Muslim lady. I think they’d told her that I was trans, and she didn’t want to have anything to do with me. She came, sat down, and did nothing but stare at me contemptuously for 3 h. I said, “Well, could you help me change my bed or get my book?” I forget what I asked her. Then she looked at me, grabbed her phone and said, “Hello, office, this lady here, she’s telling me to do all her housework and yelling.” I swear to God, like, it was unbelievable. I thought, This is not real. But that’s what she did. Then she passed me the phone and the guy said, “You’re not allowed to abuse her.” I said, “I wasn’t! I wasn’t!” He said, “No, no, don’t tell me that! She called the office. Are you a paying customer?”

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I told him I wasn’t, and he told me I therefore had no right to complain. When my doctor used to refer me to a specialist, she’d always say, “I’m sending you a trans woman to have her eyes examined”, or, “I’m sending you a transsexual that needs to have her mole looked at.” She was tickled pink that she had a trans patient. I was her first, and she thought it was really cool. And after that introduction, well, my body parts actually became transsexual eyes and transsexual moles. The endocrinologist told me, “You know you’re not a woman, right? You’re not a real woman.” This was 40 years after my transition. I said, “No. I’m not pretending to be a real woman. I know. That’s why I’m seeing an endocrinologist right now.” The doctor had sent me with that little note, even though I was asking her to stop doing that because all of them became so rude. The skin doctor was rude. The eye doctor was rude. I wonder if a doctor would ever say, I’m sending you this black patient? I asked her, “Please don’t do that. I get really bad service from them when you say that.” But she said, “Well. They might need to know. It might be important.” She’s stopped doing it now but only after quite a few years. That’s what you get all the time. At the same time, they fall down on routine health care. I’d like to have somebody examine my vagina, because my friend got cancer of the vagina. And another girlfriend too, from the operation and the drainage inside and what have you. And I’d like to make sure I’m not dying, not developing cancer down there or catch it in time if I have it. But I don’t know who to ask. I guess I could ask my doctor, but I haven’t seen her in person for years. And I’d have to call and then the receptionist would say, “Why are you wanting to visit the doctor?” Just before last Christmas in the fall, I got an infection. It felt like somebody had two fingers in my vagina and they were pressing up. I still have a prostate, and I thought I had prostate cancer, so I tried to call an online doctor and the receptionist demanded to know what the problem was. I had to tell her I have a prostate and thought I might have a prostate problem. That was very …it was very embarrassing for me. And then they couldn’t do anything. They said I’d have to go to my doctor in person, and that was impossible. I live in a place where there’s no clinics; they’ve all closed down. I ended up having to go to the emergency, and I was there for 7 h before they finally said, “Look, we’re too busy. We don’t have time for this. We’re going to take your word that you have an infection. We’re going to give you this prescription. Come back if it doesn’t get better.” I do what I can for myself, you know, because I don’t have a doctor who does any of that. My family doctor, she’ll never propose any tests. None of the doctors here understand my illness. You’ll be told it’s all in your head. Last week, I went to an online ME support group for the first time, and a number of people were saying, “Oh, I’m still trying to get my doctor to recognize the illness.” And other people were saying, “I finally got accepted after years and years of being told it’s in my head.” So yeah, everybody’s in the same boat. My life has always been really difficult. All through the time I was a teacher, I was never accepted by a powerful Catholic organization that tried multiple times to

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get me fired over about 10 years. Their excuse was that I didn’t have the cultural values of the purebred French Canadians, so I wouldn’t be able to transmit those cultural values to my students who were all immigrants at that time. My bosses would call me into the office and say, “People like you should be whores, or Gogo dancers, or naked dancers, not teachers.” It only stopped when I realized that I could take a union representative into the meetings with me. Then I got this stupid debilitating illness and I have to face it on my own. And I’m so afraid that someone will call me out or attack me. I live right across from a primary school. And up till late last year, when I tried to walk my dog, I walked anywhere else but near the school, but now my health has declined, that’s the only place I can walk. I walk around the school looking straight ahead. I’m so afraid of somebody saying You’re a sex pervert. The reason you’re walking around the school every day is because you’re trying to get a kid to look at the dog. The kids are playing on the fence right there on the sidewalk, and I’m walking away the whole time - quick, quick, quick - pulling the dog along. When a kid says, Oh. You have a cute dog, I look away and walk faster. It takes all the courage I have to stick my head down and plough forward. There’s no other way. It’s death or the path I’m taking. Now I’ve told this story, I have come to recognize my strengths and to see that the Boogey man I was so scared of all my life was perhaps not so scary. He was real for sure, but my fears exaggerated him. I put up walls to defend myself against him. At the same time, I do give myself credit for my tenacity. I took risks and acted on my own behalf. I survived…with grace.

7.2.1 Discussion Trudy’s description of her childhood and teenage years aligns very closely with many other narratives contained within this anthology. She reports feeling different from a young age, as well as encountering mistreatment and ostracism at the hands of her parents and peers. This sense of difference eventually drove Trudy to attempt suicide by drinking iodine at a very young age. Despite not being sure of how she identified, Trudy found a sense of community within the gay bar scene during her early teen years. Even though she did not drink, Trudy reports that it was enough to just be in that space with “people who were weird, like me.” Like some of the other narratives (compare those of Joseph and Candace), Trudy’s story suggests that support for younger queer and trans people may be both problematic and difficult to find. “Somehow, I knew about Christine Jorgensen, the first famous trans woman in the United States. I think maybe she had been on a late-night TV show. I don’t think I watched it back then, but I knew of her, so I knew it was possible, but I thought she was one person on the whole planet and her path was not something I could choose.” Outside of the oasis of acceptance she found in the gay bar, there is a repeated pattern of people in Trudy’s life attempting to convert her to a gender-conforming, heterosexual individual. This is initially clear in the way Trudy’s parents treated her

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as a child; they were so displeased with the way she threw “like a girl” as a child that they attempted to “beat” this trait out of her. The experience of conversion is even clearer in Trudy’s recollection of being sent to see a psychiatrist as a teenager to “get the fairy out” of her. Although she does not explicitly use the term conversion therapy to describe her experience with said psychiatrist, this term seems to be an apt descriptor for the type of therapy Trudy endured. Trudy’s story is unique in this anthology in that it contains the only experience that can fairly be termed as sexual abuse. She was repeatedly subjected to non-­ consensual touching of her private parts by a home healthcare worker, whose motivations remain unknown. On the other end of the spectrum, Trudy also encountered a home healthcare worker who refused to touch or help her in any way. Trudy believes this was because the agency had told the worker she was transgender, but of course we cannot confirm that this was the case. These two extremes – inappropriate touching on the one hand and a complete refusal to touch on the other – are also evident in FlyGirl’s story (though they do rise to the level of abuse in that case). We take up the matter of appropriate physical contact in our final chapter, as we suggest the need for more sensitivity to the special needs of GSM individuals when it comes to physical care. In Trudy’s case, for instance, her bottom surgery was performed by a doctor she deemed “shady” (this was the only available option for her), and she developed a subsequent infection. Worried that she might have prostate cancer, Trudy was embarrassed at having to disclose her fears to a receptionist, and at the same time, unable to access appropriate care. Like several of the other narrators, Trudy points to the pervasiveness and subtlety of homophobia and transphobia. One of her caregivers enjoys telling her about how she and her sisters would seek out gay people and “laugh at them on street corners.” “It shook me up,” Trudy says, “and I thought that telling me was intentionally cruel.” Once again, it is arguable whether this treatment meets the definition of emotional abuse. This has been defined by Hall et al. (2016) as “behaviors intended to be, or clearly perceived to be humiliating, degrading, insulting or devaluing the older person.” This is a topic we shall return to later. Trudy’s story paints a clear picture of the way in which aging and illness can make an GSM elder vulnerable to forms of homophobic or transphobic abuse they may have been able to avoid in their younger years. If it were not for her ME diagnosis, Trudy would not have had to rely on home healthcare workers for her hygiene needs, and thus would not have been in a situation where she was vulnerable to sexual abuse at the hands of one of these workers. With stories like these, it is perhaps not surprising that many GSM elders are hesitant to access the services of home healthcare providers (Cook-Daniels, 2017). Trudy’s story also provides further insight into the unique way in which trans elders experience interactions with the healthcare system. Trudy describes her doctor as always referring her to specialists as a trans patient, even when that information is not relevant to the medical issue being treated. It is evident that Trudy’s doctor is not doing this maliciously. Rather, Trudy had the sense that her doctor was rather proud of having a trans client, and wanted fellow health care providers know it  – a case of too much attention, rather than too little. However, the disclosure

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prevents Trudy from being able to conceal her status as a transgender woman and leads her to be treated poorly by the medical specialists she encounters. It may be that this is an issue for transgender individuals of all ages; however, Trudy’s age and ME diagnosis means she has a much higher level of interaction with the healthcare system than her younger counterparts, and thus a higher risk of encountering discrimination at the hands of medical practitioners.

References Cook-Daniels, L. (2017). Coping with abuse inside the family and out: LGBT and/or male victims of elder abuse. In X. Dong (Ed.), Elder abuse: Research, practice and policy (pp. 541–553). Springer. Hall, J., Karch, D. L., Crosby, A. (2016). Elder abuse surveillance: Uniform definitions and recommended core data elements. Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/ violenceprevention/pdf/ea_book_revised_2016.pdf

Chapter 8

Jackie’s Story: In Home Care

8.1 Introduction This is the second of two stories told by a caregiver, rather than the protagonist. Again, this is because the protagonist is now dead and did not have the opportunity to tell her story at the time it occurred. It should also be noted that many details have been obscured and altered to protect the narrator’s confidentiality. As the reader will see, both a major charity and a well-known university made determined attempts to silence Zoe, who became very fearful of the consequences of naming them and consequently had considerable anxiety about being involved in the Indigo Project. This fear was not unrealistic, given that her interventions on behalf of Jackie, a lesbian widow living in squalor and deprivation, resulted in the threat of a lawsuit by the charity, and the termination of her doctoral work by her university department, which was funded, in part, by that charity.

8.1.1 Just Call Me an Old Butch In 2012, I was in grad school doing funded research, living and working in a large city. At that time, I had completed a first degree and a master’s degree in Psychology. I was also an out lesbian. My name is Zoe. My supervisor encouraged me to base my research upon the work of a well-­ known charity, and specifically, on a program to provide services and supports for hard-to-reach isolated LGBT seniors. These services would be provided through various other existing projects. The program was nationally funded. I had a lot of experience in the field, and was looking forward to this new venture. I visited a self-run project for lesbians, who were suspicious of the national charity’s new involvement with their group. They questioned why that funding had not © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_8

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come directly to LGBT groups themselves to manage and deliver. Additionally, they shared their experience of gay men getting all the services. And looking at present services, this certainly seemed to be the case. It was no surprise that the newly appointed Project Manager was a gay man. One of the two newly appointed project workers was female, although she was very, very young. I quickly learnt that she had very little insight into the lives of older lesbians and no skills with carrying out time-consuming, yet much needed, client-led research with communities of older lesbians themselves. The programs she came up with were either of little interest to these communities, or they were already being organized by older lesbians themselves. She was consistently unable to connect with the communities effectively and ultimately failed to gain entry. Whereas, I as an older lesbian myself, skilled and experienced in working alongside diverse communities, gained entry. Around this time, I was contacted by an older lesbian who ran a local drop-in group. She had noticed that a woman who used to attend one of their groups quite regularly had stopped coming, and was worried about her. The organizer of the drop-in rang and asked if I could visit this person, and that is how I met Jackie. As it turned out, home care and home help were already being provided to Jackie, by the national charity I was reporting on. They had won the contract during the privatization of health, community support care and other services. When I tracked Jackie down, she was living in public housing in the inner city. She had a counselor, two daily caregivers, and a social worker. Despite these aides, Jackie was in very poor shape. She was thin, and all the clothes in her closet were too big, suggesting recent weight loss. There was very little food in the apartment, which was dirty and disorganized. Jackie had a dog, and the floor of her apartment was covered in dog feces, some of which had been trampled into the carpet. The smell was so strong that it permeated the corridor outside. Several of Jackie’s neighbours told me that they were very happy to see that I was now visiting regularly because they had been concerned about her wellbeing for a while. Jackie herself was isolated and seemed depressed. I thought I detected the beginnings of dementia, but if so, it did not seem severe. She was, however, extremely suspicious, and expressed strong mistrust of her two carers, who were women of colour who talked a lot with her about their strong faith beliefs. It was a perfect storm  – she was white, racist and suspicious, and they came from conservative Christian cultures that disapproved of same sex relationships. At this point, it seemed that their function was purely a wellness checkup in the mornings to see that Jackie was still alive. They were low paid, in a hurry, with many other clients in the community to visit. Jackie often refused them entry, and consistently refused their offers of practical help. Additionally, the local authority had assigned Jackie an Albanian man as a counselor (since Jackie was Albanian). They culture-matched, but Jackie’s father, who was Albanian, had entirely rejected her lesbian identity and had tried to bully her into marriage with a man. Jackie was initially suspicious and hostile when I visited. However, I made gentle inroads in the first visits by just chatting with her on the doorstep, telling her about myself and my female partner. She started inviting me in, I started bringing

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milk, teabags, biscuits and we would sit and chat over tea. I offered to tidy up but she was not interested, and preferred for us to sit chatting. I started saying things like, “I’ll just do this little thing while the kettle boils,” and gradually persuaded her to let me help. As I chatted, I also cleaned and tidied a little and noticed piles of photographs on the bookshelf. Over tea, I invited her to show me some. As we began to chat over the photos, I learnt about her life. She had been a teacher, quite well-known and highly regarded. She had travelled extensively, including a number of trips and holidays abroad. I noticed the same women cropping up in a lot of the pictures, and asked who this might be. Jackie explained that this was her long-term partner, who had lived together with her in that apartment; she had died only 2 years previously. The contrast between their life of 20 years living together, travelling, and as a couple well known and integral to the local community, and Jackie’s current life of isolation and disorder was remarkable. The larger clothes I noticed had belonged to Jackie’s partner; she couldn’t throw them away. It was apparent that losing her partner had led to Jackie becoming isolated, lonely, and failing in the end to care for herself. Interestingly, looking at the photos, I noted that Jackie’s partner appeared classically femme and Jackie more butch. As so many others of her generation had done, Jackie and her partner had kept quiet about being Lesbians and a couple. Indeed, I soon found out that Jackie hated the word ‘lesbian.’ Instead she assertively and proudly stated, “Call me an O.B.” “An old butch, that’s what I am.” I carried on visiting every week, and carefully, sensitively learned that Jackie had given one of her neighbours her bank cash point card. This family were meant to be doing Jackie’s weekly shopping for her; however, I never saw any substantial food in the cupboard or fridge. Fearing for Jackie’s health and wellbeing, I had begun taking her to a nearby café for a decent meal. She loved this and became a big fan of their apple pie and ice cream. At this point, I felt it was time for an intervention. I talked with Jackie about this, explaining that I would help her. She agreed that I could call the social worker in and I would be there too. This was arranged and I explained to him that Jackie had recently lost a beloved partner. I drew his attention to the poor living conditions. I also called the police and reported the financial abuse by the neighbour. The social worker and police were kind and understanding. The cash card was retrieved, and safeguarding was started to protect Jackie financially and in terms of food, cleaning, and some company for her. A charity helped with vet bills and health checks for the dog. However, I was then called into the charity’s head administrator’s office and soundly rebuked. This was because the carers employed by the Charity had failed to notice and report the neglect and harm of a vulnerable person. Additionally, my university supervisor then instructed me to keep quiet about what I had observed, pointing out that his program depended upon the funding given by the charity. There was considerable fuss as a result of my revelations, though this did not include any apparent review of the failed care and counselling service concerning Jackie’s living conditions, financial abuse, or her long-term grief and isolation. During all of this,

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the manager of one of the Charities services directly involved with Jackie’s support became very ill. I was then directly blamed for causing this man so much stress. When I refused to remove my writing about the neglect of Jackie (I had obviously changed her name) from my research, I was then asked by a very senior charity officer if I had been having an affair with her! I was further interrogated for several hours with for example, “Why did you spend your own money buying her food?” and “Why did you take such an interest in her? What are you up to? What’s the nature of your relationship?” I am 20 years younger than Jackie, although also a mature lesbian, and obviously the homophobic assumption was made by heterosexual senior staff that I must be having an affair with her, because I was a lesbian! Ironically, it was also reported to me and several others that one of the appointed male workers was ‘providing sexual services’ to some of the older gay men in a particular part of the project. However, along with others who had been informed, I did nothing about this as the organization just did not want to know. I hoped those service users were all making informed decisions and were not being hurt in any way. I tried to stay positive in my first year’s evaluation of the charity’s involvement with isolated LGBT seniors. Rather than blaming or focusing on only negatives, I highlighted positive recommendations for change. Significantly, I underlined the need for specialized training for those supporting older lesbians since all the research indicates that they are typically under researched, misunderstood, underserved, and ignored. I realized early on that this was because women, particularly lesbians, have always had to be so self-sufficient as individuals, as couples and in their different communities. Furthermore, they often have little financial resources and so have become used to being self-reliant. That said, I realized that Jackie was not the only one who had been overlooked because of heteronormative assumptions. I met older transwomen and learnt again that most home carers just do not understand. They have not had training or awareness raising about the unique requirements of older trans people who have had, for example, surgeries in Thailand and can now require support with quite complicated health and care needs. Additionally, they can be isolated, lonely, vulnerable, in need of help with social support networks. I proactively included these older Trans people as part of my research too. My supervisor instructed me to change the end of the first-year evaluation. I note, in passing, that he was an elderly white gay man with no practical experience in the field. He made it clear that if I was honest, he would not support my work going forward. Hence, I offered a compromise. Clearly, the report was somewhat redundant now, so I offered to remove it from my research and publish it separately. The university responded by advising me that my research was their property and they and the charity threatened me with a lawsuit if I published. I considered whistleblowing on a complex of power and influence that had conspired to keep silent about their failure to protect and support Jackie and others. However, when I approached a newly appointed watchdog organization, it was only to find that it was being managed by the very charity that I wanted to complain

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about. I withdrew from the situation, and the research program. In resigning from this research, I arranged for Jackie to have her own community activist who was an older lesbian herself; she became Jackie’s strong independent advocate. During the latter part of my research, someone else cautiously came to me to share their concerns about a very much older lesbian they had heard of, who was powerless. I will refer to her as Mo. Mo had been living for years alone in a rural area, and she had always been a bit of a loner. However, as she became much older, she did not eat properly, and her house was damp and very cold. She no longer drove and relied on a volunteer to drop off tinned food and other supplies in an ad hoc way. Mo became ill and was admitted to hospital, where she recovered. Despite her insistence on returning home, she was deemed too vulnerable to carry on living alone and moved, against her wishes, into an older person’s care home. In the home, she is warm, fed, has her own room, but is again isolated. She appears to be the only out lesbian in the place and again, the care and support staff are untrained, without insight, unused to a butch lesbian. The person reporting this to me described Mo as wanting to move but having no advocate, no voice herself, no friends in the home and in fact being shunned by many of the other residents and staff. I was asked to help Mo. Skilled, sensitive advocacy and befriending is obviously very much needed and preferably should be delivered by LGBT people themselves.

8.2 Discussion Jackie’s story, as told by Zoe, is interesting in a number of ways. Firstly, it is somewhat shocking to learn that two major institutions tried so hard to silence Zoe. Though this injustice lies beyond the scope of our research, it does suggest that the misuse of institutional power may not be uncommon. More significant, from our perspective, is what we learn from this account about the subtle ways in which heteronormativity played into the neglectful treatment of Jackie by the charity responsible for her care. Firstly, there is an interesting tension between the charity’s no doubt well-­ intentioned attempt to respect Jackie’s cultural identifications and the consequent failure to identify and respect her sexual orientation. As Zoe puts it, providing her with an elderly male Albanian counselor “privileged her ethnicity, but assumed that she was heterosexual.” It is interesting to note how the intersection of several minority identifications (old, foreign, and lesbian) play out in this example. Since her father, also an elderly Albanian man, had rejected her lesbian identity, this choice served to further alienate Jackie from her care team, whom she already distrusted because of her own racism. It might be argued that since her sexual identification as lesbian was deeply private, the mistake was unavoidable. However, it did not take too long for Zoe to discover it by simply looking at the many photographs that lay

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around Jackie’s apartment. This speaks to the dangers of assuming heterosexuality and the need for queer competence in staff training. Secondly, one of the biggest obstacles to appropriate care is Jackie’s own internalized homophobia, which is so extreme as to make her fearful of the word ‘lesbian’ – a term she outright rejects, even though she had a stable same sex relationship for many years. It would seem that her fear of being ‘outed’ vastly outweighed her need for support, as a recent widow, and led to a life of extreme suspicion and privacy. It might be suggested that her fears were unfounded, but the reader will have noted that the chief administrator of the charity providing Jackie’s care asks Zoe, a qualified caregiver and doctoral student who is much younger than Jackie, “Why do you take such an interest in her? What are you up to? What’s the nature of your relationship?” The assumption that any lesbian showing concern for another woman must be a sexual predator is deeply homophobic. A few years before Zoe’s intervention, Jackie was happy, healthy, and vacationing with her partner. After being widowed, she is living in squalid conditions, under-­ nourished, neglected, and financially abused by a neighbour, despite the involvement of a counselor, two caregivers, and a social worker. The reasons seem to be complex – partly her isolation is due to her own racism and reluctance to accept help (even Zoe has to work hard to gain Jackie’s trust). Partly it is due to Jackie’s own homophobia. However, the assumption of heteronormativity by her care team, who failed to discover that she was a recently widowed lesbian must be considered a major factor. Again, we will address some of these interconnected and complex issues in our final chapter.

Chapter 9

Joseph’s Story: Partner Abuse

9.1 Introduction Joseph is a highly successful, professional man. His story presents us with what partner violence can look like in a gay relationship and how support services and practitioners need to be able to respond in culturally safe ways to victims. The partner violence occurred within two marriages; this most recent resulted in the involvement of the law but did not end in relationship termination.

9.1.1 They Didn’t Have a Fucking Clue I’m 63, almost 64, and I was born in 1958, 11 years after my parents married. I grew up in a small city about 45 min from the US border into Montana. It’s known as Big Sky Country, because it’s very flat. My parents were immigrants from post-World War II Europe; my mom was German, and my dad was Polish. We spoke English at home. If you were a German woman coming to Canada, you didn’t want to claim your German identity because it wasn’t okay back then – they even changed the name of the German Shepherd Dog to Alsatian, right? I was raised with parents who were surprised and disappointed by how difficult things were after they came to the so-called promised land. I was raised in a small bungalow in the working-class part of town. My mother remarried, when I was probably about 10, so I had a stepfather who is now deceased, and though he had children, I’ve been estranged from that family, so I’ve always considered myself to be an only child. There were times of happiness when I was young, for sure. I think I was an interesting child. I was quite fat until I was 15–16, so fat shaming happened to me throughout. We had some fun nevertheless. We went fishing a lot, and we had a little camper. My stepfather was misogynist, and he had issues, as a Polish man (like my © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_9

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biological father), but he wasn’t drunk and violent. He didn’t drink and there was no physical or obvious verbal abuse. It was in many ways better, and it sure was safer at a physical level. Looking back on it, I think there were other issues. My mother had depression throughout her life. I think she probably was bipolar. She was smart, ambitious, and quite vain, actually. She was a beautiful woman and cared a lot about her looks. She kept a beautiful house in the early days. My biological father was an alcoholic. If he wasn’t home from work on Fridays by about seven o’clock, my mother would put me on the bus with her. In those days, people were paid in cash every Friday after work, and if he didn’t show up, she knew he was in some bar. Unfortunately, she didn’t drive, so we’d get on the bus and go from one bar to the other to find him – not to bring him home, but to get the remaining pay. She made me wait outside. When he got home, he was like a different person – mean and physically abusive. I’ve never been entirely comfortable in the normative category of gay. I would say that where gender is concerned, I’m non-binary. Let’s put it this way, I reject categories that have been created without my input. The reason I loved and embraced the word queer when I started writing, over 30 years ago, is that it’s pretty elusive. It was ambiguous enough and political enough that I thought, There’s somewhere for me in that – in that space that I wouldn’t really call a category. And now I would say that I live in a queer diaspora. I always knew I was different. I liked the boys, and I was very closely identified with my mother. She’d been waiting for a child for years. She wasn’t entirely happy with the men in her life, so she wanted a child. I remember having boyfriends. Brian Jackson was my boyfriend in grade two. He’d come over, and we’d take our clothes off and fool around. I remember looking forward to it, and it being a lot of fun. We all dated girls in high school, because that was the thing to do, though Brian and I were still sort of boyfriends all the way up to then. We had a pact that after graduation, we would break up with our girlfriends and maybe move in together. He married his girlfriend at age 19. I said to him, “Oh, my goodness. This is not good. You cannot do that. I mean, I don’t care. I don’t need you as a boyfriend. I got other ones for sure. But this is not good. Not for you, not for her.” 15 years later, I’m at the mall taking my mother shopping and there was a well-­ known cruising bathroom in one of the department stores downtown. Mom was off doing whatever she was doing, and I go to the bathroom and there’s this guy there jerking off at the urinal. I turn to my right and look up, and you can guess who it was. I just looked at him and said, “See. After all these years, I told you it wouldn’t turn out well. Then I left.” One Thursday, my father didn’t show up after work, which was quite unusual, because he usually went to the bar on Fridays, as I said. My mother got up in the morning, and he still wasn’t there. She had to get on the bus to go to work. Those were the days when 6- and 7-year-olds were left alone if their parents went to work early. You just locked the house up and walked to school, then when you got home, you ate and watched TV, which is why I was so fat.

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I don’t remember all the details, but I recall that when she came home from work, she went to the back door of the garage, which was locked. She got the key and went to open it up, and then she came running up the back sidewalk. She said, “Call an ambulance! Call an ambulance! Your father’s dead.” I think she called her friend Sophie, who worked at the dry cleaners with her. Sophie and the ambulance arrived, but before they did, while my mother was making the calls, I marched my 7-year-old self into that garage and circled around the back of the car. It was dark in there because the garage door was closed. Our car was a big four door Buick, quite new. My parents had bought it to impress my grandparents, who had come from Germany for a once in a lifetime visit. I opened the driver’s door and touched his hand, just to make sure he was dead. Just to make sure. The man was a total asshole. A horrible person when he drank. Horrible. I wanted to make sure he was dead because I thought that was a very good thing. I could not for the life of me fathom why my mother would be so upset when he had been so horrible to her and beaten her to within an inch of her life. I’m surprised she survived some of it. But of course, now I know. You know you can love your abuser. You just probably shouldn’t live with them. My mom’s younger sister came to Canada when she was 18. Years later, she told me years later that my mother had been a beautiful woman – talented and smart with lots of boyfriends. When she met my dad, he was a sexy, charismatic Polish soldier, and they got married quite quickly and off they went off to Canada. My aunt said they were for sure in love. It was a good marriage. They didn’t have much money, but things were pretty good. It wasn’t until later until things went wrong. Who knows why? I think my biological father was probably gay. No one ever said that he killed himself. I was told that he had a heart attack in the car, but it wasn’t true. I think he just gave up. It’s a made-up story in a way, but I just have a feeling about it. I think my mother had affairs. In fact, before my biological father died, she was seeing the man who later became my stepfather. They were dating, and I was brought in on it. Can you imagine who would do this to a child? I would go on dates with them and promise never to tell. My mother was a true narcissist. Everything was self-referential; it was always about her. If I had a headache, hers was worse. What I believed to be love and devotion for her son was really a source of energy for her. This is what narcissists need – a constant source of energy and attention. I took a job when I was 13. I finally thought, Well, fuck! I need money. I need a car. I have to get out of this situation, because these people are nuts. My biological father was dead. My stepfather and my mother had been ‘dating’ (fucking) for probably 2 years before and I think my father knew. He was terrible when he drank, but he wasn’t when he didn’t drink. I have this big bad memory of my father talking to me in my bedroom, which was a rare event, that I spent time alone with him. He looked right at me and said, “Well, I know that you love your mother far more than me. Can you love me?” Who would say that to a 6-year-old? Nobody. Nobody. I remember thinking Yeah, you’re right. Of course I do. I mean, you’re unreliable. You’re a horrible person and you drink. We’re fucking afraid of you. Oh, yes, of course. I love her more, because you’re crazy. You’re crazy, man.

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I was surrounded by unreliable adults, all of them. They could not be trusted. They did not tell the truth. And every single one of them in some way created a very abusive situation that no child should have to live through. I lost 75 pounds in 4 months and went to the gym and suddenly went from fat to hot. Everything changed. The girls liked me. The boys liked me. I had older men who were my boyfriends, like John, who was 10 years older than me, and had a ‘shagging waggon’ van and took me to my first gay bar when I was 17. It was a hot afternoon, and there was hardly anybody in this seedy, smoky place, but out came a woman who sang It’s not easy being green and sashayed down a set of stairs to our table and I realized Oh my god! It’s a man! I had had sex in bathrooms from the age of 13, and I never thought that there was anything abusive about it. In fact, I went after it and found it. I learned about it by going to the public library and looking up homosexual. I found a sociological study called Tea Room Trade all about public sex among gay men. I read the whole thing in the stacks, took my research and applied it. I found a note on a bathroom wall saying Meet me here tomorrow. I’ll be wearing a blah, blah, blah. So I go there the next day and sure enough, there he was. I found that there was an intricate gay subculture, much of it organized in houses. I got invited to a lot of events at my friend Ron’s. I’m not sure how I met him, but Ron took me on. He was kind of my mentor, and though I never had sex with him, he invited me to everything happening in his house. On a Saturday there might be 20 men aged, like 15–80. It’s true  – all generations. When I turned 18 and Ron was probably around 35, he said, “It’s time you learn what gay life is all about. I’m taking you to San Francisco for your birthday” (this was pre-AIDS). Can you imagine? Ten days in San Francisco! I had pretty much stopped being at home very much by this time. I’d worked at a local supermarket and saved all my money so I could afford to enrol in courses in Toronto and hang out in the gay scene, mainly bars and beaches. I met this older guy who was a fundraiser for the Catholic Church of all things. He took me to one of the seediest bars I’ve ever seen. “What are we doing here?” I asked him. He pointed to a tired looking guy collecting dirty beer glasses. Ron said, “Twenty-­ five years ago that guy thought he would just stay in Toronto instead of going and getting his education. Well. That will not be you. You will get in your little car. And you’ll drive back to Lethbridge and suck it up and finish your degree and get a good job. And when you’re making lots of money, if you want to come live in Toronto, you can.” This was not exploitation – it was the opposite. I knew several men who were much older whom I did not have sex with. They were just men who kind of took you on. It was true mentorship. I went from parents I’ve never had to parents I had had in the gay community. I have no memories of bad experiences sexually. With older men, it was all fun. It was all good. I felt I had a lot of agency. I’ve had four significant relationships. I would say the first one was the best one – a kind-hearted, handsome, good looking, sweet man, who actually, I look back on

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and now was a very caring person who did many things for me. But I didn’t notice it. I guess I didn’t want it. I left him for somebody and that went on for 19 years. It wasn’t until after he left me that I realized that this relationship had been in a very subtle but insidious way, highly abusive. I walked away from that relationship feeling diminished, feeling that I wasn’t smart, feeling that I wasn’t attractive. I could not have been in a lower place, which kind of helps to explain why I jumped into another relationship with my next partner and married him so quickly. It was desperation. I jumped into that relationship, and I realized, I don’t know what to do with all that attention and constant presence. I don’t know what to do with that. I need to keep my own psychic space. It just gets on my nerves. I wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment, so I started seeing someone on the side, of course. I initiated all of it. The reason I don’t mind paying all that alimony to Trevor is because he deserves it. What I did was wrong. I should never have married him, and I should never have done what I did. So I start seeing Rex. When I first met him, he was not heavily into drugs nor was he working as an escort, though he did that all later, after we started seeing each other. What do I do? Of course, I try to save somebody’s life. I decided I had to leave Trevor, for a whole variety of reasons. Trevor drank a lot, and I don’t. Although I am certainly no stranger to street drugs, I rarely do them. Once Trevor was introduced to them, he couldn’t stop. It was like daily. There were drugs and alcohol in the house every day. He came back from Palm Springs once, after he’d been there on his own. Oh, my God, what a mess. I mean, he had been partying the whole week. I could barely recognize him. At that point. I said, “Well, Trevor, I’ll tell you the same thing I told my mother, ‘You have to choose.’ You choose that or you choose me, but you can’t have both. I can’t have it. I’m a child of substance abusers, and if I’m not really careful, I will be one. I can’t have it in the house. No potato chips. No drugs. No ice cream.” He couldn’t stop using them, so one morning I woke up and realized that I couldn’t stay there, and I moved in with Rex. He had been completely clean for a year, and he had a job, and he was an amazing person. I loved him so much and I still do. I knew as soon as I met him that he was the love of my life. We moved in together and everything was pretty good for a couple of years. I was working in a high-level executive job, and busy, busy, busy. I’m gone at seven o’clock in the morning, and sometimes not back till 10 at night. I’m doing paperwork on the weekends. I guess I didn’t notice that although Rex wasn’t doing hard drugs, he was smoking a lot of weed and drinking beer. There were times where I could tell when I came home that that’s what he had done all day. He couldn’t seem to hold a job for a while. He′s definitely on the autism spectrum, and his brain doesn’t deal well with multiple levels of responsibility. He can do one thing at a time really well, and if the structures are highly routinized, and regulated, he can perform brilliantly, but over the years, he learned to deal with the noise associated with too much stimulation by using alcohol and drugs. It began to change when we were trapped at home with COVID. I was no longer the leader – out and about meeting other people and being busy all day. We were in

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our small condo together all day, and the clothing store station we’d bought had been shut down. I was on an extended leave and I wanted to develop a schedule, but I couldn’t because Rex couldn’t do any of it. His routine was to get up, get high, watch TV, and sort of just be there. Eventually COVID ended enough so we could go back to work, but I was to learn later that instead of working and making money for our business, he would go to the bar and drink beer in the afternoon instead of running our business. It could have been a very successful business, but I found out that not only did he not work much, but he was stoned at work, and he took most of the cash. If people paid cash, he would delete the customer from the computer database and keep the cash. That supported his buying weed and alcohol and going to the bar without leaving evidence on the credit card. Then he’d smoke weed and come home and be this other person. Not a nice person. Rex came into our relationship with no money and a lot of debt, which I paid off for him. I also paid for the business and put a lot of money into it. We never seemed to make anything and there was a lot of debt. I’ve always seemed to have to pay for all these men, every single one, everyone. I left Jonah everything. Ralph took more than his fair share. Trevor, of course, I felt deserved his alimony, but maybe not. I don’t know. And now there’s Rex. I’m thinking, Holy fuck! Another one. I’m gonna die poor! I make a lot of money, but it can go pretty quickly. The relationship with Rex got worse. I tried to point out his spiralling addiction, but he never changed his behaviours. If he was not home at a certain time, I would text him, and he would lie and I’d call him on it, then he would send these terrible texts – terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible…calling me names. They were very abusive. If you’re a meth addict, everyone can tell. If you walk up and down the streets in the city and see twitchy people with hollowed out cheeks, that’s a meth addict. I told Rex that what he was doing was worse, because it couldn’t be seen. Things got worse. Six to eight months ago, he came home late and drunk. He reminded me of my biological father. It was like Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde – he was a completely different person. The counseling I’ve had since, from this organization that works with victims of abuse, has shown me that you must never argue or engage with people in that space. It just gets worse and amplifies it. As my counselor told me, of course I will, because I want the drama, and I want proof of how bad he is – so we argued. In the end, I just left. I called 911 told them what was happening. Apparently, the police came and contacted Rex. I had gone to a hotel. He was pretty good for a while after that – very good actually. Until one night we got home from a light dinner we’d had somewhere, where each of us had had one beer. And we were barely in the door when he said he’d just remembered that he’d promised a friend to meet her at a bar. I said, “Now you’re telling me! This is Saturday night. Maybe I’d like to do stuff.” “Oh, I promised her,” he said. I said, “Well. You also promised you wouldn’t go out drinking without me.” “I’ll only be gone for an hour,” he told me.

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I texted him at around 11 pm and told him I’d driven by and seen him still at the bar with his friend. Then the tirade of terrible things began. Holy shit. One text after another, each worse than the last. I thought Well, that’s it. I’m not going to be in the apartment when he comes home. I texted him again – more terrible things. At 11.30, I packed a few things and got in my car and parked outside to see when he came home – at about almost midnight. I sat up front in front of the condo for probably about 15 min. Then I called 911. I told them that I needed police officers to meet me at the door so I could go upstairs and get a couple of things I forgot. I needed them before I left the house that night. The dispatcher was amazing. She made me feel better and made me feel like I was safe – that the police would handle things. After about 20 min a police cruiser arrived. They pulled up alongside me and talked through side-by-side rolled down windows. “What do you need?” they asked. I was surprised that they hadn’t been told, but I recounted the story again. “Well, what do you want from us?” Seriously? I couldn’t fucking believe it. I said, “I need you to escort me upstairs, so that I can get the other set of car keys for this particular vehicle. I cannot leave that set in there and feel safe. I need them both.” They sauntered behind me on the way to our apartment, yakking casually about whatever. They were so flippant. I was stunned. When we were inside, Rex said, “What’s this?” I said, “Look, I need to get something to make sure that I’m safe.” And then he started arguing. “Well, it’s you. That’s the problem.” And on and on he went. I just grabbed the keys and said, “Look, officers, I’ll be in my car downstairs, when you’re through.” They were up there for about probably 15–20 min. I have no idea what was discussed and what happened. They came down. They got into their car and rolled it up beside me again. They didn’t invite me to come in their car, which they should have. They should have talked to me and got a full report. Instead, they rolled down their window and said, “Well, yeah, you know, you guys, you guys have had some problems there and you need to resolve them. It’s not really a police matter.” I swear it’s true. I said, “What? This is a police matter. I can assure you do not feel safe going back into that apartment. I’m gonna go to a hotel.” It was two o’clock in the morning by that time. I asked them if they were going to file a report, and they said they would. I never heard anything. Didn’t hear from anybody. Nothing. This is classic homophobia in the police force. And ageism for sure. It would have been different if I were younger. And if I were a woman in a relationship with a man, because they’d have been trained how to do that. They didn’t have a fucking

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clue. And it was for sure homophobia. They didn’t want to get close to me. They just didn’t know what to do about it. I have all these tattoos, which makes me suspect and unreliable. I just felt it. I knew it. When they looked at me, they almost smirked. That night, I went to a hotel and turned off my phone. I slept pretty well, considering. When I woke up and checked my texts, there were a whole litany of terrible things. Of course, the last ones were what Rex wrote first thing in the morning after he slept for a bit, saying how sorry he was, how he’s not a person who should ever drink. Could I forgive him? I’d tried that, and his remorse didn’t last. I told him I needed some space. I needed him to leave. I arrived about 11.30 or so. Sure enough, he had left, but he’d taken a lot of stuff. When I asked him why, he said I was trying to control him, so he’d gone somewhere where he could feel better about himself. What abusers do is turn it on you. “I wouldn’t be this way. If you weren’t that way. In fact, you’re worse. You’re worse. You think I’m bad. Let me tell you how bad you are!” About a week later, there was an issue around money, after which he left me three of the vilest voicemail messages I have ever heard in my life. Each one had a different version of a death threat, with all kinds of crap in between. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it. I got a digital recording and put them on my laptop, and I called the police. A day or two later, they showed up – a Caucasian woman and a non-­ Caucasian man, both younger, both very respectful. They were very good. They asked me to tell the whole story. I told them the story, including the homophobia I had experienced at the hands of their colleagues. I found out that no report had been filed on that previous incident – just a record that I had called. They asked to hear Rex’s text messages, and the woman said, “Well, I’ve heard some pretty bad things. But that’s, like, really bad!” They didn’t ask me what I wanted to do. They said that on the basis of those texts, they were going to charge him. I don’t think that if I lived in a tiny apartment in the poor part of town and worked in a menial job, they might have taken me seriously. I live in a very nice condo with very nice things in a very expensive part of town. And she was a woman, and he was a racialized man. They asked if I thought he might follow through on the death threats, and I told them that I didn’t know. They went immediately to Rex’s place, charged and arrested him, and took him to jail where he stayed overnight. He went before the judge the next day, the charge was read, and he got out on bail. It’s a very serious charge, actually very serious. He was released on condition there be no physical or any kind of contact with me. Then they called me and told me what the outcome was. And that’s when a whole other side kicked in, where there were suddenly all kinds of support for me as the victim. I was given a caseworker who kept me updated on where things were. I hired lawyers about a divorce, and it was getting so complicated. It was too much. I couldn’t handle it. In the end, I asked if they knew of an experienced mediator, and I found one who was not homophobic.

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We had a four-hour session and in the middle of it, I thought, Well, I am in love with this guy. I’m not sure if I should be living with him. But I am. I learned from the mediator that if Rex was found guilty, he’d probably get probation for 2 years but there’d be no conditions and no counseling. What happened in the end was that they negotiated what’s called a peace bond. He would not be convicted of the offense, so he wouldn’t have a record. He’d also have a year’s probation with conditions. He’d be required to go to addiction support and programs, anger management, and individual counseling every week. They asked me if there was anything else, and I asked if he’d been required to listen to all the voice mails and texts he’d sent, in a public setting. As it turned out, they weren’t allowed to play the actual recording, but apparently the Crown prosecutor read the transcript of the voicemails verbatim. And they decided to do the same thing with everybody that day. The mediator said everyone thought it was a great idea. I wanted him to notice how other people feel about that, in a public space, and for him to hear the judge say how she felt about it. It wasn’t just me saying that what he was doing was bad, and it hurts me and makes me afraid. It became everybody in that room, the judge, the crown, Prosecutor, his own lawyer, and by looking around the room, others. I feel ashamed on many levels. People might think I deserved this. I left somebody for Rex and I know I hurt him. Also, I’m smart – I have a PhD. I don’t want to admit to anybody that I might have made a mistake. I shouldn’t have done all these things. Look where it’s led to. And it’s hard to say, even to myself, but I know it’s true. You know? Part of it is that I really, really like the man. He is the love of my life, and I understand my own complicity, not in creating what he did, but in allowing it to happen. I think if I had not been so socialized into living with insidious abuse and trauma, I would have dealt with it differently. I’d have responded to it more matter-of-factly, and less emotionally. I understand that people will think that I should not have given Rex another chance, but I believe that we have to understand our own complicity in how we respond to other people’s slips and mistakes. In the queer community, many of us have experienced trauma, and many of us have responded to that in dysfunctional ways. Most days, Rex was not like my biological father. There was no physical abuse, and he was not abusive as often. Nonetheless, as I said to him, “Even if it only happens once every three months, I’m always wondering when it’s gonna happen.” You’re always kind of on guard. You’re always anxious. You never know. I told him that unless there was a real agreement on consumption of substances that change his personality in ways that make me afraid, unless there’s agreement on that, and reliable follow through, a good relationship is not possible. We didn’t move back in together right after the court proceedings. I allowed him to come and visit me. I sold the condo and bought this house for myself. When I invited him to come and live with me again, I was very clear. If I were to get one – even one – of those texts or any of that, he would be out. I put the house in my name, not in his name. I took care of myself first for the first time in my life. I’m number one. And he’s number two.

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Since we moved back in together, I am a completely different person. My counselor says that I have figured out what I need for my own self-care, and I have. I don’t believe that I should be blamed for creating the conditions for the things he did, but my counselor has told me that I am an enabler, for sure. What I liked most about my last partner, before Rex, is that he belonged to a quintessential happy family. But I found it boring. Uh huh. I found it boring. I love drama. I’m good at my job because I take on the high-risk challenges. I enjoy it. It’s why the most successful treatment they found for young kids, you know, who are addicted to drugs and other things is high risk adventure programs. My counsellor says that I have to manage it differently and not engage with other people’s high-risk behaviors. That’s the difference. I’ve told Rex to do what he thinks he needs. I don’t want a report. I don’t want to hear about what he’s saying to his probation officer. I don’t hear any of that. I’ve got my own stuff. Rex actually loves me, and I love him. He has issues with how his brain works when he does drugs and alcohol, and I truly believe he’s going to resolve that. I do believe that I can see a big difference because of the cataclysmic thing that happened and the accountability that followed. He said, “You know, that night in jail was like the biggest Wake Up Call of my life. And the second one was having those texts read to me in court.” I believe it. I believe him. Kicking him out and closing the shop and selling the condo was very empowering. I didn’t ask anyone’s permission. I didn’t ask him. I just did it. And I bought that house. This is the new me – me first you second. I believe that violence and abuse in same sex relationships is different, and being involved in this project has taught me a lot. I can see how my childhood was the best thing and the worst thing. It was terrible in many ways, but I learned that I could get out of terrible too. For instance, I just left the house at 17 and got a job. Even though I think it’s great that these volunteers call me about what support I need, as a domestic abuse survivor, they ask the wrong questions and they say the wrong things, because they haven’t got a fucking clue. When I say I have a husband, that doesn’t mean anything, not all the same as in straight culture. If they don’t understand the microcosm, the micro details that organize the context of my experience, how I experience the world, they will not understand the different ways that I would experience abuse. After the public airing of Rex’s texts, I could forgive him, because I understand that he’s got his shit too. I know where it came from. He was a Mormon boy, out at school when he was 15 in the 80s because he wasn’t savvy enough to keep it to himself. Can you imagine? His teachers called him a homo and a fag, so he quit school 17-year-old with a big brain, a mother addicted to prescription drugs, a father who had killed himself, a family who had disowned him. Then you have to overlay all that with substances that amplify negative things in your brain – substances that are endemic in queer culture. I don’t need volunteers from the domestic abuse place who do not know what to do with me. I can’t wait to get off the phone. And they never followed up.

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The other thing about being queer is that we are really good at concealing. We already have enough shame – layers of shame around everything. I’m HIV positive. I’m nonbinary. I’m a risk taker. I’m unconventional. I’m eccentric. Don’t expect me to add on by the way, I live with insidious trauma and abuse. You have to sacrifice some of the pride to deal with the shame. I can’t let my pride override my need to be public about how shame is constructed in the queer community. Even though we’re queer, we gay men are still boys. We were socialized to be straight men, to not show emotion, to always be right. We’re still very heteronormative in that way. It’s how we were socialized. And when you put two together in the same house, Holy fuck. This is not always a good thing. And then you add shame and substance abuse or whatever. Who’s going to go talk about that?

9.2 Discussion The first thing that needs to be discussed regarding Joseph’s narrative is the fact that he was sexually active as a 13-year-old, seeking out and enjoying public sex with men after studying homosexuality in the public library, as he says ‘I … took my research and applied it’. Although this was illegal behaviour, it appears not to have been experienced as harmful nor traumatic but rather as consensual and desired. As consensual, unlike Candace’s early experiences, Joseph does not recount any negative repercussions of early sexual activity. Nor does such precocious activity seem to be that rare. In a recent study of age of sexual debut among young sexual minority men in the USA (Halkitis et al., 2021) the average age of first sex was 14–15 with almost a fifth of the cohort (men aged 18–19) reporting consensual activity younger than 13. Joseph also describes the lack of support and nurturing he received from his family, including the abuse he and his mother endured from his biological father before he died when Joseph was seven. As he says ‘I was surrounded by unreliable adults [who] created a very abusive situation that no child should have to live through.’ Not surprising then, when offered guidance and mentorship from older gay men, several of whom he did not have sex with, he willingly accepted their invitations to parties and their guidance on his future as he “went from parents I’ve never had to parents I had had in the gay community.” Finding his place in a community early seems to have been a positive factor in Joseph’s life. Joseph was in a relationship for 19 years before marrying Rex, and since the ending of that relationship, came to realise its highly abusive nature. When it was over, he was left with feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, factors he himself explains caused him to jump into the next abusive marriage with Rex. Rex’s abuse includes classic examples of financial and psychological abuse through stealing from the co-­ owned business to verbal abuse, vicious texts, and highly abusive voicemails. One question often asked is why victims wait so long to leave the relationship. Joseph points out that the “thing about being queer is that we are really good at concealing.”

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He describes the levels of shame placed upon him as a gay, nonbinary, HIV positive person and his reluctance to add publicly that “I live with insidious trauma and abuse.” Abuse in a same sex context cannot be viewed as equivalent to that in CIS heteronormative situations. Joseph provides good evidence for this when he relates his experiences with the first pair of police officers who “didn’t have a fucking clue” about how to deal with abuse happening between two men and did not seem to want to know either: “It was for sure homophobia. I just felt it. I knew it.” This relates to Rumney’s study of police officers’ attitudes towards gay men reporting violence which include ‘highly questionable assumptions regarding credibility, trauma, and truthfulness.’ The incident also reinforces the point made by Doug and Michele – that they can sense homophobia at work, even when it is not explicit. This is not only an example of the need for culturally sensitive training, but also, for a restructuring of services. Ristock (2003, p. 331) points out that you cannot depend on ‘heterosexual gender-based frameworks for explaining abusive same-sex relationships,’ and this is evident when Joseph commented on the support he received as a domestic abuse survivor: “they haven’t got a fucking clue.” There is a clear need, as Joseph suggests, for practitioners to have knowledge of how Joseph, as a gay non-binary person, experiences the world. As Gurm et al. (2020, Ch. 20) argue, “practitioners cannot and should not rely on frameworks of understanding and practice that are based on heterosexual gender relations when trying to understand and provide services to those who are/have been in non-heterosexual relationships that were abusive.” Throughout the narrative, Joseph acknowledges his own role in the abusive exchanges relating it to a history of being “so socialized into living with insidious abuse and trauma” as a queer person. He also points out that many of the queer community also carry these experiences. As such, in abusive situations the victim may respond in ways that are dysfunctional, unhelpful, and only serve to elevate the drama. Joseph forgave Rex because “he’s got his shit too…He was a Mormon boy, out at school when he was 15 in the 80s because he wasn’t savvy enough to keep it to himself. Can you imagine?” He adds that “In the queer community, many of us have experienced trauma, and many of us have responded to that in dysfunctional ways.” The research shows that GSM individuals are indeed more likely to have suffered previous trauma and are at increased risk of mental illness (Brotman et al., 2003; Cabaj & Stein, 1996). They are more likely to be depressed (Frederiksen-­ Goldsen et al., 2013), and to have abused drugs and alcohol (Choi & Meyer, 2016). As Cooks-Daniel (2017, p. 543) has suggested, “the history of social and interpersonal discrimination, violence, and trauma that LGBT elders have experienced simply adds to the ways in which they can be threatened or manipulated by abusers.” Though Joseph’s friends question his decision to continue his relationship with his abuser, he challenges their advice, as he points out that dysfunction is more prevalent in homosexual relationships and must therefore be confronted, since it cannot be avoided. The lessons from this narrative are that same sex relationships are not the same as heterosexual relationships: the history of trauma brought to the relationship; the

References

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dynamics within and the lived experiences within same sex relationships may be much like heterosexual ones but they differ enough to require services and practices that, as Joseph puts it, ‘understand the microcosm.’ The term queer has been used to describe not only same-sex relationships and gender fluidity, but also a theoretical approach that questions our dearest assumptions. Joseph’s story can be read as queer in this sense, in that it invites us to question commonly held precepts – that queer relationships are much the same as heterosexual ones, that young queers will most certainly be harmed by sexual friendships with older people, and that choosing to maintain a relationship with someone who has acted abusively will always lead to disaster.

References Brotman, S., Ryan, B., & Cormier, R. (2003). The health and social service needs of gay and lesbian elders and their families in Canada. The Gerontologist, 43(2), 192–202. https://doi. org/10.1093/geront/43.2.192 Cabaj, R. P., & Stein, T. S. (Eds.). (1996). Textbook of homosexuality and mental health. American Psychiatric Association. Choi, S. K., & Meyer, I. H. (2016). LGBT aging: A review of research findings, needs, and policy implications. The Williams Institute. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-­content/ uploads/LGBT-­Aging-­Aug-­2016.pd Cook-Daniels, L. (2017). Coping with abuse inside the family and out: LGBT and/or male victims of elder abuse. In X. Dong (Ed.), Elder abuse: Research, practice and policy (pp. 541–553). Springer. Frederiksen-Goldsen, K.  I., Kim, H.-J., Barkan, S.  E., Muraco, A., & Hoy-Ellis, C.  P. (2013). Health disparities among lesbian, gay, and bisexual older adults: Results from a population-­ based study. American Journal of Public Health, 103(10), 1802–1809. https://doi.org/10.2105/ AJPH.2012.301110 Gurm, B., Salgado, G., Marchbank, J., & Early, S.  D. (2020). Making sense of a global pandemic: Relationship violence & working together towards a violence free society. Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Halkitis, P.  N., LoSchiavo, C., Martino, R.  J., De La Cruz, B.  M., Stults, C.  B., & Krause, K. D. (2021). Age of sexual debut among young gay-identified sexual minority men: The P18 Cohort Study. The Journal of Sex Research, 58(5), 573–580. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022449 9.2020.1783505 Ristock, J. L. (2003). Exploring dynamics of abusive lesbian relationships: Preliminary analysis of a multisite, qualitative study. American Journal of Community Psychology, 31(3–4), 329–341. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023971006882

Chapter 10

Pam’s Story: Partner Abuse

10.1 Introduction to Pam’s Story Pam was 72  years old at the time of writing. She began living with her abuser, Meera, and experienced escalating financial and psychological abuse about 8 months later. This abuse continued and escalated over a number of years.

10.1.1 I’ll Pay the Rent “You MUST pay the rent, you MUST pay the rent, you MUST Villain pay the rent today!” (napkin as moustache, fiendish voice):   Victim: “I CAN’T pay the rent, I CAN’T pay the rent, I CAN’T pay the rent today.” Villain: “You MUST pay the rent, you MUST pay the rent, you MUST pay the rent today!” Victim: “I CAN’T pay the rent, I CAN’T pay the rent, I CAN’T pay the rent today.” Hero “I’ll pay the rent!” (napkin as bow tie, DudleyDo-Right voice): I started going to bed with women at 22, and by age 26 I realized I could make a life full-time with women. I’m currently 72 years old.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_10

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I grew up in an abusive family. Life looked glamorous from outside the home. My fashionable mother was known for her good looks and often had her photo in the newspapers. Behind closed doors, she was a battered, wife – punched, dragged out of the bathtub dripping wet and shoved outdoors naked at 40 below zero. She was ashamed of being beaten and hid her bruises with pancake makeup. My parents were as good looking as movie stars  – but the reality was ugly. My narcissistic mother couldn’t bear pity, so ignoring the effects of witnessing violence on her three children, she covered it up. My father often shashed her clothes off with a knife and slammed her head through drywall. He could take an undarned sock and turn it into a catastrophe worthy of extreme punishment. I was a caretaker for my mother from a young age: parentified. As a child, I’d say, “Leave him. I’m seven, I’m strong. I can look after you.” My mother would shake and say, “No. He’ll get a gun and kill us all.” So instead, I did my best to take care of mother and my two young brothers. I was in charge of keeping my mom alive. I set up a secret savings account for her when I was 14, so that she had access to money without my father’s knowledge. I closed that account only recently, just before my mother’s death. Her death and strange betrayal that I won’t describe here has rearranged my molecules somehow. A painful awareness of being deeply unloved has bubbled to the surface… feelings hard to fathom. Here’s a multi-layered example from 60  years ago  – a story I only recently became willing to remember. When I was 11, I was hanging out with my male cousin who taught judo. He said, “Let me show you this new martial arts hold.” I was cautious, “Okay, but don’t you throw me or flip me. I don’t want that.” He said, “Oh. I’ll just show you the hold.” The next thing – whoosh! I was smashed down on the floor. My cousin claimed he hadn’t meant to throw me, that it was an accident. He said if anyone found out, he would lose his job teaching at the YMCA. My collarbone was broken. I was in a shoulder brace for months. My mother covered it up, “Don’t tell doctors. Don’t tell anyone that your cousin flipped you.” I learned it was okay for a relative to hurt me, but it wasn’t okay for me to talk about it. I had the power to ruin his reputation. It was my job to hide the damage. I do understand that those early experiences – being expected to be strong, to keep quiet, be the family fixer, to act as a parent, to save the others, to cover up the effects of violence – all laid the groundwork that lhad me feeling very competent yet so often attracting unhealthy relationships. It’s subtle. I did not learn how to look after my own self – that never entered my awareness. I sought love by mightily looking after others. I’ve spent thousands of dollars and hours on counselling, psychologists, excellent therapists, support groups and done all kinds of personal growth workshops – and still got myself into sick relationships. I did seek professional help frequently over the years. But that core experience, being raised by narcissistic parents in a violent home, left me highly capable, sure of myself, yet aching, vulnerable and willing to make any sacrifice in order to be loved. And I learned through my narcissistic mother that I deserved contempt if I didn’t do it right.

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Due to violent family life, I ran away from home at 17. Two years later, one of my two brothers shot himself. He committed suicide at 16 because he was bullied at school and had no one to stand up for him. I would have done the same thing if I had not left. *** I still feel ashamed to admit I had never experienced what a healthy relationship felt like. In those days, I did not know. Looking back, it’s obvious my first girlfriends were broken-wing women that I could support and rehabilitate – one was on welfare, others had low-paying jobs. I felt in control as I helped several go back to university or develop new careers. I flourished in a highly paid career all along. I’d learned in childhood that I’d be safe or loved if only I was a good enough caretaker. Thus, I attracted a series of unhealthy relationships. One of my earliest exes went to court for burning down my house in retaliation for a poem I’d written – it angered her. My guilt at causing her to set fire to my house was so awful that I persuaded friends to serve as character witnesses at her trial. I felt so guilty that I used my insurance money to open a business for her. People guffaw when they hear this story now, but you can’t imagine how deficient I felt in my heart. Because of me, the poor thing had a criminal record for setting fire so she could not get a job. [Please don’t laugh. Later I did indeed seek extensive therapy.] *** Recounting family history is one way of explaining and of being accountable for my blind participation in abusive relationships. My experience with Meera is particularly shocking. Despite my baked-in tendency to look after others, when I met Meera, I was in good shape financially and emotionally. I believed I’d effectively healed from all the therapy I had done. I’d just sold my house and had more than quarter of a million cash (this was many years ago), plus a job with a high-powered salary. Meera had come from another country and just qualified as both an MD and a psychiatrist in Ontario. When we met, she looked dowdy with badly cut hair and ugly glasses, but with my guidance, she soon became beautiful. With a different hair style, contact lenses, and fashionable clothing, Meera turned heads wherever we went. I was thrilled to have helped geeky Meera blossom. She had no friends when I met her. I was a millionaire when it came to life-long friends. I soon helped Meera become her true sexy, powerful self. She nestled into me and told parents and friends how she loved being supported by me. I felt important. Little did I know back then that nothing that feels more captivating, more reassuring, than being loved by a psychopathic psychiatrist with an agenda. I was deeply in love and resolved to do anything she asked in the relationship – she was the self-described expert. Within a few months of meeting each other, we were signing powers of attorney and making wills naming each other as beneficiary. She began taking control of my bank savings, “so we could build our investment together.” I recall saying, “Yikes! I’ve known you only six months and I’m naming you as sole beneficiary in my will. This is like the beginning of a horror novel where the person’s only known their lover briefly and is already signing all their assets over…ha ha ha! Good thing we trust each other so deeply.”

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How ironic. [Also, reading what I’ve written above leaves me feeling sickly humiliated.] My financial and psychological unraveling began early in our relationship, when Meera broke into tears saying that her traditional parents would never believe I loved her for her – they felt partners were only with Meera to take her assets. I reassured Meera, “Don’t worry. I have more money than you, especially with your recent graduation and school debt. I’ve just sold my house for lots of cash. So your parents will see that not only am I not going to take YOUR money, I’ll given you all of mine.” Meera sobbed. “You don’t understand. My engineer brother doesn’t dare get married because my parents say a wife will be a ‘rice bucket’ – someone who eats up resources.” “In that case,” I said, “we’ll show them I earn more money than you right now, and that I’ve signed over all my life savings to you. Then they’ll know I love you.” *** After my painful childhood, I longed for a committed, intimate relationship, and Meera said everything that I wanted to hear: She told me people in her culture knew how to keep relationships going, divorces were rare, that she loved me absolutely, and that together we were unbreakable; we were unique. As a psychiatrist, she had an uncanny skill of sizing people up and telling them exactly what they wanted to hear–- she charmed everyone. One key factor is that she made me promise that I would never have any intimacy with others greater than the intimacy we shared, and to never spend a night apart. We’d be the role model for lesbian relationships. She said that her profession as a psychiatrist made her an expert in emotional intimacy – and with a mischievous, sexy giggle, added that if I did everything she asked, we’d be together forever. Yes. I was smitten. Without realizing, I’d agreed to give up privacy and autonomy, and dissolve all my boundaries. Meera had a very high IQ, soared to the top of her profession, earned four hundred thousand dollars a year and worked on the side as a highly-paid expert witness for law firms. We traveled the world including to India, her homeland. I loved her blindly. Everything we did was together. She became drastically upset if I didn’t share every conversation with a friend. If I had a work conference, Meera would close her practice and accompany me. We were rarely apart. Our symbol was a ginko leaf, two parts in one. For many years, we lived a glamorous existence. I loved taking care of her, helping her feel loved and sexy. Sometimes, she’d cry and say, “At work I have to make tough decisions, but with you, I can be my tender self, my real self. You’re so important to me. I need you to protect me.” Meera acted so vulnerable, my heart burst open. Looking back, there were warning signs. She had no friends when we met (she claimed she’d been too busy in school). In the month I retired, in our last 18 months together, she suddenly revealed that she was stealing from the hospital where worked, through brazen overbilling and the manipulation of patient files. Meera tried to separate me from my mother (which made sense at the time, given my family history). After I left her, Meera’s cousins told me Meera had stolen their toys when they were kids and dismantled their dolls. When parents came in the room to see why the kids were crying, Meera would have quickly reattached the dolls’ arms and the crying kids were not believed.

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*** Sometimes Meera cried because I had a pension to look forward to, and she didn’t. I hated to see her so upset so of course, I cooperatively signed over half my pension to her (which she will begin collecting upon my death). ‘We’(actually ‘she’) had invested my quarter million dollars in real estate and soon amassed several rental properties. Foolishly I let my salary cover our living and vacation expenses while Meera allocated her income to the mortgage payments. Also, Meera said our financial empire and tax situation had become so complex, we should use only her accountant to keep track of it all. She became angry when I wanted to handle my own income tax returns. Soon all our rental properties were held inside Meera’s medical corporation for ‘tax purposes.’ Meera said her accountant would add my name to the corporation but there was always some complication and it never happened. I trusted Meera. I felt loved, cared for, so vital. Meera would cling to me, verbally reassuring me how important I was to her. We were “together forever.” What could possibly get in the way? We have a “unique, intimate relationship that no one else could ever understand,” Meera whispered. “We’re special.” Just a few years into our relationship, Meera began encouraging me to retire early. She promised in front of 25 friends at a party that if I signed over half my pension (if I took the Joint & Last Survivor option), she would buy me an annuity to make up the difference in pension amounts. We toasted her generosity at the party. I knew I was being coerced to give up half my pension to prove my love, to look after her with the promise of the annuity. I did quit my career and signed the retirement papers giving Meera half my pension after my death. Because she was over a decade younger, I took a massive actuarial hit. Little did I know what was to come. The annuity never materialized. When I dared to ask where it was. Meera airily announced annuities were too expensive. A shock: as soon as my first monthly pension cheque arrived, reality changed. It is hard to describe, even harder to believe what happened next. Like the rubber mask that’s ripped off in a horror movie, my beloved Meera disappeared. I found myself dealing with a menacing lizard. Meera became another person overnight. She browbeat me and complained for hours. She wanted complete control over me. I felt terrified. I had no privacy at home, not even a locking drawer. My phone calls were monitored. I’d entered another dimension. Meera suddenly accused me of “acting entitled” and tried to keep me awake all night talking at me. She accused me of hiding money from my salary. It was not true. Meanwhile by now Meera had five million cash dollars in her corporate account plus the real estate holdings. Worst of all, once I retired, Meera announced that she was stealing from the hospital where she worked and was cheating the medical system. I can’t share the details here – it feels too risky. When I told her to stop stealing, Meera got angry. Her eyes turned black and glittered. “You better keep your mouth shut because if the Ontario Billing Integrity department catches the over-billing, they’ll claw back money from my corporation, and that includes you losing your life savings.”

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Overnight I learned I was living with a thief. A doctor ripping off the medical system. I had no savings left and a big decision to make. I knew I couldn’t live with a thief. After all this time, Meera’s very traditional, conservative parents slowly began to accept our relationship. I loved them. I felt they loved me back. However, an awful dynamic developed that I didn’t recognize at the time. Whenever her parents called, Meera would refuse to take the phone. She would whisper to me that she was tired from being a boss at work and she detested dealing with her tedious, slow mother. Could I please tell them she wasn’t home? I knew how much her parents loved her, so I would cajole her to take the call. The parents could hear me saying, “Come on Meera, talk to them just for a few minutes. You can do it.” It was not until after our relationship ended that her dad revealed in anger how much I’d hurt him. He thought I was limiting his daughter’s talk time to “just a few minutes.” Meera had set this up for her parents to resent me. The dad was choking back tears, saying I’d cut him off from his daughter. To this day, I feel sad about this. After I left the relationship, there were dozens of these kinds of instances that bubbled up. where Meera had been calculating and strategic. She brilliantly isolated me from so many different people and organizations. Fortunately, I had several friends who saw through Meera’s peculiar insistence on secrecy and need to control me. *** Once I retired, Meera became increasingly possessive. I had joined a well-known art collective and Meera hated the fact that I was doing this on my own. She started complaining that if she “didn’t have to keep working to support us,” she’d be taking art classes too. A last point I’ll mention is her attempt to control my access to medical care. My benefits plan ended after I retired, and when I announced that I was getting a broken crown repaired at the dentist, Meera raised her eyebrows and said we needed to discuss these kinds of expenditures. Were they necessary? Even in my nasty family-­ of-­origin, dental care was a given. What had I got myself into? As my relationship with Meera deteriorated over the next few months, I realized I had no private space in our big house. Using vacation absence as an excuse, Meera locked up all my handwritten journals in her filing cabinets and wouldn’t give them back to me. She monitored what I wrote. She confiscated my photos and travel writing. Other things I valued began to disappear - diamond jewelry, a briefcase, my mother’s will, a camera tripod, my birth certificate. I buried myself between blind trust and fear of upsetting her. Meera would lie awake beside me in bed at night. I’d open my eyes and find her just staring at my face. She’d begin complaining for hours, accusing me of not loving her, of having ‘emotional’ affairs because I didn’t disclose private chats with friends. I later found out that she had recorded my phone calls and hacked into my computer. She’d throw screaming fits if I went out with a pal while she was at work. She left angry notes taped to the mirror, “You’ve been out of the house for 4.5 hours.” Odd, menacing, accusatory notes. I saved at least four of them at a friend’s place – any of the earlier notes I tried to store at home just disappeared. My friends were worried for me. They were aghast I’d signed over half my pension and urged me to seek legal advice. However, I had so few savings that I was too afraid.

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I’d suddenly learned she was a thief, yet I’d signed everything into her corporation. Friends urged me to seek legal advice, but I was so afraid of Meera that I didn’t dare give my name to any law office. Meera was often hired by members of a powerful lawyers’ association and threatened that she’d find out if I’d talked to a lawyer because of her professional network. Two different lawyers I tried to interview understandably asked me to leave their offices because I was too afraid to give my name. I was coming apart mentally. I could not keep living with an admitted thief, but I had no resources. I no longer even had a house in my name. Life at home was horrible. I desperately tried to get us couples’ counselling but Meera refused. When I pointed out that the Ontario Medical Association offered marital counselling to physicians and their families, Meera screamed that I would ruin her reputation as a psychiatrist. I was desperate. A free counsellor at a battered women’s shelter explained that having one’s partner refuse therapy is an indication of being in an abusive relationship. This sounds so ridiculous now, but I loved Meera so deeply, I thought I could get us fixed. The medical association therapy was no help. If there was one question I wish the physician had asked me in therapy, it would be, “What are you afraid to tell us Pam? What are you not saying?” I was so afraid of Meera, the guttural, hissing lizard persona that emerged so abruptly, I could not tell the medical association psychiatrist that Meera was stealing from the medical system and from me. Meera tried to tell the psychiatrist that I was taking anti-psychotic medication so was untrustworthy. Thankfully, the therapist laughed at her. That was one moment out of ten free sessions that I felt supported. Earlier a different counsellor said she would gladly see me but “would not touch Meera with a barge pole.” She advised me to get us to a registered psychologist. People were afraid of Meera. Friends told me they also feared Meera could harm me and do it so cleverly she would never be discovered. I was used to discounting abuse, so those concerns evaporated. My forever relationship was collapsing. Desperately I was trying to save it. *** I finally found a lawyer that specialized in mediation. I still foolishly believed Meera and I could resolve our problems and fairly divide our assets so at least I had my house back in my own name, and we’d continue the relationship. Meera ran circles around the mediator. I felt even more helpless after I’d paid what was left of my savings as a retainer and the mediator announced, after draining the account, that she wasn’t willing to face Meera in court. What a letdown. Meera hired high-profile lawyers who intimidated mine to the point where they withdrew from my case. Another wouldn’t take me on as a client. I went to battered women’s support association, and there was nothing they could do. Meera manipulated every situation to her advantage. She was brilliant. Telling this story here is still frightening for me. I am strong and intelligent but I was so blind to what was happening. Even in recounting this experience, I fear she will come after me. I am afraid. She will stop at nothing. As I was talking about my escalating difficulties with Meera to a friend, he commented, “This is terrible. Meera won’t stop until she crushes you.” It finally sank in.

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I had to step off the cliff and leave, even without any resources. I arranged for friends to be in the house as I gathered items in a suitcase and left the house. I remember how Meera blanched when she realized I was actually leaving. I was close to penniless when I got out. I could not live with a thief. Meera had millions of dollars and our real estate investments - plus the other half of my monthly pension that she’d collect after my death. *** Epilogue. I am accountable for what I allowed to happen. I am not a victim. Be assured I am financially okay today. Under the threat of a lawsuit that would have exposed her thefts, Meera quickly signed an offer for settlement. I got my life savings back. But what a journey to love so blindly. When our relationship began, I was like a happy cow frolicking in a pasture. The cow had green grass and blue sky, and the farmer was so attentive. However, cows don’t understand the whole picture  – the underlying arrangement, the surprise ending. And so it was, I found myself tied up by my hooves, hanging upside down on a moving metal conveyor belt, clack, clack, clack, heading relentlessly towards the slaughterhouse. The beloved farmer stroked my neck, right over the jugular vein, reassuring me, “There, there, don’t worry little cow. Everything’s okay. I’ll love you forever. There, there. I’ll look after you.

10.2 Discussion A climate of structural violence, built on heteronormativity, heterosexism and sexual stigma shapes the lives of gender and sexually diverse (GSD) persons. This reality creates the social conditions within which interpersonal and intimate partner relationships are established, and within which domestic violence can occur. This article argues that a climate of structural violence against GSD persons creates specific risk factors for domestic violence victimization and unique barriers to receiving safe, appropriate and accessible services and supports act as obstacles to healthy intimate relationships. We purport that GSD persons experience additional risk factors such as heteronormativity, heterosexism, sexual stigma; traditional gender and sexuality norms; early stigma and homophobic harassment; social exclusion and isolation; and lack of appropriate domestic violence prevention services and supports which enhance the risk for domestic violence within GSD intimate relationships and limits the potential of prevention efforts. They emphasize that domestic violence will not be eradicated using a solely heteronormative interventionist approach and that the inclusion of a primary prevention approach that takes account of these additional risk factors is necessary to stop the violence before it starts. (Lorenzetti et al., 2017, p. 175)

Pam’s story shares many similarities with those told by heterosexual individuals who have been abused by their partners. Meera is younger than Pam, very attractive, and very smart. She began to execute a well-thought-out plan to steal Pam’s money only 8 months into the relationship, and it seems likely that this was her goal from the very beginning. Emotionally manipulative, she uses dramatic displays of

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passion, rage, and grief to control Pam’s behaviour, alternately flattering her and telling her how much she loves and needs her and then exhibiting rage and anguish to get her own way, urging Pam to sign over her investments and her pension to prove how much she loves her. For her part, Pam was “blinded by love” and thus unaware of some early warning signs, though in retrospect she noticed that Meera had no friends, tried to separate her from her mother, and became secretive about revealing her address, so it was hard for them to make social connections. Over a period of years, she succeeded, little by little, in separating Pam from her savings, her family, her friends, and half her pension. Ultimately, Pam became so afraid of Meera that with the help of her remaining friends, she walked away from the relationship with very little. This deep fear remained with Pam at the time of her involvement in the Indigo Project. Understandably, she was tentative about being involved and needed a great deal of reassurance that her identity, and that of Meera, would remain confidential. She told Robson that, “Telling this story here is still very frightening for me. I fear that she will come after me. It is hard to describe how terrified I had become of her and still am. I realized that she would stop at nothing.” Pam’s story is a classic example of financial exploitation by a younger partner. As she suggests in her narrative, her mother’s narcissism and her father’s violence left her particularly vulnerable to women she “had to support and rehabilitate.” Love made her blind, and so although Pam is an educated and intelligent activist and professional, highly regarded in her community, she failed to see through Meera’s schemes. It was only looking back that she realized how calculated her actions had been. As she said in one of her interviews, “It was like a Perrier bottle with all these little bubbles arising out of the sand or the muck as I put things together.” Her story raises interesting questions, which we shall take up in our final chapter. Given that the same sex dating pool is smaller than its heterosexual counterpart, might it be that those in same sex couples – particularly women, who are culturally conditioned to seek stable monogamies – might endure abuse more compliantly? Meera talks of her dream “to be a model of a loving lesbian relationship.” Read this way, Pam’s story can be seen as a struggle to achieve romantic perfection in a world that often does not accept same sex couples. Another distinctive feature is Meera’s conservative family and Pam’s attempt to reassure them that her intentions are honourable. Though the family are suspicious even when their heterosexual child becomes romantically involved, it seems likely that their suspicion was heightened by their conservative views of homosexual relationships. Indeed, the first step on Pam’s road to financial exploitation is taken in order to reassure them of her honourable intentions.

Reference Lorenzetti, L., Wells, L., Logie, C., & Callaghan, T. (2017). Understanding and preventing domestic violence in the lives of gender and sexually diverse persons. The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 26(3), 175–185. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhs.2016-­0007

Chapter 11

Eleven Flygirl’s Story: Abuse by Other Lesbians

11.1 Introduction Flygirl was 63 years old at the time of writing, living with relapsing, remitting MS, a disease that affects the myelin sheath surrounding the nerve fibres in the central nervous system, causing a range of symptoms that can include, among others, fatigue, weakness, vision problems, cognitive and emotional changes, and loss of balance. As her narrative suggests, she was an idealist and an activist for the rights of women and lesbians for many years, but later became disenchanted with the lesbian community.

11.1.1 It’s Our Dirty Secret I am a lesbian. I started to have inklings that this was the case when I was a teenager, but I repressed them, of course, because I was a Christian, and Christians don’t do that. However, when I went to university, I had a very intense friendship with a woman whom I had known since I was a child. She was a very talented artist, though she was tormented. I was really in love with her and worked up the courage to tell her so, but she was not willing to pursue that option with me. She was young and also traumatized. I don’t know what exactly happened to her in her childhood, but I’m guessing she was sexually abused – I never knew the details. We had a very, very strong bond. Eventually, she committed suicide in 1986, and that was just devestaing. I made a film about her later, about what happened to her and about what happened to me when I came out to my family, about homophobia. I confided to my eldest sister that I thought I was gay, and she told me it was disgusting, then immediately told my mother. She did that because she knew my mother would prevent me from telling my father. It was a great big drama for my © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_11

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drama queen sister who has to have every eye in the room on her all the time. She’ll say whatever terrible things she needs to get attention – whether homophobic, racist, or disablist. She doesn’t care whom she offends, so long as she’s the center of attention. My mother disowned me over the phone and told me how ashamed she was of me. She said that she only had two daughters now. It was very dramatic and painful. I thought, All right. Well then. Screw you all. I moved to BC and didn’t go home for 3 years. I had no contact with them. My father kept asking, What the hell is going on? We haven’t heard from you. We haven’t seen you. It was at least 3 years later that I finally went home. My mother had warmed up somewhat since the initial drama of my coming out, but only so long as I didn’t talk about being a lesbian. As long as I kept my mouth shut, she tolerated me. My father was a Navy man and smoking was just what men did in the 40s, and eventually, he developed lung cancer. We had a wonderful United Church minister who ministered to him during his final years of life and supported not just my father, but our whole family. My second sister suggested that I talk to the minister when I came home to see Dad, just for some emotional support and to get through my father’s illness. I met the minister and she and I went for a little walk to have a talk about my dying dad, and I said, “So Reverend, why did you hop back in the closet?” She said, “Is it that obvious?” “Do bears shit in the bush?” I asked her. “Come on! It’s obvious to me!” We ended up having a long conversation about why she went in the closet, her failed marriage and so forth. We really bonded she and I, but for reasons other than she had expected! It was a very interesting and ironic turnaround. Nonetheless, she was very good to my parents, and I was very grateful to her for that. I thought about telling my mother that the minister was also a lesbian, but it would have really hurt her, and my father had died, and of course, we were all enveloped in the drama of that. Also, my parents and sisters adored and respected her, so I didn’t want to tarnish her reputation. I am cynical these days, and I ‘retired’ from romance over a decade ago – not that I have women lining up! The exceptions are two relationships that I had with women whom I remain friends with, even after many years. All of my other relationships were screwed up and abusive in one way or another. Usually I was the caretaker – the one who kept the house clean and put food on the table. As I look back at those relationships now, I realize that I was young and naive, and I was really exploited by women who just wanted to be taken care of. In my last major relationship, I was certainly a 24/7 unpaid caretaker in every single way. My partner at the time was living in a beautiful big loft in an underground community of artists, but the owner got wind of it and kicked everybody out. Suddenly she was homeless. She was also jobless, and then she was diagnosed with MS. I told her to come and live with me, and said I’d take care of her. Her illness advanced very quickly and pretty soon, I recognized I couldn’t really give her everything that she needed. We lived together for about 5 years, and by the end of that

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time, she was insane. This can happen with MS (and that’s a prospect that I find terrifying). I was also having symptoms of MS. I was seeing that my partner was dropping things, and I was dropping things. We were both tripping and falling. I was catching her and falling and hurting myself. In the end, I went to our doctor and I said, “Listen. I think I have MS. I want you to schedule an MRI.” I asked more than once and finally my doctor said, “You know, when you’re taking care of somebody who’s ill, it’s stressful and you can feel resentful, and then eventually you start to imagine that you’re having the same symptoms. You don’t have Ms. You’re making it up to get attention.” She refused to schedule an MRI. I went hiking soon after with some friends, on dangerous mountain paths. It was an overnight trip, and the next day, I couldn’t stand up. I had to come down the mountain on my backside with one friend in front and another behind. I was able to get in to see my doctor again. I said, “Look at me! This is MS.” And she said, “Take your pointer finger and touch your nose.” I couldn’t do it. I had no coordination at all. My diagnostic MRI showed that I had had MS for 10 or 15 years, maybe 20. I’m fortunate to have a fairly mild version of relapsing remitting MS and I take good care of myself. MS is a multifactorial disease, affected by environment, contaminants, trauma (emotional and physical) and genetics. I was raised in the MS capital of Canada. Also, there’s so much industrial contamination in Canada from 150 years of industry such as logging and mining. All that garbage went into the Great Lakes, and that’s the water I swam in and drank unfiltered. MS runs in families, and I have it on both sides, and yet my siblings and even my parents never got it. They just thought when I would come home to visit and had to lie down for a nap at three o’clock, that I was lazy and didn’t want to make dinner. They’re also really homophobic, so already I’m the weirdo of the family, and now I’ve got this thing, this disease that gets me right off the hook for doing housework and making dinner and cleaning up. They just think I blow it up into something bigger than it is. They don’t want to hear anything about my experience as someone with MS, and certainly not from someone who is a lesbian. After my diagnosis, many people, unconsciously or consciously, were just repelled by me, as if it were contagious. When I told one woman that I had MS, she said, “You’re cursed!” Then she turned around and walked away. I never heard from her again. People were afraid of me. I was out of work when I was diagnosed in 1998, and I had to go to social services to claim welfare. I told the intake officer that my partner had MS, and that I’d been taking care of her for years, and then I was also just diagnosed with MS. I said that I had no resources and needed financial help. He said, “I didn’t know MS was a sexually transmitted disease.” I had to do a lot of explaining about what MS is to healthcare providers to social services. I couldn’t believe the level of ignorance. I’m honest, I’m reliable. I’m generous. I’m the one people call when they’re in a crisis. During my whole life as an out lesbian, it’s always been that way. When someone has a heartbreak, or someone needs a place to stay, I’m the hotel. That’s how I was raised in Northern Ontario. It’s what you do. When people are hungry,

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you feed them, and when people need a place to stay you house them. Those were fundamental values that I was raised to believe in. I’ve always done it in the lesbian community. When I came back to the city in 2001, after having several MS relapses during a very stressful job, I was really messed up, physically ill and weak. I wanted one on one time with people. I don’t do well in large groups, so I’ve never been a party gal. I invited people over for dinner one by one and told them some of what I had experienced in the North. Of course, they didn’t get it, because they’re all white women with not a clue about First Nations politics or residential schools, so they didn’t understand my activism in those communities, or the struggles I’d had in my work. I spent a year making dinner for people, with the expectation of reciprocity, but it never happened. I ended up ill and flat broke and wondering what was wrong with that picture. As my lesbian community turned their backs on me and walked away, I received an invitation from a woman who wanted to develop a support group for women with disabilities. That was the hook for me, and I answered her call. She wanted to make a video about the abuse she had experienced, and I helped her by doing all of her camera work. I was new to the Coop where I live, and I needed a house sitter because I didn’t feel like my things were safe here. For that reason, I invited her and her partner to house sit for me for a month while I was away visiting my fragile mother. When I got home, I found that they had robbed me. She had eaten every single crumb of food in my house. There was nothing left. And then she complained that it wasn’t vegan! They stole my disability equipment, like my cane, my walker, my wheelchair, everything. They also went through a walk-in closet and stole a bunch of my Arctic carvings as well. I didn’t find that out until much later. But they were the only people in my apartment, and they’re the only ones who could have done it. Nobody else had a key. I was stunned that they took my health care equipment, but I couldn’t tell her to get lost because I needed it back. I felt held hostage by this expensive equipment that I needed and couldn’t replace, so I carried on working and volunteering with her. I gave her a lot of information about video production and shared my many contacts. I continued to do a lot of shooting for her, as she bamboozled her way through various grant programs and community agencies, landing a big pile of money to do this feature length project about her abuse by her mother. The film came out. I watched it and found that I wasn’t even mentioned in the credits, after working on this project for 2 years and doing virtually all of the camerawork. A few years later, I did get my healthcare equipment back. I came home 1 day, and it was sitting in my living room. I think it was the partner of my abuser who did that. Then I changed the lock. Also, that woman made a pass at me once. She was here in my apartment and she made a pass at me. I said “What the hell are you doing? You’re madly in love with your partner, aren’t you?” She said, “Well, yeah, but I have affairs.” “Well you don’t with me honey,” I told her. “Get the hell out of my house!” I’ve come to realize that the lesbian community is extremely superficial. We like to think that we’re sisters, and we support each other through thick and thin, but

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really, this isn’t true. Largely, lesbians are superficial, they want to get laid, and they want to have fun. Being lesbian is just about sex for them. All the high and mighty politics in the 1960s women’s movement, we speak those words, but we don’t live them by them. People just walk under the lesbian banner and exploit whomever they feel like exploiting under this guise of sisterhood, which is a big lie. It’s just a ruse. It allows abusers to reel in suckers by inviting them to let their guard down under this idealistic banner of sisterhood, which is total bullshit. I am so disillusioned with feminism and sisterhood in the lesbian community, because so many people are just selfish abusers who will exploit anyone to get whatever they want. At this point in my life, I look around and I think of all the people that I have supported through health crises, family crises, deaths and there’s not one of them that I could count on. None of them. And I feel utterly abandoned by a group of people who I believed was my community. I think in part this is because the lesbian community has been so isolated, and so incestuous. So many women have been traumatized by their upbringing, by their families, by society. There are a lot of really screwed up women who have not resolved their many issues, and those issues are like a fungus growing inside them, which explodes on out into the community and spreads. We like to think that we have moral principles, but we don’t. We’ve invented this on paper profile of lesbians as good healthy people, but we are so sick, in my view because of that aggregation of trauma, and the fact that we’re still struggling just to be alive, to not get beaten up by the cops or some guy in the street or our families We walk around with a lot of trauma, and it really has messed with people’s moral sensibilities – if they ever had them. I grew up with a really strong moral sensibility as a Christian, which is problematic in its own way. I’m not a Christian anymore, but that was the universe that I was taught to believe in, and it really shaped me, but some of the values are so messed up. Women are at the bottom of the pit, sinners, evil, everything that’s bad, but ultimately, women are responsible for taking care of everybody and taking on all the responsibility. That’s the part I got. Taking on the responsibility and taking care of people is deeply ingrained in me. And it sucks. I just hate that. But it’s so deep inside me, I have a really hard time casting it off. It’s so deeply ingrained. I wouldn’t ever talk openly about my disillusionment with lesbian culture. It’s our dirty secret. We like to tell the world we’re wonderful because we need the world to think that we’re wonderful, but we’re not. We’re shitheads most of the time to each other and to ourselves in our drug and alcohol abuse. In the 80s, a number of lesbians I knew decided to have children, and they were just horrible parents. When I was such a wreck with my illness, I thought my life was over. I was on a medication that made me very depressed. Initially, what prevented me from being self-destructive was that was that my mother was very, very ill. And I could not imagine doing that to her. It would have been such a blow. In addition, I got a lead to a counselor with a local Jewish association. I followed up and I met this lovely woman who was so kind. She met with me at a very affordable rate for maybe six sessions and really helped me turn around. She really gave me perspective and hope, and I’m very grateful. It sheds light on the importance of structured support for people with disabilities and people who identify as minorities. It was a lifeline.

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After that experience, I stumbled onto another organization that was fundamental in my recovery, and that was an arts collective for elders. It was not all rosy. It was pretty tough, especially initially, because people were annoyed that I was younger than them. There’s also a class disparity in that group. Some people have money, and some people like me, have not. Periodically, there have been members who have tried to have me expelled because I’m younger than them and some are jealous about the attention that one of my pieces got in the media. And they’ve got their cliques. That’s the thing about lesbians, we get our little cliques and we exclude other people, for whatever stupid reason whether it’s class, or race. That is so deeply ingrained in lesbian culture, and it drives me crazy. My doctor, who is the best I have ever had, closed their practice, so at the moment, I have no doctor. I have been told by a local clinic that I have been accepted as a patient, but that was 6 months ago and I have not been assigned to a doctor. When I called, first of all they said, “Well. You will have to wait six months.” I said, “Well no. I was accepted six months ago. Here’s the document.” “No, no, they told me. You’ll have to wait. We’re processing applications. You have to wait.” A couple of weeks ago, I asked about the status of my application and was told that I’d have to wait another 3  months because they’re still processing 3000 applications. I said, “Listen. I have a serious illness. I just got out of the hospital. I almost died a month ago. Surely I should be a priority?” He told me I just have to wait in the queue with everyone else. I’m screwed basically. A few months ago, I was at my chiropractor and passed out. I woke up in hospital the next day and found out that I’d had two grand mal seizures in my chiropractor’s office and two more on the ambulance enroute to the hospital. I almost died. They thought I was having a stroke. I spent 4 days in the hospital, where they made a lot of promises to me about all the home care support I was going to get. They were all lies. They wouldn’t even release my admission form to me. I had to get that from my GP after the fact. They told me I’d have additional homecare support, but what they meant was that they’d send someone to give me a bath once a week. I will not allow personal care. Nobody touches me. I had personal care when I had my first seizure in 2017, and it was a horrible experience. This complete stranger was touching my body and it was just awful. She was totally grossed out by the process and so was I. Her body language told me that she didn’t want to touch me. She handed me the washcloth and said, “You can wash your thing”  – those were her exact words  – You can wash your thing! She was repelled by the process, and I was humiliated. I would have imagined that she was used to bathing people, since that was her profession. Maybe she picked up on the fact that I’m a lesbian. It could have been some homophobia in there. I don’t know, but it was horrible, and I vowed Never again. I will never allow that again. When I woke up in hospital, after being unconscious for 24  h, a male and a female nurse were in the process of taking my clothes off and bathing me. I was stunned. The female nurse started to wash my crotch and I said, “Stop that!” I was

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so pissed! I said, “Get your hands off me.” I felt violated. I told them to get out. I’m sure that the immigrants who are hired to do this work in hospitals are paid shit wages. They have no opportunity for advancement. They have to do the dirty work of wiping people’s asses. I’m sure they hate their work. Nonetheless, it was a humiliating, degrading experience for me. After I got home from the hospital, I called the Ministry and despite all the promises from the doctors and nurses in the hospital, they told me that I wasn’t getting any home care except personal care. What I need is help with cleaning my extremely dusty house. I live very close to a major road and there’s a lot of dust. The fact that I have a really dusty home has a profound impact on my neurological disease. They tell me that I am damn lucky to be getting 45 minutes a week for cleaning services, because they don’t do that for anybody else – only because they’re being nice to me. Apparently, I should be deeply grateful. The other day I was thinking of summer camp when I was a little kid. It was just glorious, because I got away from my family. At the end of the 2 weeks, everybody signs their autograph book for other kids, and I always signed, Love many, trust few, and always paddle your own canoe. And that’s my thing. I realized that’s what you have to do. Ultimately, if you’re not self-reliant, nobody’s going to be the person who takes care of you. So, love many, trust few and always paddle your own canoe.

11.2 Discussion Rejected by her own family because of her lesbian identity, Flygirl, like many other lesbians in the 60s women’s movement, initially trusted the notion of chosen family (Jackson Levin et al., 2020). A support group of this nature, formed outside of biological familial bonds, may help and support GSM individuals through daily tasks, crises, or ill health, by providing emotional support and practical assistance. “A chosen family offers folks the opportunity to experience abundant love, joy, safety, and belonging,” suggests queer sex educator Gabrielle Kassel (2021). A brief web search offers up similar celebratory narratives about GSM individuals who had been rejected by biological families, but found solace and support in families of choice. It is a cherished notion in queer culture, so much so that Sister Sledge’s iconic 1971 song, We Are Family, is still played at many queer events, almost as an anthem. Flygirl’s story challenges this narrative of supportiveness (at least as far as lesbian culture is concerned), as she suggests that “We walk around with a lot of traumas, and it really has messed with people’s sense of moral sensibilities – if they ever had them.” “We like to tell the world we’re wonderful because we need the world to think that we’re wonderful, but we’re not,” says FlyGirl. Though FlyGirl’s view cannot be read as definitive or verifiable, it does serve to raise questions, which we will take forward into our analysis.

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The literature supports FlyGirl’s suggestion that GSM individuals, and lesbians in particular, have experienced more than their fair share of trauma, such as rape and violence. As FlyGirl (and Joseph) also point out: “We’re shitheads most of the time to each other to ourselves in our drug and alcohol abuse.” While it is comforting to believe in the rhetoric that suggests an informal network of mutual support, the research suggests that minorities under threat of survival may exhibit the kinds of lateral or sideways hostility that FlyGirl references (Moane, 2011; Tran et al., 2021). For Flygirl, these were experienced as cliques that excluded her, jealousy of her artistic talent, and as struggles for recognition (her removal from the film credits) and scant resources (such as the appropriation by another disabled woman of her disability equipment). FlyGirl’s testimony also points to the intersection of disability and queerness, as she recounts her rejection by friends and family members who believe she is cursed. She details the ways in which they cease contact, or refuse to recognize that she has physical limitations. As we consider the background of the people we interviewed, we cannot help but note the irony of FlyGirl’s encounter with the family’s highly respected Christian minister. FlyGirl’s sister, who is homophobic, suggests that FlyGirl talk to the minister as a way to improve her mental health, which can be read as a move to conversion to heterosexuality. However, FlyGirl knows that the minister is herself a lesbian, though deeply in the closet, and she ends up listening patiently to her account of her marriage break up. In a final, and somewhat heartbreaking twist, FlyGirl decides not to ‘out’ the minister, since FlyGirl’s family rely upon her for support. Finally, we draw a comparison between Trudy’s account of the overzealous in-­ home care aide (who insisted on touching her genital area) with FlyGirl’s experiences of both in-home and hospital care. On the one hand, the in-home care provider is reluctant to touch FlyGirl, and declines to help her wash her genital area, which she disparagingly calls “her thing.” On the other hand, two nurses, one male, undress FlyGirl while she is semi-conscious and begin to wash her crotch – to FlyGirl’s horror: “Nobody touches me.” This suggests that greater sensitivity and cultural awareness might be required when it comes to intimate physical care for GSM clients, who may have deep sensitivity to this kind of intimate touching and a strong sense of personal independence. FlyGirl’s narrative, difficult as it is to read, provides an interesting counterpoint to the more comfortable tales of queer solidarity and mutual support often shared by the GSM community.

References Jackson Levin, N., Kattari, S. K., Piellusch, E. K., & Watson, E. (2020). “We just take care ofeach other”: Navigating ‘chosen family’ in the context of health, illness, and the mutual provision of care amongst queer and transgender young adults. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(19), 7346. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17197346 Kassel, G. (2021, June 9). What chosen family means – And how to create your own. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/relationships/chosen-­family#examples.

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Moane, G. (2011). Gender and colonialism: A psychological analysis of oppression andliberation (Rev. ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230279377. Tran, D., Sullivan, C.  T., & Nichola, L. (2021). Lateral violence and microaggressions in the LGBTQ+ community: A scoping review. Journal of Homosexuality, 1–15. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/00918369.2021.2020543

Chapter 12

Twelve Grace’s Story: Spiritual Abuse

12.1 Introduction Grace grew up on the West Coast of Canada and was in her mid-seventies at the time this book was written. She has self-identified as lesbian since her late forties, though currently, she wonders if the word ‘nonbinary’ might be a better fit. She became Christian in her last year of high school and has sought for accepting faith communities ever since. Grace has received individual counselling through the Indigo Project, and also takes part in the peer support group. She opted to write the following account herself and it appears here exactly as she wrote it.

12.1.1 I Am Gay and That Is Good The literature defines abuse in myriad ways, but what I seldom hear mentioned is spiritual trauma. I suspect that the greatest and most profound harm done to LGBTQ people has been spiritual abuse. Rev. Elizabeth Edman, an Episcopalian priest and a lesbian woman, states that coming out as gay is a spiritual awakening because it arises from within the individual; it is not imposed from without. From my own experience I agree with her. From my own experience also, I conclude that any form of sexual abuse, including multiple forms of homophobic and transphobic oppression and violence, are inseparably linked to spiritual trauma. The full range of homo/transphobic prejudice and hate assaults the most profound levels of being, impeding healthy emotional development and maturation, the capacity for rewarding wholesome relationships with oneself and others; and generates destructive forces within the person who can no longer connect with the deepest gift of life – truth and beauty of their own being gifted from the Creator as the breath of life flowing freely throughout their own body (soma), soul, and spirit, to be © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_12

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shared with others. This quelling and quenching of life meets my personal definition of spiritual trauma. Whether that oppression comes from a stunted religious belief system trapped in ignorance and rigid moralizing or a culturally inculcated homo/ transphobic society at large, the impact is devastating. It most assuredly has been the case in my own life. I grew up in a middle-class conservative Anglo Canadian family during the post-­ World War II Cold War, with all the concomitant values. I knew very early that something about myself was different, but I could not have told you what it was. Around about the age of 10 or 11, I shut down, knowing that things weren’t going to be safe. On reflection, I think it wasn’t me shutting myself down. There was something deep within me, shutting me down for my own protection. Also, in my pre-school years I was molested in the local school grounds by a pedophile stranger who was eventually arrested. I have only partial memories; the rest is a black hole that never leaves my consciousness. I’m an only daughter; my older brother sexually harassed me all through my teens. He became physical on a couple of occasions. And if he had gone further than he did, I feared my parents would have found me at fault. This was overall an unsafe environment in which to begin life; withdrawing, separating, shutting down was a defence system I quickly erected and became habituated to very early. Throughout my life from childhood through adolescence into adulthood, I endured many comments about my femininity or lack thereof. I was an outsider who didn’t fit into the teenage dating game and had little interest in it. As teenagers became young adults pairing off into marriage, I felt different, inadequate, ashamed, alone, and was sliding into a lifelong depression. The one thing that helped me through it all was my Christian faith, with repeated spiritual experiences that kept faith and hope and myself alive. Through my twenties and thirties, I had intense suicidal urges and sought counselling and pastoral help. A minister at one of the churches I attended was a gifted and compassionate counsellor and I have no doubt saved my life. But all the counselling and pastoral wisdom entirely assumed heterosexuality as the norm, confirming that I remain hidden from myself and buried in levels of shame and self-hatred which I battle to this day. Trusted close relationships have been very few, mostly unstable, and filled with pain. In my late thirties, far from my home community, I sustained a back injury and needed help. I was in a conservative small town in a conservative church that was a very bad fit which I couldn’t see at the time. A married woman 10 years older than myself had befriended me and offered help. But that help and friendship began to cross boundaries into her physically holding, caressing, and kissing me. In retrospect I assume she was unaware she was lesbian but was meeting her own unmet needs. Similarly for myself. When I finally responded beyond merely receiving, she was shocked into awareness and totally withdrew, abandoning friendship and all contact. In that religious and social environment, heterosexual relationships were the only thing viable. I can only imagine the shame, guilt, and trauma she felt. I know what I felt. Abandonment, loss, grief, guilt, self-recrimination, isolation, exclusion, shame, humiliation, degradation, self-loathing, in-turned rage, suicidal urges – all feelings quite familiar to me by then, but greatly intensified because of

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the actual encounter which I had never experienced before. The worst part of those feelings was that they were not words I could name. I felt them entirely in my body as a pervasive sinking, indrawing sensation accompanied by an intense physical whole body urge to throw myself off my ninth floor balcony. I managed never to step onto the balcony and found pastoral counselling from an Anglican clergyman who had the wisdom to withhold judgment. He directed me towards a little book on Christian meditation that changed my religious practice and initiated me into a contemplative Christian spirituality that has been a source of increasingly deep healing ever since. But it is a path requiring truth and honesty in my deepest self, so I’ve had to descend into the darkest places in myself where I never wanted to go. Years later I heard that this woman had divorced. I learned no details, but if she had come to accept her homosexuality and possibly a same-sex relationship she would certainly have had to leave the faith community that had been so central to her life and family. Several years later, once I had returned to my home turf and reconnected with friends and faith community, I had a repeat experience, less intense, with a friend of many years. I loved her as a kindred spirit. I felt nothing sexual in the friendship. But one time when I was visiting her, she kissed me unexpectedly. It surprised me and clearly shocked her. She distanced herself quickly from our friendship, which confused and greatly hurt me. Our friendship was never restored. Not too long after that incident, she met a man who needed rescuing and married him. I felt like a failure and numbed myself to an overwhelming sense of shame, grief, guilt, and inadequacy. I didn’t recognize at the time that I was not the only one battling confusing relationship boundaries, unmet needs, and sexuality. Friends who knew us both, and who were a married lesbian couple, confirmed they had watched my friend for many years struggle with her sexuality; they were not surprised to see her find a heterosexual partner and hide further from herself. Of course, I asked myself why these experiences were happening. I felt something was very wrong with me. Later the question changed. What would life have been like if all of us had been free to identify our sexual orientation and live freely and happily into it? Surely, I would have been far less lonely and far less traumatized. But the questions all fell away. Life was about to get even more difficult than I had ever thought possible. In my early twenties while in university residence I had become ill, probably something like “mono”, and never fully recovered. It took 20 years of life repeatedly disintegrating before I got a diagnosis of Post Viral Syndrome (an illness with many names and very poor medical recognition over the years). In my forties, after a series of vaccinations and a day surgery, I finally collapsed and spent three and a half years in complete isolation pretty much bedridden. I had been receiving counselling around that time, from a therapist who ignored professional boundaries and warnings from her colleagues. The result was total disruption of my significant relationships and faith communities. I felt blamed, scapegoated, labelled, judged, and abandoned in the shadow of that, at the same time as my health collapse was happening. I was so ill I was incapable of mending any of the relationships; the loss of health, friends, community, employment, financial independence, self-worth was

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absolute. In a moment of letting go and accepting the losses, I concluded that when failure is the only option, failure is the predictable outcome. A nurse in one of the local mental health agencies knew of the controversies around this therapist and termed her “dangerous.” A clinical psychologist in another time and place suggested that I had experienced “spiritual rape.” Those years of overwhelming debilitation and isolation were a living death, but I also had some deep spiritual experiences which held me and gave me courage to investigate the unrelenting internal pressure to explore my sexuality. Many things I had shut out I now considered. I recognized that over the years I’d had uncomfortable moments when I felt male energy inside me. I had no context, no vocabulary, found it threatening, and confusing, told no one and dismissed it with feelings of shame; I wasn’t meeting the prescribed feminine standard. Today I have terms: cisgender (I’m not), non-binary (likely, but I’m still unclear what that’s about), gender fluid (apparently, but not clear what that means either). The term ‘lesbian’ has been coloured by the homophobic culture with which I have been indelibly indoctrinated, feels harsh, and too limiting to address the fullness of my opening experience of being. I’d spent 3  years in extreme solitude, with visions and dreams, and deep internal dives into vast dark empty spaces of great stillness and profound inner silence. From this came my impulse to identify as gay. So far, I see no words in the developing queer dictionary that addresses this. Toward the end of those 3 years, I was nearly 50 years old, and things weren’t looking promising. I’d had enough. I prayed to a God who I felt had asked too much of me, “Fix this or finish it, but don’t leave me here.” Over the next 6 months, I experienced sufficient improvement to consider social re-engagement somehow. I packed one box at a time over several months and moved out of that town back to where I had previously been living. I connected with a Christian contemplative community that was offering silent meditation retreats. This became my new community for the next decade and was both healing and transformative. I also found a way to contact a local Christian LGBTQ group. This proved to be very challenging both for myself and for them. My illness multiplied my anxiety and stress levels in general. Three years of extreme isolation had robbed my social skills which weren’t terribly good to begin with. I had to relearn by mimicking people who looked like they related reasonably. I was risking the small support system for my life with serious illness, because all those people were homophobic. Feeling very unwell, I was driving a distance to meet with the group; I was pushing against all my homophobic conditioning which further increased my anxiety and stress. My first time with them, I momentarily blacked out and came to with someone staring at me in a hostile manner. I must have been staring blankly at them sufficiently long to cause discomfort. But they were gracious in understanding I was ill and had problems, and they included me generously. At the same time, I often had to travel to my hometown to help my parents. My father was undergoing heart attacks and strokes. I finally moved there, facing our family dysfunction. It was necessary to protect my mother from manipulation and abuse. Vulnerable myself, I faced financial threats, emotional blackmail, and

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intimidation from one of my brothers. This, on top of my illness, pushed my stress to barely manageable levels, complicating my efforts to come out. But one must keep on; so, I did. I had attempted to come out in the meditation retreat community that was so important to my life, with challenging results. Clearly it had never happened to them before. One leader became very angry. Another attempted to explain why being gay was something superficial… I didn’t hear her beyond that. I did not return for 2 years. At this same time, I had begun my process of coming out at home in a little Anglican parish with a supportive priest. And for the second time I contacted a Christian LGBT group, this one in the city Cathedral. It was a stressful time in the diocese with the first synod votes for same-sex unions, and outspoken homophobic intolerance from some priests and their supporters. One of those priests tried befriending myself; that was mighty uncomfortable. The Cathedral group formed a small education team to visit parishes and put a human face to the confusion and controversy. I imagine this group felt much pressure; that is the only explanation I can find for the lesbian woman who demonstrated several episodes of extreme rejection towards myself. When the team, including herself, finally came to speak to our church, she kept looking at me coldly as they were being introduced. Her presentation, filled with requests for hugs from people, left me feeling more embarrassed for LGBT people than encouraged. After her presentation, two of my supportive friends went up to congratulate her, and I was standing with them. She spoke with them, looked at me without a word, turned her back and walked away. She had been offered support from my friends, happily received it, and rejected and isolated me all in one unhappy action. That event was so traumatic it was life changing. I shut down for the next 10 years. I had been working uphill against a debilitating illness in which I needed support from my faith community where homophobia was seriously problematic; I couldn’t risk alienating them. I was trapped between trying to come out and trying to find a faith community that accepted me for both my faith and my sexual orientation. This woman represented both; her actions left me feeling completely exposed and shredded. The tension between opposing forces and communities (faith and orientation) had become beyond intolerable. I was simply too traumatized to endure any more. I was done with being gay, coming out, enduring the shame and degradation. It was over. Or so I thought. I needed the deep spiritual sustenance I found in my meditation retreat community, so I returned after those 2 years absent. In that time the two people I had upset had opened, learned, and grown. The woman who had exploded in anger, now apologized to me immediately. But she got absolutely no response from me. So, she apologized a second time and again got no response. I was shut down. She looked bewildered. But I couldn’t talk about it, and I didn’t. The other offending person was leading this retreat, and in a public teaching session, looking directly at me, offered comments on accepting LGBTQ people with full inclusion. As I shrunk into my chair, I hoped no one could tell who she was looking towards.

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Over a decade later, in my 60s, I began the coming out process for a second time, more cautiously and more successfully. It was sparked by an experience during a retreat in a Buddhist tradition. I was meditating on opening the heart. I felt an intense internal pressure in my chest. Suddenly I felt that pressure explode in a burst of light with the most loving nurturing sensations pouring through me, accompanied by the words in my mind, “I am Gay and that is good.” Those nurturing sensations lasted several months. This was not something I could walk away from. This time I created a safer and more able support system. I contacted Courtney, the Seniors program coordinator at Qmunity who provided a welcoming and safe way forward. I’m finding friendships. I have had a psychiatrist for many years who is attuned and supportive of my mental health needs. I have found a spiritual teacher who is a strong ally, well attuned, wise, and sensitive to my spiritual inner processes. I have an Anglican priest who is also a strong ally for LGBTQ people. I have in-depth training with Christian contemplative spirituality that integrates depth psychology such as Jungian with ancient spiritual wisdom for inner healing; I have learned from a western lineage of Tibetan Buddhism also informed by western psychology; I am working with the Diamond Approach which integrates Sufism with western depth psychology. I find these traditions inform each other and have given me a path for deep levels of healing. But it is a lifelong work. I continue to battle dissociative states, and difficulty trusting and forming relationships. I suspect it is not possible for me to form a healthy, intimate relationship because of internalized homophobia; because of my illness which isolates me; because forming trusting intimate relationships require levels of energy I don’t have. The early homophobic indoctrination I received was so deep, and not just from my faith tradition, but from our larger culture. I call it cultural conversion, entirely kindred to conversion therapy. The damage it did was as profound as any type of long-term sustained abuse. I am certainly living with the consequences. I agree with the psychologists who state that forced conversion interferes with one’s capacity to form relationships. It’s certainly messed mine up. Longing is intricately locked together with extreme panic, shame, feelings of personal degradation and deep anger; all forming a wall that so far shows no signs of dissolving. I also find myself living in a tense space between my Christian faith and the LGBTQ+ communities. Coming out as gay in church requires caution. I’ve had much support but lurking nearby are those who use religion to justify their homophobic prejudice. And, not surprisingly, I find a strong anti-Christian prejudice in the LGBTQ+ community, truthfully understandable given the history of faith communities’ attitudes. I’m caught in a no man’s land again – what I was living with for years with illness and trying to come out. It is an intolerable tension I cannot contain or sustain. I need my faith tradition. My faith is the only thing that can integrate my full self: body, soul, and spirit. I cannot heal my soul; I cannot heal my spirit; I cannot be authentic until I come to the deep root of my anger and erase the inner division. I experience an interior foundation holding me on a stable ground of goodness; I am certain there is something much deeper than my anger. I’m being held by that Something, in all the fullness of

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my humanity, the depth of my sexual-orientation and the depth of my spiritual nature; these are One, an Inseparable Unity; this is who I am.

12.2 Discussion Grace’s story raises a key question: can exclusion from and oppression by religious organizations be defined as abuse? Elsewhere Grace makes a compelling argument that it can be defined that way: The depth of our sexual and gender orientation is so profound that it is the life force within us. The more we deny it, the more distortions happen within us. And the evidence of how real that is, is that when people who are in their senior years need to transition or come out, they will do so, because they cannot arrive at a realization of their life without being truly who they are at the deepest core of their being (personal communication). At the same time, none of Grace’s experiences fall under the accepted definitions of elder abuse, and we are mindful of the dangers inherent in expanding these categories. The chief danger in doing so is that they will become so broad as to encompass such things as discrimination, insults, exclusions. While these are indeed egregious, they cannot be considered abusive in the sense used in the literature on elder abuse. We will return to this dilemma in Chap. 15. Grace spoke in the townhall meeting about the way in what she called ‘psychic wounding’ can open one to further abuse, as the slights and injuries we’ve endured in our lives lead us to be more accepting of terrible things that are done to us. Her story speaks to this issue as it references childhood sexual abuse, and an early sense of difference that caused her to “shut down.” Finally, her account is one of several that speaks to the complicating factor presented by ill health. At one point she says “I had been working uphill against a debilitating illness in which I needed support from my faith community where homophobia was seriously problematic; I couldn’t risk alienating them.” Elsewhere, she speaks about the cost of coming out: “Given the intensity of the cost, which is very high, and even higher when you are in your 70s with all the related health problems, you still have to do it. It speaks to how true and real this is.” Grace’s very honest admission of the difficulties she has experienced, and still experiences, in forming relationships, and figuring out her sexual identity, even within current nuanced GSM terminology, is an indication of the complex struggles faced by older GSM individuals.

Chapter 13

Candace’s Story: Systemic Cultural Oppression

13.1 Introduction to Candace’s Story Candace was born in the UK, emigrating to Canada in 1981  in her thirties and finally transitioning gender in her seventies. Candace reports that she received strong support from a confidante and, once she had been told, from her wife. This does not equate with elder abuse as an older person, which was the original call for the Indigo Project. However, Candace’s story is included here to show how she viewed what our call was about – she interpreted it as an opportunity to address childhood abuse and other events leading to suicidality that she is only now, in her senior years, beginning to process.

13.1.1 I Spent So Much of That Time Suppressing Anything in That Direction, Just to Try and Keep Myself Safe Disturbed Why do I constantly think of Death? I fear its ever-growing presence in my mind, Suicidal thoughts weave constant patterns in my head, Is taking my own life the answer? Will my soul find release? So many questions regarding my existence, I have always feared dying, Wakening in a cold sweat, overwhelmed by panic, It creeps into every crack and crevice of body. Its constant knocking at the door to my soul.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_13

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I want to open the door and let it in, I’m so tired of fighting my demons, Can I only find peace by letting death in? Truly I want to, so the only question left is WHEN?

I found out about help available from QMUNITY from a therapist I was talking with in XXXX Clinic. She’d suggested that I should do something on my own, like a blog or something, to help others. I was just a little apprehensive because I don’t use social media. That said, I needed to find something, because just trying to deal with all this on my own wasn’t working well. I went online and I found QMUNITY, and I also looked at trans care resources. I sort of looked back at QMUNITY – should I join this or not? I think it was after looking at it two or three times. I thought, I’ll try and see. The first meeting was really cool. Boy! I didn’t even know what I could say, especially when I had to introduce myself (by that point, I had changed my name and my pronouns). It’s a great group. We all offer ideas – ways of relaxing and dealing with things. I even used one this very morning – one I found on YouTube. You start with the top of the body and relax all the way down. I was born in the UK in 1948 in a mansion that had been converted to a maternity hospital. I think I must have been around about a year old when my family moved to Essex. My mother inherited a house, and my first memories are from there. We had that house, but my father worked on a farm. My mother didn’t work, so we were property rich, but we were not well off. It’s odd. I’ve got memories of being very small before starting school but nothing much until my later years. It might be because they were painful, and I blocked them out. I had a sister who was 5 years older than me – I don’t remember mixing with her that much. By the time I started elementary school, she was in her last year and left. It was the same later when I went to high school. When I got there, she had already left for work. I spent most of my time by myself until a family moved into a larger house next door, and I became friendly with a boy who was older than me and quite serious. Then another family moved in close by, and there were two brothers, one about my age and one a couple of years older. I got to know them and gradually developed a friendship. This was around the time I was set to take my 11+ examination. I didn’t do well at all, because I had discovered this new-found adventure – playing with other kids. Then something happened with these two older boys. They were much more streetwise than I was. I don’t think I even understood what was happening at the time. It may be how I presented myself. I don’t know, to be honest. If I did, I didn’t understand how or why or what I was doing. Basically, what happened was that there was some onset of homosexual abuse. I didn’t really understand it. Why would I? I’d never experienced anything like this. It happened two or three times. I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say anything to my parents because I was too frightened, of course. Eventually their father got transferred to Germany to another airbase there, so they went. They were staying somewhere else before they went to Germany, and the younger one came to see me, just as a friend, for a day. Even then  – I don’t

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know – these boys seemed so corrupt. I think he actually tried to force himself on this younger girl who was living there. I didn’t know what to do and, in the end, I said, “I don’t want anything to do with this.” He was caught by the girl’s mother, not actually in the act of doing something, but because the two younger ones went and fetched her. We had gone back to my house by the time they told her, and then the mother came around asking. I was not necessarily a completely innocent partner in that, because I was supposed to keep watch. But again, I didn’t really understand what was happening. I would have been 10 or 11. I’d never even at that point heard the word homo, but I kept my distance from another family that moved in nearby, with younger children. Then I went on to secondary school as we called it. Later it became a comprehensive school. There were several entry level classes: 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D. I was put in 1B, which worked a bit more slowly than 1A.  It was odd joining the school and not knowing anybody there, because everybody I knew from junior school went to grammar school. When I went into this class, I knew nobody. Most of the children in that class, both boys and girls, were bused in from surrounding regions. After the second year, I moved up into the A’s. I missed all the exams that might have led to that move because of illness, but they decided to move me anyway, based on my school work. Thank God – finally! But it didn’t work. It’s very hard to transfer at that age. It was very, very hard because the curriculum was so different, and you had to choose subjects. I wasn’t very good at art. I didn’t care for history – I could never remember all the kings and queens, and so I took geography. We had to do maths. I didn’t like English grammar so much, but I loved the literature side. Unfortunately, there was no option for both. I didn’t like Biology – I was far too squeamish! I was still very shy, and I didn’t want to put my name down for anything. We had a school choir. I thought I was tone deaf, but I got press ganged into an audition, and thought I’m going to leave to go home! But I did it and got in. We went to the public hall and did the Hallelujah Chorus. I was still tone deaf and didn’t like performing on stage, but there were three of us that sang some pop songs together. One of our favorites was the group Herman’s Hermits. I could sing those songs, but I couldn’t sing hymns. I still wasn’t very forthcoming. My hobbies were the usual solo activities – fishing, model airplanes, that kind of thing. At this point, I think the abuse was buried. During the last year, the school had our exams, and I knew I hadn’t done well in any of them, but I had a job lined up. Some of us boys got together one last time to play cricket. I don’t think it came out before this, but it turned out that the one person I’d made friends with at school was homosexual. I’ve never been in any inclination towards that. I’m sad to say that when I left to go home, I didn’t want to cycle back with him. Instead, I went off and hid in the trees and watched him go by. It was unplanned, but [knowing he was homosexual] put the fear into me. In all the things we’d done together there’d never been any indication. I had the summer off. And then I started as an apprentice at a factory in the next town. All the people I worked with there were my age or much older. Again, I don’t know how I presented, but one of the older men there tried to touch my leg when we

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were getting our coats. I didn’t say anything. I don’t know why he would pick on me. I did find out he’d been in the Navy. He tried it on several times. In the end, something happened. There was a struggle in which my thermos flask got broken. I went to the charge hand and told him I didn’t like this. I still couldn’t explain. I just knew it wasn’t comfortable. It felt bad. I have a feeling, but not a clear memory, that the older man threatened to “get me.” However, even the charge hand would also refer to me in feminine terms, as she or sometimes even ducky. Then the part of the factory I worked in was relocated and moved closer to where I lived. I could just cycle to work, but there were still odd cases of – I don’t know if it’s ‘non male’ behavior? They’d go around pinching one’s nipple and things like that. I just isolated myself from those things. I started going to dances around that time. I didn’t quite know what to expect, but on the train coming home, I got to talking with someone and we became friends and still are to this day. He was more outward than I was, so he’d chat up the girls and I was the shrinking violet. I had no confidence in asking girls to dance, and I noticed that many of them just danced together. We’d go there, or the local pub, most nights, seven nights a week. I wouldn’t get drunk, just light-headed, but when we’d walk back to the station, for some reason, I would always step off the curb into oncoming traffic and have to get pulled back. I don’t know why I was doing that. I just felt rejected, I guess. The truly suicidal thoughts didn’t come till later. I went through a period where I was still at home, but I wouldn’t even talk to my family. My friend had met a girl and decided that he was going to marry, so I knew I wasn’t going to have that friendship much longer. That’s when I met my partner. We started dating and the four of us went out. We finally got married without telling our parents and when we finally managed to get a council house, we moved in together. I didn’t know how much stigma there was involved in living in a council house. We were both still working on the production line. By that point. I had given up my apprenticeship. I felt I wasn’t getting anywhere. It was around then that a partner’s sister moved to Canada in the 60s. This triggered a memory I had from junior school. We’d had a whole presentation on Canada and a trip through the Rockies in the steam train, so we decided to try and emigrate. We emigrated in 1981. It took a little while, but I got a job as an Office Equipment Technician and my wife got a job as well. Our home in the UK sold and we gambled by buying a bungalow in Canada, but then a huge recession hit and I got laid off. One Friday, the boss came in and said, “Oh, you’re fired.” You’re fired. Just like that. We moved around a lot in the next few years, from job to job. At that point, I’d put everything aside with regard to my gender and sexuality, but it started to surface during one of the periods that I was out of work. My father had died, and I got very depressed and had suicidal thoughts. I didn’t talk much, and at one point it was affecting our relationship. I have never shared with my wife what happened to me when I was young. I’ve never told anyone about that, so I was still dealing with it. I didn’t actually make any suicide attempts directly, but indirectly, I don’t know. Once there was this terrible thunderstorm and I went out on the flat ground near the

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river. I didn’t care if it hit me. I wasn’t consciously thinking about it, but I didn’t care if it happened. If it happens, it happens kind of thing. I didn’t care. My relationship with my wife became strained. The sexual side of it disappeared, and I started sleeping in a separate bed. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Then I got a part time job, which became a fulltime job. That ended in a nightmare. First of all, two young pilots died suddenly on the job in a crash, just before Xmas. They were studious types, not like some of the cowboys that flew for the company. Everyone seemed to just get on with things after it happened and didn’t seem to give a damn, but it affected me profoundly. I’ve always had a fear of death, and it brought my underlying panic to the surface. Then the company went bankrupt, owing us all a lot of money. That’s when my health issues began. I was getting out of breath, so I had a stress test and an angiogram. They found out that I had three or four blocked arteries. After a while, I became more and more sick. I had a constant cough and I thought it would never go away. In the end, I had surgery and took some time off. After a while, I decided to retire. I was still having some gender identity issues. I’d be walking with my friend, and I don’t know why, but we’d find ourselves looking into the windows of clothes shops and I would be looking at the ladies’ clothes. He’d tell me that a certain dress would fit and I’d thank him and say that I wished I could wear it. I was around 70 at that time. I’d never experienced anything like that before. I had noticed however, that when I was on my own, I’d watch the series Call the Midwife, and I loved the camaraderie between the girls. Then there was a relationship that started between two of the girls, and there was something in that that latched right on to me. I couldn’t explain why. During this time my friend got ill. He got cancer, and it wasn’t looking good for him. Indeed, he passed away just over 2 years ago. He wanted to die at home, and I had one last visit to say goodbye to him. One last hug. And I don’t know if he’d said something to me about being myself, or whether it was his wife that said that. A little later on in that same year another friend was killed in a boating accident. This was all feeding back more and more into my feelings about Call the Midwife. I had a Christmas where I honestly didn’t know what I was doing. I worked through the year just on my own. Then finally, I decided to explore this side of things. I think the film I watched that really struck home was The Danish Girl. I just thought That’s me! The way he stood in front of the mirror and tucked his genitals out of the way. I would do that when I was little, and I had never remembered. The fact that that character was willing to go that extreme. They died because of the operation. They were so desperate. The other movie that helped me a lot was The Crying Game. I met a lady who had become my confidante. I was trying to explain to her how I’d felt about the film, and she talked about this woman whom my wife had worked with and had experienced some of this journey. I made an appointment to talk to my doctor. But I couldn’t really explain. I had another talk with my confidante. In one of our conversations, I had told her about the suicidal thoughts I’d had when I was laid off and finally, she said, “What are you going to do about it? You have to do something about it!”

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I talked to my doctor again, and she decided I should talk to somebody else. That was where the referrals began. I started off with a nurse practitioner, then a mental health practitioner. It was both frightening and a relief. I had to leave some of the therapy sessions and go for a walk around the garden. From early on, I wrote a journal. At first it was every day; now I write two or three times a week. We’ve gradually been working through the practicalities for most of last year, going through the process of changing my name. I started out initially using they and them pronouns, and then it got to a point where I couldn’t do that anymore because sometimes I was a woman and sometimes a man. I couldn’t deal with it. I decided that I had to be one or the other, and I knew where I was comfortable, so from the first of June 2021, I started learning to present as a female. There was certainly no going back then. I started clearing out the [male] clothes. One of the last ones was a man’s winter coat. It was quite new, and I’d been proud of it, since it was the first good one that I’d had. I had mixed feelings to see it go. I wished that I could have just reversed the buttons! Everything I bought to replace my male clothes was from thrift stores, and that’s a good thing, because I bought large in a ladies’ size and then lost 30 pounds in the first month! I wasn’t even trying – the weight just went, maybe because I was a little bit more happy and content. In therapy I looked at photographs of myself as a child, and I realized that I looked so very unhappy. Over the last year, I have come out and joined the [GSM] community. I did the name change, which wasn’t too bad, and the gender change. That whole process is a roller coaster. First of all, there was COVID to deal with, then various misunderstandings, and failures to fill in the confusing forms correctly. For instance, I would fill in a form for gender change, but the form was designed with the assumption that I was born in Canada and not in the UK. This all cost me some grief at the time. Also, I’d come away from therapy sometimes wondering, Should I have said this? Did I say too much? After we worked through all the provincial side of the paperwork, the federal side started, where again there were many issues – waiting for 2 h on hold on the phone, and people still misgendering me. My wife has been a rock. She didn’t even know about any of it, and now I’ve told her and we’re talking about it, it’s been so much easier. The only thing now, paperwork wise, is that I don’t have a passport. I still have a UK passport, which has just been renewed, but they have refused to change my gender on it. I will apply for a Canadian one later. The paperwork continues. And still continues! Just when I think I’ve got over the last hurdle, along comes another piece of the paper trail. It’s going fine, but I am very worried about the political climate in the US, and Trump and the backlash against LGBTQ people that’s being shown on the media. I just don’t know how to deal with this, because it’s pushing me back. I’m starting to get back to sadness. I cannot even predict it. I could be outside doing something in the garden, and I walk back to the house and I have to sit down to cry. That’s how it affects me. And I still have memories of the childhood abuse. I’ll be getting out of the shower in the morning, and it comes into my mind, and I feel guilty about it, and somehow responsible.

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There’s a fear in there. Once I found out about how some people are homosexual, I kind of felt that wasn’t me, but that was where a lot of transgender people felt they had to fit in. That’s the only place you could go [back then]. But you were taught to be afraid of them. I spent so much of that time suppressing anything in that direction, just to try and keep myself safe from that happening. One person I followed on YouTube was a little bit older than me. They said they’d spent all their life as a man. They’d been married and had children. They had more women’s clothes than men’s before they separated from their wife. They were in a fortunate position because they had the funds to transition privately. Because they were older, there might not be enough time to do it through the UK National Health [because of the long wait list]. They started hormone therapy and presented quite well with a wig and makeup. They had some facial feminization surgery and full bottom surgery. I definitely thought she would pass. She was very confident. Then they posted a video talking about what had just happened. She was waiting to cross the road, and a car stopped. The people in the car made fun of her, laughed at her, and called her horrible names. They’ve never posted anything since. I know I can never go back to who I was. I would rather take my own life. My real regret is not coming out much earlier. There were indications along the way – some things I heard or saw or felt. The focus on keeping myself and my partner safe was my top priority. Following my heart and being the real me finally came to fruition.

13.2 Discussion Candace’s story speaks not of the abuse at the hands of others as an older queer adult but to the lifelong effects of sexual assault in childhood and the deep-rooted societal homophobia, misogyny, and transphobia which she herself absorbed. Painfully shy as a child, she experienced child sexual abuse both as victim and as an unwitting collaborator. Child sexual abuse is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the USA as “any completed or attempted sexual act, sexual contact with, or exploitation of a child” (Scoglio et al., 2021, p. 41), and it is clear that Candace was subjected to both actual and attempted acts even into early adulthood. This may be related to the perceived ‘otherness’ of Candace as a child and young adult, for as Balsam et al. (2010, p. 459) note in their meta-analysis, a “higher risk of child maltreatment, including emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals relative to heterosexuals has been consistently found across research studies with a wide range of sampling methodologies.” It is only in late adulthood that Candace recognizes the nature of that experience and how it might be related to her identity “I don’t think I even understood what was happening at the time. It may be how I presented myself. I don’t know to be honest” she states in relation to the childhood attacks by two boys;

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then as a young adult “one of the older men there [the factory] tried to touch my leg… He tried it on several times.. even the charge hand would also refer to me in feminine terms...” She realizes now that the “abuse was buried.” It is clear that the trauma of those experiences is now revisiting Candace in her older years. Another trauma Candace relates is a deep-rooted fear of homosexuality causing her to avoid cycling home with a friend once his homosexuality was known. Perhaps it was this fear that also prevented Candace from reporting the repeated abuse endured as a child, “I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say anything to my parents because I was too frightened.” In the end, Candace reports blocking out the abuse. It appears that Candace is revisiting the trauma of childhood abuse and gender issues, noting that society had taught her to be scared of homosexuals, yet “I kind of felt that wasn’t me, but that was where a lot of transgender people felt they had to fit in,” expressing further experiences of being ‘other’ even within the category of homosexual. The feelings of ‘otherness’ and confusion that Candace describes likely contributed to the shyness and self-isolation she experienced. Another thread in this narrative is the recurring feelings of suicidality, even when these feelings were unconscious but acted upon, such as walking into oncoming traffic or deliberate exposure to a thunderstorm. Candace describes several periods of depression and being currently concerned about “the backlash against LGBTQ people that’s being shown on the media.” Such a backlash can be experienced as abuse. If you are part of a group under attack, it is not uncommon to fear that abuse on a personal level. Candace demonstrates awareness of the general continued oppression of trans folk and the effect such abuse can have on a person when she notes that a trans woman she followed on YouTube has stopped posting after being verbally victimized by strangers. On a side note, Candace suggests that she found support in coming out from a concerned friend, but also from the British television show, Call the Midwife. Set in the late 50s and early 60s, the show tends to reinforce and romanticize traditional British cultural values around gender and sexuality. Though it does include a lesbian couple in its cast, there is no discussion of trans experiences, and the show is on the whole, very comfortable and uncontroversial. It is therefore somewhat telling that Candace drew strength to come out as trans at the age of 70 from the “female camaraderie” she saw demonstrated there. It raises interesting questions about the forms of support that are available to gender and sexual minorities, particularly those, like Candace, who spent most of her life unconnected with GSM community or resources. What Candace’s story tells us is that even though one can be supported in transitioning the experience of living a life as an unconscious, sometimes conscious, ‘other’ can cause traumatic consequences in senior years. As said before, this cannot be labelled elder abuse, but it is something that has to be considered regarding trauma and mental ill-health in older GSM individuals.

References

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References Balsam, K. F., Lehavot, K., Beadnell, B., & Circo, E. (2010). Childhood abuse and mental health indicators among ethnically diverse lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 78(4), 459–468. Scoglio, A.  A. J., Kraus, S.  W., Saczynski, J., Jooma, S., & Molnar, B.  E. (2021). Systematic review of risk and protective factors for revictimization after child sexual abuse. Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 22(1), 41–53.

Chapter 14

Interview with Courtney Dieckbrader: Seniors’ Program Specialist at QMUNITY

Claire Robson: Can you just give us a background on QMUNITY? Courtney Dieckbrader:  QMUNITY is the BC queer, trans and Two Spirit Resource Center. We are a hub of information. When folks call in, they are connected to a volunteer who has access to a lot of different resources. We also have our own programming – a youth program, a seniors program, and peer groups for specific issues. We have something called autistic queer peers; we have something called Transgathering. Depending on what you’re looking for, we might have a peer group that fits your needs. Claire Robson: It’s provincial? Courtney Dieckbrader: It is provincial, and almost all of our programs reflect that. With COVID, a lot of our services moved online, so we created even more access. For Pride this year, we didn’t just do Vancouver Pride; we went to almost every pride celebration in small towns all over BC. We really tried to make sure that everybody knew that we’re here and available. Claire Robson: What is your role, specifically, in QMUNITY? Courtney Dieckbrader: I am The Specialist in Seniors Programming. I plan, coordinate, and often end up facilitating our programs that exist for 55+ community members. Through those community engagement interactions, I get to hear many stories and I’m able to share a lot of that with other organizations and different levels of governments and advocate for what kind of care and services these older adults need and are asking for. Claire Robson: Can you describe your involvement in the Indigo Project? I know it’s been considerable. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_14

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Courtney Dieckbrader: I came in when the Indigo survivors project didn’t even really have a name, but it was in progress. We had a grant from the Vancouver Foundation, and we’d been connected with SFU, but it had been on the back burner for a while. We kind of had to reimagine and rethink what this was going to be. I met you, Claire, and then we did some brainstorming about what we really wanted this to look like. We had to find a way to create something that could be a teaching tool and that we could use to inform policy. We wanted voices to be heard. Lots of folks were very focused on the research, but through a lot of discussions we decided that QMUNITY’s contribution would be hosting a 55+ group. I am somebody who really values community connection and I do that well through group programs. If someone is going to be sharing stories of such a personal nature, and if we want people to actually come to us and share their stories, we needed to be offering something more than a than a cash honorarium. We needed to be showing them that we care about what they’ve gone through and how that still shows up in their lives. That’s why I wanted to bring in a clinical counselor to support people through the process of giving their testimony or their stories. I brought that to QMUNITY and we went from there. Now we do have that support group running. Claire Robson: Could you talk a little bit just about the individual counselling and the peer support group? Courtney Dieckbrader: Almost half of the folks who agreed to be part of the research project also agreed to be part of this support group. It runs once a week, and it is led by a clinical counselor. We had somebody on contract for a couple months, and then took a bit of a break over the summer. Now we have someone else on contract and we have the funds to continue that through QMUNITY through to the summer of 2023. Therapy is a very individual thing for a lot of folks, so we wanted to make sure that within those contracts, the counselor was also open to working with people on an individual level, so that they could discuss things that they weren’t necessarily comfortable talking with the group about. Outside the group we are also paying for individual sessions for anyone involved. Claire Robson: How many are there in the group? Courtney Dieckbrader: There’s five. Claire Robson: Has anybody opted for individual counseling that’s not in the group?

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Courtney Dieckbrader: No, actually. Not that I’m aware of. Claire Robson: I wonder if that indicates that being in the group has made people more willing to take some risk of individual work? Courtney Dieckbrader: I think so. One of the things that I’ve learned about people that have reported abusive situations is that disclosure doesn’t happen right away. Sometimes it can take a year before someone actually opens up and says, Hey! I think that happened to me or that IS happening to me now. I think that being part of other groups and QMUNITY programs allows people who might not have said anything to open up because there’s a previous relationship created in a safer space that allows people to feel supported and feel connected to others. Then, when we offer something like [the Indigo Project], that person is more inclined to say, Okay, I might try that out, too, because this other thing has been working for me as well. Claire Robson: What I’m hearing you say is the people who have been abused, whether in youth or, you know, in their senior years, sometimes don’t understand that this is what happened to them? Can you say a bit more about that? Courtney Dieckbrader: I think that in our community, it can happen slowly, it can happen fast. But it happens in a way that people don’t always recognize as abuse. We, as a LGBTQ community, have created very thick skins to people who don’t treat us right. Sometimes we haven’t been able to learn different boundaries around certain situations and that contributes to why we’re at a greater risk. Claire Robson: I hear that coming through the participant interviews very strongly. What follows from that, for you, as an organization, is that you want to approach it from several different directions, you’re saying that it’s almost like a snowball effect? Courtney Dieckbrader: Definitely, yes. People come to us for a lot of different reasons. If it’s social, then that’s great. But one of the things that our social groups do is allow people to learn about all of the other supportive programs that we have – our free and low-cost counseling, the Indigo Survivors project, the trans ID clinic. When people come to our social gatherings, our events and things like that, they can start to understand that there’s all of these other ways to find helpful caring communities. Maybe they hear somebody else talking about something in group and they think, Oh. I didn’t know that that was abuse. I think that’s what’s happening to me, and that’s why I’m depressed and scared. When we can have those broader conversa-

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tions in social situations, it allows people to really learn about things that are happening in our community. They’re also a lot of fun too! It’s not all so serious. When people can relax and feel good about themselves, celebrate their differences and make friends, that’s when folks feel better opening up. Claire Robson: I’m thinking of one of our participants who contacted you because they were thinking that they might be trans. This is somebody who came out as trans at the age of 70. If I’m right, they contacted you firstly through the trans group and have ended up in the project. Is that correct? Courtney Dieckbrader: The first conversation I had was a telephone conversation. It was a panicked call saying “Hey! I’m not okay, right now. I’m having these feelings. I don’t know what they mean. I’ve been trying to get services. But the place that I’m in, there’s not very many services.” That’s why it’s really important that I can be there to take those one-onone calls, as well as do advocacy work and facilitate the groups. A lot of the time it just starts with an open and honest conversation – This is where I’m at. Is there anything there for me? Through that, we are able to connect them to the broader groups, the other seniors who had said something similar saying, Hey! I’m not connected to anybody, I don’t know what to do. In this case, going to the social group and meeting other people like them, and meeting other people who had been through the process, allowed them to put a plan in place and to connect with trans care BC, to connect with the right doctors, and then also to connect with the other trans folks in our community who are over 55 and talk about things in a very specific way. It’s not the same transitioning when you’re a youth to transitioning when you’re a senior. To be able to connect people in this way has been very important and to be able to connect people who aren’t necessarily in the same geographical area is still extremely helpful. COVID demonstrated the importance of online programming, and phone calls and different ways of communicating a lot of the time. When a place is situated in only a downtown area the people who come to the programming are often always the same, and branching out can be very difficult. But now we do have a BC wide program, and it’s allowed the staff at QMUNITY to learn about more opportunities in different areas. It’s allowed us to open up what we call our Q directory, which has expanded a lot since COVID, because we’ve had so much contact with other communities, rural areas. It allows people on Vancouver Island to help people in interior health and then they can help people in Northern Health. We have folks from all over joining in.

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Claire Robson: Just going back to this particular participant, have you noticed any changes in them? Courtney Dieckbrader: I got to watch that participant go through such a transformation of hopelessness to an active lifestyle with true friendships, comfortable talking about their situation, plans in place to make sure that they get to where they want to be in life. It doesn’t matter what age you are. When we get together and talk about things and find out what supports are needed, that’s when truly amazing things happen. And it’s honestly never too late. Claire Robson: I interviewed Devan, the counselor and facilitator for the group, and they said that one of the things that happened in the group was that everybody was saying, Yes! That happened to me! Courtney Dieckbrader: Yeah, I agree. And a trust formed. It becomes easier to say, Yes! That happened to me. It’s not as scary. It becomes a place in which you know that by sharing your own story, you’re also helping other people. That’s pretty powerful stuff. Claire Robson: That’s a great point. I think one of the foundational planks of the Indigo Project has been to include the voices of participants to make it a nuanced and robust program where people are self-advocating. Courtney Dieckbrader: Definitely. Putting the power back in the hands of the survivors is extremely important. Claire Robson: It seems that your role is quite complex. I’m wondering if there are any challenges or conflicts? I mean, you’ve already said the importance of fundraising, the importance of being just there on the phone, running programs, outreach across BC. What are some of the tensions and conflicts and challenges that you found in the work? Courtney Dieckbrader: I think there are three main obstacles to somebody reaching out or talking to us in the first place. Some people just don’t know that it’s abuse. Like I said, a lot of folks feel shame. Something that we’ve talked about as a staff is that folks who have spent their whole life or most of their life advocating, sometimes for professionalism reasons, will remove themselves from the community and only work in service. When these advocates find themselves in a situation that requires the services that they have helped create, it can be very hard to reach out. It can feel shameful. People are still scared. I know that from seniors that I’ve worked with that nobody wants to be called vulnerable. But the fact of the matter is, we’re part of a

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community that is vulnerable. I think we can be scared of that. But we can also band together and talk about the fact that, yeah, there are certain things that make us vulnerable, and here they are, and what are we going to do about it? Having opportunities for people to do that is important, and how we get them is through funding and the hard work of dedicated people. We want to pay people for their work. We need to pay for our own housing. We need jobs, not necessarily only volunteer opportunities, and we need safer places for seniors. We need seniors’ residences that have mandatory queer inclusion training, and we need places that are not for profit. We need places where people can actually afford to be there. I think a lot of the research that comes out of some of the care homes and things like that is very one sided, because there are only certain classes of people that can actually afford to be there in the first place. That kind of research has a bias to it. I would also say that in a perfect world inclusion trainings and courses would be part of any curriculum that involves seniors care in post-secondary institutions, I think it’s very, very important that people understand the history of some of the people that they’re going to be meeting if they do go into seniors’ care. We need the same thing for school aged children. There’s gender and sexuality alliances (GSA’s), older adults need the same thing. We need GSAs in seniors’ residences, and in centers and networks, advocacy offices. Anyone who is advocating for seniors needs to have seniors who are part of our 2SLGBTQIA+ community at the table informing their decision processes, because there’s a lot of us. And we need to be heard. I think, Claire, you’ve said before, Nothing about us without us. Claire Robson: One of the participants who was financially abused by his partner talks about the police and how homophobic they were. I think there’s a huge gap there. There is what people think they need to know about queer and trans populations, and what they actually do know. How do we address that? I mean, I guess you’ve covered it, you know, queer competency at all levels. Courtney Dieckbrader: And not just queer competency that applies to youth, but queer competency that talks about our history in a way that is extremely broad. Not just, Oh yeah! We got gay marriage, and everything was fine. Somebody who’s in their 80s, they could have been arrested, or pushed to wearing different clothing when they were a teenager. People need to understand the struggles and the constant decisions that are made every day about the safety of coming out. Claire Robson: It happened to one of our participants who was going to gay bars at the age of 14 and ended up in an institution doing conversion therapy. Courtney Dieckbrader: People need to understand that that’s still recent history. There are people out there who actually experienced all of that. What are you going to do about it? I would urge

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the younger 2SLGBTQIA+ populations that are accessing our programming to live the ally life and support your elders through action. It can be hard to relate to older generations, but try to understand just how much social trauma has happened in that older person’s lifetime. We need to take care of our elders, we need to learn from our elders, as well as teach them the newer ways that we relate to each other now, and what’s going on in our lives. It’s only together that we will eventually change the ways that things are happening for people. And we need to think about the way that we want to be treated as elders when it’s our turn. Claire Robson: You have mentioned to me in the past that you are just overwhelmed in your work. I know you love it. And I know you’re very good at it. But there is a tension, I think, between working with individuals and looking at the big picture, it seems like almost you’re working at two ends of this piece of wood. Courtney Dieckbrader: Yes. That happens in most LGBTQ organizations, and I think it’s very difficult when there is, say, one senior’s programs specialist instead of a senior’s program specialist and a team of social workers, and then other people who are facilitating programs and things like that. It will take whole teams to accomplish what we’re working towards. There are other organizations out there who are doing similar things to us, and that splits the funding. That is the nonprofit world. There’s only so much government funding that comes out, and we’re pitted against each other to get it and that doesn’t end up helping anything. That keeps us down. It means that we can’t accomplish as much as we would be able to if we had more resources, if we had more paid staff. But we’re working towards it. QMUNITY has actually had a lot of really good things happen in the last couple of years. We’re getting a new building. We’ve actually doubled our staff, which is great. However, a lot of these changes have depended upon donations, and not actual funding that we can necessarily count on. We want to continue to increase our capacities as individuals in different programs, increase my capacity and continue to grow opportunities. But we need all levels of government to step up. The system needs to change, and it needs to be taken seriously if we really want to start helping people. I have high hopes that it will. I find myself in situations where sometimes, I can’t take a call because I’m doing advocacy work, or talking to people in power positions, just trying to make things better for folks. It’s difficult to juggle, but it’s also necessary until the folks who are in power decide to give us what we’ve been asking for a long time.

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Claire Robson: How many calls do you get from vulnerable seniors? And do you feel that you can point them to adequate resources? Courtney Dieckbrader: I came back from a three-day vacation with 50 voicemails, and that doesn’t even count the 100 emails that were in my inbox. I give out information on a daily basis. I talk to multiple people in a day. I try and get people set up with as many programs as possible, but with our capacity, we can only support so many people. Sometimes it takes us a while to get back to folks, and I hate that. Claire Robson: Can you give me an idea of what the phone calls are about sort of generally? Is it housing? Is it income? Is it abuse? Is it all of the above? Courtney Dieckbrader: It’s all of the above. A lot of the time it has to do with housing, and unfortunately, we haven’t had the capacity to help with that. It is extremely difficult to find queer competent housing facilities that will take someone on a limited income. Housing is a huge issue. Claire Robson: I guess this moves us into my final question. You have told me in the past that you’re often speaking to people whom you either suspect have been abused or who are actually reporting abuse, but won’t disclose more broadly, say to the police, because of the levels of shame and stigma and fear of retaliation. We both know how hard it was to find participants able to join the Indigo Project. Can you speak to that one? Courtney Dieckbrader: Sometimes it takes people a long time to even recognize what I see as abuse right away. Part of my job is to see situations when they’re happening. When it’s actually brought up, and people are actually asking for help, there’s very few resources that we can actually give them that are going to get them to a person who’s safe. The way that we report abuse is still through the police. It is still through a body that our elders, the seniors in our community have had nothing but trouble with throughout their lifetime. It’s not only shame and stigma; it’s also fear of the systems that are in place. When somebody wants to report, or somebody has been, or still are going through something, the roads to getting help are daunting. They’re terrified of going into a shelter that is not going to listen to them, that is going to not believe them. Going to a women’s shelter can be terrifying for queer folks, especially for trans people, as is reporting to police officers who they don’t know, who I can’t reassure them will be friendly, who will understand their history, will understand why they’re nervous to report. You know, if a partner says to them, “Oh, I’ll just tell them you have dementia, and I’m your friend, who takes care of you” – that’s another piece of

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abuse. They might say, “Oh! You think the cops are gonna help you when they used to beat and arrest us?” There are no specific LGBTQ avenues set up to report. We need to change the reporting process, to make sure that they are culturally appropriate. It’s very difficult to make sure that that happens, because it’s like you said – this project is so important, because policy makers want data. The government and the folks who are in power and can change things want all of these hard facts, these hard data points that fit nicely and say, this many people reported over this amount of time. Who does that responsibility fall on? The non-profits who are under-resourced, who are packed to the limit with responsibilities and are underpaid and undervalued. It’s a vicious loop where nothing really is changing or being done at that level of power. That’s one of the reasons that it’s important for universities, and non-profits to work together and for people to come forward and tell their stories and report even when it’s scary, because we do need to be able to change things. Unfortunately, we need to work within their systems to do it. Claire Robson: It’s a very data driven field, as you say, and of course, studies are not being done. There’s been only one study, I think, in the US, that has actually proven that queer elders are more susceptible to abuse. I mean, this especially has been suggested because of the many risk factors we experience, but nobody’s done a Canada wide study to see how many are actually affected. Courtney Dieckbrader: A lot of people want to work towards this, but it’s very difficult, so we do need people to come forward and be brave. I hope that when this is published, people do read it and think to themselves, Okay! Well, maybe I will call or maybe I will find a way. Maybe I will participate in that study that was in that newsletter. Claire Robson: So just to be clear, you have received phone calls from people who were being abused and been unable really to find anywhere to send them or to persuade them to formally report? Courtney Dieckbrader: Yes. The number varies. There’s months where I’ll get one person a day, and there’s weeks where nobody reports at all. It’s hard to quantify that data. Claire Robson: It’s not five times a year? It’s more than that? Courtney Dieckbrader: Much more than that. Yes. It is still difficult to point somebody in the right direction, and a lot of the time, the first time somebody reports, they won’t give their name or any information. It’s an anonymous phone call, so we can’t we can’t retain their numbers. We can listen and be there for that person in that moment. But a lot of the time, there’s one phone call, and then we never hear from somebody again.

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Claire Robson: That was a great interview. So many thanks. Courtney: Thanks. Sometimes I’m a little bit hard on myself. It’s the extreme importance of this project. I really want people to be able to hear the message. And I don’t want to get lost in the weeds of, you know, how hard this all is. I just want to elevate the voices of the folks who are disclosing.

Chapter 15

Interview with Devan Cecelia Christian: Individual Counselor and Peer Group Facilitator for Indigo Survivors

Devan Cecelia Christian: My name is Devan Cecelia Christian. I’m a registered clinical counselor in Chilliwack. I have worked with public mental health since 2015. I want to say that before that I was in hospice support. And I’ve had a private practice since 2017. My focus has always been actually seniors in grief and loss. And over the years, it’s kind of changed and morphed into more mental health support, as well as sort of communication trauma work, and as well as life transitions, in general, for folks, just any kinds of transitions where we’re making a change from where we have been before. Claire Robson: Can you just describe your role in the project? Devan Cecelia Christian: My role was to come in as a registered clinical counselor to support the participants in their process during their research. We offered everyone one to one counseling, as well as a peer support group. In that way, I was able to work with a couple of the individuals who took us up on the one-to-one option, and we had four consistent members in the peer support group. We met weekly over 8 or 9 weeks. Originally, we had a meeting with Courtney to ask what they wanted out of this group. I can come from the academic side and give all this information. Courtney can come from QMUNITY and her perspective. But we really wanted the participants to come to a group where they were getting information that they wanted. And we were together building a space that was safe and protective and helpful for them. In that initial meeting, it came out that they would actually like skills to be able to manage day-to-day life and the things that are coming up now from the individual research interviews. Together, we created a list of the topics that folks wanted to talk about. And then each week I brought forward © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_15

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a new topic. Some of the weeks we never even got to the topic because other issues came up for members of the group. We just shifted and flowed for what the group needed in those times. However, by the end of the group, we got out all of the information that had been asked for. We would do it in a very sort of semi structured but informal way - we would start the group off kind of check in, you know: How was last week? Any questions from what’s come up? How are people doing? How are things going? We’d either talk about the information that was shared then, or the topic for the week, or if people had concerns, we would talk about that and support each other. And then, at the end of every session, we did a mindfulness exercise; all of the participants had asked for that, and found that it was really helpful. As the group I was asked to provide a written overview of the material that was talked about, just because in the hour, we talked about a lot of stuff. So I then would send an email by the end of the day with an overview of the information that we talked about in terms of resources and options and skills (never about the topics that the clients brought forward). That became extended into YouTube links or books to read or just overviews of skills and handout copies that they could have. At the end of our time together, to support them in continuing their peer support group without a clinician present, I had given them an overview of different articles to read and Ted Talks to watch and things that might be helpful in the topics that they were looking for, to continue supporting one another, and to bring that conversation about. Claire Robson: Why did you agree to work with the Indigo Survivors’ Project? Did you see it and think, Wow! That sounds interesting! or was it just, you know, a gig? How did it fit in with your practice, and your own life’s journey? Devan Cecelia Christian: Actually, a colleague of mine that I went to school with was very connected with QMUNITY and supporting folks there. The email about the position had actually been sent to her for any of her staff. She instantly actually forwarded it to me and said, Devan, this is your gig! Like, I know you! I know this of you! I read it and fell in love. I love working with seniors. I worked in rural mental health for seniors only for 3  years out here and as well, in hospice support. My whole master’s degree was focused around seniors. I loved the idea of being able to provide them support, where they could have free access to services to heal the things that have happened. Everything about the projects just screamed Yes! I didn’t even think twice. I emailed Courtney right away, and just sent in my application and was really thrilled and honored to be part of the project. Claire Robson: So you mentioned the fact that the services are free. How important do you think that is? Devan Cecelia Christian: I think it’s imperative. You know, particularly with our seniors in your community, they’re on limited income. If they’re fortunate enough to have a pension, then

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they’re on pension, but most folks end up being on our basic CPP, you know, guaranteed income supplement, maybe Old Age Security, and a little bit of money, but not all the time. To be able to access private counseling is so expensive it’s just not realistic within the budget. Some of our folks in the group lived in rural communities, and some folks lived in really urban community settings. Yet everybody is dealing with the cost of living and increased housing and limited services. For me, it was really important to be able to offer free services where there was no financial pressure and that they could just come as they are. I think that in particular with our senior community, while there are services available, you have to fit sometimes into a particular medical box. And if you are well enough, or you’re not quite there yet, or the services don’t necessarily pertain to you at this time, you’re really limited to the options that are available for publicly funded services. Claire Robson:  That’s interesting. One of the participants that you didn’t work with told me that this was an issue for them  - they get 45  minutes a week, and it’s personal care. And they said, I don’t want personal care. I don’t want people touching me. I have MS. I live in a very dusty apartment, I need cleaning. As we look at the paucity of services, I would imagine that counseling is quite low on the list of anything that people have access to? Devan Cecelia Christian:  And that’s so disappointing because psychological wellness is an imperative part of our physical health. If we are not psychologically well or working on our health, then our physical health can deteriorate so much. We have no motivation to get up to eat, to shower, to take care of ourselves, to attend to the doctor, or we’re too anxious or too depressed or too scared. We have too much trauma from experiences, then all of those other pieces fall so much faster and harder and sometimes to their detriment. If we could be able to offer free services, my goodness - what a wealth of difference I could make! Claire Robson: If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or whatever it is, you put spiritual, psychological well-being right as the foundational piece? Devan Cecelia Christian: Yeah, I would, because depression, anxiety, and trauma are things that absolutely hinder our ability to do the rest of those basic level needs. If we don’t have a bal-

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ance between them, we are not ever moving from that bottom tier. We’re barely surviving in that bottom tier. We’re not getting out of bed in the morning. We’re not showering. We’re not eating. We’re not asking for support. We’re not connecting with our services, right? Claire Robson: This is a big question, but what is your take on whether all the people who are part of the queer community are at more risk for depression, isolation, substance abuse, you know, all the risk factors for abuse? Do you have any information to share on that, or any thoughts or ideas? Devan Cecelia Christian: Just that I’m in agreement with it, right? Particularly the stories of coming out and being able to be themselves living in spaces where they feel safe enough to identify as their true selves. That all plays a huge factor in how they’re able to cope not only within themselves, but in their own environment, in their homes, in their communities. For a lot of folks, depending on how their coming out experience was, their understanding of self, it might mean a significant lack of support, they might be hiding their true selves from their supports just to be able to maintain their supports. It can be a huge detriment in their financial stability. If you’ve lost family connections and the family’s financial support, you’d have to change jobs, move away, you know, all of those pieces that really affect all of our areas. Claire Robson: Did you find that coming through? Were the participants talking about this idea that because they’re hiding their identities, they are more cut off from support? Devan Cecelia Christian: Absolutely. Quite a few members talked about not feeling comfortable in their community. They’re comfortable around some people, but not all people. They’re worried about going to neighboring towns, when they’re going to seek services, or even accessing any of the services they were offered for their health and, and wellness because they weren’t sure if the clinicians were queer competent, or accepting. I encourage folks to connect with their general mental health and they said, Well, if they’re not encouraging our understanding of what it means to be trans, then how is this a safe space for me? Other individuals shared that they have to lie about who they are and how they live their life to their family members, because their family members are the ones that help manage their finances or help them with their physical needs or caregivers coming in.

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All of it is impacted - every single aspect of their life is impacted by their own selves. It’s not about anything that they are. It’s about how the world sees them. It plays a huge role in their mental and physical wellbeing. Claire Robson: How would you describe the response and the uptake, if you like, of working together and working with you? Devan Cecelia Christian: I think really, the biggest thing about working together is that it was a really nice space for folks to feel normalized, to feel welcomed, and to feel that their experiences were not just their own. You know, any one of the group members would bring something forward. And there would be at least if not multiple other group members going, I totally get what that’s like! Yeah, me too! And just the ease that you would see in their body language, even over Zoom, that, Oh, this isn’t just me, I’m not the only person that feels this way. It happened every session, every session, right? It was a beautiful piece to watch. This group became more solidified and more connected and more supportive of one another. They were reaching out to one another way outside of group. They would email me to let me know the other person wasn’t gonna be there that day, because they had a medical appointment or whatever. They really started to look out for one another. Claire Robson:  Did they visit with each other? Did they share resources? Was there any spillage outside the boundaries of the sessions? Devan Cecelia Christian: I think definitely in terms of their connection with one another. They would often come back to group and say, This person shared this with me., and I really thought it was so helpful for me so I thought I ‘d bring it to the group and they’ve given me permission to, or, I’ve been having zoom chats with so and so about the group topics, and this is what’s been really helpful, or This other person and I we talked about what we’re doing in the writing group, and how it’s related to this, or I’m struggling with this. Can we talk about it? You know, every session, this was always coming back, that members of this group all connected with one another outside of the group, some more so than others. But yeah, there were no physical meetups simply because of distance. Claire Robson:  You’re speaking about connection? Isolation and depression are the two biggest risk factors for all seniors. Right? When it comes to these particularly vulnerable seniors, that’s why peer support, I guess, is

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so important. How would you compare the individual counseling and the peer support? Was one more instrumental in supporting them than the other? Or do you think we need both? Devan Cecelia Christian: I think both are important for particular reasons. The group is for the majority of folks, the peer support, the group processing skill building base is so helpful, because you provide people with skills that they don’t know about - things that can help them in their day-today life, information about why they might be feeling the way they are, why things have happened, what their brain is doing. That was a really helpful piece for folks to understand - Oh, your brain is actually wired to look for problems. And they’re like, Oh! It’s not just that my brain is wrong. And I was like, No. It’s actually wired to do that to protect you. That offers normalcy of understanding what’s going on with them. Then one to one was really imperative for particular folks for specific issues that weren’t necessarily group appropriate. Some individuals came to see me because of particular issues, for instance, how to communicate with caregivers. Other group members weren’t necessarily involved in that issue and it was a long conversation that would take away from group time for other things that were more relevant for everyone. And then another individual who was seeing me was struggling quite a bit with suicidality. Again, that’s not group appropriate. And so, you know, while it came up in group, and they got lots of support from their peers, it was working with that in a different way on our one-to-one basis to create safety, to create understanding, to make meaning, and just to normalize that experience. I do think both, though both aren’t necessary for every single person. Claire Robson: How was this work different from other peer groups and other work that you’ve done in the field with seniors? Devan Cecelia Christian: What was different here was the fact that while everyone understood that they were here because of the project, which meant they all came with some particular background around elder abuse, and identifying with the 2SLGBTQI community, I do believe that it was different because there’s so much lived experience around being a minority living life within discrimination, or in hiding. That added another level in terms of support for the group members, and also safe space. Other groups

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that I’ve run are really psychoeducational, that balance of peer support and education. I used to run hospice support groups. Everyone knew that they were coming there because a loved one had died. But it was so different, right? They were all on their own journey. They’re all in their own grief. They might have made a friend or two; they would share a little bit. But here, everyone welcomed one another. They wanted information; they wanted to be able to contact each other; they wanted to be able to help and support and share resources and normalize that their experience is not alone. It was such a place of love is what I want to say. Everyone was so welcoming and loving to one another. Everyone was there for a purpose. And everyone was missed if they didn’t come. Claire Robson: Devan, why do you think that happened? If you’ve if you’ve lost a partner, if you’re widowed, if you’ve been through domestic violence, that bond is still there. Why do you think this group was so different? Devan Cecelia Christian: Part of me says that it’s because of the length of time that these folks have experienced life and in particular life as belonging to the queer community. These are folks that had to hide their true sense of self for decades, or didn’t know that this is who they were. There are folks that had come out and come back and come out again. I think it’s just that piece of how society has changed, how policies have changed, how laws have changed, and how the world still is, like a lot of the World News played a big impact in some of our sessions: events south of the border, attacks on trans communities, attacks caused by the Trump aftermath. They wanted to know, Am I safe here? Am I free to be myself? Do I have to do this all over again? Do I have to go hide again? There was a lot of that kind of uncertainty. It was about providing education on fact checking. Reassurance such as Look where you are. You’re not in that country. You’re in this country here. You have your laws and your rights. Hear your people. Hear your supports. Even just being able to normalize it in the group, like Here are the people within this group who are here to support you and to support one another. And so that to me, I think was a really big piece. Claire Robson: This generation is the Silent Generation, from an era where being queer was pathologized and criminalized, and I include myself in that generation, too. We know

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what it can look like. A lot of younger queers haven’t lived through those dark times. They don’t perhaps have the same embodied fear of what that can actually feel like. Devan Cecelia Christian: To deepen that comparison with the younger community, they get to come where they have rights, and they have pride, and small communities have pride. And it is a big national celebration. There’s a whole month dedicated to pride. I think it’s a really big, welcomed thing that we can talk about and celebrate now. The older generation lived when this did not exist. When we were working together in the month of June, it came up that attending Pride events wasn’t helpful, because that energy levels, partying, the celebration was actually not aligning with who they are, and their age level, their capabilities, their sensory capabilities. How do you connect and find your community when you can’t attend the big celebrated event, right? The public celebration was actually not a place that they could always go. Claire Robson:  That’s interesting, too, because you met on Zoom, right? Do you think that it was important that otherwise some could not have attended in physical space? Devan Cecelia Christian: Absolutely! There are two individuals that wouldn’t have been able to attend at all - myself included. Two of our members do not live in the Lower Mainland, so the zoom option was so helpful, because we are able to connect to folks living in other communities and with limited resources. Claire Robson: What were your takeaways on elder abuse in the queer community? Devan Cecelia Christian: How unrecognized elder abuse in the queer community is. How silently it was experienced for the group members. And how impactful  - the levels of shame, guilt, blame, that are already living inside of their psyches inside of their bodies, and then adding this on top of it was just such a big component in their experience of living as full human beings, and in their lives, if that makes sense. Claire Robson: Yes, it makes perfect sense. I think a lot of people who have very little experience of queer people tend to think in terms of explicit homophobia when they think of homophobic abuse.

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Devan Cecelia Christian: To be honest, the discussion around the actual abuse was not something that came up in our group, almost at all because there were so many other levels that were coming out instead, right? From their interviews, from what they have experienced, from their lives, from how they were integrating to their lives now, with having these conversations and having these interviews. There’s so many levels that this was a component of it, but so much else was still needing to be healed and worked on. While we all knew that they were there because they had been abused, that was not what was worked on. Claire Robson:  I was actually going to ask you more about this, because right at the beginning of the interview, you said it was about knowledge and skills, and when I think, in my uneducated way, about peer support groups, I think people will be talking about their feelings and their experiences. But you’re saying it wasn’t about that. Devan Cecelia Christian: There were their feelings and their experiences on what had come up, but it was what was coming up that was bubbling to the surface. This is the past traumas, this is the past experiences that they’ve kind of had to step away and hide or deal with, without actually having proper skills to be able to put it away properly, and to integrate it into life where it was no longer causing them harm or distress. That’s what we had to do. We had to do the work on the question of how you create safe space for yourself within your own mind and in your own body. What skills do you need in order to be able to communicate your needs and your boundaries with other people? We talked about assertiveness, we talked about stress, we talked about anxiety, depression, how to stay safe as a trans person, how to communicate our needs, how to set boundaries. You know, we talked about so many different topics, because they were all imperative in what is coming up out of their interviews. Claire Robson: In a way, you know, what is the helpfulness in reinscribing trauma? I don’t know much about the field, but I know I’ve seen some groups in which people just tell the stories, you know, the same awful stories to each other, again and again. Is this a debate in your field?

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Devan Cecelia Christian: Well, around the trauma therapies that I’ve worked on, yes. I’m trained in EMDR and something called traumatic incident reduction. EMDR takes the perspective that you don’t have conversations about it, you work, you tax your working memory, and you just noticed the bits and pieces that you are left with in between the intermittent working of the short-term memory. Traumatic incident reduction is about repeating the story until it has no more power; you’re kind of letting it bubble up and come out. So there are different perspectives on how that can be healed. It’s individual; some work one way and for some others, it’s a different way. And I think it’s really your preference on how you function. If you’re a chatterbox, you might want to talk about it and talk about all the details. That’s important. It feels cathartic in a safe space, whereas for some folks, it’s too concerning and too terrifying to talk about all the details over and over and over again. You do have to have ways to be able to process it without having to relive all those components verbally. Claire Robson: If you were to send a message to any future counselors working in this project, what would be your professional advice around facilitation? Devan Cecelia Christian: I learned that people don’t have enough resources to be able to safely put away the traumas they’ve experienced. If I can give an analogy, we kind of just like shove it onto a bookshelf in our mind and hope it stays there. But we walk past the bookshelf of our mind all the time, and so it pops up, it reminds us, and it can be really quite overwhelming. Instead, we can try to create a container, where we know we can safely put things away and have control on how we bring it out, and when we bring it out, and ways to be able to regulate ourselves when things pop out unexpectedly. You can’t actually do any true trauma work unless you have these grounding foundational skills, where people can be able to put it away, relax their bodies, and be able to walk out of the session out of the group and still function. They might only be with me for an hour or once a week, but they have so many hours and days left to live their regular lives, and it would be unethical for me to just let them be exposed and walk around thinking they’d be fine.

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Claire Robson: As I recall, in the first townhall meeting, the very first person who spoke said, What we need is a toolkit. It’s important to know that this is about skills and strategies and knowledge and resources, to move on and to have a safe container and to manage one’s life. Devan Cecelia Christian: I think that’s a piece where the one-to-one work would be for the individual processing of the actual experiences to create contained space, whereas the group work is about creating all of the toolkit needs in order to keep going and to be able to do that one-to-one work. One thing that I would recommend moving forward is to always prepare people with some sort of toolkit before they open these stories. Some people really were quite shocked on how impactful their stories actually were hitting them as they were doing the interview. They weren’t quite prepared for the emotional impact that that was having. Claire Robson: That’s really good to know. I’m trying to think - did I start the interviews before you met with them? Devan Cecelia Christian: Yeah, before group started. I had sent them an overview of the container and a process called Safe Place or Calm Place, so that they could do that themselves in preparation for the interviews, but I think even like a preface  - here’s a group session  - everybody log in before we start interviewing. Here are a couple of tools. It’s important for you to know these before you start your interviews, just in case you need them during or after. Giving people the opportunity to talk about the scary awful things at length, in the interviews you conducted, is in itself very powerful and important. In our society, even as you go in to get an assessment done, it’s always just, Can you give me the point four point form version? This information that I need. I don’t want all the details. Yet, these are such profound moments in their life, we cannot just reduce them to a checkbox – yes, check, I’ve experienced elder abuse. There’s so much behind it. It’s such a story, such an experience, so much emotion that it deserves and needs a safe space where you can talk about and process and be supported. The whole point about traumatic memories is that they’re fragmented memories. There is not a beginning, middle and end, closed circuit, easy, contained piece. Our psyche has dissociated in the moment to protect ourselves until we don’t remember it. We might only have physical sensations and not know what they’re related to. We could have a visual component and just feel so overwhelmed that we can’t even speak words to it, because it’s so scary within our own mind. It’s a fragmented experience that we can’t contain and close up. It’s as though it’s still happening, even, you know, potentially years or decades later.

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Claire Robson: So you’re saying that the opportunity to just free flow without judgment or questions and just be in a space where everything can come out, like a tangle of wool, is in itself therapeutic? Several of the participants wrote to me after the interviews and said things like I feel lighter. It was so great. I feel different. That in itself almost speaks to the nature of the kind of work that has to happen here and how the three pieces dovetail together, right? The individual counseling, the peer counseling, and the storytelling/interviews. Devan Cecelia Christian: And I think the biggest component about the storytelling is making sure that it feels like a private and safe space where they can speak freely, and that they are welcome to speak just as they are. A big component of that ability to just unload - the yarn ball unraveling – speaks to how comfortable you made them feel. If you were very stoic, or you know, in a white coat sterile sanitized environment, where things were very, very recently, an environment where it’s not warm and welcoming and safe, people are not going to open up that way. They’re going to keep themselves reserved and very point form, simply for self-preservation. Claire Robson: Is there anything else that we haven’t covered that you’d like to add? Devan Cecelia Christian: The biggest piece is being able to offer the support services. As you open up the door to folks, I just really hope that there’s ongoing support that can become available. What really came through in our group is that while it was a wonderful two-month experience together, the work wasn’t done. There was still so much more support that was needed. It was such a helpful resource that the members of the group really did not want it to end, which is why they took it upon themselves to be able to create their own group, which was wonderful. But I think that’s a big component. If we’re going to ask folks to start opening up and have these conversations, there needs to be at least a good chunk of time and resources available. Claire Robson: Devan, I’m so pleased that you know, you were the counselor on the group. It just kicked everything into high gear. It was amazing work. Thanks so much. Devan Cecelia Christian: It was honestly such a privilege and a pleasure. I really enjoyed it.

Chapter 16

Analysis and Discussion

16.1 Introduction In this final chapter, we begin by discussing the ways in which elder abuse looks similar in the stories told by GSM survivors and the general population. Next, we look at the ways in which, for these narrators, they might be considered different. We conclude with recommendations for those working with elders, and for those conducting research.

16.2 Similarities in Elder Abuse GSM older adults are particularly vulnerable to elder abuse. Research shows that in the case of physical abuse, both older women and GSM older adults are more vulnerable than older, heterosexual cismen (Gurm et al., 2020). That said, in this section we examine the commonalities between the abuse of the GSM elders whose stories appear in this collection and the general heterosexual and cisgender population. Recent experiences with the COVID lock downs have laid bare the shortcomings of long-term care homes for all seniors and the additional pressures affecting family conflict. Our cases show that there is a great need for GSM culturally-­informed training, but as Michele’s story indicates, that insensitivity is not restricted to GSM but also extended to other minorities, such as the First Nation woman made to wear ‘Mickey Mouse ears.’ In fact, Canadian studies show that victims of physical abuse are frequently disadvantaged in other ways such as being cognitively impaired; physically disabled; low-income; Indigenous and living in rural areas (Brozowski & Hall, 2010; McDonald, 2011).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0_16

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There are also parallels in the financial abuse stories in our cases and the general older population, in fact the most common form of relationship violence is financial abuse (Weissberger et  al., 2019). According to HealthLinkBC (2022), financial abuse is often perpetrated by those closest to the abuser such as family members and friends, as we see in the stories of both Pam (partner) and Flygirl (friends). Such abuse can result in basic needs like medical care being unmet, which can result in negative health implications (National Institute on Aging, 2020). Flygirl provides an example, in that she maintained contact with her abusers in the hopes of getting her vital medical resources returned to her. Gurm et al. (2020, chp 17, unpaginated) offer a definition of neglect of elders: Elder neglect refers to either intentional or unintentional failing or refusal of a caregiver to meet an older person’s physical, emotional and social needs. … Some examples of elder neglect are failing to give medication, bathing, toileting, and dressing, stopping essential health treatment, consciously ignoring an older person and failing to provide appropriate food and water. We can see from the narratives that these experiences are also shared by GSM elders but may, in some cases, be exacerbated by their sexual and gender identities. According to Freeman and Vaillancourt (1993), spiritual abuse refers to “the erosion or breaking down of one’s cultural or religious belief systems” indicating that spiritual abuse is not restricted to the GSM elder population. Grace’s experiences of spiritual abuse may be specific to her lesbian identity, but it has to be noted that others in society may be denied spiritual support through, for example, those in a position of trust always finding excuses not to drive an older person to church, gurdwara, or synagogue, or by policies of exclusion of women, or around issues such as abortion, divorce, and birth control. Another similarity in victims of elder abuse is the presence of risk factors for victimisation. Storey (2020) conducted a meta-analysis of the literature and concludes that risk factors include mental and physical health challenges, attitudes of self-blame, an earlier history of abuse, and problems in their domestic relationships. Storey also found that stress and an inability to cope with it can also lead to withdrawing and self-neglect, a further risk factor for victimisation. Storey’s analysis did not include GSM elder abuse, but we can see that the risk factors she identifies for the general population also exist in the narratives here.

16.3 Differences in Elder Abuse In this next section, we turn to consideration of the ways in which GSM elder abuse differs from that experienced by the general population.

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16.3.1 Systemic Cultural Violence As we have noted throughout this book, the GSM people we interviewed came to adulthood in a cultural climate that was often hostile to members of sexual and gender minorities. This situation is reflected in their narratives, which detail lifelong experiences of physical and emotional violence within their families of origin, organizational oppression, sexual predation by peers and adults, suicidal ideation, and workplace harassment. Early Abuse Several of our participants report being abused in childhood (Joseph, Trudy, Michele, Candace, Pam, Grace). Though we cannot draw broad conclusions from our small sample, the literature does suggest that GSM children and young adults are more likely to have been abused as children (Barba et  al., 2021; Friedman et al., 2011). This has led to a popular assumption that early abuse, and sexual abuse in particular, can ‘turn’ a child gay (Saewyc et al., 2006). Other commentators have pointed to the contradiction inherent in this suggestion, in that on the one hand, male perpetrators are said to cause men to seek out men in their later years, while on the other, they cause women to reject them entirely (PFLAG Atlanta, 2023). They also draw attention to the fact that there are significantly more cases of sexual abuse than there are people that identify as GSM (MacMillan et al., 1997), and that the vast majority of persons sexually abused as children are heterosexual. They point out that the suggestion that homosexuality and transsexuality are ‘abnormal’ conditions whose provenance needs to be explained (while heterosexuality is viewed as a normal and naturally occurring state) is inherently insulting. Organizations as diverse as the American Academy of Pediatrics (Frankowski, 2004) and the US Department of Veteran Affairs have stated that sexual abuse does not cause individuals to become gay, lesbian, or bisexual. What seems more likely is that sexual minority individuals are more likely to be targeted by abusers, since they have often been rejected by their parents because of their identifications, even when these are barely understood by the victims themselves. GSM subjects are both more isolated in their early years and more confused about their sexual identity, all situations that can be taken advantage of by perpetrators (Gracia & Musitu, 2003). Many learn early in life to conceal their identities and to maintain a low profile. With the exception of the two narratives where early childhood conditions were not made known to the researchers because they were recounted by someone else (Jackie and Matthew), all of the narratives in this collection told by extant survivors report an early sense of difference, parental violence, rejection of gender and sexual identities, and a sense of extreme isolation (Michele, Trudy, Joseph, Pam, Flygirl, Grace, Candace). Joseph points out that in the GSM community, “many of us have

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experienced trauma…and responded to that in dysfunctional ways.” Interestingly, he decides to remain with his partner, “a Mormon boy, out at school when he was 15 in the 80s,” since Joseph understands the trauma that affected his partner’s ability to maintain a loving relationship. He also points out that this empathetic awareness of the fact that many queer elders suffered similar rejection is something that volunteers and social workers usually do not understand. He suggests that if he had “been not so socialized into living with insidious abuse and trauma,” he would have “dealt with it differently.” For the GSM population, the slights, microaggressions, and “psychic wounding” (to quote Grace) that they have experienced over a lifetime might be said to serve as a form of “grooming.” Shame, low self-esteem, secrecy, and isolation have been developed over a lifetime, making them prime and easy targets for abusers. “It’s conditioning for self-hatred” says Grace, who reports that she shut down at the age of 10, because she did not feel safe. As noted above, it also contributes to the maintenance of silence.

16.4 Organizational Violence There are three major institutions that our participants said have failed them, historically speaking, and thus made them reluctant to trust them. Discussed below are health care, in- home and residential care, and faith communities.

16.4.1 Health Care The first is the health care system. It is worth noting here that the research indicates that GSM individuals are less likely to visit doctors than their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts, and even when they do, they are less likely to disclose that they are queer or trans (Jennings et al., 2019). This is disturbing, given that doctors serve an important role in identifying and reporting abuse. Our survivor narratives shed some light on possible historic reasons for this mistrust, for example, Trudy’s experiences with health care professionals were oppressive. “Every adult seemed to want to destroy me,” she said in her interview, “the police, the doctors, my parents.” She was sent to a psychiatric unit twice a week until she was 18, where she was subjected to aggressive and demeaning conversion therapy.

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16.4.2 AIDS Older GSM individuals lived through the AIDS epidemic; even if they were not directly affected by it, they learned that the health care system could be highly discriminatory. In Chap. 3, we have summarized the ways in which gay men were refused treatment and abandoned by their families. Douglas reported that “From 1990 until 1994, I worked for AIDS community hospice in LA. It was emotionally exhausting, and it gave me a deep mistrust of the health care system, and the way that people in the straight world can treat us.” He tells the story of a mother who refuses to visit her dying son, or help dispose of his remains. Michele, a lesbian, also recalls “the ways in which gay men were sidelined, marginalized, and mistreated [during the AIDS epidemic].”

16.4.3 Trans Health Care Like many trans individuals, Trudy found it difficult to access gender affirming surgery, and ended up going into debt in order to visit a “very shady doctor” who seemed interested only in getting paid and was willing to fake the necessary paperwork in order to do so. When she developed an infection, Trudy was stranded in a tiny room in New York, with no support or aftercare - probably a typical story at that time. There are no accounts of current mistreatment by doctors, apart from the extreme insensitivity of Trudy’s doctor, who insists, despite her objections, on outing her as a “transwoman” when referring her to specialists, even when her gender identity is not significant in terms of diagnosis or treatments.

16.4.4 Residential and in Home Support Systems Residential Care As discussed earlier in this chapter, the residential care industry has been highly problematic in terms of neglect towards both heterosexual and GSM clients. However, the narratives indicate that for GSM individuals, homophobia and transphobia add an additional layer to the complications of understaffing and inadequate training. Both participants who report on residential care felt that their sexual orientation put “a target on their backs” as Michele put it, or a “whirlwind of homophobia” as Doug reports. In the residential care environment that Michele endured for 2 years, homophobic jokes and slights were common. The photograph she shared of a First Nation resident being publicly ridiculed suggests that the environment was generally insensitive to the needs of minority groups. As Michele also indicates,

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understaffing led to undue authority being handed to care aides who were less welltrained than the nurses (presumably in terms of queer and racial competence as well as medical knowhow), but on whom the nurses depended heavily for support and thus did not wish to challenge. This has clear implications for clients who belong to any minority group. In Home Care When it comes to in-home care, the inability to empathize with GSM clients is much more problematic, since it is unchecked by senior administrators or more qualified health care professionals. In situations like this, GSM clients are at the mercy of staff who are sometimes members of faith and ethnic communities who are traditionally hostile to GSM individuals and whose views and prejudices have not been tempered by queer competent training and awareness, Trudy is exposed to several in-home care support staff who are both abusive and neglectful. One is openly derisive about GSM people, telling Trudy how she and her friend travel to gay communities to ridicule people there. Another touches her genitals inappropriately and without consent. Another refuses to touch her or help her at all, and lodges an unfair and unfounded complaint against Trudy with her supervisor. It is interesting to note that Flygirl reports a similar dichotomy around genital contact, as an in-home care provider flatly refuses to wash “her thing”, while nurses in the hospital touch her genitals without her consent. It would seem likely that genital contact is highly charged for a population whose identifications are constructed in terms of their sexuality and who have, in the cases of trans folk of this age, experienced affordable but problematic gender affirming surgeries, many conducted in other countries. This situation is compounded by the suggestion that caregivers who are unused to working with GSM people might fluctuate between the two extremes of overfamiliarity and curiosity on the one hand, and repulsion and distaste on the other.

16.4.5 Faith Communities Though Grace presents as a deeply spiritual person, who wanted to practice her religion with others since her last year in high school, she was unable to find an accepting church until very recently. “The literature defines abuse in myriad ways, but what I seldom hear mentioned is spiritual trauma,” Grace wrote, adding that she suspects that “the greatest and most profound harm done to LGBTQ people has been spiritual abuse.” As we noted earlier (see Chap. 1) over the last 10 years, some commentators have added spiritual abuse into the existing categories of elder abuse (Matthews, 2019). Though spiritual abuse is admittedly difficult to define, so are any of the other forms of abuse that fall within the category of emotional and

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psychological abuse, and this does not make them less real, or less destructive to those who experience their harmful effects. Grace makes a strong case for the inclusion of spiritual abuse, particularly for GSM individuals, as she details her difficult struggle over the course of many years to find acceptance within faith communities, either because there was an institutional assumption of heterosexuality, or on three occasions, confusing and unwelcome advances were made by seemingly closeted lesbians within those faith communities - again, a product of prejudice and discrimination. She says that spiritual abuse “assaults the most profound levels of being, impeding healthy emotional development and maturation, the capacity for rewarding wholesome relationships with oneself and others; and generates destructive forces within the person who can no longer connect with the deepest gift of life – truth and beauty of their own being gifted from the Creator.” We are reminded here of Devan Cecelia Christian’s comments on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as she says that “every single aspect of their life is impacted by their own selves. It’s not about anything that they are. It’s about how the world sees them. It plays a huge role in their mental and physical wellbeing.”

16.5 Homophobia and Transphobia – A Spectrum Grace’s story, like many in this collection of survivor narratives, speaks to the complexity of the impact of internalized homophobia and transphobia. Though the layperson might imagine that these play out through overt slurs and attacks, the realities on the ground are much more complex, as our participants described them. Times have changed since homophobia and transphobia were considered acceptable, and the rights of GSM people are now legally upheld in Canada, as we discuss in Chap. 3. That said, discrimination still occurs, though it might not be overt. One of the chief understandings we reached by listening to our participants is that the ways in which marginalization plays out is complex and subtle. Rather than being obvious and discrete, homophobia and transphobia might be said to exist on the following spectrum for those who experience them: overt homophobia; covert homophobia and transphobia; and assumptions of heterosexuality.

16.5.1 Overt Homophobia At the extreme end of this spectrum, our participants did report disturbing instances of overt and outright homophobia during their senior years. In the two in-home care situations, care providers were on occasion sexually abusive (Trudy), neglectful (Trudy and Jackie), and openly homophobic (Trudy). In terms of residential care, though we cannot conclusively ascribe Michele and Doug’s experiences to homophobia, it seems highly likely in Michele’s case that her cruel mistreatment was a direct consequence of homophobia, given that homophobic jokes were left

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unchecked, and one of her aides suggested that she “hated all men” because she is a lesbian. Trudy’s doctor identifies her (unnecessarily) as trans to other practitioners, leading to discrimination at their hands, and her care provider tells her stories of how she and her friends travel to gay communities in order to ridicule gays. According to the literature, these experiences are not untypical. In relation to neglect, GSM older adults are at the highest risk for abuse by caregivers (Grossman et al., 2014), a situation that Frazer (2009) suggests may be explained by homophobic views held by caregivers.

16.5.2 Covert Homophobia and Transphobia Of interest is a prevalent and pervasive feeling that several of our participants experienced  – that although homophobia and transphobia were at play, they operated covertly. Michele, Doug, and Joseph all suggest that they felt marginalized by health care workers and police, though they stopped short of explicit discrimination. “It was for sure homophobia,” Joseph told us. “They didn’t want to get close to me. They just didn’t know what to do about it. I have all these tattoos, which makes me suspect and unreliable. I just felt it. I knew it. When they looked at me, they almost smirked.” Similarly, Doug’s ‘gut’ told him that he and Matthew were subjected to a “whirlwind of homophobia,” disguised as an appropriate response to certain of his actions. This subtle and unspoken homophobia, when and if it occurs, is all the more egregious because it is impossible to address, since it is never openly articulated. Instead, victims are left to doubt their interpretations and live with the knowledge that though they feel that they have been victimized, there is nothing they can do about it, thus reinforcing their sense of powerlessness and invisibility. Several of our other participants (Trudy, Candace, Flygirl, Grace) report microaggressions, insidious everyday traumas, and the difficulties they experience in living in such cultures on a daily basis.

16.5.3 Assumption of Heterosexuality Heteronormativity is a context in which queer and trans identifications do not lead to direct and open discrimination, either overt or covert, but are simply glossed over and ignored. A good example is provided by Jackie’s support team, who assigned her a social worker based upon ethnicity, rather than sexuality or gender, and failed to recognize or investigate the possibility that a client might identify as lesbian (Jackie), though evidence, in terms of photographs of her and her partner, lay in plain view and her dead partner’s clothes still hung in her closet. If a client or patient is afraid and reluctant to reveal their sexual or gender orientations, as were Jackie and Grace, such assumptions of heterosexuality serve to compound their invisibility. In the narratives presented here, some suggest that failure to ‘pass’

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(as heterosexual and cisgender) leads to discrimination (for instance, the police are suspicious of Joseph because of his many tattoos), while the ability to pass leads to an assumption of heterosexuality or cisgender (Jackie).

16.5.4 Internalized Homophobia and Transphobia Older GSM individuals have lived through times in which they were considered sick, insane, and dangerous. A fear of being outed caused isolation, lack of self-­ esteem, and inability to seek support for several of our participants. Even though there is no causal link between child predation and being homosexual or trans, Trudy fears that passersby might think that she is a sexual predator if she talks to children in a school playground. Jackie begs Zoe not to say the word ‘lesbian’ out loud, preferring to be called “an old butch.” Of course, we do not know how her care providers would have responded had they understood that she was a recent lesbian widow, but it does seem that her extreme isolation is due in part to her determination to remain closeted. Although she chooses to define as lesbian or gay, Grace has chosen not to enter a sexual relationship and has not been out to some of her friends, though she reported that her involvement in the Indigo Project has enabled her to do so. Candace provides another interesting example. She was so afraid of being identified as homosexual that she deliberately shunned her best childhood friend because he was thought to be gay. Though she was repeatedly subjected to unwanted sexual advances by men, because she seemed effeminate, and experienced a lifetime of feeling unsettled and at odds with her biological masculinity (leading to frequent suicidal ideation), Candace did not come out as trans until the age of 70. Again, we suggest that for this particular generation of GSM elders, internalized homophobia and transphobia are of special significance.

16.5.5 Second Hand Homophobia and Transphobia Homophobia and transphobia need not to be experienced directly in order to impact those who belong to the GSM community. Again, Candace offers a good example. She was never specifically targeted for being homosexual or trans (except perhaps for being the subject of sexual experimentation by male peers as a child). She lived, albeit unhappily, as heterosexual for 70  years, keeping her distance from young children, remaining silent about her early sexual abuse, window shopping at women’s clothing stores, but unable to come out as queer. “You were taught to be afraid of them,” Candace said in her interview. “I spent so much of that time suppressing anything in that direction, just to try and keep myself safe from that happening.” When Candace does begin to think about living as a woman, late in life, she was much discouraged by the story of a very confident transwoman who is ridiculed on the street - a clear example of second-hand transphobia. Candace nevertheless found

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the courage to go forward by following her heart and “being the real me.” She reached out to QMUNITY and found support and validation. “My real regret is not coming out much earlier,” she reported. It seems likely that there are many people like Candace who are discouraged by systemic and cultural norms and thus remain unable to take the brave final step of coming out, but live invisible lives of quiet desperation. The National Centre on Elder Abuse (NCEA) notes that the fear of being outed also contributes to invisibility. This invisibility poses a difficult and possibly insurmountable problem for researchers, but even though these authors cannot solve this problem, we know that such survivors still exist. We can only hope that our project, which has created one community of support, will generate similar projects that will offer them safe places to come forward.

16.6 Additional Risk Factors for GSM Individuals Members of gender and sexual minorities may experience additional risk factors when it comes to elder abuse, ones which are a direct result of their sexual and gender orientations.

16.6.1 Multiplicity of Risk Factors Firstly, gender and sexual minorities might be described as existing in a “perfect storm” of risk factors, since they are more likely to be disabled (Frederiksen-­ Goldsen et  al., 2013), to misuse drugs and alcohol (Choi & Meyer, 2016), to be childless, or to have little contact with their families, and to be isolated (Frederiksen-­ Goldsen et al., 2013). Table 16.1, below, shows that all of our participants suffered from a range of medical conditions, with the exceptions of Pam and possibly Jackie (who was malnourished but seemingly healthy otherwise).

Table 16.1  Health conditions reported by study participants Trudy Michele Candace Donald Flygirl Grace Joseph

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/ CFS) Late-stage ALS Heart condition brought on by stress. PTSD from service in Korea. Diabetic. MS ME/CFS HIV positive, severe bone loss from medication

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Table 16.2  Sense of dislocation reported by study participants Joseph I always knew I was different Michele I was asked to high school parties and dances by boys, but always avoided those encounters by making excuses Grace I knew very early that something about myself was different, but I could not have told you what it was. Around about the age of 10 or 11, I shut down, knowing that things weren’t going to be safe Trudy It started very, very young that I felt other Flygirl I started to have inklings when I was a teenager, but I repressed them, of course, because I was a Christian, and Christians don’t do that Table 16.3  Histories of trauma reported by participants Joseph Michele Jackie Matthew Pam

Physically abusive alcoholic father who committed suicide. Physically abusive parents. School reported heavy bruises. Father who tried to force her into marriage to ‘cure’ her. Not known Very physically abusive father. Mother clinically diagnosed as narcissist. Brother committed suicide. Trudy Attempted suicide at 5 years old. Beaten for being insufficiently masculine. Sent for conversion therapy in teens. Candace Sexually assaulted throughout childhood and adulthood. Suicidal ideation throughout life. Flygirl Disowned by family after sister outed her. Grace Ostracism and dislocation within various spiritual communities. Childhood sexual abuse. Suicidal urges throughout her life.

For most of our participants (see Table 16.2 above) there was an early sense of dislocation and difference. For almost all, there are histories of childhood trauma (see Table 16.3 above). Suicide is frequently referenced in terms of both family instances of suicide and suicidal ideation on their parts.

16.7 Other Considerations 16.7.1 Minority Status The statistics on the proportion of GSM people vary considerably, and are not generally trusted in the GSM community, because they depend upon self-reporting, which many are reluctant to do, since they fear discrimination. That said, they are generally thought to be somewhere between 4% and 10% of the Canadian population. It is highly likely that this minority status plays into the abuse of GSM elders.

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As Joseph points out, members of gender and sexual minorities are more likely to have lived through difficult experiences, which are thus compounded in their relationships. Since the ‘dating pool’ is much smaller for GSMs, and Joseph understands that many if not most have experienced some form of abuse, he decides to remain with his partner and work through their difficulties. In her work on violence in lesbian relationships, Ristock (2003) notes that many women, especially the younger or more newly-out partner, remained in their relationships to be able to remain in contact with the lesbian community. In this sense, there might be increased dependency on partners and increased difficulties in finding social support.

16.7.2 Keeping Up Appearances Since relationships between GSM individuals are already under scrutiny, they can be said to be under extra pressure both to appear, and be experienced as, successful. This pressure to ‘keep up appearances’ in GSM relationships may well play into the abuse of GSMs, as it contributes to the maintenance of silence. Historically, the queer community has focused upon pride, youth, and celebratory narratives of success. Like some other minority groups, the GSM population has avoided confronting or revealing narratives that might reveal the existence of conflict or harm. “You have to sacrifice some of the pride to deal with the shame,” Joseph told us. “I can’t let my pride override my need to be public about how shame is constructed in the queer community.” Pam reported a “need to look like a model of a loving relationship.” Indeed, she hands over control of her finances to Meera initially in order to reassure Meera’s parents of her honest intentions, since Meera suggests that they will suspect that she is only dating Meera to gain access to her money. Flygirl believes that she cannot speak out about the ways in which the lesbian community let her down, because it would be too risky: “I wouldn’t ever talk openly about my disillusionment with lesbian culture. It’s our dirty secret.”

16.7.3 Support Systems Issues in Finding Support A key factor to surviving trauma is the way in which it was managed (see Chap. 15). In this sense, support systems are vital in both shielding us from abuse, and helping us escape and recover from it. The participants in our study suggest that throughout their lives, support was unavailable, difficult to access, or problematic in other ways. As Reid (2014) has suggested, unlike other minorities, those who identify as queer or trans are raised in families that do not share their identifications and thus lack robust role models.

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I have no bloodline of queerness: no family tree, no “alternative” ancestral line to account for my queerness. There was an utter lack of queer role models from whom I could learn, and no queer bodies on whom I could lean, I was the only one. I am the only one: the only queer person on both sides of my parents’ families. Further to that, there were the homophobic jokes, innuendos, and slurs in music videos and movies I watched and at school (in which, I too, participated), and the ‘flamboyant gay man’ impressions my father occasionally performed at the dinner table. It has made for a confusing, unsettling and persistent experience of attempting to figure out and be comfortable with who I am, to make sense of my sexuality and gender identity. Reid, 2014 Joseph’s mentors are older men, some of whom he had sex with. Though he rejects the notion that he experienced this as abusive, and we respect his testimony in this regard, it is at the very least a situation that opened him to the possibility of dangerous exploitation. Other forms of support were equally tenuous and difficult. Trudy’s visits to gay bars led to police intervention and an attempt at conversion. Grace sought spiritual community but was rejected by churches and by other Christians throughout her life, partly as a result of internalized homophobia which can be attributed to the historical rejection of GSM individuals within these communities. Though many GSM people do depend upon chosen family and are supported by them, Flygirl’s narrative disrupts this concept by detailing a perfect storm of lateral violence within the lesbian community. Resilience It is also interesting to note the resilience and ingenuity of our participants in finding support, often in unlikely places. Trudy seeks out gay bars when she is still a teen, just to “watch the people come in.” Joseph conducts library research to track down hook up sites in bathrooms. Rejected by battered women’s support services, Pam eventually finds support from her friends. Even though Jackie is terrified of identifying as a lesbian, she can comfortably identify with the old school butch/femme community. Grace persisted in her pursuit of finding accepting faith communities and, at the time of writing, is working with QMUNITY, a supportive psychiatrist, an accepting spiritual teacher, and an Anglican priest “who is also a strong ally for LGBTQ people.” Candace came out as trans at the age of 70, and attributes this courage late in life to improved media representations that were unavailable during her youth (The Danish Girl and Call the Midwife), and gave her the courage to reach out to QMUNITY. Matthew was unable to act on his own behalf, but was eventually removed from residential care by his loyal and loving partner. Indeed, all of our participants were eventually successful in finding support, a situation that may explain, at least in part, their willingness and ability to participate in this project. Of course, this is not true for many victims of abuse, and here we acknowledge the likely reality that there are many who are abused, unidentified, unsupported, and alone.

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QMUNITY Support Grace, Candace, Michele, Flygirl, and Trudy are all members of the facilitated peer support group established by QMUNITY. This is perhaps not surprising, given that all but one (Flygirl) were recruited as participants by Courtney Diekbrader, and Flygirl had an existing relationship with the organization. This suggests that peer and/or organizational support might be important both in terms of facilitating and encouraging disclosure of abuse and also in terms of healing from it. As Devan Christian Vermeer, the group facilitator, reports: “This group became more solidified and more connected and more supportive of one another. They were reaching out to one another way outside of group…they really started to look out for one another.” All four of the original support group continue to meet, and the group has now been opened to other survivors. We end this section by acknowledging the vital role that QMUNITY has played in the project, both in reaching out to survivors and in providing them with vital support. Given the paucity of support for queer elders who have experienced abuse, it seems that organizations like QMUNITY, who provide them with unique support and resources, are vital, though often unacknowledged in the literature. We would not argue that all studies into GSM abuse should necessarily provide free counseling and peer support to participants, since this would be impractical and unaffordable for many projects, and is probably unsuited to most quantitative studies. Given the lack of extant studies, the last thing we would wish for is to offer further obstacles to research. That said, it was highly successful in supporting our participants through sharing their first-hand accounts, and might be considered as best practice. The Indigo Project The Indigo Project as a whole was itself viewed as a source of support for some of our participants. Below are extracts from some of the emails Robson received after the interviews. • “Thank you for your work Claire. I’ve felt some healing this week.” Grace • “If others can benefit from our stories, I am proud to have taken part.” Candace • “The support the project provided has given me the chutzpah to get up the nerve to file an incident report with the RCMP. On the physical abuse.” Michele • I’ve learned a lot from doing these interviews, about myself and about my relationships. Joseph As Michele notes in her email above, she has recently made a formal complaint to the RCMP about her treatment in residential care, and attributes her ability to do so to the progress she has made in the project. Again, after the research process was concluded, Grace came out to a long-time friend (who is a Christian), and again attributed her courage to her involvement in the project. Although it may be difficult

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to quantify the benefits of simply telling one’s story from start to finish, without interruption, to an attentive and nonjudgmental listener, we suggest that it was both educational and empowering.

16.8 Recommendations 1. Those working with elders, such as police, health care providers, staff working in residential and in-home care, drop-in centres, and organizations working with minorities such as immigrants, the poor and ethnic and/or racialized communities, would be advised to be aware of and sensitive to the possibility that clients might identify as GSM. Specifically, they should be aware of the possibility that GSM clients might be reluctant to share their identifications and take care not to assume that they are heterosexual, particularly during intake. Intake questions should always include the possibility of GSM identifications. 2. Queer competent training is essential at all levels of administration and provision of care. Particular attention should be given to ‘on the ground’ care providers, such as residential and in-home care aides, who are often low paid and lack nuanced awareness of GSM issues and rights. Since staff turnover is particularly high for these staff, training should be ongoing, rather than discrete and annual. Specifically, training should include attempts to provide education around the histories and rights of GSM people in Canada, the extra sensitivities of GSM individuals with regard to assistance with personal hygiene, and the special medical needs of trans clients. 3. Given that GSM clients are often invisible in the largely heteronormative settings of doctors’ offices, hospitals, residential care settings, or elder day care, it is particularly important to maintain a visibly GSM positive climate. Visible signage such as rainbow stickers and inclusive mission statements are an important first step, but administrators should also consider ways to go beyond these, even when they believe that all their clients are heterosexual or cisgender. The steps taken might include the following:

(a) Awareness of the complex histories of GSMs (i) Invite GSM speakers and advocacy groups to present (ii) Celebrate events such as Pride and the International Day Against Transphobia and Homophobia (iii) Have books, films, and images of GSM history available (iv) Encourage storytelling projects that forefront the narratives of all residents, including GSM people and members of other minorities (b) There should be zero tolerance for homophobia and transphobia. This should include addressing homophobic and transphobic jokes, slights, and slurs. (c) Language used in trainings, bulletins, communications and signage should be inclusive of gender and sexual minorities.

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4. Our study suggests that there is a pressing need for more projects that offer counselling, support and advocacy for GSM survivors of elder abuse. There is no specific process for GSM victims of abuse to report or disclose their situations. Diekbrader suggests that though many call GSM organizations such as QMUNITY, she is unable to provide them with queer competent resources. This situation might be helped by more robust alliances between health care providers and GSM organizations, who can both offer queer competent training, identify those at risk for abuse, encourage them to seek help, and offer peer support groups such as that pioneered in this study. 5. Brotman et  al. have suggested that the categories of elder abuse might be expanded to include homophobic abuse, and Westwood (2018) has argued that the abuse of GSM elders can be broken up into three categories: elder abuse of older people who are GSM, homophobic/transphobic abuse toward GSM people who are also older, and abuse of older people due to both age and GSM status. This raises an issue which gave these authors considerable cause for reflection: Should GSM-related abuse be understood as a separate category? In some ways, we found this a tempting proposition for a number of reasons: (a) It does seem that GSM elder abuse looks somewhat different, as we have argued. (b) The creation of a new category of abuse would raise much-needed awareness of the victimization of GSM people. That said, at this point, we do not recommend it. Firstly, though identifying as GSM certainly increases the risk of abuse, it does not really affect the ways in which GSM individuals are abused. Secondly, the definitions of abuse generally used, particularly emotional and psychological abuse, are already slippery and difficult to quantify. That said, we do argue, with Grace, that expanding the commonly used definitions to include spiritual or cultural abuse might be justified, given the historical context experienced by our participants. 6. Further research is called for with regard to the GSM populations. We recommend that these should include the following:

(a) Quantitative studies that determine the extent of the abuse of GSM people and use a range of inclusive terminology. (b) Studies that focus upon reaching invisible, closeted, or hard-to-reach minorities. (c) Studies that capture lived experience through such practices as storytelling and photo/video narratives. (d) More outreach to GSM, BPOC, and Indigenous minorities that involves

(i) Researchers within those communities (ii) Cowritten grants (iii) Outreach to community organizers and organizations (iv) The inclusion of non-academics and activists

References

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7. Further research is necessary in order to determine the impact of homophobia and transphobia on younger GSM people. Given that they have reached maturity in times when they are better protected by legislative and cultural changes, will future generations be at less risk for abuse?

References Barba, A., Mooney, M., Giovanni, K., Clarke, M., Grady, J. B., & Cohen, J. A. (2021) Identifying the intersection of trauma and sexual orientation and gender identity part I: Key considerations. National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. https://www.nctsn.org/sites/default/files/ resources/special-­resource/identifying-­the-­intersection-­of-­trauma-­and-­sexual-­orientation-­and- ­ gender-­indentity-­key-­considerations.pdf Brozowski, K., & Hall, D.  R. (2010). Aging and risk: Physical and sexual abuse of elders in Canada. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 25(7), 1183–1199. https://doi. org/10.1177/0886260509340546 Choi, S. K., & Meyer, I H. (2016). LGBT aging: A review of research findings, needs, and policy implications. The Williams Institute. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-­content/ uploads/LGBT-­Aging-­Aug-­2016.pd Elder abuse. (2020, July 29). National Institute on Aging. https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/ elderabuse#types Financial abuse of older adults. (2022, February 24). HealthLink BC. Retrieved March 15, 2023 from https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/healthlinkbc-files/financial-abuse-older-adults Frankowski, B.  L. (2004). Sexual orientation and adolescence. Pediatrics, 113(6), 1827–1832. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.113.6.1827 Frazer, S. (2009). LGBT health and human services needs in New York State. Empire State Pride Agenda Foundation. https://www.lgbtagingcenter.org/resources/pdfs/LGBT%20Health%20 and%20Human%20Services%20Needs%20in%20New%20York%20State.pdf Frederiksen-Goldsen, K.  I., Kim, H.-J., Barkan, S.  E., Muraco, A., & Hoy-Ellis, C.  P. (2013). Health disparities among lesbian, gay, and bisexual older adults: Results from a population-­ based study. American Journal of Public Health, 103(10), 1802–1809. https://doi.org/10.2105/ AJPH.2012.301110 Freeman, P., & Vaillancourt, M. (1993). Canadian panel on violence against women. Government of Canada. Friedman, M. S., Marshal, M. P., Guadamuz, T. E., Wei, C., Wong, C. F., Saewyc, E., & Stall, R. (2011). A meta-analysis of disparities in childhood sexual abuse, parental physical abuse, and peer victimization among sexual minority and sexual nonminority individuals. American Journal of Public Health, 101(8), 1481–1494. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2009.190009 Gracia, E., & Musitu, G. (2003). Social isolation from communities and child maltreatment: A cross-cultural comparison. Child Abuse & Neglect, 27(2), 153–168. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0145-­2134(02)00538-­0 Grossman, A.  H., Frank, J.  A., Graziano, M.  J., Narozniak, D.  R., Mendelson, G., El Hassan, D., & Patouhas, E. S. (2014). Domestic harm and neglect among lesbian, gay, and bisexual older adults. Journal of Homosexuality, 61(12), 1649–1666. https://doi.org/10.1080/0091836 9.2014.951216 Gurm, B., Salgado, G., Marchbank, J., & Early, S.  D. (2020). Making sense of a global pandemic: Relationship violence & working together towards a violence free society. Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Jennings, L., Barcelos, C., McWilliams, C., & Malecki, K. (2019). Inequalities in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) health and health care access and utilization in Wisconsin. Preventive Medicine Reports, 14, 100864. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pmedr.2019.100864

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MacMillan, H. L., Fleming, J. E., Trocmé, N., Boyle, M. H., Wong, M., Racine, Y. A., Beardslee, W. R., & Offord, D. R. (1997). Prevalence of child physical and sexual abuse in the community. Results from the Ontario health supplement. JAMA, 278(2), 131–135. Matthews, A. (2019, May 11). When is it spiritual abuse? It’s probably not what you think. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/traversing-­the-­inner-­terrain/ 201905/when-­is-­it-­spiritual-­abuse McDonald, L. (2011). Elder abuse and neglect in Canada: The glass is still half full. Canadian Journal on Aging/La Revue canadienne du vieillissement, 30(3), 437–465. https://doi.org. proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1017/S104161021300015X. PFLAG Atlanta. (2023, February 23). The problem with the belief that child sexual abuse causes homosexuality/ bisexuality. https://www.pflagatl.org/the-­problem-­with-­the-­belief-­ thatchild-­sexual-­abuse-­causes-­homosexuality-­bisexuality/ Reid, K. (2014). Not a sad little question. Unpublished manuscript. Ristock, J. L. (2003). Exploring dynamics of abusive lesbian relationships: Preliminary analysis of a multisite, qualitative study. American Journal of Community Psychology, 31(3/4), 329–341. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1023971006882 Saewyc, E. M., Skay, C. L., Pettingell, S. L., Reis, E. A., Bearinger, L., & Resnick, M. (2006). Hazards of stigma: The sexual and physical abuse of gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents in the United States and Canada. Child Welfare, 85(2), 195–213. Storey, J. E. (2020). Risk factors for elder abuse and neglect: A review of the literature. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 50, 101339. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2019.101339 Weissberger, G. H., Goodman, M. C., Mosqueda, L., Schoen, J., Nguyen, A. L., Wilber, K. H., Gassoumis, Z. D., Nguyen, C. P., & Han, S. D. (2019). Elder abuse characteristics based on calls to the National Center on elder abuse resource line. Journal of Applied Gerontology, 39(10), 1078–1087. https://doi.org/10.1177/0733464819865685 Westwood, S. (2018). Abuse and older lesbian, gay bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people: A commentary and research agenda. Journal of Elder Abuse & Neglect. https://doi.org/10.1080/0894656 6.2018.1543624

Appendices

Appendix 1: Interview Questions 1. Do you have any questions for me before we begin, maybe about the research or this interview? 2. Okay. Let’s start just with a little bit about yourself. Maybe when and where you were born, and a little bit about the family you grew up in? 3. How do you identify in terms of your gender, sexuality, and age? Has this changed as you’ve gone along or have you always been certain of your ‘queer’ identity? 4. This might be hard to talk about, but can you tell me where you were living when you started to feel uncomfortable or afraid? What were your circumstances then? 5. How did you meet the person who abused you? What was their relationship to you? 6. If it’s not too hard, can you tell me about your abuser(s). What were they like? 7. Were things okay at first? Were there any red flags? 8. If it’s not too hard, can you describe the abusive behaviour? 9. Did you have any support during this time – even just someone you could tell? 10. Were you ‘out’ at the time? 11. How did you get through this difficult time? What helped you come out the other side? 12. If the abuse stopped, can you tell me when it stopped, and maybe why, if you have an idea why? 13. Do you believe that your queer identity made you more likely or open to being abused? 14. Did your abuser ever make mention of your LGBTQ2SA+ identity? 15. Did you feel that being LGBTQ2SA+ prevented you from telling anyone what was happening? © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Robson et al., Elder Abuse in the LGBTQ2SA+ Community, International Perspectives on Aging 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33317-0

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1 6. Have you shared this story with anyone before? 17. Have you had any help dealing with this? Therapy? Family? Partner? Friends? 18. Has it affected your life in any way? Made you more cautious or suspicious, given you bad dreams, made you feel differently about yourself? 19. Is there anything you think we’ve missed talking about? Is there anything else that you would like to share? 20. Can you tell me how you are feeling now? We are offering counselling support to all our participants. Here’s how you can contact me. With your permission, I’ll check in in a couple of days just to make sure that you are okay. Sometimes talking about this stuff can be very unsettling.

Appendix 2: List of recruitment contacts GSM/Elder Abuse/Seniors/Health Organizations JQT Vancouver (Jewish GSM group) Quirk-e: The queer imaging & riting collective for elders. LOVE CRN Vancouver (GSM community resources network) LOVE CRN Vancouver Island Seniors Advisory Committee for the City of Vancouver North Shore Volunteers for Seniors City of Vancouver 2SLGBTQ+ Advisory Committee Dignity Seniors Society Collingwood Neighbourhood House EGALE Canada Celeste Pang Senior Research Officer 2SLGBTQI Health, Aging, and Housing UBC The Social Justice Institute SHER Vancouver (South Asian GSM group) SFU gender sexuality and women’s studies QMUNITY BC Council to Reduce Elder Abuse Simon Fraser University Gerontology Research Centre (GRC) Alzheimer Society of BC (ASBC) Health Initiative for Men (HIM) Interior Health’s Office for Vulnerable and Incapable Adults Program, Vancouver Coastal Health West End Seniors” Network (WESN) BOLDFest (older lesbians & dykes) Media This Way Out. International LGBT radio CBC Radio Georgia Straight Vancouver Magazine

Appendices

Individuals Thirty individuals were contacted, but their names are redacted here. Community Consultants Pat Hogan Wayne Cordocedo Jane Traies Vimalasara Mason-John El Chenier Social media Sites Eight personal Facebook Accounts LGBT news group Vancity Queer Queer space creation Superdykes Help Stop Elder Abuse Coalition to stop Nursing Home Abuse Elderly Nursing Home Abuse advocates Out Vancouver Elder Abuse Awareness Older UK lesbians Lesbians of BC Victoria Pride Society Kootenay Queers Queer Ontario Chronically Queer (disability) LGBTQ+ elders and seniors LGBTQ+ friends and history Elder abuse is a crime

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