Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE) held its Cherry Grove gathering on July 21 at the home of Jack Dowling and honored guests were veteran GLBT activists, writers, and historians Jonathan Ned Katz (“Gay American History,” “Gay/Lesbian Almanac,” “Coming Out,” “The Invention of Heterosexuality,” Gay Activists Alliance, OutHistory.org) and Amber Hollibaugh (“My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home,” Queers for Economic Justice, Elder & LBTI Women’s Services at Howard Brown Health Center), “two champions of change,” as SAGE Executive Director Michael Adams called them. The afternoon event was co-hosted by Jack, Jan Felshin and Edrie Ferdun, Troy Files, Audrey Hartmann, Michael Hertzman and Joel Ulster, and Frank Stark.
The organization, Michael Adams pointed out, had opened its new, government-funded SAGE Center in Manhattan in March, and centers in Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn are forthcoming. He also praised the sense of community in Cherry Grove.
Jonathan recounted the history of Ruth “Peter” Worth, Holocaust survivor, who included the name “Peter” in her naturalization papers and bought her house in the Grove in the 1940s. At her death, she left bequests to Lambda Legal and to SAGE and her home here to Amber.
Amber spoke of her increasing awareness of LGBT aging issues, having joined the SAGE Board as a younger member. Addressing the issues of “queer aging” and “invisibility in the larger LGBT community,” she stressed that it is “important that we be recognized as an older population, not just a youth population.”