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LGBTQ+ ELDERS OF COLOR TAKE CENTER STAGE AT GRIOT CIRCLE
By: Justus Wilhoit
Sandie Green first met Regina Shavers, founder of the GRIOT Circle, at an event honoring Shavers’ community work. What began as a brief introduction became an invitation from Shavers to help organize the group’s office as a full-time volunteer. Green accepted and has stayed with the group in some capacity ever since, even while being diagnosed with epilepsy.
“It’s very hard when it comes to people of color for us to find places where we find other people of color,” said Green.
Green is not alone in that feeling, as other members described the same sense of belonging that calls them to return to the Brooklyn-based organization year after year.
“After I started coming here, I enjoyed the company as well as participating in these activities here,” said Ordille Newsum, who goes by “Cilk” (yes, with a C; he made it clear and has been attending GIROT Circle events for over a decade after being introduced to the organization at a barbecue one of his friends invited him to.
Unlike other senior centers across New York City, the GRIOT Circle, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, serves specifically LGBTQ+ elders of color through arts activities and social programming. This includes weekly Spanish classes, Paint and Sip events, and field trips to nearby museums and parks, recently traveling to the Brooklyn Museum.
For members and staff, the organization’s appeal is in part due to its ability for members’ racial and LGBTQ+ identities to both be reflected in the same space, something that members and staff say is a struggle to find elsewhere.
Green said she prioritizes the GRIOT Circle because the other LGBTQ+ centers she has visited in New York City from the 90s even to now are predominantly white and less inclusive. In one instance, she recalled sitting down to eat lunch at another LGBTQ+ center in the area with another person of color when all the white people at that table got up and moved elsewhere.
“All of us are supposed to be treated equally; all of us are LGBT just because the color of our skin is different doesn’t mean we are supposed to be treated differently,” said Green.
Staff says Green’s experience reflects the space Shavers set out to create when she founded GRIOT.
“This is one of the few places that has a space where you can come in and be your true self, and you don’t have to put away your identity for that short time you’re in the senior center; you could be as unapologetically black as you want to be,” said Aundaray Guess, Executive Director of the GRIOT Circle.
Even when there’s no formal programming, GRIOT Circle members are there for each other. When “Cilk” lost his mother, the GRIOT Circle stepped in to help him move forward.
“The GRIOT members all came to my rescue. They’d fill out cards, they made food, they helped me go through all of that.” “Without even asking, they were there for me, through thick and thin.”
Rosalyn Davis, who has attended GRIOT Circle events since the late nineties, had a similar experience that the Circle helped her to be more social and creative after her mother’s passing, a time she said she felt “unworthy.”
“It gave me a chance to be around my peers and do things I’d never done, like woodcarving,” Davis said. “To be back around people like myself and to be creative, because I had never done art before.”
For Guess, the experiences of these members have taught him numerous lessons.
“They taught me that aging is beautiful,” he said. “ They not only taught me how to have a full life as someone ages, but also that it’s just another chapter of your life that’s just beginning.”
He added that many members remain active and socially engaged, often more so than he is himself.
“Sometimes they’re [seniors] out and about in the city more than me,” Guess said. “I’m like, wow, Friday night I’m looking for my remote, but these seniors, they’re out doing their thing, even sexually.”
At GRIOT, elders can build full lives after retirement and grief, pushing back against the idea that aging means staying at home or becoming disconnected from the world.
“As seniors get older, some of them are not aware of these kinds of spaces, so they stay home alone with nothing to do, not feeling worthy,” Davis said. “But the older you get, you need spaces like this. It gets you to really live again.”