GAY PRIDE


For seniors, being active in SAGE is a wise choice

By Albert Amateau

Except for his wonderfully long memory, Gean Harwood gives the impression that he is one of the younger members of SAGE — Senior Action in a Gay Environment.

At the age of 94 he still plays the piano, travels alone, goes out to dinner with his lover Luis Rey and entertains friends at home.

He introduced himself to a visitor at a Gay Pride brunch in Chelsea last week as the author of “The Oldest Gay Couple in America,” available from Amazon.com on the Internet.

Harwood and Rey had just come from Philadelphia where they saw a performance of “Bruhs and Gean” a musical about Harwood’s long love affair with his partner Bruhs Mero who died in 1995.

“We met at a party in 1929,” Harwood said of his late lover. “He was interested in dance — studied with Martha Graham, and I was a pianist. We eventually wrote about 40 ballads together and in 1937 we opened a studio on W. 10th St. — Dance Gallery.”

What was it like to be gay in the 1920s and 30s? Not much fun in Auburn, N.Y., where L. Eugene Harwood was born, raised and learned to be a musician. “That’s one of the reasons why I came to New York in 1927 — a better climate for gay people.” That was even before the term “gay” meant little more than merry and carefree.

“We used to say a person was ‘temperamental’ instead of gay,” Harwood recalled.
Although Mero and Harwood weren’t at the Stonewall Inn on those fateful June days in 1969, they were very sympathetic and welcomed the new era.

SAGE, which was organized in 1978 by Chris Almvig and John Dorf, gave Harwood and Mero a 50th anniversary party in 1979 and about the same time Arthur Bell wrote an article about Harwood and Mero for the Village Voice.

“We didn’t think of ourselves as particularly out of the closet at the time but people who read the Voice article would stop us on the street and congratulate us. It was wonderful,” said Harwood.

“We were grand marshals in the Gay Pride Parade in 1985,” Harwood recalled. But within two years Mero began to show signs of Alzheimer’s. “I tried to take care of him at home until 1991,” said Harwood. Mero spent his last four or five years in a nursing home near near the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. “He seemed to have lost the sense of his personality and of our relationship,” Harwood recalled.

It was a sad time. But in 1996, Harwood met Rey who had just lost a lover of many years. “We were just in the mood for each other,” Rey recalled.

Harwood’s latest production is a CD of him playing the songs that he wrote with Mero. And he’s anticipating a New York production of the musical “Gean and Bruhs.”

SAGE, which as an organization predates the L.G.B.T. Community Services Center by five years, serves about 3,500 people a year with a paid staff of about 20 and a corps of 350 dedicated volunteers, according to Sandy Warshsaw, director of community building.

Those volunteers are the prime movers of SAGE’s Friendly Visitors, a one-on-one program in which SAGE members visit a homebound gay man, lesbian or transgender person.

Ray Razee has been a member of SAGE for seven years and a friendly visitor for the past five years. “It’s a very rewarding experience,” said Razee, who is a young-looking 76. “I visit Charles — he’s a semi invalid who doesn’t get out. But he loves opera so we meet on Saturday afternoons, eat ice cream and listen to opera.”
Ali Soucy, a member of SAGE for the past five years and a director of the SAGE Women’s Task Force, recalls the year and a half she spent as a friendly visitor as particularly enriching.

“I used to visit a woman who was 30 years older than me. She was about 80 and she told me what it was like to be gay in the 1930s,” Soucy recalled. “She used to say, ‘It’s a wonder that lesbians ever found each other.’ She had such a full life. She had been married to a man, had children and grandchildren and had lived with a woman for 40 years.”

Soucy now devotes a few hours a week to the SAGE Women’s Task Force, which seeks to get more women involved in SAGE programs. “It’s particularly important for women, who tend to be more isolated than men when they get older,” Soucy said

Last week, Soucy was helping run a Women’s Task Force open mic event at the L.G.B.T. Center on W. 13th St. where talented SAGE women played music, sang and recited poetry.

Another important SAGE program is a task force dedicated to developing a cultural change in nursing homes. Organized in 1997, the task force, with the cooperation of the Brookdale Center for Aging, is trying to sensitize nursing homes to homophobia among the aging and among care providers.

SAGE is also involved in the Rainbow Aging Awareness Project, joining with SAGE-Queens, Pride Senior Network and Griot Circle, a group of gay senior African-Americans who meet in Brooklyn. The Rainbow project is dedicated to extending awareness of the needs of L.G.B.T. seniors from all walks of life.