Joy's Blog: Surprises

We officially opened in June of 2006 in Santa Fe NM, with ribbon cutting that included elected officials like Gov. Bill Richardson, and Santa Fe Mayor David Coss. Interestingly, the Santa Fe GLBT community has shown interest in having their blood relatives and loved ones live with us in The Castro, which is our Assisted Living. What surprises other people, although we expected this to be true, is the range of ages our members make up. The youngest is 44 and the oldest is 96. We see our population doing great advance planning for their futures - we get requests for information from people in their 30’s and 40’s. RainbowVision Santa Fe is an open and inclusive GLBT- majority community. We do encourage our allies to consider us as we believe a diverse community is the most interesting. We are a living laboratory, and our community members serve as an onsite focus group. We have benefited from the input of our members as to all aspects of living: wellness, physical fitness, dining, and events. What we have learned, and continue to learn, will be incorporated into our future communities as well.

There are a number of things that surprised me about our evolution. Let me mention the top two. The first is that community as an ideal, and learning/acquiring the skills to live in community, are two very different things. Many people want to live in community, but don’t know how to make this happen in reality. Our generation - that is Baby Boomers - have grown up with ideas like “rebel against authority” and “be radically opposed to things” rather than with the idea of, and skill to, negotiate in order to be part of. How a community defines itself becomes the bigger issue. We can say that there are essentially two ways community usually comes together. A group of people may become a “community” by uniting against something, or they may unite by coming together for the good of something. How both of these things might be accomplished in a way that accomplishes a forward momentum is then a question of how much skill a community has acquired or developed. Our members’ committees work with the residents to define needs, desires and wants. They are self governing and have learned to work with many, many different voices.

The second “surprise” is that I learned there are many more configurations of gender and orientation than I would have ever imagined! Some of our members are coming out for the first time at the age of 70 and beyond. One member felt so comfortable at RainbowVision that he is making the gender reassignment decision he has needed to, but couldn’t for fear of repercussion. Our allied members are unanimously supportive of each and every GLBT resident and their differences: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, pre and post op, queens and kings, femme, butch, etc. One of our allies makes it a point to have her own personal education dates with our members; she wants to know the proper language and the best way to talk with us so she does not offend! On the other side, some of our more senior LGBT members had initial fears about living with allies, based upon negative life experiences. These personal biases have also been overcome as we all live and learn together.

Of course, we are aware of the current economic storms and how this affects current and future members. While the downturn has been exceedingly sharp, we are in a favorable position of offering a literal and figurative shelter from the storm. We have seen a great deal of interest from people who no longer wish to live in vulnerable weather areas like the Gulf coast states and we talk to people who are very concerned about their future. It is clear to us that when weathering the economic and/or environmental storms, community seems to become even more important. Establishing a trusted family by choice circle to face life’s challenges holds a lot of meaning for not only our GLBT population, but, it seems, for the mainstream boomer population as well.