What’s it really like to live in an LGBTQ+ senior community? That’s the question LGBTQ Nation put to two older adult residents, one in Palm Springs and the other in San Francisco, who’ve both moved into affirmative housing in the last year.  

Both were outspoken.

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“Not everybody likes me, and I don’t like everybody, because we have different interests and different personalities,” said Jan Zivic, 83, about her fellow residents at Living Out, a self-described luxury retirement community in the Southern California desert.

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“Everyone knows no place is perfect. We try as best we can to make it good. So, yeah, I’m willing to talk to you about it, and this is what you must know about me: I am really honest. I’m not BS-ing, I’m not marketing. I will tell you — really tell you — what I think.”

“But to get to the point,” Zivic finally said, “I love it.”

Sylvester Campbell, 69, was equally blunt as he spoke on the way to a Safeway store around the corner from his apartment at Openhouse, a community-built, below-market-rate housing complex at the edge of the Castro District in San Francisco.

“It’s hot. Yeah, I’m going to buy some beer.”

Of his year at Openhouse, Campbell said, “I’m really blessed. That’s all I gotta say.”

“We all know each other, so to speak,” Campbell added of his neighbors in the low-rise complex.

“We’re connected because of our sexual orientation, right? And just because we’re gay don’t mean we going out knocking on every door for a blow job,” he added, laughing. “You know, it doesn’t work that way.”

Asked about his favorite thing at Openhouse, he said, “The privacy. Like I said, if you come and visit, you see there’s silence. Like, I feel good about myself because I’m in a situation that everybody else we have might be gay and lesbian or bi or whatever, in a building where we feel safe, and that’s a good thing.”

In a surprising coincidence, both Zivic and Campbell’s road to LGBTQ+ retirement communities wound through San Francisco.

“I was a high school English and film teacher in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then I moved to San Francisco,” Zivic says. A sales interview led to her next line of work.

“I had an interview at Crown Zellerbach, the paper company. And the guy, and this is 1972, and the interviewer is smoking a cigar while he’s interviewing. Times have changed, thank God.”

“He put out his cigar, and he said, ‘Okay, I think you can do the job. I don’t think you want to.’ Oh. And I said, ‘I don’t. I want your job.’ So he hired me, and I spent the rest of my life in recruiting, and went from corporate recruiting to executive search to having my own firm.”

Campbell’s career trajectory was less straightforward.

After a short stint in college, he enlisted in the Army.

“I just wanted to join something that’s going to give me a check every month,” he said.

“Now, this is what’s funny,” Campbell says. “I’m quite sure the sergeant who signed my contract, he probably knew I was gay. There was a lot of people in the military just like me, who knew who they were. But we were never in the closet.”

“I was always myself. I didn’t have to prove anything to no one.”

After his discharge, Campbell supported himself with jobs as an occupational therapy tech and addiction group facilitator by way of Chicago, Baton Rouge, and then New Orleans. Along the way, he fell for a few good men.

His first love of ten years died of complications from AIDS.

“He was from the first generation that they used — I’m trying to think of the drug, the first drug that came out — yeah, AZT. But he couldn’t take it, yeah. So he passed away.”

Another three-year relationship ended when his partner “moved down to Georgia or someplace, because our relationship was so intense that we actually had fights sometimes. Too hot, yeah. So, somebody separated us, so to speak.”

It was about five years ago in the Crescent City that Campbell told himself, “You know, I’m gay, so I need to be in a gay atmosphere, where I could really be myself.” He made his way to San Francisco.

Campbell found himself not in the gay mecca he’d dreamed of, but a rough neighborhood in the city’s Bayview/Hunter’s Point neighborhood, where he’d been placed in subsidized housing.

“I couldn’t be myself,” he says. “I told one of my counselors, I’m literally, literally dying. They would say horrible things, like ‘bi**h’ and stuff like that. I am so terrified, that’s not really a nice place to be. And I’m really — I like to tell people this, though — but I’m really, really sensitive and empathetic, and sometimes people misuse that.”

“I really wanted to get the hell out of there,” Campbell says.

Zivic was five miles and another world away in the city’s toniest neighborhood.

As her career flourished, Zivic rode San Francisco’s housing boom, from fixing up and selling her first small house on Elsie Street in the Mission district to her last residence in the city, a three-story, Le Corbusier-inspired home in Pacific Heights, bought a few years ago from the current mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie. She was embarrassed to share the selling price.

Along the way, Zivic was outed by another San Francisco mayor.

“I was closeted for a number of years, and then the mayor at the time, Frank Jordan, appointed me to be a Library Commissioner. I said to Frank, ‘Okay, I’m interested, but I don’t want to be your, you know, ‘first lesbian appointee.’ And on the front page of the Chronicle the next morning, above the fold with my picture, ‘Jordan names first lesbian Commissioner.’ So I was out.”

While “an active member” of the San Francisco LGBTQ+ community, Zivic had “several partners” and was married and divorced. Her daughter, now 38, was one of the first surrogate pregnancies ever in the U.S.

She’s the one who encouraged Zivic to think clearly about her plans for the future.

“I really fought it for a while, and then it became clear when, at one point, I tripped and broke my arm. And my daughter said, ‘You know, really, for your own safety, you shouldn’t be in a three-story house where you’re running up and down stairs.'”

While maintaining she “wasn’t quite there yet,” Zivic was on one of her annual trips to Palm Springs for the Indian Wells tennis tournament and met some friends for dinner at Alice B’s, a restaurant from LA celebrity chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken.

“I went to the ladies’ room, and I got back to the table and I said, ‘I’ve never been in a restaurant with so much art. The walls are lined with art.’ They said, ‘Oh no, that’s for the residents.’ ‘What do you mean, for the residents?’ I didn’t know that’s what it was. All I knew was it was a gay restaurant.”

A gay restaurant at Living Out.

Last November, Zivic booked an apartment in the resort-style community for a month to test the waters.

“After my first week and a half, there was a residence meeting, and they let me go, although I wasn’t a resident yet. And I spoke up at the meeting, and I said, ‘I’ve been here a little more than a week, and I’m ready to sign up.’ It’s just a very healthy, caring, fun, interesting, stimulating place.”

Those qualities Zivic admires so much about Living Out, opened in 2023 by gay developer Loren Ostrow and his straight business partner Paul Alanis, come with a price: rents range from about $5000 to close to $8000 a month.  

There are lots of amenities.

“They designed a lounge where we have breakfast, and the breakfast is free, and it’s like a buffet at the Ritz. It’s fresh fruit, multiple bowls, it’s smoked salmon and French pastries,” Zivic says.

There’s a pool, three jacuzzies, barbeque pits, croquet and bocce ball courts; a health concierge; a dog park; electric charging stations in the carports; housekeeping services; a movie theater; an art studio with regular instruction; and a “very well equipped” gym, according to Zivic’s daughter, who’s a regular visitor from her home in Santa Monica.

And there’s that celebrity-filled gay restaurant, where Lily Tomlin is a regular. Residents get a discount when the doors open at 4:30.

Best of all, Zivic says, are her Living Out neighbors.

“People say, ‘We never thought you’d leave the city,’ and, ‘Why are you so happy?’ And my answer is always the same. It’s the people. There are amazing people here.”

Zivic ticks off a long list of her favorites, including about a half a dozen doctors, a retired psychiatrist, a retired emergency room doctor, successful entrepreneurs, and lots of people from the Hollywood community.

“We have two or three editors who worked on very famous films, and we have writers,” she says, among them one of the original founders of Lambda Literary.

“They’re just caring, compassionate, bright, accomplished, well-traveled people that have interesting stories, and it’s a very congenial place,” Zivic says. “But let’s be real. I would say there are about 10% of people here who just are, you know, have quirks. Be careful quoting me. They’re just not engaging. They’re not seeking active lives. They’re seeking some peace and quiet and reading all the books they’ve been saving and that kind of thing.”

Overall, though, her new home “exceeded my expectations,” Zivic says.

For Campbell, getting into Openhouse wasn’t as easy as putting down a hefty deposit. He had to navigate a byzantine bureaucracy to the door to his new apartment, just down Market Street from the city’s gay epicenter.

If there’s a squeeze on affirmative housing for wealthier LGBTQ+ older adults, it’s a vice for those on a fixed income like Campbell, whose only means of support is Social Security.

“I wanted to get out of my situation that I was into, so I came down here and went to the Social Security desk or representative or whatever, and I wanted to really get into the building. And then he said that, you know, it takes a long, long time to get in here, like six or seven years. I told myself I’d be dead like that.

“But I sat down, they gave me this big pile of paper, and they said, ‘Well, you gotta fill this out, and that out, and then the lottery.’ So I was disappointed when they called me the first time and said they didn’t get my number.”

“Anyway, you want to know how it got from there to here? Well, basically, I had a counselor. I had a lot of people working on my behalf, you know,” he said. Slowly, after what felt like a fool’s errand to Campbell, the door to his new apartment opened.

“And if I should die tonight or tomorrow, that’s the place I want to die, you know? That’s how it is so peaceful. It’s not even funny, you know?”

Asked about his dining options, Campbell says, “Actually, I cook for myself. I don’t really cook through the week. I used to cook on weekends because I had the time and the energy to put things together. I get Meals on Wheels, and I would eat that way, and then I go to Friday, I cook my own food.”

As for socializing, Campbell says he enjoys living among like-minded residents, but his social life now is “kind of — not kind of — it’s like non-existent, you know? Put it that way. I’m attracted to a lot of people, but I don’t tell them that, because if I do, you know, they might mistake it as something, and then they’ll probably take advantage of you.”

“I haven’t yet really met a lot of people that I really care about to go out and have dinner or something like that. I will [for] New Year’s. I’m just going to go out, take my time, you know? I’ll go to a restaurant indy. I don’t need nobody to go with me, right?”  

Campbell’s one-bedroom unit is among 121 below-market-rate apartments in two buildings on the Openhouse campus. Twenty-three units are designated for formerly homeless older adults (including Campbell) and receive a Continuum of Care subsidy. For those apartments, the cost is a third of residents’ income, no matter how low.

Residents have access to over 10,000 square feet of programming space at the Bob Ross LGBT Center. The senior center provides a lot of the same activities found at Living Out, like yoga and art classes, socials and movie nights, and a book club.

On the day we spoke, Zivic had just finished her morning book club meeting with about 20 fellow residents at Living Out, where the group discussed the latest novel by gay Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist Ocean Vuong.

“Do you know him as a writer?” Zivic asked.

“Well, he’s Vietnamese, so you have the immigrant experience and friendship and love and family and desperation in a place where people choose their family, that kind of thing,” she explained. “He even goes into a pig slaughterhouse, and some people said they couldn’t even read it, because his description is quite distinctive and clear, and there’s a horrible scene of violence. It’s a metaphor for the immigrant experience, coming in and being taken advantage of and not helped, and being homeless and being beaten.”

“It’s a nice, light topic, right?” Zivic adds with a laugh. “It was the best book club we’ve ever had because there was some disagreement. So, it was a fun exercise.”

On the same day, Campbell, on the terrace at Openhouse, was asked what he’s reading lately. He exclaimed, “I just had to read this book.”

“This book was on The New Jim Crow law. The author was Michelle Alexander. She’s a lawyer out in the Boston area, and she’s trying to make a parallel between the mass incarceration of Afro-Americans and people with brown skin. Yeah, it was a very technical book with a lot of statistics in it, and I imagine that book could have been on campus for legal courses, stuff like that. That was a great, great book. It was so great that I had to read chapter by chapter, you know, because you had to process all that information. Sure, she’s an excellent writer.”

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