I recently was at an event with a woman who, in 1978, was one of the few prominent, professional women to write a check to an out lesbian candidate running for the New York State Assembly from a district in Brooklyn. I was that candidate. I recall this woman as being very proud of the fact that she was able to help in the way that someone a generation older takes pride in a dream that might well have been her own if times had been different. When I met her again last year she seemed diminished, withdrawn and spoke in a voice so much smaller than the one I recalled. She told me she was living in a retirement community and that she felt she had to be closeted in order to be accepted.
All discrimination is brutal and ugly.
But this struck me in a particular way. Maybe I wondered if I would ever find myself in such a terrified and lonely situation. The issues of Social Security Reform, Medicare and Medicaid are critical areas of concern to us. They are complex, but not impossible to understand. In some instances the implications of policy options to older lgbt persons are yet to be determined.