The mission of the LGBT Aging Project is to ensure that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender elders have equal access to the life-prolonging benefits, protections, services and institutions that their heterosexual neighbors take for granted.
Today’s LGBT elders are a generation that came of age before the gay civil rights movement. Explicit discrimination from their families, employers, neighbors, landlords, faith communities, and government was accepted as part of the “homosexual experience.” Their most successful survival strategies were to remain invisible and secretive, and to distrust the mainstream institutions that many heterosexual people assume are in place to help them (healthcare, government agencies, faith communities). To be gay has meant to live in shame and fear, and most of all in secret. Given these life experiences invisibility and reluctance to trust the "straight world" is understandable.
As a result many LGBTs are wary of revealing their sexual orientation or gender identity to helping professionals and would rather go without, even when sick, rather than turning to aging service providers for help.
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