We held our annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender achievement awards ceremony today and presented awards to Dr. Michael Wong from BIDMC's Division of Infectious Disease and Sue O'Connell and Jeff Coakley from Bay Windows. Dr. Wong has been involved in the laboratory, the clinic, and the community in the HIV-AIDS arena. New England's largest LGBT newspaper, Bay Windows has brought award-winning articles and editorials for more than two decades to the region.
The theme of today's session was, "Our future: The aging LGBT community." The featured speaker was Lisa Krinsky, Director of the LGBT Aging Project. You can see excerpts of her talk below. In her talk, she refers to a Stud Maddox documentary entitled Gen Silent. Here's the clip we showed to the audience.
I, for one, was surprised and saddened to learn of gay people going back "into the closet" because of their fear of how they will be treated in long-term health care settings. The movie is moving and well worth watching. As Lisa notes in this excerpt, it will be available for viewing here in the Boston area in the near future.
If you cannot see the video of Lisa's talk, click here.
Thank you for putting this post on your blog. As someone with a gay nephew, it hit home for me, as I had not before considered what it might mean to him to grow old as an LGBT person. The strength of our country is its tolerance - we need to remember that now more than ever before.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which, see the link below indicating that many hospitals do not include sexual orientation/gender ID in their nondiscrimination policies (the latter part of the article generalizes beyond Washington):
ReplyDeletehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/07/AR2010060703332.html?sub=AR