Younger Gay Men Caring For Older Gay Men—As a Living

I talked with my longtime friend Alex Snell, 51, about leaving corporate America to care for gay male seniors in the Palm Springs area.

My friend Alex (left) with Lou B., one of his care clients when Alex was still in NYC.

Hi there Caftaners, I hope this finds you well as Thanksgiving weekend winds down. I'm taking some of this stretch of free time to write up this interview I did a few days ago with my longtime friend Alex Snell, a Gen Xer like me, about his transition from corporate America to social work school to becoming a professional care manager for senior gay men, which I think is a really cool thing that I wouldn't mind exploring myself.

It makes sense, doesn't it? Senior gay folks often don't have children and/or a partner (particularly a significantly younger partner) of their own to care for them, and often don't like to be cared for by a straight person after a lifetime of moving in gay circles. And they often don't want to go into a longterm care facility that might not be very gay-savvy or gay-friendly. At the same time, younger/middle-age gay men are often looking for some kind of career, or career change, that feels more meaningful and connected than sitting in front of a laptop all day (See: me! lol).

To put some need-to-know info at the top of this interview: If you're a senior gay and this option interests you, you could start your research by reaching out to a number of places including the venerable LGBTQ seniors org SAGE (which can help you find LGBTQ-competent services near you), Centerlink (which will connect you to the LGBTQ community center(s) nearest you, which can then hopefully help you find local care options) and/or your state or locality's office of the aging. But you might also want to use your own networks (via word of mouth and/or email or social media) to put out the word that you are looking for a trusted caregiver, or perhaps that you will be looking at some future point.

If you're a gay who's interested in getting into this line of work, it helps to have a degree in nursing and/or social work, according to Alex. (There are at least a few agencies out there, like Renewal Memory Partners in NYC and Chicago—which partners with SAGE and which Alex mentions—that specialize in matching LGBTQ caregivers to LGBTQ clients.) But such a degree isn't technically necessary, especially since very likely your caregiving role would involve managing your client's care team (nurse, social worker) and liaising between the team and your client's custodians (who could be a family member, such as a niece, or a close friend) as much as it would involve spending time with your client.

That's why, according to Alex, a great way of finding out if this kind of work is right for you would be to start as a volunteer or informal part-time companion to a senior gay. (Perhaps that might make you realize you wanted to get a nursing or social work degree.) Again, you could contact SAGE about this. I also googled "How do I become a companion to a senior LGBTQ person?" and found opportunities in Boston, NYC, San Francisco, the UK, and Asbury Park NJ.

I also found this really good overall guide to this topic.

Also, here is an essay Alex wrote on his experience with LGBTQ eldercare so far.

So without further ado, here is Alex. But if you have experiences with either end of this issue, please drop me a line at timmurphynycwriter@gmail.com and tell me about it. It's definitely something I'd like to keep writing about and providing resources on as I continue to build out The Caftan Chronicles as not just a place for great interviews with older gay men of note but as a total service and lifestyle resource. (And I'll say again: thanks to ALL of you who've subscribed at $5/month and/or told others about Caftan, to help me build this labor of love.)

This coming week I'm interviewing A VERY HOT DADDY. Haha! If you liked the two interviews I've done with porn legend Tom Chase, I think you'll like this one—which Tom, in fact, sweetly helped me set up. I'll try to have it up by the second week in December—a big, thick holiday candy cane we can all enjoy!

And now here's my amazing friend Alex. (Oh, and by the way, here is his LinkedIn.)

Alex, you are the best for making time to talk to me today. Can you start by telling me about how you transitioned into this work of caring for older gay men?

Sure. I'm 51. A decade ago, I was working in Web design for a corporate advertising company and I really hated it. Meanwhile, I'd befriended various older gay people over the years, including one couple in their mid-eighties that I was particularly close to. I saw that as their health declined, their needs increased and their closest relatives were nieces and nephews who lived out of state, so there was a nobody to take care of them on a day to day basis. They were super-sweet. One of them had been an illustrator for Women's Wear Daily from the fifties to the seventies and the other was a designer, and they had a giant classic-six (six-room apartment) on the Upper West Side that they'd bought for $35,000 in the 1970s.

So their needs were increasing and it was becoming more than their friends could handle. So I had read this article somewhere talking about professional care managers, something I'd never heard about before. So I emailed one of their nieces and said "I've been informally looking after them, but do you want to try to find a real care manager?" So they reached out to The Jewish Board, which has a care management program, and got one. And within a month, I was just amazed because she had dealt with all these problems they'd been having. She got home care in place and got one of them off all the bad, unnecessary meds he was taking so he could think again. Their quality of life improved hugely. I thought, "Oh my God, this is amazing." So I felt that a good way to support my elders, which I feel passionately about, was to go into this field.

And that's why you went to social work school?

Typically, care managers are nurses or social workers, and it would be hard to do the job well without being one or the other, but you don't have to have either of those degrees—even though if you are working through a care management agency, they'd want to see those credentials.

So you went to Hunter for social work school here in NYC, which is thought of as a very good deal compared to, say, Columbia’s program.

It's an amazing bargain, but I still came out with $70,000 in debt, most of which had been for living expenses while I was in school. It's like a two-year intensive therapy program because you're learning all about these different modes of therapy and of relating to people. And it had a very strong social justice aspect, which I really liked.

What was going back to school around age 40 like? I watched a friend going through social work school when we were about that age and I was like, "I couldn't do it—I don't have the stamina anymore." Especially when you are balancing studies with your practicum work in the field.

Going back to school and processing information and writing papers again was challenging, but I got through it. I enjoyed my internships. One was at a high school and the second was a day program for older adults with severe mental illness.

So anyway, in terms of that older couple, one died not long after this period. The other lived another six to eight years, during which I stayed in his life. But meanwhile, because grad school likes you to come in with some experience, I reached out to Renewal Care, which was based in NY at the time but later moved to Chicago.

That agency connected me to an older gentleman, a New Yorker who spent most of the summer at his place on Fire Island, so I worked for that gentleman from 2015 to 2019, starting when he was 87. I was hired as his care companion, an entree into caregiving. You don't provide hands-on care or help with ADLs (activities of daily living, such as dressing, bathing or eating). He'd been going out to Fire Island, where he’d owned a house for a long time, on his own and had some safety issues. He'd worked in theater and we hit it off. We went to the same college, so we bonded over that. He had lots of stories to tell and I'm a good listener. And I think I'm pretty good at not making people with memory issues feel reminded of it. He would take me to the theater and to meals when we were out on the island, but I still had time to do my own thing even though I helped prepare meals and spent the night with him. So that became my fulltime job for those years, and it paid $30-$35 an hour for basically a 40-hour week.

Were there hard aspects of the job for you?

As his health declined, my caregiving increased. I'd stand by him while he was taking a shower, help him get dressed, take him to the bathroom. My last summer with him I only left the house to go to the store. One of the hardest things about being a caregiver is that it can be very isolating. If you do it professionally, then presumably you have a life outside your work hours, but a lot of people work more than 40 hours a week. In the city, though, he had 24-hour care, for which I played a care-manager role. One of his nieces had his power of attorney and she managed his affairs, including me.

What did you like the most about the job?

I'm very good one-on-one with people, so I enjoyed spending time with him and making him meals, which was new for me. Also, I'm a very routine-oriented person, and his days were very routine.