Aging Lifestyle & Culture
‘Griot Circle’ is a haven for Black LGBTQ elders
By Justus Wilhoit
The night they met in 2005, Regina Shavers offered Sandie Green an opportunity. Green, queer and Black like Shavers, immediately agreed to volunteer — on a full-time basis — to organize what now is a 30-year-old center reserved for LGBTQ people who look like them.
“It’s very hard when it comes to [LGBTQ] people of color for us to find places where we find other people of color,” said Green, whose introduction to Shavers came at an event where Shavers was being honored for founding and directing the Griot Circle.
The circle, which started out meeting at a YMCA and later moved into its own home on Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, is a rarity. As its original members age, it has become one of the few LGBTQ senior centers across New York City’s five boroughs that mainly attracts Black gay people. For those who are at least 50 years old, center programming includes Spanish classes, paint-and-sip events and field trips to nearby museums and parks.
That togetherness creates a special sense of belonging for some.
“After I started coming here, I enjoyed the company as well as participating in these activities here,” said Ordille Newsum, nicknamed Cilk, with a C, who’s been attending Griot Circle events for over a decade. He learned about the organization at a friend’s cookout.
For members and staff, the organization’s appeal is partly due to its ability for both members’ race and gender identities to be considered and reflected in the same space. Finding that elsewhere, members and staff say, can be a struggle.
Long before she arrived at the Griot Circle, Green recalls, she’d gone to lunch with another queer person of color at an LGBTQ center in Manhattan. When they sat down, the white people at that table got up and moved elsewhere, she said.
“All of us are supposed to be treated equally, all of us are LGBT,” Green added. “Just because the color of our skin is different doesn’t mean we are supposed to be treated differently.”
“This is one of the few places,” said Aundaray Guess, Griot Circle’s executive director, “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.”
Even outside of official events, Griot Circle members are there for each other.
When Newsum’s mother died, members helped him as he mourned and tried to 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,” he said. “Without even asking, they were there for me through thick and thin.”
Rosalyn Davis, who has attended the center’s events since the late 90s, had a similar experience. After her mother’s passing, she said she felt unworthy. But being with circle members eased that feeling.
“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 … ” Her voice trailed off.
Guess said he also has learned some lessons by witnessing the exchanges and experiences shared among circle members. “They taught me that aging is beautiful. 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.
“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.”
“As seniors get older,” member Davis said, “some of them … stay home alone with nothing to do, not feeling worthy. But, the older you get, you need spaces like this. It gets you to really live again.”