In 1974, Caroll Lesage fashionably began his career in Canada’s federal public service. And by fashionably, he meant light green ballroom pants, a business-chic sports jacket, black platform shoes, an earring and a handlebar mustache to accessorize.
Quickly, Lesage learned to hide himself.
“On my first day, my supervisor, a straight woman, called me into her office and said, ‘This won’t do. You’re coming to work […] you have to dress the part.’”
In what would be coined the “purge,” 2SLGBTQ+ people working in Canada’s federal government throughout the 1950s to 1990s were invasively and systematically discriminated against.
This sanctioned practice, according to the LGBT Purge Fund, affected approximately 9,000 Canadian public servants and involved ongoing harassment and firing.
“At first, I was hiding that I was gay,” Lesage said. “What I found hard was not socializing too much because otherwise, they start asking personal questions, and you end up having to make a little white lie, which generates another.”
Expressing gratitude for colleagues who looked out for his safety, Lesage said the workplace atmosphere gradually shifted.
“As the decades progressed, society changed in general. By the time the ‘90s rolled around, I was working in a department where there were quite a few of us in senior managerial positions. We ruled the place, it was great,” he joked.
A 2018 settlement agreement with the Canadian government awarded $110 million to victims of the purge. According to a 2018 report on Canadian 2SLGBTQ+ seniors, “discrimination can have long-term effects if […] negative perceptions are internalized.”
Allie Grady, a clinical psychology PhD student at the University of Ottawa, said evidence suggests queer older adults experience higher rates of depression and memory loss than their straight, cisgender peers.
“We theorize that this is due to something called minority stress,” Grady explained. “Minority stress is the idea that the minority stressors people experience throughout their lives accumulate and actually result in mental and physical health disparities.”
For queer older adults in the Ottawa area, the purge and other lived experiences connected to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, social stigmas and criminalization may contribute to minority stress.
However, Grady added minority stress can be buffered by social support and healthy lifestyle choices.
“Being part of the community, I really want to emphasize the strengths and resources and resilience in the community because sometimes the literature tends to emphasize the deficits,” she said.
With vibrant social programming and in-depth educational efforts to make long-term care, housing and public infrastructure safe, 2SLGBTQ+ older adults in Ottawa are insulating community spaces. Queer seniors are engaging in activities that combat minority stress and strengthen their social health.
“The majority of us just have simple lives. We want to find love, we want to have a job, a roof over our head. We’re the same as anyone else. We just want basic happiness in our lives,” Lesage, who is now in his 70s, said.
Launched in 2008, the Ottawa Senior Pride Network (OSPN) is composed of various subcommittees striving to meet the social, death and dying, housing and political needs of 2SLGBTQ+ older adults.
Karen Munro Caple, a 67-year-old founding OSPN member, said chosen familial support is crucial as queer people age.
“My family isn’t in the city. Having to create my own family here, my family of choice, is a big deal,” Munro Caple said. “It’s prevalent within our community because we often have not had connections with our families.”
OSPN also partners with the Good Companions, a local seniors’ centre that delivers programming for more than 300 queer community members aged 55 and older. As of 2018, 7.3 per cent of 2SLGBTQ+ people in Canada were aged 65 or older.
Featuring coffee clubs, yoga and mindfulness programs, the Good Companions aims to offer events by queer seniors for queer seniors.
One such event was a holiday drag brunch hosted by the Good Companions and OSPN on Dec. 9, 2023. Older lesbians “shot their shot” with charming drag king Zak Zinya, while other attendees strutted down the runway with their finest, self-proclaimed “butch catwalks.”
“Aging with dignity is just getting older and doing the things you’ve always done — giving back and caring about your community. You don’t get to retire from being queer,” Kerry Beckett, a 70-year-old Ottawa queer community member, said.
The Good Companions also runs a well-being check-in program, providing queer seniors with regular check-ins from 2SLGBTQ+ volunteers at each senior’s desired frequency. These check-ins can take the form of phone calls, friendly drop-ins or going out for coffee.
Nearly 50 per cent of queer seniors in Canada are not in a committed relationship, meaning they face higher risks of loneliness.
Stephane Gauthier, the Good Companion’s 2SLGBTQ+ co-ordinator, said the well-being check-in program centres around honouring older queer adults’ dignity.
“There was an isolated senior within the community who had actually passed away, and no one knew where he was or what had happened,” Gauthier said. “One piece is to make sure we protect people’s dignity and that that doesn’t happen to anyone else in the community.”
“At the same time, it works as a social connection for people who are more isolated.”
Beckett explained that the community’s reliance on one another strengthens with age.
“We have learned to get the right financial people, to get the right health, to surround ourselves with people our age so we can depend on each other and age together,” she said.
Education
To Lesage, advocating for his community’s safety includes educating long-term care facilities, retirement homes, hospitals and other public organizations about older 2SLGBTQ+ people’s rights.
“People who are in their 80s and 90s often go back in the closet when they move into an institution,” he said. “They’re afraid of having to experience the same kind of attitudes that they experienced when they were younger.”
Gauthier said regrouping queer seniors with prejudiced peers may also lead to re-traumatization.
“What’s challenging when you talk about long-term care in Ottawa specifically is that a lot of these people have come out and fought against […] people from their generation,” he said. “They’re having to now relive those bully moments with people they thought they had escaped from.”
Munro Caple added that the barriers to safe living conditions are even more intense for transgender seniors.
Both Lesage and Munro Caple recently retired from OSPN’s educational team, which delivers in-person awareness sessions primarily to the staff of long-term care facilities and retirement homes.
“Most of it is making them aware that in Canada we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms and everyone is entitled to appropriate healthcare and social services,” Lesage said.
“Ottawa Senior Pride has developed, in my humble opinion, one of the best training programs for front-line workers in long-term care across Canada,” said Susan Braedley, who researches equity in long-term care and is the director of Carleton University’s institute of political economy.
Citing openness to complex questions and senior-led sessions as crucial components of the OSPN educational team’s success, Braedley said the training meets personal support workers (PSWs) where they are.
“Personal support workers are cleaning people’s genitalia, they are helping people to shower, they are doing intimate care,” she said. “Often the questions that PWSs have are hard to ask because they cross our typical borders of what is considered polite. This training allows them to cross boundaries, to have those naive but brilliant questions and to help them unpack their own assumptions.”
While Munro Caple has stepped away from the OSPN educational team to work full-time, she said she is astounded by the program’s impact. The team’s material is currently being adopted in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.
“It was amazing to see people’s minds open up to what LGBT people would have lived. Some people had no idea.”
Despite the OSPN educational program’s success, Gauthier noted that high staffing turnover in long-term care poses ongoing challenges.
“Staff come from different backgrounds and places and opinions,” he said. “You’re constantly re-educating on person-centred approaches.”
Braedley proposes this barrier could be structurally overcome with a queer-specific long-term care home or retirement home unit.
“I think we would fill it. I think it would meet a need. I think it would also be a place where knowledge and skills could be further developed and transferred to long-term care homes across this region,” she said.
According to Munro Caple, previous efforts to create an Ottawa 2SLGBTQ+ nursing home in the early 2000s were unsuccessful. Beckett added that a 2015 OSPN housing survey found Ottawa’s senior 2SLGBTQ+ community does not necessarily want queer-specific housing.
“I was shocked. They want housing like anyone else. They want a mix of queer and straight people, young and old. They want to have a sense of community amongst themselves, whatever that community looks like,” Beckett said.
An August 2023 study from EGALE Canada, a 2SLGBTQ+ advocacy organization, noted that many older queer adults hold contrasting feelings towards 2SLGBTQ+ specific housing. While some expressed eagerness to live collectively with friends, others held concerns the housing would be violently targeted. Some seniors also stated they would prefer to live at home with their partner longer.
Lesage is currently navigating healthcare and housing options with his partner of 25 years, Brian. After Brian was diagnosed with the initial stages of dementia, the couple started frequenting Bruyère, a specialized health care organization in Ottawa.
“Bruyère is always so considerate. We always go to these meetings together and need to feel comfortable as a couple. We’ve been very fortunate all the way,” Lesage said.
The couple has also visited Chartwell Rockcliffe Retirement Residence for an OSPN education session, where Lesage said they were warmly welcomed.
Ultimately, the pair is currently prioritizing quality experiences with each other.
“Every day’s a gift because of Brian’s situation. When he got his diagnosis, it was so difficult to accept. Nobody wants that,” Lesage said. “Then we decided we’re wasting our best time. We should enjoy every day before it gets worse. We’ve changed our attitude completely and we find joy in every small detail in life. The snow the other day on the branches was so beautiful. We kept looking in the backyard at the trees.”
Queer-led care
While perspectives may differ on what safe housing looks like, many support workers and queer seniors enthusiastically support queer-led healthcare, senior centres and organizations.
Guided by the understanding that “the conditions of care are the conditions of work,” Braedley said organizations should aim to cultivate work environments where multiple queer people can be hired and openly out.
She added queer workers must be adequately paid and acknowledged for their support of older 2SLGBTQ+ adults.
“This connection between queer carers and queer older adults is super significant at this particular moment. It means that their knowledge spreads through an organization. To me, this is the direction for really culturally safe spaces and services,” Braedley said.
Aimee Paetz, a third-year Carleton social work and placement student at the Good Companions, said having workers from marginalized communities lead care organizations will contribute to safety.
“Social work has a horrible history of being so colonialist, ableist, racist, everything. I think there’s a lot of work that is being done and a lot that still needs to be done.”
She added that witnessing the Good Companion’s commitment to inclusivity has been encouraging.
“I get to work with a lot of queer people. Just to know there are people like me, there are 2SLGBTQ+ seniors around and there is a place for us is amazing,” Paetz said. “It feels like I can be really open and have a friendship with them.”
Gauthier shared he is overwhelmingly grateful to work with his community.
“My ultimate favourite part of the whole experience has to be being able to give back to the community of trailblazers who started the fight and put us on the path that we’re on today,” Gauthier said. “I’m married to my husband, we have a three-year old, and without these people, I probably wouldn’t be in the position that I’m in. To be able to give back to them is the best thing.”
Featured graphic by Alisha Velji/the Charlatan.
