LGBTQ+ older adults find support in community, affirming care

By Skye Crawford

Before opening what is widely recognized as the first LGBTQ+ senior co-housing community in the U.S., Pat McAulay spent a lot of time at the beach, dreaming.

McAulay and her wife, Margaret Roesch, who dreamed alongside her, knew the idea of aging in community wasn’t original. Facebook pages with older lesbians host multiple conversations about aging together, McAulay said, but it rarely ever happens. The discussion came up a lot on beach trips with their friends.

“We even had one gal who drew up floor plans, but none of that came to fruition,” McAulay said. “None of those people came along with us.”

When McAulay and Roesch reached retirement, they didn’t want to end up isolated. As they looked at different options for living in community, they considered co-housing — a form of community living that originated in Denmark. There have been other co-housing projects in North Carolina, communities where a neighborhood of individual homes is designed around shared spaces to foster connection.

“There’s a lot of co-housing communities in the Triangle, but none of them were quite right for what we wanted,” Roesch said. “We wanted to make sure that it was going to be not just LGBTQ-friendly, but LGBTQ-focused, if possible. We didn’t want to be the token lesbian couple that live down the hall.”

They started researching the idea of building their own co-housing community in 2013. In 2020, Village Hearth opened in Durham. Nearly 30 pastel homes now sit on 15 acres of wooded land.

McAulay and Roesch’s concerns about being able to age in a supportive environment are shared by many older LGBTQ+ adults.

LGBTQ+ adults older than 50 are less likely to report feeling confident that they’ll receive support from community resources and family and friends, a University of Michigan’s National Poll on Healthy Aging found. In that same poll, 20 percent of those polled said they felt a lack of companionship in the last year, compared with 8 percent of non-LGBTQ adults over 50.

For Daisy Nauroth, 56, not feeling a sense of community in Knoxville, Tennessee, brought her and her wife to Village Hearth in 2022. Being a younger member of the community has left her reveling in the “generational family” feeling of the community.

“I’m sure I’d feel happy in other housing places too,” Nauroth said. “I just feel like this is a very special kind of situation.”

Weight of a lifetime

Unlike Nauroth, Kristin Chervenak was less conscious of feeling isolated in Louisville, Kentucky. It wasn’t until she moved to Village Hearth with her wife in October 2025 that she noticed feeling “lighter.”

“Thinking back on it, there’s always just a little bit of guardedness, this little bit of caution, this little bit of, ‘Is anybody gonna have a problem with this?’” Chervenak said. “And I don’t think I realized how heavy that weight was until I came here and it wasn’t there anymore.”

She said she doesn’t think this would be the case even if they lived in a community that was LGBTQ-friendly but wasn’t LGBTQ-focused.

Karen Cushing, director of business development at SAGECare, the training division of the LGBTQ+ older adult advocacy organization SAGE, said that older LGBTQ+ adults carry decades of trauma. For example, elders still feel the impact of the many deaths in the community during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, Cushing said.

The National Poll on Healthy Aging also reported that 19 percent of LGBTQ+ adults older than 50 cited poor or fair mental health, compared with 11 percent of other seniors.

Christian D. Chan, associate professor in the UNC Greensboro Department of Counseling and Educational Development, is working on a multi-phase needs assessment to understand where mental health support is needed for LGBTQ+ seniors in North Carolina.

As a volunteer for Carolina Aging Alliance, a nonprofit in the Triad and Triangle that advocates for older LGBTQ adults, Chan views building relationships as foundational to any community-based research. He said the Triad regional director of Carolina Aging Alliance, Steve Stonecypher, initiated the conversation that this mental health research project emerged from.

As their work begins, Chan is not only looking at what LGBTQ+ older adults want and need from mental health support, but also what their understanding of that support looks like in general.

“Rather than starting programming, education or interventions, or even a support group, I was coming from a place of, ‘I would love to hear what’s happening in our own community first,’” Chan said.

Chan’s academic research focuses on how multiple forms of discrimination overlap. He said this background has helped him see the forces that have impacted LGBTQ+ seniors over time.

“Sometimes that can culminate in an emotional toll for a lifetime that you hold,” Chan said. “And you might not have even had the opportunity to voice all these different experiences, all these emotions about what happened.”

Chan said older LGBTQ+ adults can find trauma difficult to process because they were born into generations with negative attitudes about mental health and mental health treatment.

“What is life-saving for many of our older LGBTQ adults is community, but it’s also affirmative providers,” Chan said.

As a member of the community herself, Cushing said that beyond her work at SAGECare, she understands the need for living situations that feel safe. 

“Our home is our sanctuary. It’s where we’re the safest, where we can be ourselves 100 percent,” Cushing said. “So when we’re thinking of moving into a community, we’re losing that sanctuary. It becomes very much a habit to know who we can invite into our home.”

Continued growth

In addition to having a safe place to age intentionally at Village Hearth, Chervenak said the community and organizational structure can be a positive challenge.

Operating as a homeowners’ association in which all property owners are each a board member, Village Hearth runs with multiple teams holding different responsibilities — from landscaping to bylaws to the cooking crew for Thursday night group dinners. As with any homeowners association, differences and tensions arise.

“It’s the one thing that we heard the most when we came here,” Chervenak said. “We came back for a week after that first visit and got more deeply involved in the community and what everybody said was, ‘I’ve grown more here than I have anywhere else in my life.’”

Interpersonally, Chevenak said members have a commitment to communicate civilly with one another and have agreed to doing nonviolent communication training.

“That’s what makes co-housing great,” Chervenak said. “If we continue to grow as we age, then we’ll live longer. If we continue to challenge ourselves in new ways, we’ll live longer.”

McAulay said they always emphasize the interdependence of living in co-housing, encouraging people to be comfortable asking for help with something as simple as getting a suitcase from the attic, as she and Roesch often do.

“Being here in community feeds people’s souls,” McAulay said. “It’s such a comfort to know that there is a group of people here who will stand by us no matter what.”

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