Gay, gray and black: a Brooklyn organization helps elderly lesbians and gays find each other and stay out of the closet in the golden years.

I grew up in Brooklyn. When I was in high school in the 1950s, I always knew I was a lesbian. I can't tell you when I first knew; I've always known. In high school, I met other lesbians. When we talked about being gay around other people, we always talked in code. African-American code is "one of the children," like "so and so is one of the children," or we'd say a person was "in the life." Of course, you have to realize, too, in those days that just wearing pants signified that you were gay or crazy. If you did anything that was out of the gender norm, everybody was aware of it immediately.

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I was a gender bender. I wanted to wear pants. But my mother wanted a daughter who had little tea parties. I used to wear pinafores and Shirley Temple curls and little Mary Jane shoes. That's what my mother wanted, so any time I deviated from that she had a fit; nobody could understand it. One time I bought a pair of jeans, and I wore them home so she wouldn't make me take them back.

I used to hang out at the gay clubs in New York's West Village. At the bars, there certainly were older [lesbians], but I didn't think about older people. We had a fine life--and by that I mean we knew people in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens. You could go to two or three dances in one night. One of the things about being so closeted is that we were in a special club. And the special club had its own life.

Struggling with Secrecy

When my friend Tootsie was taken away to a nursing home, well, I had seen things like that happen many times. I'd seen people die and the family come and ship the body down South or whatever--never even had a funeral or went to a funeral.

The family that reaches out is very, very rare in my experience. You have people whose families are not openly against them, but once that person dies the family takes that opportunity to "set things right." I've been to numerous funerals where the family now takes this opportunity to put the person in this dress they wanted them to wear. It's totally negating. But at the same time, these are the things that provoke me to make older lesbians and gays visible and be considered as a community.