An old age home for gay men has opened in the Narmada district of the Indian state of Gujarat.

The old age home at Hanmenteshwar village, located on the banks of Narmada river, was inaugurated yesterday and named after late American writer Janet who generously donated funds for the project.

Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, main architect behind the project, said, “I decided to name it after Janet as she had contributed a lot in its set up. She was like any other ordinary person… and that added more beauty to the project, which was initiated in 2009.”

The centre was inaugurated by Janet’s sister Carlafine, who accompanied by her husband, flew down from US for this purpose.

Gohil belongs to the royal family of former princely state of Rajpipla. He is the only known person of royal lineage in modern India to have publicly revealed that he is a gay. “The home can accommodate 50 elderly homosexuals,” said Gohil, scion of the 650-year-old Rajpipla dynasty.

The project has been developed under the auspices of Lakshya Trust, a community-based organisation founded by Gohil, known as India’s gay prince, to provide support and promote HIV/AIDS prevention among gay men.

Gohil hoped his project would remove misgivings about homosexuals and help in promoting a society where people from different sexual orientation can co-exist peacefully.

He said he was happy that a priest of a temple located near the home attended the inauguration ceremony along with his family which is a “good sign” and indicated towards changing mindsets.

9 APRIL 2012

Letter in The Age:

I WISH to contradict a Council on the Ageing report that, at 31 meetings held by Minister for Ageing Mark Butler around Australia, ''usually one or two people … expressed concern at having to sell their principal residence (to meet nursing home bonds), but this concern was not generally picked up and supported by the majority of the audience'' (The Saturday Age, 6-7/4). I attended several meetings. I, and others, were applauded when we expressed opposition to selling homes for any care. I asked Mr Butler whether he knew of any other health area in the world where mortgaging or selling the home was a prerequisite for receiving care. He did not.

Currently many people have to sell their homes to pay an accommodation bond for low-level care. The Howard government tried to introduce bonds for high-level care, but was unsuccessful because of public opposition. There will be disappointment and anger if the Labor government introduces such legislation.

7 JULY 2012

This letter has been sent to two seniors newspapers: Victorian Senior and Fifty~Plus. We hope that one or both will publish it as it is an issue that will not go away!

Elder abuse takes many forms and the one to consider at the moment is the abuse metered out to the Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and HIV (GLTH) members of the community.

Consider that for many years of their lives GLTH people were considered pariahs by society, were treated with contempt, derision, homophobia, discrimination, bigotry, hatred and exclusion.

On 1 July 2009 the federal government became one of the biggest perpetrators of GLTH elder abuse. On that day, after GLTH people aged over 60, 70, 80 and more were suddenly outed and made into married couples (if living in partnerships), called de factos, and those who were single pensioners suddenly became “married pensioners” and each in a partnership received “married” rates thus losing some few hundred dollars each per fortnight of Centrelink payment.

There were campaigns around the country for some months before the legislation came into effect asking the government to “grandfather” the legislation, because many GLTH retired elders had had to make provision as best they were able, to plan for old age without the benefits of relationship recognition because of ongoing homophobia and discrimination.

The campaigns being waged requested the government to consider doing away with the “couple” pension rates and providing single pensions for all pensioners receiving benefits from Centrelink. The campaigns were not supported by any of the Seniors organizations such as Council on the Ageing (COTA), Combined Pensioners and Superannuants Association (CPSA), National Seniors Australia.

Amongst the points raised in the discussion were those that pointed out that “married” pensioner rates had been introduced when pensions were introduced because in those early days, many women had not worked in paid employment and governments still considered women to be “looked after” by their husbands who had direct control of the household income.

Those days vanished some several decades ago as women achieved changes in employment situations and became independent from having to rely on men for their handouts.

The government ignored the proposals because it was obviously going to save them millions of dollars for GLTH couples to be treated as married couples without providing the other securities which marriage would provide, legally and in other social ways.

So elder abuse of the GLTH communities writ large by a homophobic government and other ageing institutions came into force on 1 July 2009 and not a word of protest about this ongoing abuse.

How many of these organizations will take up the call to have this abuse stopped now?

Don’t hold your breath!

The letter was published in Fifty~Plus News in their August 2012 edition - many thanks to them.

27 JULY 2012

Thousands heading into an old age they did not think they would see, having given up jobs expecting to die young

In the 1980s and 1990s they were told they were going to die young, so they gave up their jobs and cashed in the pensions they wouldn't need, buried their friends and tried to make the most of their last months on Earth.

Decades later, thousands of men and women with HIV in the UK, US and across the world are heading into an old age they never expected to see. In the US in 2001, 17% of people with HIV were over 50. Now that figure stands at 39% and by 2017 it will be half. In the UK, the Health Protection Agency says one in six people (16.8%) being seen for HIV care in 2008 were over 50 – and that will double in the next five years.

Many of those who were saved by the discovery of antiretroviral drugs in the early 1990s felt it was a miracle to be alive. But life for the survivors of HIV, as they age, is bittersweet. Many are poor and have long since been edged out of the workforce. Half a lifetime spent on powerful drugs has taken its toll. Aside from the physical health issues as a result of the virus, there are high rates of mental health problems too.

John Rock, from Sydney, Australia, was diagnosed with HIV 30 years ago. "My partner started getting sick in 1983 and died early in 1996," he said at an international Aids conference in Washington DC. "Many of my colleagues and friends were pushed out of the workforce around the mid-90s because they were not well enough to work.

Subsequently triple combinations [of antiretroviral drugs] came along and they are still alive, but at the peak of their earning capacity they were out of the workforce for 10 years. Now they are destined for a retirement they thought they never would have, but it's going to be in poverty."

Lisa Power from the Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), who spoke at the conference about the ageing HIV-positive community in the UK, acknowledged the unfortunate consequences of advice from support groups to those who were thought to be dying. "In the 1980s and 90s we encouraged people to give up work and go on state benefits and not be economically productive," she said. "Now we have condemned people to live on an old-age state pension."

Money is not the only need. Many feel lonely and isolated. In a video made for a project called The Graying of HIV in the US, Bill Rydwels, 77, from Chicago, recalled a time of terror and sadness when Aids was scything down his friends. It was nonetheless a time of warmth and support that he no longer has. "It's just so much better today and yet it is a lonelier time. Years ago it was a time that we all spent together. It was a terrible time and a wonderful time because you got to know everybody very, very well. They cried on your shoulder and laughed with you. You don't get that any more."

Recent research from THT in the UK reveals similar sadness. James, 61, a gay man living in the UK who did not want to give his full name, is suffering from serious health problems, including blindness resulting from the use of an experimental drug to treat another condition (not HIV). "My life is empty," he told researchers. "I have tried so hard over the last 10 years to fill the emptiness. Worked really hard at it. I am in a cul-de-sac. It would be nice just to have somebody to telephone.

"I am fed up with people at the top of HIV organisations saying because there is combination therapy everyone is fine. People with neuropathy, and in wheelchairs, we are the forgotten people."

Half the world away, in Africa, which now bears the brunt of the epidemic, the numbers of older people with HIV are also rising fast. Epidemiologists at the University of Sydney estimate that there are more than 3 million people over 50 with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, and that the figure is rising rapidly.

Ruth Waryero, from Kenya, now 65, had an HIV test when she was 48. She went home and told her husband. "He listened to me and then he got up and said, it's up to you.

"Take care of yourself – I'm off. Since that time I have not seen him again and yet he was the breadwinner in the family. He left me with the four children and two years later I had two grandchildren.

"In Kenya we have different problems [from those in Europe]. Older men try to get younger women for sex. They ignore you because as far as you are concerned, you are finished. You don't need sex and they can apply to the young girls.

"But when you are old you are likely to be raped by those who are positive because they believe if they rape you, as old as you are, they will turn negative."

Older women also face embarrassment at clinics when they go for tests or drugs, she said. They are asked who they are collecting the drugs for.

"You are not supposed to have sex at your age," she said. "As a woman they ask if you are a sugar mummy. I say this HIV came from an old man and the old man has run away from me."

The older HIV generation – in Africa and elsewhere – is not only made up of those diagnosed years ago. Some are people who have been diagnosed late, having lived for years without knowing they were infected. And many people are now becoming infected later in life.

Laura, who took part in the THT research, is a white, heterosexual, divorced mother of two. At the age of 52 she started a new relationship and then suddenly became ill. Because her symptoms were similar to those of a friend who had been diagnosed with HIV, she took a test. When she was told it was positive, she felt numbness and shock, she said. She cannot believe, as a well-educated person, that she stopped using condoms with her partner and allowed it to happen.

Mark Brennan-Ing, from the Aids Community Research Initiative of America, told the conference of the "fragile social networks among people living with HIV in the US and Europe". Families have abandoned them or do not give them enough help, meaning they end up relying on friends, who often have HIV themselves.

Men who have sex with men, he said, are much less likely to have partners, spouses or children to care for them in their old age. Many of those interviewed live in fear of encountering hostility and rejection in care homes. A 52-year-old gay man from London told the THT: "I am somewhat fearful of a lonely old age. In practical terms, if I become mentally or physically frail, the prospect of being the only gay man in an old people's home is very frightening indeed."

4 AUGUST 2012

Article in The Age newspaper:

THE dinner party at Peter Dickson's home had been a success. The former chef had produced a memorable meal, and over a glass of red, Dickson and his friends began to reflect on some deeper matters. This was almost 25 years ago, and the group around the table were in their prime. They were young and they were gay, and they were pleased with life. But what would happen to them when they grew old?

The consensus, Dickson recalls, was that they didn't want to die alone.

"We wanted to be in a happy situation," he says. "What I mean by that is a secure, safe place."

Happiness, security and safety. Surely, this should be the starting point for the care of people as they reach their senior years. Yet for Dickson and his friends, there could be no such assumptions.

Beyond the usual trepidation about ageing, for gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual people the prospect of aged care is particularly daunting and frightening. At a time when they are most vulnerable, they fear discrimination and victimisation, not only from carers but from fellow residents.

"You're born in the closet, you come out of the closet and then you go back into the closet because of victimisation," Dickson says.

At that reflective dinner party more than two decades ago, Dickson suggested they could buy a house and live together, with carers coming in to give support. As the idea developed beyond that late-night conversation, he realised the anxiety about growing old was widespread.

"After having that dinner party, and over the years, I realised it wasn't just us," he says. Now, the idea that began as a house is about to turn into a village.

Dickson is behind the development of Linton Estate, a 120-unit residential village for people from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex communities — LGBTIs. As much a resort as anything, the development, between Ballarat and Melbourne, will be a place for people to grow older with a supportive and understanding community.

Linton Estate will provide the answer for some, and the inspiration for others. It is one, symbolic part of a growing recognition of what has largely been a hidden problem. More importantly, it is part of the answer to an issue that has long festered behind closed doors. A week ago, there was a modest announcement by the federal government that it would develop a national LGBTI aged-care strategy. In the churn of the news cycle, it was noticed by few. But for many, it is hugely important.

Jo Harrison, a gerontologist and expert in the field from the University of South Australia, says the proposed strategy and the recognition of older LGBTI people as a special needs group are ground-breaking. The changes, she says, are the culmination of years of research, education and advocacy across the LGBTI community, who, she says, have been fighting for a virtually "invisible" group.

"Older LGBTI people have been mostly afraid to be open about their identities for fear of discrimination and persecution, and have lived hidden lives," Dr Harrison says. "These changes begin to redress that seriously negative situation and provide them with safety and security."

The issue received some serious attention two years ago during the Productivity Commission's Caring for Older Australians inquiry. The problem was clearly defined in a submission from the National LGBT Health Alliance, which said that seniors from these communities had endured decades of stigma, discrimination and exclusion by the state and mainstream society.

The alliance noted that homosexuality had not been decriminalised in most states until the 1980s and 1990s, and the World Health Organisation had kept homosexuality on its list of diseases until 1992. And, of course, same-sex relationships are still not fully recognised.

"This means today's LGBTI seniors have lived well over half their lives being considered criminals by the state, diseased by the medical profession and excluded by mainstream society," the alliance said. "LGBTI people, and especially older LGBTI people, have developed protective mechanisms to shield themselves from stigma, discrimination and violence."

Aged carers needed to understand "the abuse and harm that many LGBTI people have suffered throughout their lives — harm that in many instances has not been healed".

Many older seniors would not even identify with terms such as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, actively hiding their identities for fear of discrimination.

But the ageing of the baby boomers — the oldest of them now in their mid-60s — may help force the changes.

"The baby boomer generation and those following may well have different expectations of aged-care services," the alliance said. "These are often people who have fought for their rights, and many have been out about their sexual/gender identity for most of their lives. It cannot be assumed that they will be prepared to go into the closet when dependent on aged-care services in the home or when requiring accommodation in aged-care facilities. This generation will more than likely openly demand services that meet their needs and lifestyles."

The national strategy — advocated by the alliance and others, and recommended by the Productivity Commission — is certainly the breakthrough for which many had been hoping. Meanwhile, other smaller groups and individuals — including Peter Dickson with his Linton Estate dream — have been working from the ground up to support older gays, lesbians, transgender and bisexual people now facing the reality of the prospect of aged care.

Care Connect, which provides support for people to live independently at home, has managed to secure federal funding for specific age care packages for LGBTIs in south-east Queensland.

The idea emerged from a connection established between the group's Brisbane branch manager and the Queensland Association for Healthy Communities, which promotes the health of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

The association conducted a survey of its communities in 2008, finding that 40 per cent of respondents reported a negative experience with aged care based on their sexuality or gender identification. A lack of knowledge, acceptance and understanding were the key issues. Asked about their concerns on ageing, 61 per cent listed the lack of specific accommodation.

"Nobody likes the prospect of ageing," Care Connect's chief executive, Paul Ostrowski, says. "But for people from this community, it seems the fear is actually acute."

Ostrowski says one of the main concerns is that same-sex partners will not be recognised by an aged-care facility, meaning that instead of contacting a resident's partner in the event of health or other issues, institutions will instead turn to the resident's children from a former relationship.

There is also the fear of prejudice, stemming from the fact that much of the aged-care sector is faith-based. Ostrowski says this is more a perception than a reality, and that his organisation, which is secular, has never encountered a report of discrimination by a faith-based organisation.

There is also the attitude of fellow residents. "Take the scenario of somebody in a country town of 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000 people," he says. "They may face going into a residential-care facility room by room with . . . people who made their lives absolute hell when they were going through school."

A lot of people, Ostrowski says, wonder why the new approach is necessary, given society's growing acceptance of people's sexuality. But it is the experience of people now in their 70s and 80s that matters.

"Many of them have not declared their sexual orientation even to their own families, and if they have, they may have been cut off by their own kids, or judged by their own kids," Ostrowski says. "We've had people approach us who have been so acutely sensitive about their own privacy who said, 'You can't even go to my doctor over this because my doctor doesn't know. Don't send anything to my home address because my family doesn't know.' " Ostrowski says the training and recruitment of Care Connect's staff is a crucial first step, from the executive level down. "I'd always thought that I was completely comfortable with the communities, but then you realise it's not whether we're comfortable or not, it's the kind of prejudice they have lived with that is the issue, and being sensitive to that."

Care Connect then recruited staff from the LGBTI communities, who are now working to raise awareness of the services.

Even when people have sought help from Care Connect, some have chosen to "de-gay" their house by taking down photos and closing wardrobes during carer visits. "And we've had to say, 'Look, you don't need to do that; this is a legitimate service'," Ostrowski says.

Beyond the organisations such as Care Connect, there is also encouraging work by groups including the Matrix Guild, which supports lesbians over 40.

Matrix's Anneke Deutsch says the prospect of going into aged care is frightening enough, but for lesbians, there are added fears.

"We have a life where we live with our partner or hang out with our lesbian friends, and then we go out and face the heterosexual world," Deutsch says. "But once we go into aged care, we don't have any lesbian space any more.

"Because we're vulnerable, and because we're worried we might be passed over — if somebody's homophobic, they might just walk past and leave us on the bedpan a bit longer than they need to — a lot of women who might have been quite out in their normal lives will go back into the closet, because they feel it will assure them better care."

The guild has produced a publication called We Live Here Too for aged-care services, aimed at helping them provide the support that lesbians need. Members have also been going into aged-care facilities to talk to staff. The booklet includes some encouraging tales of progress.

In one case, Helen was visiting her friend Maria, who had dementia. At the nursing home where she lived, she would take Maria's arm and walk with her. When staff didn't intervene after a fellow resident made derogatory remarks about them being lesbians, Helen raised it with the director of nursing. Staff apologised at a subsequent meeting, and it was made clear to residents the remarks were not acceptable.

But change is slow and patchy. Peter Dickson knows of one older gay man who has been forced to conceal his sexuality. "The poor guy can't even put a male picture up because he could be victimised by his carer," Dickson says.

In the village planned for the paddocks of Ballan, there will be no such issues of acceptance. The vision is not far from reality, with a builder to be selected soon. Already there have been almost 300 expressions of interest in the idea that began around a dinner table a quarter of a century ago. Dickson, who has worked two jobs and invested well, has sold everything he has to fund the project. "I believe in it so much. I won't die wondering."

14 AUGUST 2012

Article in The Age newspaper:

People of all ages, including older people, have sexual desires and are sexually active.

IF YOU chuckled at these jokes you wouldn't be alone. If you cringed at the idea of old people having sex, you most certainly wouldn't be alone. Older people as sexual beings may well be one of the last - and hardest to dispel - taboos in developed society.

Walk into your local newsagent and you'll find any number of greeting cards that lampoon the ageing process and the concept of older people having sex. Older people are presented as wrinkled and saggy, desperate and past it, pervy, decrepit or addicted to Viagra.

Satirising old age, it seems, is part of life, and certainly part of the vernacular. Phrases like ''you're over the hill'', ''he's an old fart'' or ''she's mutton dressed as lamb'' are a common part of Australian parlance and barely raise an eyebrow in general conversation.

But substitute a black, Asian, gay or disabled person as the subject of the joke and it becomes inappropriate to laugh. Why, then, is ageism tolerated in our society?

Researchers from the Australian Centre for Evidence Based Aged Care at La Trobe University (ACEBAC) say ageism can be connected to a fear of death. It also reflects our entrenched value system that focuses on productivity. Also, sexual attractiveness is associated with youth and beauty, so the inverse assumption is that older people are asexual and undesirable.

But the opposite is true, say advocates such as Rhonda Nay, a baby boomer and a refreshingly plain-speaking professor of interdisciplinary aged care.

"We have this perception that the only people who are sexually active are the hourglass women and the six-pack men. But when you look around, very few of us actually fit that description, but we're all having children and getting together," Nay says.

People of all ages, including older people, have sexual desires and are sexually active, most people masturbate and it's time we all got used to these ideas and started to talk about them, she says.

She says it's time for older people to "come out of the closet" as sexual beings, just as victims of homophobic prejudice have fought to achieve visibility and equality.

In an article Nay co-wrote for the International Journal of Older People Nursing, she described a future where older people have seized their sexual rights: "It's the year 2025 and the baby boomers have pioneered the revolution! Individual agency and resistance by older people to the asexual stereotyping have been successful.

''They realised that while they collaborated in the secrecy the stereotyping would continue and those 'oldies' who did dare to 'come out' were being stigmatised … A courageous few are always required to confront discrimination and start the change in attitudes and behaviours."

Jenny Jockhurst *, also a baby boomer, agrees that the time is nigh for older people to "make their own story" when it comes to their sexuality. Jockhurst, a consumer advocate who lives in regional New South Wales, cared for her husband, Mick, for 15 years as he battled younger-onset dementia. He died in 2010, when he was in his late 60s, after 35 years of marriage.

Jockhurst says that watching her ''very handsome'' and athletic husband succumb to the disease made her understand that a person's need for intimacy never changes, no matter what their age or physical state.

"It was about halfway through that his capacity to be himself [sexually] changed, that our relationship was no longer as it had been, and his needs had to be addressed differently. But his needs never changed: his intrinsic need as the person he was, for a demonstration of love and acceptance and warmth, that never changed until the day he died."

Jockhurst says reading Hugh Mackay's book, What Makes us Tick, articulated for her that people never lose their desires entirely.

"There's a drive that remains with us until we end our days. Older people and people with dementia don't lose the essence of the person they are. Anyone who knows them knows the essence of the person is there right to the very end," Jockhurst says.

She says that although her husband's decline was gradual, it was sometimes difficult for them both to adapt to the change to their sex life. "Certainly you do for a long time grieve the loss of the things that have been so special between the two of you and have given you immense joy and fulfilment; you are losing those things and don't have them in the same way any more. ''You can't replace those things, but people have to make their choices around that - your intrinsic needs don't change, but it's how you're going to satisfy them." She says there are a lot of people "not living the fullest, most normal, emotionally healthy life you'd advocate for".

Towards the end of his life, Mick was unable to lift his arms, so Jockhurst would place them around her so he could hold her, while she lay close to him. "I would spend ages cleaning his hands and his fingernails and rubbing cream into his arms. That lovely gentle touch and contact and closeness was lovely for him. It was immeasurably good for him in the absence of more usual ways to have that closeness."

For the majority of his illness, Mick was cared for at home, enabling him and Jockhurst to create their own framework for intimacy. For older people in residential care, however, the challenges surrounding sexual expression for both those who are of sound mind and people suffering a mental or physical disability can be difficult - for residents, their families and staff.

Catherine Barrett, a research fellow at La Trobe University's Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, began her career as a nurse in residential aged care. She says when she began working in the industry it was impossible to get people to talk about the sexual needs of residents, but as staff were encouraged to respond positively to the issue she saw an improvement to the quality of care, and therefore to residents' lives.

"Without education a lot of service providers will respond using their personal value judgments, but once you give them education and they get skilled at putting aside their own values and beliefs and saying what is best for the client, you find it's less of a problem."

One former aged care facility manager, who declined to be identified, recalls two carers walking in on an older man and woman in a room - "he with his pants down around his ankles and she with her knickers around her knees". He laughs and says: "The carers were a bit taken aback, and I said, 'Well, did you knock on the door?'

"You have to accept that people don't change because they're older. Their sex drive and need for companionship don't necessarily change. You get a few carers who are prim and proper, saying, 'That's disgusting' - but that's wrong. That's where you need a good policy in place, and to talk to staff about how to handle it."

Barrett runs workshops for residential care providers and says the most important thing is to give staff permission to talk about sexuality. She says it is also crucial that they recognise that older people have the right to a sexual identity and life - it's not a privilege - and that the resident is the primary client, not the family.

The trickiest issue, Barrett says, surrounds consent, particularly for those with cognitive impairment, as carers and families try to determine whether the older person is able to apply reasoning to their own situation.

A paper published by a team from ACEBAC this month tackled this question, addressing the concern that a person with dementia, for example, is seen to need protection from his or her own impaired memory and judgment. But they were clear that such decisions go beyond cognition and rationality and that emotions are important.

"While philosophers have argued for centuries over the relative importance of reason and passion in decisions about morality, surely in debates surrounding sex and intimacy more than any other topic, the role of passion and sentiment must feature prominently."

The right to take risks is also inherent, says Nay, who believes that by eliminating risk you eliminate the person. She says that part of what makes us human is struggling, overcoming challenges and taking risks. Most of the time, if the family's and resident's views contradict, it is the family's wishes that are mistakenly followed.

"To simply go with the family is not correct; [the older person] has the right to take risks. The issue of consent is vexed; I may not be able to understand my giving away $3 million, but if you look at my face you can tell what's going on in this relationship."

Nay is in favour of having a guardian or arbitrator who can mediate and ensure that the resident's rights are being supported.

Jane Boag is the general manager of residential services at Benetas, which operates 11 residential facilities in Victoria, across a range of care levels. She says providers must tread a careful line between meeting their legal responsibilities, their duty of care to patients, and the wishes of the resident and their family.

Benetas has a ''diversity'' policy which staff are trained to adhere to, covering factors like a resident's cultural and spiritual background and sexual preferences. But the problems are rarely black and white, Boag says. "It might be fine to say that the person is happy, but if you've got a spouse who's turning up three times a week to visit and their partner is in a confused state and having a sexual relationship with another person, it becomes difficult."

Industry workers say that this type of scenario is not uncommon because residents form friendships and romantic attachments with people other than their partner. Last year Benetas employed a dementia adviser to work with staff and families to iron out problems as they occur, particularly around communication between the different parties.

For the children of older people, becoming aware that their parents have a sexual identity may be confronting and enough to send them into what Nay and others have called "nauseated denial". Such resistance is a common obstacle to ensuring an older person's rights are protected when they are living in care.

Ellen Skladzien, the national policy manager at Alzheimer's Australia, says: "For a long time children haven't thought about their parents as having a sexual identify. It can put them in quite a difficult situation because they have never conceptualised their parents in that way." Add to that a reluctance to talk about end-of-life care and discussions around sexualised behaviour become mired in embarrassment, denial and anger.

Not all sexual behaviour is necessarily synonymous with sexual desire. Barrett says it's about looking "above the belt" - at what might be missing from a person's life. In many cases the older person may have lost a long-term partner and gone from being touched or embraced regularly to not being touched affectionately at all. Jockhurst says: "Night time is lonely, and being in the bed on your own. It just seems cavernous."

Nay says: "Often when people are behaving in a sexually inappropriate way there are ways of reducing that behaviour that have nothing to do with sexual activity, be it intercourse or anything else. It might be about giving them a massage, someone spending more time with them or giving them a hug.

''You will often see situations where people are stripping and that's seen as inappropriate behaviour. That can be as simple as that they're too hot, they've got itching, excoriation under their breasts. It's a matter of saying, 'what is this person trying to tell me?'"

EDITORIAL COMMENT: In the article Rhonda Nay says it's time for older people to "come out of the closet" as sexual beings, just as victims of homophobic prejudice have fought to achieve visibility and equality. Further in the article Catherine Barrett, a research fellow at La Trobe University's Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS) is interviewed and quoted, and althought Catherine is a research fellow at ARCSHS, and deals presumably on a regular basis with the issues of Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and HIV (GLTH) people who are part of the ageing communities and are discriminated against on a daily ongoing basis, she does not mention them once in the article. If people such as Barrett keep us in the closet, what hope is there in any age care facility - mostly belonging to religious organisations - of discrimination being eliminated for ever? Not much, one can be sure! AND THAT IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE ARTICLE - THE WRITER OF THE ARTICLE IGNORES GLTH PEOPLE FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE END!

17 JANUARY 2013

An article in the newspapers during the week of 31 December 2012 to 4 January 2013 - has produced some interesting analyses.

Pension reductions have been forced on single women with children to force them into newstart allowance and to make them look for employment when the youngest child turns 8. There are less and less jobs and if incomes are reduced, searching for jobs becomes more and more difficulty because of associated costs. No matter, an Australian Labor Party (sic) has all the answers for social problems, as ever robbing the poor to pay the rich and make them richer. Hence the growing divide between rich and poor!

On 1 July 2009 the Rudd ALP government "married" gay, lesbian, transgender, HIV couples living together and made them into "married couples" in itself and antiquated outmoded custom where men owned women and no woman was entitled to a single pension when her husband retired and was given a pension. Married couples did not and do not each get a single pension - they get a married rate pension, considerably less than 2 single pensions - and this is now 2013!!

Fast forward to the here and now! When the two of us were "married" by Kevin Rudd and his bunch of merrie men and women, and our single pensions which we had been receiving during our 70s and some of our 80s were combined into a "married" rate pension, we each lost about $100 per fortnight.

The Rudd government refused to provide a "grandfathering" clause to this change thus apparently ensuring a saving annually to the federal government of about $66 million per year.

In addition, now that we had a joint and combined income, where previously I personally as an individual received extra income from two small superannuation indexed pensions which, when they went up with indexing increased my income by a few cents a week, Centrelink reduced my pension by a few cents per fortnight, but now that we had been turned into Siamese twins by the government, when my pension was reduced fortnightly, so too was my partner's, thus saving the federal government a paltry sum which was expended on sending us letters each time with our amended incomes.

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction!

Where is the understanding of low income people by a government hell-bent on ensuring that their capitalist friends are enriched immeasurably - by a few paltry dollars from pensioners and single parents?

Spare us from their tears!

21 APRIL 2015

An interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Anyone who has not lost their mental faculties must be aware of the hype surrounding the ''new'' old age. This is the old age where 80-year-olds go hang gliding, 90-year-olds win chess tournaments and centenarians play competitive table tennis.

An industry is devoted to projecting images of ''positive ageing''; there is even a prize, awarded by a group, for journalists who toe the line. Accentuating the negative - old age poverty, elder abuse - is so yesterday.

The hype is projected mainly at baby boomers; at 50 or 60 they will do what it takes to defy getting old in the way their grandparents and maybe their parents did - with complaint and disability, illness and dementia. The boomers will defy history and age ''successfully''.

There is another part to the message about successful ageing which is a big worry. The new old age won't be for everyone. A happy, mentally and physically active old age will be a reward bestowed upon those who put the effort in, starting now. We'll get the old age we deserve.

Those who end up suffering the old old age with its indignities, frailties and mental decline will be seen as losers who didn't try hard enough.

The idea that we can control the kind of old age that lies ahead of us is seductive but probably misguided. We boomers want to age disgracefully, kicking our heels up, living life to the full. And that's all very possible in our 50s, 60s and 70s providing we have the money. We can take advantage of opportunities our parents never knew, unconstrained by conventions that held them back.

Yes, we look fabulous compared to our sun-beaten parents at the same age - or so we think - and surely that means we will stay forever young, providing we do the right things. Not for us an ending that is brutish and long.

But the 80s may be another story. Women who have reached 60 have a good chance of living another 26 years, and men another 23 years. However, how healthy the last years will be is still highly contestable, with some scientists positing that life expectancy is increasing faster than the expectancy of life in good health.

Even more contestable is how much individual effort makes a difference in the last years. Genetic inheritance is one factor that influences how long we live and how healthy we will be. So too does diet and exercise. But surely luck, good and bad, plays its part as well.

It is important to take personal responsibility for our health, and do what we can to minimise the risk factors (always easier for the rich than the poor).

Giving up smoking, drinking alcohol in moderation, cutting down on saturated fats, eating smaller portions than most of us probably do, and taking regular exercise are indisputably important to reduce the risks of all sorts of health problems.

As well, battalions of scientists pump out daily missives on how to ward off dementia. There is in fact some merit in the ''use it or lose it'' argument.

But unfortunately some of the messages become confusing. Crosswords, chess, dancing, singing … it is unclear what really works best (the evidence is strongest for exercise), and at what intensity the activities must be pursued to have a significant effect on the brain. Is being sociable enough, reading the newspaper, and going for a walk as some evidence suggests? Or do we have to try new challenges, learn Mandarin, give the brain a real workout, as other research indicates?

Whatever, the ball has been put in our court; it's up to us to take up brain training and weights training. And heaven forfend we should ever feel gloomy. Being positive, especially about ageing itself, is a prerequisite to living a long, happy life.

It makes sense on a population-wide basis to encourage people to aim for the new old age by changing their lifestyles and exercising their brain.

But the emphasis on self-help and personal responsibility creates dangers too. The first danger is that in the future those stricken with the bad old age will be blamed for their own misfortune.

When mum starts putting the kettle in the fridge and asks the same questions over and over, the temptation will be for the family to re-assess her life in the light of her illness. Perhaps silently they will castigate her for her perceived shortcomings, her failure to take up bridge, her lack of interest in current affairs. Sure, she might have liked walking but clearly she should have taken up cycling - like that razor-sharp Mrs Withers who has her own blog and teaches refugees English.

Cancer sufferers already know what it is like to feel admonished in this way. Many feel that they are responsible for having contracted their disease despite what they thought was a good-enough lifestyle. Clearly it wasn't good enough.

The second danger is that the emphasis on personal control raises impossible expectations of old age.

If illness, memory lapses, and sadness dog the last years despite the brain and the weights training, will we feel, on top of all the other ailments, a sense of failure?

Old age needs to be approached with realism. We may do our best and still be robbed of our reward.

We can hope to die on a tennis court in our 90s but more likely, like the old old today, we will end up reliant on government services and the kindness of our family and strangers.

3 MAY 2015

A recent Quarterly Essay published in March 2015 by Dr Karen Hitchcock is called "DEAR LIFE - ON CARING FOR THE ELDERLY

When the next Quarterly Essay is published (it comes out every three months) in June 2015 it has the new essay and Correspondence about the previous essay. People are invited to write comments and submit for publication.

I submitted my contribution and received the following reply:

Dear Mannie de Saxe,

Thank you for your very interesting and informative letter. I regret to say it arrives too late for inclusion in our published correspondence section - we have just gone to press with the next issue. However, I have passed in on to Karen Hitchcock, as I am sure she will want to read it.

Ken is 92 and I am 88 and we have been together for 22 years. We are gay and were “married” by Kevin Rudd on 1 July 2009 when he refused to grandfather phasing in de facto pensions for newly recorded gay, lesbian, transgender, HIV/AIDS partnerships. As equivalents of married pensioners and now no longer on single pensions, we lost about $200 each fortnightly from our Centrelink pensions.

As gay activists we were known as a partnership and would not have escaped scrutiny from Centrelink if they had started to investigate who were “couples” and who were not.

We moved to Melbourne from Sydney and Newcastle in 2001 after we bought a house in Preston in one of Melbourne’s north-eastern suburbs. We are fortunate to have been able to buy a house and not be renting, so that in our very old age we do not have to struggle with our finances every month as so many other people have to, and while we have maintained reasonable health over time, when one of us has health problems, we do our best to keep up with normal activities as much as possible.

I am our webmaster, and I look after two different web sites and a blog. When we were in Sydney we belonged to an activist group called InterSection, and one of our activities was involved with local government areas and discrimination by councils of their gay, lesbian, transgender and HIV/AIDS (GLTH) residents, where we discovered some appalling homophobia and other mistreatments.

In Preston we found ourselves living in Darebin City Council area, and from about 2003/2004 when we read some council document about inclusion, we decided to see what was going on in relation to the GLTH communities with which we had been active over the years.

and InterSection (on the josken web site) from Part 3 onwards, details some of our involvements with Darebin, and their responses over time. Eventually we just gave up!

Recently a few events occurred which have shaken us out of any complacency, and one of these being a major health issue relates directly to Karen Hitchcock’s essay concerning our health care-givers and their co-ordination with each other.

First, the other two events.

We live within walking distance of Northland shopping centre and we walk from our house to the centre in less than half-an-hour. If we have heavy shopping to carry home, we are able to catch one of 2 buses which drop us around the corner from our house which is just up from the main road, Murray Road. The footpath is uneven and in parts it has lifted, leaving lips which if you are old and your vision is not the best are easily missed and you can trip and hurt yourself badly. Ken tripped over one of these lips but was able to support himself on the house fence closest to where he tripped. His hand was gashed and bleeding, but he had not fallen on the ground and injured himself worse than the bleeding hand. We protected it with a clean handkerchief which one of us had, and when we arrived at Northland we went to the nearest pharmacy and asked them to put a plaster on it. The woman who dealt with us at the pharmacy didn’t put any disinfectant on the wound, but just covered it up with a plaster.

Ken was shaken up by the episode, but by the time we had sat down at our usual café and had some lunch and coffee he was feeling better, we did our shopping, and caught the bus home.

It has taken more than 3 weeks to stop being painful and it is now almost back to normal. We have not yet written to Darebin about the incident but may still be doing it soon.

The other event concerns a trip into the city about 2 months ago. W e live 2 corners away from the tram stop which is in Plenty Road, near Murray Road. Our trip takes about 45 minutes and we always take something to read for our trips in both directions. We finished our shopping in Bourke Street Mall in the city and crossed to our tram stop outside the old Post Office at the corner of the Mall and Elizabeth Street. The tram was fairly full and no empty seats were visible, so I was making my way to the rear stair well when a man got up and offered me his seat. As I was making my way there to sit down, the tram started off with a heavy jerk and I fell to the ground in the stair-well and hurt my upper arm. I was helped up and sat down in the seat offered and remained there all the way home. Ken had managed to get a seat as we boarded the tram so he was safe from falling.

At every stop-start on the way home, the tram driver jerked the tram so that we thought maybe the vehicle had problems. However, when I wrote to Yarra trams about the incident, it seems the driver was in the clear, I should hold on better, and it seemed it was probably my fault! My upper arm took at least a month for the pain to subside, which is just as well that it ultimately did because little did I know what lay ahead in the health episode which as followed!

Towards the end of 2014 my eyesight had deteriorated sufficiently for me to know that it was time to get my cataracts attended to after years developing but not rapidly. We have both been patients at the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital, and Ken had both his cataracts attended to within 3 months of each other about 5 or 6 years ago, and I had been told about 4 years ago that I still had to wait awhile.

We went to emergency at the eye and ear and they said to me that waiting time for cataracts was now about 2 years and I should get myself a private ophthalmologist (and thereby hangs another tale for another time!). So we went to our GP and he arranged a referral to an eye doctor who practises not far from where we live, which is of course very convenient for us. She said the first eye was more than ready to be operated on and the cataract was removed in the middle of December 2014. We arranged for the second one to be done in March 2015 and the date was set. Operations are still done by the private doctor at the eye and ear, but of course not on the public health system and I have to pay for them privately.

A week or two before my operation was due, all sorts of other episodes occurred with my health and I started to get very worried – headaches across both sides of my head and across the top, and I felt peculiar and without energy all the time.

The eye doctor said to me when I spoke to her on the Friday, a few days after having had some treatment from my GP that if I was having problems with my reading I was to go in to emergency at the Eye and Ear during the weekend and not waste any time. By the Sunday afternoon we managed to go to emergency, getting there at 2pm and leaving at 7pm, having been attended to almost immediately because the problem was deemed to be very urgent – the proof of which was confirmed a few days later!

I have been treated by our rheumatologist for a few years for a disease of elderly or old people called Polymyalgia Rheumatica and treatment is cortisone-based and I was already down to a maintenance dose which keeps pains away, but does no harm to the system.

What transpired at the Eye and Ear was that there is a possible side effect from Polymyalgia Rheumatica which one in 10 patients may develop, and I was one of them – Temporal Arteritis or Giant Cell Arteritis.

Second cataract operation postponed (sine diem as they used to say in Latin) and full-on treatment for this disease from which one can go blind, have a stroke, have an aneurism and other nasties! My eye doctor and the one that we saw after my biopsy at the E&E said they had caught it in time!

Now we get down to the crux of the story and Karen Hitchcock’s items in her essay relating to this – we are living in an advance technological age where means of communication are as they have never been before. I am in the hands of a GP, an Opthalmologist, a Rheumatologist, the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital, St Vincent’s Hospital and various Pathology laboratories around the city.

YET THERE SEEMS TO BE NO METHOD OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THEM TO KEEP PATIENT RECORDS UP-TO-DATE!! WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL THE DATA-BASES ON ALL THE COMPUTERS AT ALL THESE INSTITUTIONS?

Nobody, but nobody told me about what would happen when my maintenance dose of 2mg per day of Predisolone was suddenly increased to 60mg per day to ward off this new disease with its frightening consequences. The dosage is gradually being reduced to manageable limits a few weeks at a time, but I am suffering the consequences of corticosteroid overdose! And nobody has explained to me what side-effects Prednisolone has on the body!

Ken and I manage to keep going as best we can – at home, trying not to be a burden on limited resources in all these organisations and going into them only when we really feel we need some assistance, and doing things around the house as normal, but it is interesting to not that councils such as Darebin do not bother to find out how their old citizens are doing or whether they would like a little help now and then. Darebin is but one council in Victoria – what is happening in all the others?

In conclusion I would like to say that in a Quarterly Essay such as this one which Karen Hitchcock has written so graphically, she was able to cover a fair amount of ground within her space limitations for the article.

This is what I would like to know – “we are two white Anglo English-speaking, middle class, educated, articulate home owners, living in a culture we both grew up with. What about all the other minority groups such as GLTH, Aboriginal, Cultural and Linguistically Diverse (CALD), African, Asian and others being demonised in our communities such as Muslims? Who is going to help and support them as they are thrown into environments for their aged care which are so often hostile as some any gay and lesbian couples in aged care have discovered over time?

As for financing of institutions for the forthcoming generations of geriatrics, Australia is a wealthy country and the resources are there, but governments wilfully use them for issues of no relevance to our communities, such as military adventures.

We will not be around to know what happens then, but it won’t be pretty for our older people unless they do some strenuous politicking over time.

A thesis and/or a book needs to be written – and urgently!

17 MAY 2015

Another interesting article about ageing in the Sunday Age:

Research shows 89% of preventable deaths in nursing homes are due to falls.

More than 100 elderly residents are dying prematurely each year in Victoria due to preventable causes, research has found.

And that figure, based on cases reported to the state coroner, is believe to be just the tip of the iceberg.

The first comprehensive study of deaths in nursing homes in Victoria, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, found 1296 nursing home residents died of "external causes" – or injuries – in Victoria between 2000 and 2012.

The vast majority – 89 per cent – perished after a fall.

After a fall, the second highest cause of death was choking, which claimed 89 residents, or almost 8 per cent of premature deaths.

Most residents who died from choking were men, many of them younger than 65. Many of these men had acquired brain injuries, which lead to a higher risk of choking.

Suicide claimed 17 residents. Another eight residents died after being given the wrong medications, and seven died after being assaulted by a fellow resident.

The study was led by Monash University consultant physician Professor Joseph Ibrahim, who also works with the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine.

"We tend not to reflect on these deaths in the same way we do a child who dies in a playground, but we really want to get people to think about the fact that your life is worth something no matter how old you are," Professor Ibrahim said.

"And if you die a week before you had to, that week could be a really precious week lost. Time's more precious the older you get, because you've got less of it."

Across Australia, more than 186,000 older Australians live in nursing homes, a figure that is set to rise as the baby-boomer generation ages. Until now, there has been little research into how they die and how many of those deaths could have been prevented.

Carol Williams, an advocate for people with family members in aged care, said the figures were alarming, but likely reflected only the tip of the iceberg. She said many families had reported to her that some nursing homes failed to take timely action on fractures and on infections.

Unlike childcare, there are no minimum staffing levels demanded of nursing homes.

"Any forensic analysis of contributing causes would consider the exclusive role of managers in determining the number and the skill levels of staff on each shift," Mrs Williams said.

"Staffing in nursing homes is a regulation-free zone. Management prerogative reigns."

.........and not present in the article is reference to homophobia and its impact on elderly gay, lesbian, transgender and HIV members of one of our minority groups subject to elderly abuse as detailed elsewhere in these web pages! (josken)

12 JANUARY 2017

Letter to Darebin City Council about age care in the Council area:

You have a web page which says "have your say" but there is no indication of how to have your say.

As I do not understand how to have my say on your web site I will have my say on your email:

I suggest that council establish a data base of residents in Darebin who are 80 years old and older, so that the council can monitor the well-being of its older citizens.

13 JANUARY 2017

Reply from Darebin Council:

Hi Mannie,

Thanks for your email. Our Have Your Say page is for when we invite the community to provide feedback on consultations that we open to the community from time to time, e.g. Thornbury Junction plans, ideas for the Council Plan and Budget consultations, etc. Enquiries such as yours are best sent from our Contact Us page or by email to mailbox@darebin.vic.gov.au, while questions directed to the Council can be submitted at Public Question Time. In order to help others who may be confused by this, I have added an extra piece of content on the page linking people to the Contact Us form.

I’ve forwarded your suggestion about a database of 80+ year old residents to the manager of our Aged Services team.

Thanks for taking the time to write to us.

Follow-up response to the above letter:

Hello Mannie,

I've received a response to your question about the list;

Thank you for your suggestion.

Council has a range of services providing support to older residents. Council already has a register of the more vulnerable clients from our wider client group, for whom we have specific procedures in the event of severe weather, service disruption, or other defined risks.

There are also a number of other health, welfare, and social support services operating in the municipality also assisting older residents to live safely and well in the community.

Red Cross also operates a vulnerable Persons register.

All of these services and systems work on the basis of referral and consent, so that resources can be most effectively directed to where they are most needed and wanted.

A lot of vulnerable people are younger than 80, and the majority of people over 80 living in the community do not consider themselves vulnerable.

Council is also required to abide by Privacy legislation, so creating a data base other than by the processes I have outlined above, that identifies and monitors people, would be problematic ethically and legally.

Thanks for you enquiry.

Kind regards

Inter~Section Part 10 - 2009 EQUAL RIGHTS CAMPAIGNS - PART 4

GAY AND LESBIAN HATE CRIMES - BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RECOMMENDED READING LIST

LESBIAN & GAY SOLIDARITY PAGE

Mannie De Saxe also has a personal web site, which may be found by clicking on the link: RED JOS: HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISM

Mannie's blogs may be accessed by clicking on to the following links:

MannieBlog (from 1 August 2003 to 31 December 2005)

Activist Kicks Backs - Blognow archive re-housed - 2005-2009

RED JOS BLOGSPOT (from January 2009 onwards)

This page updated 16 MAY 2014 and again on 18 FEBRUARY 2019

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