A Visionary Plan Enabling Senior Gays to Age in Their Own Homes
Respected gay NYCer David Nimmons, 68, is developing a model where younger gays live with and care for older gays in exchange for inheriting their property. You can play a role moving this forward.
Happy holidays, Caftaners! This will likely be my last Caftan post of the year so I want to take a moment to thank all of you who free- or (especially!) paid-subscribed this year. (This post, in fact, has no paywall so everyone can read it through to the end.) Please tell your friends about Caftan if you continue to like it.
This was a year of good, steady growth for this platform and I go into 2025 super-excited to bring you more interviews with our older gay notables (and perhaps even some non-gay notables) as well as what we in the journo biz call “service” pieces about how we can live good versions of the second half—or perhaps the final third?—of our gay lives. (I always wanna say “our best lives,” but that’s so copping from Oprah.)
Before I set up this interview, I want to take a moment to say HAPPY PUBLICATION MONTH! to porn-actor-turned-author Spencer Keasey (he was known as Spencer Quest in the flick biz), whose new memoir A Nice Guy Like Me I actually helped edit and (as you can see on the cover) also wrote a blurb for.
Spencer is a really sweet guy who now lives in Provincetown with his partner. If you’re looking for something juicy and fun but also with some depth to read over the holidays, check this out—it’s a good curl-up-with! (You all know I love my porn daddies…even if they’re retired!)
As for the interview below: When author and therapist Don Shewey (whom I interviewed recently) saw my recent interview with my friend Alex Snell about younger gay men caring for older gay men, Don told me about his friend and fellow New Yorker David Nimmons, who is trying to set up something very cool called Stonewall Bridge: basically a national model where younger gay people (not just men) live with and care for older gay people in exchange for not only a salary but a chance to earn equity in the older folks’ homes. That intro alone made me think almost simultaneously What a cool idea! and How on earth would that work legally, logistically, contractually?
So I got a chance to ask David all those questions and more in a long convo we had on Thursday Dec. 5. I’ll let the interview speak for itself, but I want to highlight that if this at all interests you as an older (or getting older) gay person and you want to be a part of this as it evolves, David said that the best thing you can do is to take this survey, which will not only help David grow the data needed to make this happen but will put you in the loop as this evolves. (You can also use that same link to donate to the project, which for now is “nested” in the NYC nonprofit Stonewall Community Development Corporation.) David also said that if you have serious interest in being part of this on the younger or the older side, you can email him at davenimmons@gmail.com.
I think this is such a cool idea that would serve so many gay needs and I will definitely keep you posted about it via Caftan as David moves it forward, in all its complexity. And with that, my dear Caftaners, I wish you a joyous holiday season and all the best in 2025, whatever it brings. (Oy!) Thank you thank you thank you for supporting this little project of mine. (And please tell people about it!) xo Tim
David, thank you so much for agreeing to talk to Caftan about your innovative idea for intergenerational two-way gay caregiving. Let's get into it!
Sure. I want to start by saying that I've spent most of my adult life doing gay activism in one way or another and looking at the big picture for gay men. (Tim: Although we should note, this model David envisions is not restricted to gay men but applies to all LGBTQ people, and perhaps even some straight people.) I was the board chair of the New York City LGBTQ Community Center and the deputy director of GMHC. I did research in HIV prevention and wrote a book on the ethical basis of the gay male community called The Soul Beneath the Skin: The Unseen Hearts and Habits of Gay Men. (Tim: This is actually a 2002 book that I was not familiar with but that I now want to read because it explores, among other things, why gay men are almost never violent the way straight men are, even when drunk in crowded bars.)
So I've always spent time thinking about what's happening to my people. In the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of that was about HIV, in the early 2000s it was about gay men's ethics and then, starting around the mid-late 2000s, the thing most on my mind was that around this question of the future that my generation of gay men—I'm 68—and older are facing. I thought, "Wow, we've done this amazing job of creating this liberation-oriented arc of our lives. We moved to places and created gay meccas, neighborhoods, institutions practices—not only for ourselves but for generations to follow."
Then it occurred to me that we hadn't written our story's last chapter—we're all on this yellow brick road to Oz, yet we're stranded before the gates of Oz because we haven't figured out what a good gay old age looks like. So I started talking and researching about that, and I realized that there's this crisis of care for older gay folks who didn't have kids. We don't really have default caregivers or inheritors. Many of the aging gay people I talked to said that they were leaving their assets to lifelong friends or partners. So we have this cohort who has some assets and needs care, and then a few generations behind us—say, a lot of queer folks who are now between 35 and 50—are facing a really different set of challenges that are economic.
So the idea behind Stonewall Bridge is that you take an older gay person who has a house or a coop or condo and they want to stay there and you match them very carefully and at great length with a younger person who moves in and thus gets their own housing needs covered, and in return their job is to help the older person stay independent as long as they can living in their own home.
In the beginning, that may just be things like getting the Wifi working, getting groceries, cleaning the backyard. And over time it may evolved into more personal care, which you really only need about a week of training to learn. And so the younger person is living with the senior and getting housing and some kind of salary, and in every year or service, they're being credited with a portion of the senior's assets. And the longer they stay helping the senior, and/or other seniors in a particular neighborhood area or pod, the better they do.
Hm, that's a really interesting model and raises a ton of follow-up questions, but go on.
When it comes to LGBTQ seniors going into traditional senior care environments, like nursing homes, there's tons of research showing that we're really vulnerable to stigma and abuse, especially by religiously affiliated institutions. So for queer folks, it's important to have people taking care of us who understand and respect us—and who better than a younger queer person who is not going to freak out at your Tom of Finland posters the way a religious home health worker might who thinks you're living in sin and is going to try to convert you.
However, the idea is that the younger person who is caring for me, this relationship can be extended to other LGBTQ seniors on my block or in my building or cul-de-sec, or to my friend group in which someone may not have an owned house to put into the deal—they may be renting. Then you start to have a care structure that can reach across class lines.
That potentially sounds like a lot of work for the younger caregiver, caring for a pod of people at once. What is the salary picture?
The caregiver's housing and utilities are covered. Then, say they are caring for five of us total, lifting heavy things and escorting us to doctor's visits, etc. So we put together a budget that approaches what they've been earning previously and is close to the area median income and we come up with a number. So say you, the caregiver, made $70,000 last year and $35,000 of that went to housing. So now you need to make $35,000. So we divide that number by the number of seniors you're caring for and we all pay you that. So it would be like five seniors all paying about $500 a month, which is a fraction of what they'd pay for care anywhere else. And they can stay in their homes. And for every year, one or more of those seniors apportions, say, 5% of their home equity to the caregiver. And that's a much better deal than the caregiver would get working at Home Depot, and they're getting to do community-centered work and being part of an intergenerational web.
Wow, that's all very intriguing. So where are you with executing this idea?
A couple years ago, I took the idea to Stonewall CDC (Community Development Corporation), a NYC nonprofit whose main mission is to use federal housing vouchers to ensure housing and care for LGBTQ people. So right now, my idea of Stonewall Bridge is nested within their programming, but we're still trying to figure out if SCDC is the right container for it, because they're not allowed to receive donations, which is central to the idea. So we're working with lawyers to create a national nonprofit that can do this. Currently, we have no legal structure, partly because SCDC can't do things outside NYC. But my idea being nested for the time being within SCDC has at least allowed me to do a huge amount of the formative research.
Having said that, we've pretty much developed the care model. We have a group of seniors, both LGBTQ and not, in Asheville, North Carolina, who wanted to be the pilot program, so we've installed the sensor technology, a HIPPA-compliant online portal called Grand Care —which can detect things remotely like if a senior is not making their usual movement patterns in their house in the course of a day—in one of their homes. The tech also allows them to press a button for a ride to the grocery. It costs about $1100 to install it in a house.
However, we don't have caregivers—or what we call "sharegivers"—in the Asheville community yet. We can't yet because we're wrangling with lawyers about the economic model. Also, Hurricane Helene set everything back when it hit North Carolina last fall, destroying or damaging a lot of homes.
It actually sounds like NYC would be the ideal place for the pilot, given how densely people live. I think you would be able to set up small pods or networks of aging LGBTQ people fairly easily—even within the same large building in some cases.
We're trying to develop one here, once the lawyers sort out all the legal and financial parts like the home equity transfer. But at least all the care aspects of the program are in place. We want to create a protocol that can be used anywhere, almost like a kit. It could be applied by 10 friends who want to buy property together in the Berkshires or it could be applied to a city block on the Upper West Side.
How would your model compare to the model of certain new dedicated senior housing complexes that are going up in a few cities, like SAGE's Stonewall House in Brooklyn or Center on Halsted's Town Hall apartments in Chicago?
One of the constraints of creating complexes like that is fair housing law, which says you can't discriminate, so when an entity puts up a property with x number of units, only a fraction of those can go to LGBTQ people. And we have roughly 1.5 million LGBTQ folks in the U.S. over age 65 currently, with millions more to come who don't have kids to care for them.
So, would Stonewall Bridge be like the technical adviser for different pods or would it be the through-put for the contracts and the finances?
The idea has three different contractual relationships: one between the senior(s) and the sharegiver (that's the care contract), then between us (Stonewall Bridge) and the senior donating property, but our lawyers are currently trying to figure out if that would be legal if the senior is getting services; maybe they won't get a tax break. And the third is between us and the sharegiver.
So there's a lot of legal and financial stuff that needs to be worked out. Is there anything out there that already exists that's comparable to this idea?
No. Little pieces of it have been tried. A bunch of cities (Tim: like NYC) have programs where a younger person becomes the roommate of an older person, but there's no care element officially involved. And Scandinavia has some models of younger people moving in with and caring for older people, but nowhere has tried this with an eye toward using the senior resources to pay for the care and pass equity to a younger generation.
Who is working on this with you?
We've had a series of national roundtables convened by TD Bank, of all people, with housing and affordable care and senior experts. Out of that we have some people providing ongoing expertise. But I'm the one mainstay at the moment.
Do you have a budget at this point?
SCDC is starting to raise money for a budget for this for a couple years of development. And thankfully we became the pro bono client of a big law firm whose people are working with us now to figure out all the legal and financial stuff.
So theoretically, you would start to execute this idea with one pilot pod like the one you were trying to stand up in Asheville?
Exactly. We have to test it somewhere, and we would provide the basic home-care training for the sharegivers.
How can anyone reading this help out at this point?
A really important thing they can do is take our survey, which has about 350 responses so far. (Tim: I just did it. It's easy and quick, even though some questions about the future are difficult to answer yes or no to at this point.) As for the results so far, I couldn't get better data to support what I'm trying to do. People are worried about what's going to happen to them as they age but they haven't made plans. They want to live among gay people, but not just among gay people. They would like to be able to stay in their homes. They're open to having someone live with them and to having tech in their home if it means they can stay there safetly. And they're open to using the value of their property to ensure their care. And those results remain the same as the sample grows.
Taking the survey will also loop you into our network so that as this evolves, we can see where we have clusters of interested folks and we can follow up with you. We have good clusters particularly in NYC and Seattle.
Could you see a way of Stonewall Bridge facilitating all this without having to take on all the legal and financial obligations?
Oh, yeah. My goal is to create a model that people can take and run with. That's when I'll be able to go to rest happily. But we would like it to run through a nonprofit entity that would be the owner of the properties. We want to sequester it from the private market.
How do you think the care pods would be grouped or organized? Like, say if there are dozens if not hundreds of people who are interested in one NYC neighborhood.
Part of the reason we chose Asheville for a pilot is that they already had a group of seniors who were thinking about aging in place. And they had a really robust culture of helping each other, which is really essential. This model requires neighbors to be looking in on neighbors. Here in NYC, residents on a block in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, have talked to me. That's a fairly working-class neighborhood where a lot of people don't own their homes and don't have kids but need care.
I'm actually stunned that bringing this to fruition has taken as long as it has. I thought we'd have a pilot with one sharegiver in place by now, but only a year ago we found out that SCDC can't operate programs outside of NYC. So my hope is that we have a model with a sharegiver in place by the end of 2025.
Is there any way you could set up the first pod informally without all the legal and financial contract?
The seniors in Asheville have identified a sharegiver, whom they're each willing to pay for a day a week. But as of yet, nobody has committed to giving them lodging.
If the property transfer piece becomes legally too complicated or even impossible, would you continue with the model?
Yeah. But we do want to keep the property part of it alive. We want to create a career path for the sharegivers that is second to none, where the longer you commit to this, the more there's in it for you.
Also, in talking to people, one of the first things we learned was that older LGBTQ folks didn't want sharegivers in their twenties. They wanted people old enough to be able to make a commitment and stick with it—and who are already motivated for a career change because maybe they're thinking, "I'm a little nervous about my future because I have this job that isn't stable."
What's your personal stake in this?
I have a property in Brooklyn and a partner and we have a younger adopted informal straight "nephew" who lives on the top floor of our home who helps with yardwork, heavy lifting, shoveling snow. But my impetus for this really wasn't personal. It was, "What's going to happen to everyone I know? What does the final chapter of the great gay story look like?" We haven't done a great job of answering that. •
Fascinating idea. Being 67 and in a long-term-relationship, I feel secure in this moment, but....you never know. And, older single friends are a source of concern. I'll take the survey. Thanks for this!