Oakland’s gay, lesbian, and trans elders are still fighting for their rights — and partying

When Karen Anderson landed within the Bay Space in 1985, she eagerly sought out “something homosexual.”

It wasn’t that the queer group did not exist in her native Chicago. Removed from it. However on the time, the scene was centered on events, and customarily segregated by gender and race, she remembers.

In Oakland, Anderson was overjoyed to discover a thriving, various lesbian group, usually concentrated in native bars Ollies on Telegraph.

“It was very loving, supportive and social,” she mentioned.

Anderson arrived in California throughout a interval of tragedy, with the AIDS epidemic sweeping by means of the group and in the end overcoming its results tens of thousands of lives and tearing aside teams of buddies, households and {couples}. However within the midst of the disaster, Anderson discovered love. Years later, she and her spouse grew to become one of many first same-sex {couples} to marry at Oakland Metropolis Corridor, in a 2008 ceremony officiated by then-Mayor Ron Dellums.

Anderson, who’s now 81, spoke with The Oaklandside on the thirtieth anniversary occasion final month Lavender seniorsa corporation for native LGBTQ+ elders. The group first started assembly within the Nineteen Nineties at a church in San Leandro, fed up with what they noticed as a scarcity of devotional providers within the East Bay for the “gays and grays.”

Final yr, Lavender Seniors was given a everlasting deal with and have become an official program of the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center. John David Dupree, 83, a former Lavender board member, mentioned the group had executed properly by itself, securing grants and operating sturdy applications. However the management “was getting outdated,” Dupree mentioned, and so they welcomed the middle’s supply to take over the administration.

When Lavender Seniors first began, “all of us may have a spot to fulfill and be collectively right here in Oakland,” Anderson mentioned. “The whole lot else occurred in San Francisco. Individuals weren’t throwing cash at us.”

On the November celebration, held on the North Oakland Senior Heart, dozens of skilled Lavender Seniors joined newer individuals who have just lately discovered or joined the group. Collectively they’d the chance to get pleasure from what they’ve constructed collectively, eat, chat, hug and luxuriate in performances underneath an arch of rainbow balloons.

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It felt particular, Anderson mentioned, “to have the ability to get this recognition whereas we’re nonetheless above floor.”

Rising older with satisfaction

Lavender Seniors’ mission is to assist roughly 150 individuals members are growing older with “well being, happiness and satisfaction,” now as a part of the LGBTQ Heart’s broader group Elderly care program.

The group runs a certification program for suppliers which are pleasant to LGBTQ+ seniors, and gives coaching supplies to organizations on the right way to higher assist an older homosexual inhabitants. A lot of the programming additionally revolves round alternatives for mutual assist and socialization: common lunches, occasions and outings; assist teams and social circles for older homosexual males and lesbians; a volunteer service that coordinates visits to remoted members. Lavender Seniors additionally participates in political advocacy.

On the anniversary occasion, group middle director Joe Hawkins introduced that Elder Companies will broaden into its personal area subsequent to Grand Lake’s predominant constructing, with drop-in providers, a pharmacy and a library. The information drew cheers.

Older LGBTQ+ persons are twice as prone to dwell alone or be single than their heterosexual counterparts and are 4 instances much less prone to have grownup youngsters, studies have discovered. Meaning the hazards associated with insulation for all seniors are aggravated amongst unusual elders.

Lavender Seniors’ mission to mix respect with tangible providers “actually made me love this group,” Noela Campbell, the middle’s new supervisor of Elder Companies, mentioned by e mail.

Many older LGBTQ+ individuals have skilled “a lifetime of prejudice and stigma, which has left older adults cautious of growing older and well being care suppliers,” she mentioned. Some members are additionally in dire want: The middle is getting calls from individuals who cannot afford long-term care or, in some circumstances, have turn into homeless, she mentioned.

Campbell plans to proceed Lavender Seniors’ current applications and hopes so as to add visible and performing arts actions. She would additionally wish to create extra connections between youthful queer individuals and seniors. The older technology can encourage and educate the younger, she mentioned, whereas the younger might help and be in group with their elders.

Wealthy historical past of wrestle and connection

It is unimaginable to have lived as a queer individual within the Bay Space for the previous six, seven, eight, or 9 a long time with out experiencing a exceptional and difficult life, in lots of circumstances crammed with loss and love.

Dupree, a former board member of Lavender Senior, does his greatest to doc these lives whereas they’re nonetheless being lived. In virtually each challenge of the Lavender Notes NewsletterDupree publishes a colourful, in-depth profile of one of many group’s members. Over time, he has constructed an archive of wealthy, heartbreaking and thrilling lives.

“It is one among my life’s wishes to verify persons are acknowledged,” mentioned Dupree, a former journalist.

Dupree, who is simply too covered his own lifementioned he first knew he was homosexual when he was six years outdated in Michigan, however did not come out till he was a 30-year-old postdoc at UC Berkeley with a spouse and two youngsters. After a messy divorce and the traumatic, if non permanent, lack of contact together with his youngsters — a product born in a part of attitudes about homosexual fathers within the Seventies — Dupree married a person he nonetheless lives fortunately with in East Oakland. The couple adopted 4 youngsters collectively.

In 1978, Dupree obtained a job on the Pacific Center for Human Growth in Berkeley, which payments itself because the Bay Space’s oldest LGBTQ middle. He led the group’s lobbying efforts, together with a marketing campaign to take away a fear-mongering video warning male college students about homosexuals that was being proven in Alameda County faculties on the time. The middle’s imprecise identify was chosen as a result of no group that explicitly supported homosexuals may obtain funding, Dupree mentioned. When the middle was established in 1973, homosexuality had not but been decriminalized within the state.

Not lengthy after the HIV epidemic broke out, Dupree helped launch the East Bay’s AIDS Undertaking. He organized nightly assist teams for homosexual males and their members of the family struggling underneath the emotional burden of experiencing loss after loss.

His dedication to the trigger quickly took him overseas as a “International AIDS Warrior” for the U.S. Company for Worldwide Growth. The work took him and his household to dozens of nations, the place he cast deep connections with native homosexual communities. He mentioned he was working with native activists to arrange the primary satisfaction march on the African continent Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1990.

Going through a rollback of rights

Dupree mentioned it was painful, after being on the forefront of many profitable fights for rights and recognition, to see a lot of that progress disappear in 2025. President Donald Trump dismantled the company that employed Dupree to assist fight the worldwide AIDS disaster, and his administration has systematically eliminated all references to LGBTQ+ People from authorities web sites and issued anti-trans statements. executive ordersand cancelled dozens of subsidies supporting homosexual well being care.

“When he was re-elected, I learn plenty of Undertaking 2025 and knew what lay forward,” Dupree informed The Oaklandside. “I most likely went by means of the deepest despair of my life, the place I felt like every thing I had labored for… was being flushed down the bathroom.”

Whereas many within the room mentioned they’ve witnessed a lifetime of discrimination, Dupree mentioned this second feels totally different.

“Institutionalized homophobia has been alive and properly from the time I used to be born in 1942 till now,” he mentioned, “however it has by no means had as a lot power as all of the instruments of energy because it does at this time.”

As communities throughout the Bay Space expertise a way of disaster from the federal government’s assaults, some Lavender Seniors informed us it may be particularly horrifying for individuals going through the ultimate chapters of their lives and needing extra assist than earlier than.

“Typically you are feeling hopeless and unhappy,” Anderson mentioned.

However in the course of the November celebration, the pessimism and concern had been blissfully pushed into the background for not less than a couple of hours.

Seniors took pictures in entrance of a shiny background. They ate fried hen and salad. They obtained a proclamation signed by Mayor Barbara Lee. They watched a efficiency by Mother Tongue Feminist Theateran virtually 50-year-old collective that dramatizes the non-public writing of 90-year-old member Corky Wick.

They laughed and cheered on the performers – and loved the fleeting late autumn afternoon mild.