As the Stonewall generation ages, many LGBTQ+ seniors are facing a lack of safe, affordable housing.

We take a closer look at this problem and show you a new home offering a solution.

Plus, cases of the highly contagious monkeypox virus are on the rise in south Florida, and disproportionately affecting the LGBTQ+ community.

We look at the steps being taken to help curb the spread.

And the Stonewall National Museum's new executive director takes us inside their archives and shares his plans for the future of the museum.

That and more.

Stay with us as we diverse into Your South Florida.

Hello, and welcome to Your South Florida.

I'm Pam Giganti.

There are roughly three million people in the US aged 50 or older who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, a population expected to more than double over the next decade.

They're known as the Stonewall Generation, members of the LGBTQ+ community who came of age during the time of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, which ignited the gay rights movement.

Like many seniors, they face economic, health, and safety issues, but LGBTQ+ seniors are also burdened with some unique challenges.

A lifetime of discrimination has led to greater odds of poverty, homelessness, poor health, and elder abuse.

The Equal Rights Center found that 48% of LGBTQ+ seniors have faced at least one form of rental housing discrimination, from higher rent prices to fewer housing options.

In Palm Beach County, the Pride Tribe gave us a sneak peek of their new facility there, made solely for those over 65.

They hope their new home will be a safe space for LGBTQ+ seniors to live out their remaining years with love and dignity.

Pride Tribe is an organization we put together to provide services and housing for LGBT elders.

These are people who have lived their entire lives, and they've had to deal with discrimination along the way.

Some of it was rather brutal, and in their years, their golden years, if you will, we don't want them to have to feel insecure about who they are and being comfortable with their living environment and being protected.

Some of these elders, if they go into a facility, they can suffer discrimination not just from staff, but from residents as well, and nobody wants that to happen.

Going back into the closet after freeing your spirit is detrimental to people's wellbeing, and that's where we're gonna to work to make sure that they have a comfortable environment to live in.

There is a need.

We've talked about this for years.

We decided finally that we were just gonna put a stake in the ground with the Connie House, and that would be our starting point.

Here in south Florida and in Florida, I believe we've made good progress with assisted living facilities and nursing homes and cultural competency training, but that's not true everywhere.

It's absolutely not true everywhere.

So, as the gay community has always done, we step up and take care of our own, if you will.

We've built our own churches.

We built our own communities, and we will build our own assisted living facilities and programs to make sure that nobody falls through the cracks and everybody's taken care of and is protected and loved.

That's gonna be a beautiful thing.

The Connie House will be an assisted living facility, a standard assisted living facility, for up to six people.

So it's a home environment.

We'll provide meals; we'll provide scheduling for people.

We will bring in the community, and we will take this community that lives in this house out, like, to Compass, to Coffee Clatch, to whatever social events that we can do and people that want to do.

We'll also have programming that comes in.

In the house, it's a standard assisted living facility.

They get their room and board and care, help with getting in and out of the shower and in and out of bed.

Meals will be provided, and care will be provided.

We're going to be more than just someplace where people sit around and stare at the TV.

There'll be six beds eventually and one bedroom for staff.

The reason this is called the Connie House is after my friend, Connie Kurtz, who was an LGBT rights activist.

She and her partner Ruth Berman were the first to bring lawsuit to New York, the school board in New York, I believe, for domestic partnership benefits.

Connie passed, ooh, it's probably four or five years ago.

So it was appropriate to start with Connie as a remembrance.

Her spirit is here.

Her artwork is here.

Ruthie donated six or seven pieces of her artwork.

She would have given us more.

Ruthie is still very much alive and very much a part of this effort to do whatever we need to do to take care of our elders.

There is a bill in Congress, it's called the Ruth and Connie Elder Americans Act, and it's named after Ruth and Connie.

And basically, it adds the LGBT community into protections that are already there for elders in general, if that makes sense.

So that would be phenomenal, if we could get that done.

We don't care what it's called.

But it'll free up some moneys and some resources for our elder community.

The Connie House is in the process of licensure.

We are finishing up our permits with the beautiful city of Boynton Beach.

So that should happen in the next month.

We'll get our change of use permit, if you will.

Then we are prepared to go to AHCA, the state agency that licenses ALFs.

That process will take a couple of months, hopefully.

So we'll be up and running by fall!

Is it possible to do the Connie House in Tampa or Sarasota or some other places?

Yeah, absolutely.

So where it's going from here, it's up to the community.

It literally is.

You know, this was a place to get started.

If I had my way, if I ruled the world, we would have a safe environment all over the great state of Florida for our LGBT elders.

And joining me now to talk more about safe, affordable housing for LGBTQ+ seniors and the most pressing issues that the community faces are Julie Seaver, executive director of Compass LGBTQ+ Community Center in Lake Worth, and with us virtually is Robert Boo, CEO of the Pride Center at Equality Park in Wilton Manors.

Thank you both so much for joining us today to talk about all of this and this very important subject.

I saw you, Julie, smiling watching that piece about the Connie House.

First tell us, what are your impressions about this new space and how it is to your community?

Well, first of all, this is my first opportunity to see this space, and it's just beautiful and so fitting, and when Allan talked about, it's about taking care of each other and caring for one another.

And absolutely, the pioneers that built this legacy before us absolutely deserve safe, affordable, assisted living facilities and affordable housing for the rest of their lives.

In the piece, he mentioned Coffee Clatch, which takes place at Compass.

Talk about that, what that program's all about and how important it is to that older LGBTQ+ community.

Well, Coffee Clatch was born out of a need for our LGBT more mature community members.

They are our silver foxes, if you will, of Palm Beach County, and we recognize that the Pride Center in Wilton Manors had a very successful, thriving seniors program for the LGBTQ community.

So we attended a few of their coffee and conversation, and we really modeled it after that, bringing resources to the center and to the group members but really offering a safe space for social support.

Yeah, most definitely.

Robert, the Pride Center has been working on the issue of affordable senior housing for the LGBTQ+ community for years now.

Kind of walk us through the process to make this happen and what's been the reception from the community.

First, thanks, Pam, for allowing us to have this opportunity to help educate the community.

The Pride Center partnered with Carrfour, which is the state of Florida's largest nonprofit developer.

We applied through the Florida Housing to receive the nine percent federal tax credits, and in October of 2020, we actually opened up to lease to the active aging.

It's the state of Florida's first LGBT-focused senior affordable and supportive housing.

And so, during the middle of the pandemic, we had people start moving into our 48 apartments, a community called The Residences at Equality Park.

This was a seven-year dream, to get to this point.

And how has that been?

How has the community received this?

The response from the community has been overwhelming.

Now that it's actually built and they see that there's this huge $15 million-asset on our campus, it really has brought attention to the desperate need of affordable housing for our active aging community, as well as affordable housing, period, but for especially the active aging LGBT community, desperate need.

No, absolutely, and you have a similar program for seniors to talk and share.

It's called Coffee and Conversation.

So tell us about it and why it is so important.

So yes, Coffee and Conversation, we started many, many, many years ago, and it was just a group of individuals that came together, like six, 12 people, and then Bruce Williams, who is our active aging manager really grew the program to be the nation's largest weekly gathering of LGBT active agers.

That was pre-pandemic.

Now we're still gearing up and bringing that opportunity to the active agers.

It may be their only time of being in a safe space where they can be themselves in a totally LGBT environment.

I wanna shift and talk about monkeypox for a moment, 'cause it's out there.

It's in the news.

We're hearing so much about it.

There's been this uptick in the number of monkeypox cases in Florida, with Broward being the county with the highest amount.

So Robert, tell us about the efforts to get the word out to the community that there's a vaccine available and how folks can keep themselves safe?

So we've actually started talking about monkeypox in late April, trying to educate the community that it was coming across from Europe and it would eventually come to the United States.

Then in June, we were approached by the Our Fund Foundation, and they wanted to sponsor a medical educational town hall for our community.

That was the week prior to the Stonewall Street Festival.

So we wanted to ensure that the community was aware of monkeypox and how it was contracted and how easily it can be passed on to others so that way, people going into the Stonewall Street Festival, Pride celebrations, could be armed with information and maybe make better choices.

Julie, what about Compass?

What are they doing to educate folks about monkeypox?

So just like Robert was mentioning about helping others and hosting town halls and getting the information out there, Palm Beach County is also of course worried about monkeypox.

And the most challenging area is receiving the vaccinations.

So Compass did host three meningitis clinics, free clinics, but we do rely on our department of health and the local community partners to get those vaccines to us.

Unfortunately, the availability, there's not enough vaccines to go around, but I think it's important to know that, you know, with the Pride Center in Fort Lauderdale, as well as Compass and across the nation, that community centers, LGBTQ community centers have been treating the whole person, and health and wellness is a very important part of that project.

We believe in science.

We believe that you should all be vaccinated, and so, just like COVID and the flu and meningitis, when the monkeypox vaccine is more readily available, you should get those vaccinations too.

Right, well, and one of the issues too that the Health Department has been talking about, and you all have been very active as well as getting the word out, is talking about HIV and AIDS, obviously.

The latest data from the CDC shows that Black women account for 57% of the new HIV cases.

62% of Black transgender women and 35% of Hispanic transgender women are living with HIV, in comparison to 17% of white transgender women.

So there's also an uptake in HIV cases in people 50 years and older in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties.

So Julie, talk about what Compass is doing starting with the focus on HIV testing and education.

So Compass, thank you, Pam, Compass started out as the Stop AIDS project in 1988 at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and it was a group of volunteers just passing around condoms and making sure that people had the most up-to-date information.

But back in those days, it was truly a death sentence.

So HIV and the AIDS epidemic really is a part of our historical trauma within the LGBTQ community, but we do need to remember and recognize that HIV sees no gender, no age, no sexual orientation, and that we're all at risk.

[pam] All communities.

That's correct.

Yeah, young and old, anyone.

And Robert, you say there needs to be a renewed push to target Black, brown, and trans communities with more funding.

So talk about that and the testing resources at Pride Center.

Sure, well, unfortunately, in the state of Florida, HIV prevention funding was cut at the end of 2018.

So we used to have two programs that specifically reached out to the Black and brown community and one grant that reached out to the transgender community.

But when that funding was cut statewide, our resources and ability to reach the marginalized communities really became much more difficult.

So we try to keep up and go out into the community where the community members are, as opposed to trying to get them to come to the center.

But it's an uphill battle, 'cause it all comes back to funding.

Another issue, and not just of concern for the LGBTQ+ community, but for many, for educators and for parents as well, is the recent banning of books in some public schools which went into effect July the first.

There were the so-called "woke math books" that were debated by the Department of Education and affected the whole state, and then there are books banned in certain districts across the state, books particularly dealing with gender identity, sexual orientation, or even critical race theory.

So Robert, what are you hearing from parents in the community about this, and how do you think this is going to affect students and young people?

I think unfortunately, this is an attempt to whitewash the LGBT community out of the books.

Banning of books is absolutely ridiculous, and it's putting our educators in a very difficult situation where they are now not even allowed to have pictures of their husbands, wives, significant others in their classroom.

So this whitewashing is absolutely horrible, and we'll be judged in history just terribly.

Julie, what about you?

What are you hearing at Compass from families and parents related to this issue?

Are they worried?

Are they concerned?

Oh, absolutely.

It's affecting our children and our staff, our volunteers and our community members on a daily basis.

I think that what is ironic is that America was built on the idea of freedom of speech and freedom of ideas, and those freedoms end when we start banning books and erasing history and communities from our history.

At the end of the day, all parents want is to have visibility in the community and have their children learn in a safe, inclusive environment.

I'm with Robert on this one.

It's truly a shameful time in our history, especially in the state of Florida, and I think that our elected and appointed officials have a lot more work to do on focusing how to keep our kids safe in school rather than banning curriculum, education, and books on LGBTQ community members or written by LGBTQ authors, and sometimes even children.

It's a real shame.

All right, Julie, Robert, thank you so much for this conversation today and for your time.

We really appreciate it.

Well, for 50 years, the Stonewall National Museum and Archives in Fort Lauderdale has worked to promote understanding through collecting, preserving, and sharing the proud culture of LGBTQ+ people.

The museum's new director Robert Kesten gave us a tour of their archives and shared his vision.

I'm Robert Kesten, executive director of Stonewall National Museum and Archives, which is one of the largest museums, archives, and libraries in the LGBTQ community nationwide.

Over my shoulder is part of the 28,000-volume library, and I'm facing one of the exhibits that is now going on.

Then around the corner is another exhibit, and then beyond that are the archives.

In the archives, we have well over six million articles that trace the history of the LGBTQ+ movement.

For many years, I've been working on global human rights issues.

So I've spent time in the former Soviet Union.

I've spent time in the Middle East during conflicts there, in Asia, in Africa, and always utilizing the tool of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And ultimately, that tool drove me to come to Florida, for one reason.

Eleanor Roosevelt, who was a former First Lady and also our first ambassador to the United Nations chaired the Universal Declaration of Human Rights committee.

It ended up that she spent vacations in Sarasota from the 1930s to the 1960s.

And when she was there, she would go into the schools and talk about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I carry with me a pair of cast shoes that belonged to Eleanor Roosevelt, reminding me that you always have to walk in someone else's shoes before you make any judgments.

While in Sarasota, I was surprised that there was an opening here, and then I was offered the position and brought that human rights experience, that activism experience, here to Fort Lauderdale and to Stonewall.

The overall mission of the museum is to bring history to life, to use history as a way of learning lessons that help us not make the mistakes that we've made over and over and over again by using history as a tool, by demonstrating where we did learn, where we didn't learn, and our agenda is to make sure that everybody's story gets told, that we don't just focus on one part of the population, but focus on everybody who makes up this community.

And what's interesting is that the LGBTQ+ community is the only community that includes bits and pieces of every other community.

If you're Catholic, you're Catholic.

If you're Jewish, you're Jewish.

If you're Greek, you're Greek.

But in all of those cases, you will find members of the LGBTQ+ community.

So it should be a melting pot, and it should be a place where we can form alliances, and it should be a place where we build a more positive world.

But because of that, it also becomes a target of those who believe in dividing and separating.

When I first started here, my development director and my chair of my development committee said that they wanted to do a women's event, which I thought was a brilliant idea and something that we had to do.

But I thought that we needed to go at least one step further, and it shouldn't have been about a single event, but the creation of a women's fund so that we could have parity in the archives and in the library and in our programming for women and men.

And I think that that in and of itself, the act of doing that, will create an awareness that we lack and will tell an important part of the missing piece not only of the LGBTQ community story, not only of the trans women's story, but also of the allies, the Elizabeth Taylors, the Mathilde Krims, the Judith Lights, who have stood up time and time again for this community because they know that this community represents potentially everybody.

We have six million documents that show why silence equals death, as they said during the AIDS crisis and as we can say now.

I won't say that history repeats itself.

I would say that it's an ongoing cycle.

And until that cycle is broken, we will continue to do the same things over and over again, even if we expect different results.

Our job as a place that holds information, that holds thousands of books, that holds millions of records in the archive, is to bring that to life, to make sure that people learn those lessons so that the history will not continue the cycle of degradation and defeating the dignity of every human being.

The only way to do that is to make sure that every single story is told.

There are few things that are more important than ensuring that the next generation has the information they need to do what is right, to be on the right side of history.

So our doors are always open to young people.

In fact, just the other day, a father brought in his daughter, and she was intrigued to be in a space that finally spoke to her.

You can see the joy in the parent and the grandparent's face as their child, grandchild, finds a place where they are not only welcome, but can find things that look like them.

We wanna do that for everyone.

We have the materials here.

Whether you're male or female or they or them, whatever you see yourself as, you can find it here.

Anyone who comes in the door should walk out this door feeling better about themselves and better about the world that they live in, knowing that they can make an important contribution that the world, the future of the world, rests to some extent on their ability to carry it forward.

So young people are more than welcome here.

We're hoping that the new laws in the state don't prevent that from happening and that schools will take advantage of all that we have to offer, because this is an important piece of American history.

Why do I say that?

Because if you look at all the artists, all the designers, all the scientists, all the businesspeople that are members of this community, you see the impact this community has had on the world, and certainly on the United States of America.

And you saw what was taken away during the AIDS crisis when so many of those great talents died from an illness that probably could have been treated earlier if people in power were willing to act.

But because they weren't, many people died.

But because of that, the community organized, and allies showed up.

There was Elizabeth Taylor, and there was Doris Day, and there were all these iconic figures representing the very straight world coming to the aid of people who they knew and respected because of their talents and contributions.

And that's the message that we need to carry out there, that we are not some pariah that's out to destroy, but we are contributors that want to enhance the quality of life for everyone.

We want this to become the village green, not only for people in Fort Lauderdale and south Florida, but for the nation, to know that you can come here, you can get the information that you need without bias.

You will not be judged because of who you love or who you like or who you wanna spend time with.

You will always be welcome, and the information will always be available to you.

For more on all the organizations and resources discussed on today's show, visit us on Facebook and at Twitter @YourSouthFL.

I'm Pam Giganti.

Thanks for watching.