“What we have seen historically is that elders have been forgotten and they don’t have the support they need.” folks are much more likely to grow old single” because many never married or had children, said Michael Adams, the chief executive of SAGE. In a 2018 survey of adults age 45 and older who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, 34 percent said they were worried they would have to hide their identity to gain access to suitable housing, according to AARP. Americans, many of whom lived through a time when being open about their orientation could lead to physical violence, arrest or getting fired from a job. Fears of discrimination can complicate matters for aging L.G.B.T.Q. Many older residents have little to no savings and a limited budget to pay for food, health care and shelter. “There are people like me in this building,” she said.Īging in New York is not easy. Nottingham settled into a new one-bedroom apartment in the Stonewall House, the group’s L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly housing development in Fort Greene. Weary of the harassment she faced in shelters and S.R.O.s, she met a social worker who put her in touch with SAGE, a New York advocacy group for L.G.B.T.Q. Epileptic seizures kept her from holding a steady job, hampering her ability to pay rent. Nottingham, now 71, struggled to maintain stable housing, sometimes living with friends or relatives, sometimes in a women’s shelter. With nowhere to turn, she wound up sleeping in parks and hallways. It was the 1960s, and being gay was “taboo,” Diedra Nottingham remembered. The Historic American Buildings Survey is a program of the National Park Service.She was a teenager growing up in Queens when her mother kicked her out of the house for having a girlfriend. This report was written by Amber Bailey, the Historic American Buildings Survey/Society for Architectural Historians Sally Kress Tompkins Fellow for 2016. With the rise of nightclubs in the mid-1970s, queer nightlife moved south to the warehouse districts bordering South Capitol Street.
So many LGBTQ businesses and organizations lined Capitol Hill’s 8th Street commercial corridor that the Blade dubbed the thoroughfare Washington’s “Gay Way.” Around the same time that queer nightlife was expanding in Capitol Hill, DuPont Circle began to transition from a haven for the 1960s counterculture movement into a gay residential and commercial enclave. Much of this scene was clustered into three communities: Capitol Hill, DuPont Circle, and South Capitol Street. More importantly, Washington’s queer nightlife scene in the 1970s and 1980s offered patrons a relatively safe space to act on their emotional and erotic desires openly and without fear of judgement. Entrepreneurs – many of them gay men – opened nightlife businesses that proudly catered to queer clienteles, permitting and even encouraging drag, same-sex dancing, and same-sex sexual encounters. But this era of visibility brought new venues for queer socializing, including nightclubs, adult film theaters, and bath houses, to nearly every quadrant of the District. Queer Washingtonians continued to frequent the outdoor cruising spots and neighborhood bars that had defined the LGBTQ social experiences in the first half of the century. In the post-World War II period, Washington, DC developed a thriving queer nightlife scene unlike anything the District had witnessed before. The DC Boundary overlaid with the rainbow pride flag.