Madrid’s aging LGBT population will soon have a safe, accepting home

Story by Jessica Mendoza

Though still energetic at 60, Elianne Garcia Ruiz can already foresee the struggles of growing old as a transsexual woman.

A former night shift attendant at a home for the aged, Garcia Ruiz has witnessed firsthand the kinds of abuses that elderly lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals receive from workers and other residents: Sexist slurs, she said, are only the most common. She recalled a lesbian married couple leaving the residence because they had been forced to live separately. Garcia Ruiz later learned that their relationship had made an employee, who saw them kissing in their room, uncomfortable.

“In normal residences, they label you,” Garcia Ruiz said through an interpreter. She declined to name the institution, located fewer than 30 miles from the capital, where she had worked for five years.

The alternative to living in a group home, however, is a lonely one. Garcia Ruiz has neither a partner nor family and is by herself in an apartment in the small city of Robledo de Chavela in greater Madrid.

Her situation is not unusual. About 42,000 LGBT people above the age of 65 reside in Madrid, based on calculations using a 2011 study by UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. Many of those people have little support.

Federico Armenteros, president of the December 26 Foundation, at the organization’s headquarters in Madrid. Photo by Maria Amasanti.