Aging Proud
As San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ community enters a new chapter, support network feels the strain
By Valerie Conklin • Bay City News
August 8, 2026
Connie Jeung-Mills sat in a café in the Castro, not far from her apartment, drinking a cup of coffee and reflecting on her future. She is a 71-year-old lesbian who has lived in San Francisco for decades.
Like many older LGBTQ+ people, Jeung-Mills has never been married and has no children. A few years ago, during the pandemic, she realized her support system was largely outside of San Francisco, her closest friends hours away.
“What’s going to happen when I get old?” Jeung-Mills asked. “Where will I be living if I can’t take care of myself? It’s been something that has been on my mind.”
It’s a concern many LGBTQ+ seniors in San Francisco share, as a growing population, rising cost of living and government budget cuts threaten to undermine the city’s existing network of care providers.
The situation is far from hopeless — conditions for LGBTQ+ seniors in San Francisco are a great deal better than in many places in America. The historically gay city has dozens of organizations serving LGBTQ+ people and several, such as Openhouse, that specifically address the needs of older community members.
Openhouse provides affordable housing, case management and tech literacy to thousands of older LGBTQ+ people. They work with the senior services program On Lok Community Day Services to run Club 75, a day program for members of the LGBTQ+ community that provides meals, programming and transportation. Curry Senior Center, which provides care to low income and homeless seniors in the city, has a program to address LGBTQ+ mental health needs. The Shanti Project, which strives to support people with life-threatening illnesses including HIV, runs a support network specifically for LGBTQ+ people. These are just some of the nonprofits and agencies in the city.
“I’ve never tapped into that network,” Jeung-Mills said. “Just knowing it exists makes me feel better.”
But as care for the aging LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco grows more urgent, the effects from federal funding cuts are making it increasingly difficult to provide such services — even here. Organizations can only help so many people with the resources they have.
A growing demographic
The backdrop for all this is California’s aging population. By 2030, nearly 10 million Californians will be 60 or older, and around 5% of these older adults will identify as LGBTQ+. On top of that, recent political trends have inspired large numbers of LGBTQ+ people, especially those who are transgender, to migrate to cities and states deemed progressive and safe.
To understand its changing demographics, California conducted the first statewide health and wellness survey of older LGBTQ+ adults and published its results in late 2024, calling the study “From Challenges to Resilience.”
The generations of LGBTQ+ people who are currently in their 60s and older lived when discrimination in marriage, military service, employment and other aspects of life was not only common, but perfectly legal. Over time, that discrimination led some community members to enter retirement with less money than non-LGBTQ+ people. They may not have traditional family caregivers, and they also have higher levels of isolation, which negatively affects overall health and wellbeing.
According to the most recent data from the advocacy nonprofit SAGE, social isolation is common and dangerous for older adults. LGBTQ+ elders are more likely to face it — they are five times less likely to be married, twice as likely to live alone and twice as likely to have no children.
Angie Perone is a researcher, social worker and licensed attorney who works with community organizations and LGBTQ+ older adults directly. She is the director of University of California Berkeley’s Center for the Advanced Study on Aging Services, which was part of the “From Challenges to Resilience” survey team.
“We have limited data on certain communities within the LGBTQ+ aging communities or population,” said Perone. “We need to know whether services and programs that we’re currently delivering are targeting and serving the variety of populations that California serves, including folks with intersecting positionalities within our LGBTQ+ aging community.”
The survey had fewer participants who were people of color or transgender than white cisgender participants, so there are potential blind spots in the data. Race and gender expression are also intersections of identity that coincide with amplified disparities even within the LGBTQ+ community. Elders of color and transgender elders experience worse hardships.
A UCLA report from May 2025 found that nearly half of the surveyed transgender people, including older adults, had considered a move or had already moved to more trans-affirming cities. The transgender population of San Francisco is growing, so organizations need to adapt and address the disparities in care.
“I think everyone has also been really hard hit with some of the more recent policy, like executive orders and federal funding changes, which have trickled down even to states like California that just have less money to provide even if they wanted to,” Perone said.
Openhouse opens doors to housing, support
Morey Riordan, a 64-year-old transgender man, recently became the executive director of Openhouse, the largest organization serving LGBTQ+ elders in San Francisco. They have four buildings on Laguna Street, two where they house 150 people in 120 affordable housing units, and two where they organize programing. Between their housing and other support, Openhouse helped nearly 4,000 community members in 2025 and expects that number to grow. They are currently constructing an additional building with Mercy Housing that will provide almost 200 new units in a few years.
“We’re serving a community that has really documented and researched health disparities trying to stay in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. and get the care and support that, frankly, a lot of these folks fought for and created,” said Riordan.
As is well known, San Francisco has a sizable LGBTQ+ population and has been the site of many of the community’s historical wins. It includes the historically gay Castro District, and, in the area around Sixth and Market streets, the first legally recognized transgender district in the world.
In the face of historical discrimination, the LGBTQ+ community has had to fight for many of the rights they have today. The 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot in the city, a response to police violence against transgender people, was three years before the more well-known Stonewall riots in New York City.
“We are lucky to be in San Francisco,” said Riordan. “San Francisco has done an incredible job with aging services over the years and kind of being innovative and creative and trying to be forward thinking. We have very solid support from the city.”
Compared to most other cities, San Francisco is culturally accepting and has established support systems. But the organizations LGBTQ+ people rely on don’t have adequate funds to support the growing community’s needs.
“We know that services are being cut, that there aren’t going to be increases in housing and food programs,” said Riordan. “People walk by Openhouse and its beautiful buildings. In some ways that can kind of camouflage the level of poverty people are living in. They’re lucky enough to be in the buildings we have with Mercy, but they may not be able to have three meals a day.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie initially proposed budget changes in 2026 that included cuts from LGBTQ+ community-based organizations and aging services. Several Pride Month events hosted by the mayor, including the raising of the city’s rainbow flag on June 5, were protested by LGBTQ+ activists booing and chanting. Eleven of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ service providers released a statement a couple weeks later that led to a compromise restoring some of the cut funding.
Building a better place for the future
Andrew Shaffer is a gay man with a background in history who has worked with Openhouse for two years and has worked in fundraising for LGBTQ+ organizations for longer.
“We really see ourselves in the work that we’re doing.” Shaffer said, sitting in one of the conference rooms Openhouse uses to provide financial and housing counseling for LGBTQ+ seniors. “We’re building the kind of world that we want to age into. For many of us, we’re taking care of our future selves in a way.”
The generation of LGBTQ+ people that Openhouse cares for right now includes the very same people who lived through the HIV epidemic and fought for their community’s equal rights.
“It’s in some ways an opportunity for us to give back to the people who really built the world that we are inhabiting now,” Shaffer said. “It’s kind of an homage, a thank you.”
Despite all the troubling disparities revealed in the “From Challenges to Resilience” survey, 86% of participants gave high ratings to their quality of life. SAGE’s data also shows that about half of LGBTQ+ seniors volunteer for advocacy or other organizations — a great way to combat the isolation prevalent in their community.
Since retiring, Connie Jeung-Mills has begun working with the political mobilization group Indivisible SF. She makes her own protest signs and art pieces and brings them to rallies and events.
“Being there every week, that’s a second family to me now,” said Jeung-Mills. “There are a lot of queer people that show up and so we talk about other things that are going on. So we’re now like a little network where we can tell each other when there are other protests.”
In her youth, Jeung-Mills remembers learning from calm, determined LGBTQ+ elders with decades of experience. Now, she mentors local students, seeing a need for cross-generational collaboration in activism.
“There’s nothing quite like a senior who’s pissed off,” said Jeung-Mills. “They’re wanting to leave the world in this place that’s better for their kids and their grandkids or their friends or whatever it is.”
Jeung-Mills said she’s lucky to have social security and a rent-controlled apartment in the Castro. She knows many LGBTQ+ people her age, especially single ones, are worse off. She said she found herself surprisingly angry while protesting the budget cuts earlier in 2026.
Morey Riordan and Openhouse were at some of those same protests, fighting to preserve the resources their community has fought for in San Francisco.
“I’ve had a number of our community members thank me and say, ‘We’re ready. We are ready to get back out in the streets,’” Morey Riordan said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do in San Francisco. But the fact is there should be these kinds of communities everywhere throughout California and throughout the United States.”
