Go Ask Alex: How do gay millennials plan for old age without a blueprint?

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My question is about growing old as gay men without a generation to show us how.

Queer Millennials, I feel like, are in a really unique position, specifically gay men, where we just lost a huge chunk of our elders to the AIDS epidemic. We don't really have a lot of examples of what elder gay life looks like. What retirement planning looks like without kids, etc.

With it getting harder to buy homes, the cost of medical care growing, etc., how are we supposed to age out of the workforce and still support ourselves? Communal living? What's your take?

Are there things, as a community, we could do to help with this?

Hey there,

A great question. All my friends are at the age where we’re sitting down over dinner dates and talking about the future. We’re clueless and terrified.

But I think everyone else is, too. I think that’s the human state! But the fact that we’re talking about it, that we’re having dinner dates, makes me think we’ll be OK.

It’s sad and lovely that these talks feel like brainstorming sessions between boys for a school project. How to age well? What will we do? One ex-boyfriend has no plan at all: He just wants to do steroids, stay juiced, and collapse at 60. He’s not the only one. There are gay men everywhere whose sincere plan is just a wager that they won’t survive to old age. It’s dark, but this is the effect of having too few examples of healthy gay aging.

But you write that we are without a generation, that we have no guides, that we have no blueprint. That’s not true. We did lose a lot of gay and queer people to AIDS, but not all. Almost everyone in queer media will at some point write about how we “lost a generation,” but TheBody, a great resource on HIV/AIDS (one I've proudly written for), pushed back on this with real numbers: In 2021, nearly three million LGBTQ Americans were over 50, and roughly half of the 1.2 million Americans living with HIV were 50 or older.

Gay elders are everywhere. They are doing great work and showing the rest of us how to live.

One comes to mind: Tez Anderson is a handsome long-term survivor who's lived with HIV since 1983. He spent decades not planning for a future that he assumed he wouldn’t have. Then, in 2013, he founded Let's Kick ASS, now the largest group in the world for long-term HIV survivors. The following year, he started HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day, marked every June 5th. He told LGBTQ Nation last February: "I had not put any money away in a 401K or savings or retirement account, dead people don't need retirement accounts. I didn't make any plans for being old, I was making plans to die young."

He's 66 now. He coined the term AIDS Survivor Syndrome to describe the psychological toll of surviving a plague that claimed so many others: a set of PTSD-like symptoms unique to long-term survivors that often includes years of anger, anxiety, nightmares, and a persistent inability to imagine a future.

He says: "We're a resource about life and death. We're not just people who need help. We are people who are restored."

Still, data is stacked against us. Michael Adams, the CEO of SAGE, the largest organization for LGBTQ+ elders in the United States, said in a 2021 interview that we're "four times less likely to be parents than older Americans in general and twice as likely to grow older, single and living alone." No kids often means no default caregivers, so it’s on us to build our own community support networks.

What might this look like? Pat McAulay and Margaret Roesch, a married couple who spent their 40s dreaming of a house full of lesbians taking care of each other, finally built it in 2020: Village Hearth is America’s first cohousing community made for LGBTQ+ seniors. It’s 28 homes on 15 acres in Durham, North Carolina.

Last year, McAulay told WUNC News: "We heard the stories of people having to go back in the closet if they go into assisted living or nursing homes, people being abused or discriminated against in housing."

Jane Haskell, who runs impact work at SAGE, said there are only about 27 LGBTQ-affirming affordable housing developments in the U.S. and, in her words, "the need is much bigger than those 2,000 units." But options are growing. The Advocate covered Mary's House, D.C.'s first LGBTQ+ senior home, which opened last year. There's Triangle Square in Hollywood: 104 apartments specifically for LGBTQ+ seniors. There are community land trusts, limited equity co-ops, and LGBTQ-friendly mobile home and RV communities for people in rural places. SAGE tries to keep track of all these things through its National Resource Center on LGBTQ Aging.

Ralph Jones, who has worked with the Human Rights Campaign and the ballroom scene, pointed out that, for queer people, often our most important relationships don’t match our paperwork: "Someone might have a ballroom child who has been in their life for 25 years, someone they've housed, fed, potentially put through college. That person is their child, their primary caregiver, their executor. But it's not recognized legally."

His advice, echoed by Mindy Neira, an LGBTQ+ financial adviser, is to make the paperwork reflect your real relationships, even if that means hiring an expert to help. Get the power of attorney and healthcare directives done. Write a will naming your people.

In service of the goal to help us age together well, I’d personally add that there are small, mundane, daily acts of love that go a long way. Few of us will ever open a care home or start an organization, but the little acts of love are things we can all do.

Go on dinner dates. Talk to strangers. Talk about mental health with your buddies. Don't stigmatize drug use. Be a safe person that someone can talk to about their drug use. Someday you might need such a person.

Let's normalize the fact that most gay and queer men will struggle with drug abuse, either their own or a friend's, a lover's. Let's toss out shame and just be there for each other. Talk with your friends about depression, even make jokes about it: Everyone feels it at some point. Talk about suicide and suicidal thoughts. Talk about bad days.

I really, really mean this. Even at a sex hookup, if a guy seems troubled or upset by something, or if there's some difficult energy affecting the vibe, I don’t call it quits and leave. I say, "Hey, do you want to talk?"

At that moment, you would not believe how many men have opened up. Sometimes they had a terrible week at work. Sometimes they're struggling with drugs, or their ex is struggling with drugs, or their partner is struggling with drugs. Sometimes they just had a breakup and are feeling depressed.

It makes sense, in moments of pain, to want to have sex with a stranger and try to forget things for a bit. (In German, we have a common phrase for it: Kopfausschalten wollen, "wanting to turn off the brain.") But it doesn’t always work. It makes sense that I am there, being an unintended salve, and in those moments, it’s my duty to be present and listen. In gay land, sometimes you have to be a stranger's therapist when all you wanted was a fuck. That’s OK.

Tell your friends they look good. Tell people how much you love and admire them. And try to make friends with the gay and queer people who rub you the wrong way; what about them irks you? It's probably something in yourself, some insecurity you feel that’s coming out in your view of them. Investigate these feelings.

All this may be a roundabout way of saying that a network of love and support is actually quite simple: It’s loving and supporting each other in small ways on a daily basis, a kind of policy of living, a way of moving through the world. A daily effort.

Government policies still matter; they affect the lives and livelihoods of millions. On my own, I don’t affect so many people. But I can love and care for my little pocket of queers. I can talk with them when they get depressed, visit them in the hospital, and cheer for them when they do well. And I believe that if more of us made this our personal responsibility, it would go very far.

No one makes it on their own. We only survive together.

Hey there! I’m Alexander Cheves. I’m a sex writer and former sex worker—I worked in the business for over 12 years. You can read my sex-and-culture column Last Call in Out and my book My Love Is a Beast: Confessions, from Unbound Edition Press. But be warned: Kirkus Reviews says the book is "not for squeamish readers.”

Here, I’m offering sex and relationship advice to Out’s readers. Send your question to askbeastly@gmail.com.