Fred McLean hoped his veteran status would help him and Donald Underwood obtain housing aid from the Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs when they got married in 2022.
McLean has received health care from the VA for years but said all it ever gave Underwood was a plot in the state veterans’ cemetery, where McLean will someday join him.
Underwood died in February at 47. He and McLean had only been together a few months when in 2011, a police officer struck Underwood’s face with a Taser and left him with a life-altering brain injury. Underwood developed severe claustrophobia that made it difficult to live indoors, so the couple learned where to sleep safely outdoors and lived primarily on Little Rock’s streets.
Underwood’s seizures and erratic behavior created more conflict on the streets than being a gay man did, said McLean, who turned 77 in March.
Still, his living situation is now uncertain, an example of how precarious housing can become for gay, lesbian and transgender people as they age.
“Without Donnie, there’s not any one particular place I want to be,” McLean said.
The support system of health care workers, police, faith leaders and others who helped McLean and his husband get by is still there for him, he said.
Advocacy within Arkansas’ LGBTQ+ community
LGBTQ+ Americans “have a shared lived history of fighting oppression,” said Paul Nagle, founder and executive director of Stonewall Community Development Corporation, a New York City-based LGBTQ+ elder housing advocacy group.
The community often uses creativity and resilience to build “networks of care and support for ourselves when the government fails us, like we did during the AIDS crisis,” Nagle said.
David and Ethan Avanzino, entrepreneurs and a married Eureka Springs couple, started Safe to Be in 2018 with the goal of creating a tiny home community for LGBTQ+ adults in need of housing.
The tiny home project is ongoing, and the nonprofit has also started providing emergency housing for up to 60 days.
Safe to Be has not yet encountered older LGBTQ+ people needing housing, Ethan Avanzino said, but the group would help if they did.
The same is true at BeYoUUU, a Little Rock transgender advocacy nonprofit with an all-Black leadership team. Founded in 2021, BeYoUUU has worked to form an emergency housing initiative for trans adults, CEO Keon Anderson said.
The nonprofit has temporarily housed a few young trans adults at its leaders’ homes, including treasurer Debra Anderson, Keon’s nonbinary parent. Both Andersons said they’re looking for a physical building to use as a shelter and grant funding to support it.
“I believe that we’ll have a really good turnout… once everybody knows there’s somewhere for trans, nonbinary and LGBTQ+ [people] to go and feel safe and be safe,” Debra Anderson said.
But many elderly LGBTQ+ people aren’t fortunate enough to have such a network, said Caleb Alexander-McKinzie, a volunteer for Little Rock homeless aid organization The Van.
LGBTQ+ adults today have more freedom to get married, raise children and be protected from workplace discrimination than older community members did. But LGBTQ+ elders often feel increasingly isolated and must depend on social services as they age and leave the workforce, Alexander-McKinzie said.
“For these macro communities, like queer communities, that rely on chosen family, they don’t have the same rights as others,” he said.
People often rely on their children to care for them as they age, but a 2014 Equal Rights Center survey found that 90% of LGBTQ+ seniors reported having no children, compared to 20% of non-LGBTQ+ seniors.
Additionally, LGBTQ+ elders might not have been able to save enough for a stable retirement, said Sydney Kopp-Richardson, director of the National LGBTQ+ Elder Housing Initiative at Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE).
“People have had disparate rates of employment discrimination or insecurity that obviously leads to income insecurity as people age, and they might not even have access to Social Security if they relied on informal, under-the-table ways of making money,” Kopp-Richardson said.
SAGE is a New York-based national organization helping LGBTQ+ elders access resources, including safe and stable housing. One of its largest programs is the SAGECare training credential program, which provides LGBTQ+-affirming cultural competency training to those who offer services to seniors.
Although many LGBTQ+ elders avoid Christian-centric resources due to religious trauma, some of these groups “want to be able to have an open door” and have sought SAGECare’s sensitivity training, said SAGECare Business Development Manager Karen Cushing.
Yet many faith-based housing aid organizations do not accept LGBTQ+ people, Alexander-McKinzie said. Some homeless shelters do not even allow heterosexual couples to sleep in the same room, and that deters people from seeking help.
“Many folks will not avail themselves of an acute situation if they can’t stay with their family,” Alexander-McKinzie said.
Similarly, McLean stayed on the streets with Underwood for 13 years, and they were married in a hospital while Underwood was ill. When Underwood died of complications from the flu and pneumonia, he received his last wish of dying in McLean’s arms.
Ensuring LGBTQ+ elders are treated with respect is especially important because of what they’ve lived through, Cushing said.
“They went through the AIDS crisis, [and] they’ve seen so many folks also pass away during the COVID crisis that they really didn’t expect to be here,” she said.
Cushing has worked for SAGECare since 2018 but has only lived in Arkansas for about a year. She said she and her wife moved “sight unseen” into the Holiday Island retirement community near Eureka Springs, a town known as a haven for LGBTQ+ Arkansans.
While it was difficult to leave behind chosen family in Florida, a state that had become unsafe due to its many anti-LGBTQ+ laws, Cushing and her wife chose their new home at the suggestion of trusted friends and found the safety they were looking for.
“The difference in friendliness” among the general Northwest Arkansas population was “a breath of fresh air,” Cushing said.
“There is no difference between us as a couple and [other older couples], and it’s so refreshing,” she said.
Safety concerns
While McLean and Underwood were never closeted, some older LGBTQ+ people hide their identities or anticipate doing so to receive care they’ll need as they age.
According to a 2021 AARP study, 77% of adults over 50 would prefer to age in place rather than find a new home. Home-based health care might be financially feasible for LGBTQ+ elders but take a toll on their overall wellbeing, Kopp-Richardson said.
“If someone’s coming to your home to take care of you in your most vulnerable state, people often don’t feel safe being out, so they might go back into the closet, which also has a horrible mental health effect that can then impact their physical and cognitive health,” she said.
A 2022 AARP report found that 58% of transgender and nonbinary older adults were concerned that being closeted might be necessary to access the housing they need.
Tamara “Tams” Lanford might have been in that position if they had ever been completely out, they said. Coming to terms with who they are explained why they’d had trouble fitting in, which others used as an excuse to mistreat them, Lanford said.
“I just thought I was weird my whole life,” Lanford said. “If I knew that there were other people like me and had an actual label for it, I would have been overjoyed in my twenties and thirties to use that information, but by the time I hit 40 and Arkansas had taken such a hard right turn… I would have been back in the closet.”
Library books and the internet helped Lanford realize they’re nonbinary and asexual a decade ago at the age of 44. At the time, Arkansas’ political leadership was changing hands from Democrats to Republicans.
In 2021, Lanford fled domestic violence, cut off contact with family and lived in a van for two years.
Now Lanford’s only family is Markham, a long-haired black cat who’s nearly 5 years old and named after the Little Rock street where he was found as a kitten.
A homeowner in a rural area has allowed Lanford and Markham to live there as squatters since November. A 200-foot extension cord attached to the owner’s neighboring house allows Lanford to use kitchen appliances, but the residence has no plumbing or running water. Lanford said they survive on “the kindness of internet strangers” via online crowdfunding, especially since losing access to food stamps last year.
The homeowner, neighbors and other homeless community members are unaware of Lanford’s LGBTQ+ identities for safety reasons, Lanford said.
While they have worked enough to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), Lanford said housing and health care will become increasingly difficult to access as they age.
Enrolling for and maintaining benefits has been a constant battle with bureaucratic red tape, Lanford said, and they have delayed several necessary surgeries even while they’ve received and recovered from other procedures.
Arkansas Department of Human Services documents classify people as only male or female, but “even if there were a [third] checkbox, I wouldn’t use it,” Lanford said.
DHS denied Lanford’s SSDI application in July 2022; the appeal hearing is in May.
It’s difficult to envision a future while living one day at a time, Lanford said.
“My goal is to live long enough to be approved for SSDI, and then I can figure out stable housing,” Lanford said.
Meanwhile, McLean said he might apply for a housing voucher through the VA after he recovers from cancer surgery. Still, thinking about his future without Underwood is difficult, and even when he talks about the challenges of caring for a disabled partner, McLean finds himself smiling.
“We had some extraordinary good times,” he said.
This reporting was supported by a fellowship from Columbia University’s Age Boom Academy.
