Mainstream conversations discussing the LGBTQ2S+ community’s physical and social relationship to their city often consider homeless youth, or the history that defines our roots. Yet, not very often do people consider the folks who lived through that history and where they may be today. Before engaging in this project, I had never considered the fact that Canada’s current aging population is the first generation of individuals who are reaching their senior years as openly LGBTQ2S+. As a result, there is an increasing demand to develop models and policies to meet the needs of older LGBTQ2S+ adults. Within the scope of Toronto, the project Aging Together: LGBTQ2S+ Housing (Principal Investigator, Victor Perez-Amado, Assistant Professor TorontoMU – SURP) is working to define how the structure of LGBTQ2S+ communities impact the needs and demands of aging, and ways in which the research can be effectively utilized, through policy and design, to serve the varying needs of these folks.

The Aging Together research team originally intended to conduct two virtual focus groups that consisted of LGBTQ2S+ senior volunteers to be recruited by The 519. The conversation would be focused on housing, identity, kinship, and aging of senior LGBTQ2S+ folks in Toronto. We intended to gather firsthand knowledge — opinions and experiences — on not only the existing state of the city, but the evolution of the city over time; as the years passed, what has changed? What has become inaccessible as they’ve aged, because of their age? How have their experiences influenced their current needs as senior members of the LGBTQ2S+ community?

Quite quickly, this plan began to shift. As we conducted research, I noticed that little to no information existed which explicitly explored the housing, service or societal gaps and needs for transgender or queer seniors. Made very clear were the opinions and experiences of the gay and lesbian communities, yet literature exploring the experiences of transgender, queer, and two-spirited individuals was limited (limited is an understatement). 

A substantial portion of the research that was identified as representative of LGBT or LGBTQ+ individuals seldom mentioned or failed to explicitly mention how it was representative of trans* or queer communities (beyond those that complied to homonormativity). Not only did research representing these communities fail to exist, but it seemed like the research that does exist attempts to group and define the experiences of the LGBTQ2S+ community as one, universal narrative. Not surprising, but disappointing. 

With the intention of beginning to fill some of the gaps we had encountered, we shifted the focus groups to include one group of senior individuals who identified as transgender or queer. Feeling good about our potential to leverage the focus groups and gain insight where existing research was lacking, we informed The 519 and waited to hear word that the participants were recruited. 

When our team finally heard back from The 519, we were told that they were only able to recruit seven participants.

Seven?

That’s less than half the number of participants we’d hoped for, and was barely enough to form one focus group. 

Two days before we planned to meet with the group, we were contacted by The 519. Somehow, we now had only one participant willing to engage with us. At this point, I was not only confused as to how we were losing participants, but disheartened.

All I could think was, what can we really do with a single conversation?

Regardless, the team decided to meet with the one individual to see what could come from it. 

In an incredible stroke of luck, the participant was a transgender man. He was more helpful to our research than he, or I, could have ever imagined. He spoke of his life, his experiences and the hardships he endured. He expressed the lack of community as a senior trans* man, how he wanted to be able to form community through housing and place as he aged. The lack of housing and supports from the government for senior LGBTQ2S+ folks, he explained, meant that housing was limited to public choice, and Christian homes were the only ones vacant. He told us the only housing that the government has ever provided for the LGBTQ2S+ community was during the AIDS epidemic, with the intention of forming spaces to isolate people like him. And he said, with the way we’re living now in the pandemic, it feels the same as it did then — isolated, no community, no support from the government, nowhere to feel safe. I was struck by the ways that he moved in and out of the past and present, drawing parallels between his experiences then and now. We learned, through one interview, that historical experiences in queer community shaped this senior’s needs and desires for his future.  

This was what we expected, and why we wanted to include oral history as a method.

I can’t help but think of how hearing more of these stories from queer and trans* elders, about their past lives and the future ones that they desire, might help us develop better policy and design. Despite our shortcomings, we did not leave empty handed. Though one person’s experiences will never reflect the entirety of the trans* and queer community, his interview does begin to fill the gaping hole in research that threatened our ability to accurately represent the needs of the senior trans* and queer communities. The information that we gained from one conversation with one trans* elder provided us with history we would have never found otherwise, experiences and concerns we would have never known, and information we didn’t know we needed. Unanticipated, yet invaluable, we learned of the influences and needs of an individual — a trans*, Muslim individual — living through our research firsthand. 

Sam Casola (they/them) is currently a Master of Urban Development student at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto. Working on the Aging Together: LGBTQ2S+ project, Sam has aligned their Major Research Paper to focus on the residential aspects of the LGBTQ2S+ community, primarily the Trans and Gender-Nonconforming community in relation to cisnormativity, beyond Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village. Holding a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from Laurentian University, Sam’s work prioritizes justice-based complete communities through community-led engagement and inclusive, human centered design.