“When you're old,” architect Christian Hamm said, “you certainly don’t want to give up your identity and live in some hostile environment, possibly sharing a room with someone who despises you.”

Christian clearly doesn’t mix in gay circles.

At the moment, a group in Tasmania is looking into the establishment of a tax-free, not-for-profit charity with a board, intending to use existing government funding to support the 30 per cent of 80+ people who will one day live in isolation.

In fact, Dr Stephen Edwards, one of the plan’s backers, believes the GLBTI elderly will suffer more isolation and need more care due to factors such as the lack of an extended family due to ostracism, and children to care for them.

‘GLBTI elderly’. To some it sounds like a contradiction in terms. But they’re all around us. Fifty years’ perfecting their camouflage means you won’t know they’re there unless they want you to see them. They’re moving into facilities filled with widows and widowers, being made to examine photographs of great-grandchildren; if male, they’re joining in with the other old blokes when they talk about nurses’ bums, when actually they’re waiting for Tuesday when the handsome pharmaceutical rep visits. (Vice-versa for the lesbians.)

Everybody wants to cling to the last to their independence, and, if Christian Hamm is right, for gay men and women that independence is tied up with the freedom to be ourselves, which at the most basic level means freedom from waves of disapproval every time a giggle pitches a little too high, or a back slap comes down a tad butch; every time some old queen starts playing ‘Spinning Around’ on the rec room organ.

Read 'Curtains for aged care' here

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