GLBT ELDERS experience a number of particular concerns as they age. In a recent study (Shippy, et al., 2001), three in four gay elders reported not being completely open about their sexual orientation to healthcare workers. Discrimination following disclosure of sexual orientation has been reported in nursing homes and senior centers. Social Security and retirement plan regulations deny gay elders access to funds from systems they pay into throughout their working lives, but cannot access due to the unequal treatment of same-sex couples.

FIFTY. I stretch all I’ve got around it, but barely grasp its half. I thought that cresting at the half-century mark might spark a wrenching essay or clever poem but, so far, the whole thing leaves me flat. Another Monday. Another Monday at the office. Another paycheck on Wednesday I’ll spend on … let’s see … pen refills, shaving cream, jam, and another dozen legal pads that somehow seem to be disappearing with alarming regularity. My pharmaceuticals are due for a refill too, and are pricey, but I can’t have my blood pressure spiking or my gastrics acting up. Certainly not on my birthday. …

INTERGENERATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS—those in which the two partners are at least twenty years apart—seem to thrive in the gay male world, greatly surpassing the corresponding rate of occurrence in the straight world. It’s a phenomenon that many people have noticed informally, though there isn’t much hard data to confirm its existence or its prevalence.

MOST PEOPLE today don’t know the name of Bruz Fletcher. In the 1930’s, however, all the right people knew his name. Humphrey Bogart, Louise Brooks, Howard Hughes, and Ronald Reagan are just some of the luminaries who laughed, drank, and blushed over the outrageous entertainment Fletcher delivered in his Sunset Strip nightclub. A modern saloon singer before Frank Sinatra or Bobby Short, Fletcher had as clear a voice as either of them, and a lyric wit that tossed off acrobatic rhymes and lavender-tinged triple entendres. This year marks the centenary of the birth of the gay wit known as “The Singing Satirist.”