
I met Mary and Suz at a roundtable discussion about what it’s like to be a queer senior – for me, that meant a college senior, and for them, it meant being a senior citizen. The three of us went out for coffee a few weeks later, sparking a monthslong connection that led to the creation of this project: YES, WE CAN GROW OLD.
For many young queer people, doing just that– making it to grey hairs, let alone retirement– feels impossible. Who can we look up to? From whom can we learn our history? How do we navigate the rough waters ahead?
With decades of silence on their shoulders, queer elders can be hard to find. Many have been lost, with life expectancies up to two times shorter than the rest of the population. But those who are still with us carry stories of love, heartbreak, struggle, and success.
Here are just a few.
MARY GROCE, 74
Mary’s first marriage ended in the mid-1970s after she came out as a lesbian. She was in her 20s, and had just had her first baby.
Despite her initial courage, Mary broke up with her lover, Joan, during her divorce proceedings. Through her lawyer, she had found out that she would lose custody of her son, Derek, if the judge in her case found out that she wasn’t straight.
This was a common experience at the time. Many lesbian mothers fleeing abusive husbands— even, in one case, a convicted murderer— lost custody battles. It eventually led to the formation of the Lesbian Mothers National Defense Fund, which provided legal assistance to hundreds of women between 1974 and 1980. Despite their efforts, such custody cases continued, including one where a sperm donor won custody over the lesbian couple who carried and raised the child.
Cases like these still exist today—in 2023, another lesbian couple lost custody to their sperm donor.
“The stuff we went through at that time–we were illegal,” Mary said, detailing her struggles to leave her marriage without a steady source of income, and the police violence she experienced during her brief time out of the closet.
She repressed the experience for close to two decades, remarried, and had three more children. During that time, she discovered her talent for singing and playing the harp. It would later become her escape.
She kept the love poetry she wrote to Joan in the drawer of an heirloom cabinet, but believed that she “used to be a lesbian.”
Hiding from that part of herself took a toll.
“I remember feeling that I had a dark, black hole at my core, I was just getting more and more depressed and I couldn’t name it, I did the same repression thing, something is so wrong in my life and I can’t name it,” Mary said.
She came back to herself over time–her second husband owned a print shop, and she realized much later that all of the women who worked there, including herself, were lesbians. A coworker later invited her to play her harp and sing at a birthday party one summer, which led to several moments of recognition.
“I walked around, and all of a sudden I see these women dancing together, and it was like BOING! And I think I had been building up to it, but it was like, Oh my gosh I had forgotten what it’s like to be in a room full of dancing women. I had completely repressed it,” she said.
But, it was a quiet moment afterwards that made the experience impossible to ignore.
“I remember getting in the car afterwards, I think Derek might have picked me up,” she said. “Derek looked at me, and he said ‘Mom, I remember Joan.’ It started then and it just expanded–I was conscious,” she said.
SUZ ATLAS, 80

Suz Atlas married a man after dropping out of college at age 20. Her lover had married a preacher, and she was failing most of her classes.
“I said, okay, so I’ll do this. I’ll get married off, have kids and dogs and we’ll get through that. By the time I’m 50 I can be myself again. And I kind of just went away,” Suz said. “There was not any choice.”
While women had obtained some new legal rights by the 1970s, getting married, having children, and being a housewife were still the norm. There were not yet any laws protecting women from sexual harassment in the workplace or being fired for a pregnancy, and women were unable to take out credit cards, open a bank account, receive direct consultation about their physical or mental health, refuse sex from their husbands, or obtain a divorce over domestic violence.
“That’s how I was brought up—nice little Jewish girl, did whatever she was told to,” Suz said.
Her husband, a pharmacist, made enough money that they were able to have a life in Cherry Hill, NJ with a house, a pool, and a Cadillac, where she could play tennis every day and raise their children.
Then, at 35, he changed. It took a toll on Suz.
“I was shutting down. That’s the way I went through life,” she said. “I was going away.”
It took a conversation with Sandy, a friend from college, for things to change.
“We talked a lot, and she said, ‘I don’t know who you are anymore. I think you need therapy,’” Suz said.
Going to therapy was less common in the early 1990s. While data about the topic is difficult to find before the early 2000s, the number of people seeking mental health treatment doubled between 2002 and 2023, going from about ¼ to well over ½ of Americans, according to Statista.
Sandy told her that she would come visit again in two weeks, and if Suz hadn’t found a therapist by then, she would bring her to one. Through Jewish Family and Children’s Services, she found a free, weekly counselor to speak to.
“I got to the point where the therapist I found said, ‘You don’t even know your favorite color—what is it?’” She said she would ask her husband.
Eventually, they spoke about Suz’s sexuality, and she came out to herself for the second time.
“It wasn’t painful until I knew that that’s not who I was,” she said.
The therapist encouraged Suz to come out to her loved ones, but things weren’t so simple.
“I had no intention of coming out to anybody, even though I realized that would be saving my life. Because I did seriously try to commit suicide. I sat at the kitchen table, our good old butcher block table with my gun loaded and ready to go. Nice towels spread out, I had read about the Japanese thing where you prepare everything and get it all ready, and then I sat there for hours. And then I said, well Rachel will be home in half an hour, I can’t do this. So I guess that’s how I didn’t do it, and I put all that stuff away, but I knew I was in trouble,” Suz said.
This is not an uncommon experience for queer people. One U.S. study conducted in 2001 found that lesbian and bisexual women reported suicidal thoughts at rates three times higher than their heterosexual counterparts.
In 1994, Suz’s therapist recommended she go to a lesbian coming out support group in Bala Cynwyd. She drove to Philadelphia and back six times before, sitting in a hotel parking lot, she was able to summon the courage to go to the meeting.
“I’d never cursed in my life, but I said what the hell, and I found the place. I sat in the parking lot for a long time, and I didn’t know where to go or how to get back to the bridge,” she said. “It was like going through a portal.”
That was May 10, 1994 — the day she met Mary.
MARY & SUZ

The pair bonded over their shared experiences trying to escape their marriages and raise their children. After the sessions were over that summer, they went out together. First, it was just to see a movie, but then it turned into dancing, omelettes at a New Jersey diner, and Mary meeting Suz’s Rottweiler.
“And the rest is history. We’re still on that first date,” Mary said.
After a year of seeing one another, they moved in together. Mary worked nights as a professional harpist, and Suz held down jobs as a spy for major hotels and a massage therapist.
“We changed our world, that’s for sure,” Mary said.

Things got harder when their health started to falter, leaving them unable to work regularly. Without a steady income, the two weren’t able to make ends meet, and had to rely on cancer charities to get by. While living in Camden, New Jersey, they applied to live at the John C. Anderson Apartments, a high-rise intended for low-income LGBTQ+ seniors in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood.
In May 2017, they got in.

“We walked in here and someone hollered, ‘Welcome home!” Mary said. “We’d always been the girls on the block, or we were different from every community we lived in, we were unusual by being an out lesbian couple. We never felt like we were part of the group, part of the community totally. But here, we did.” Mary said.
After they settled in, they noticed that the building had a newsletter, run by one woman who moved out shortly after the two arrived. They described it as nice, but generic—horoscopes, birthstones, quotes—but lacked reflection of the community. The pair, along with fellow resident and former editor-in-chief of AIDS Treatment News, John James, decided to change that.
“We realized how many amazing people lived here and they were, a lot of them, pioneers in the community and really, a fascinating group of people. And, well, we were all getting older,” Mary said.
They started the new newsletter in 2018, and featured writers from the building who covered everything from food and recipes to opinions and queer history, including interviews with residents.
“Nobody’s more surprised than I am, because I was a secret all of my life,” Suz, who writes an opinion column, said. “I was always quiet. Now I’m published.”
“We didn’t realize what a big deal it was to start that newsletter,” Mary said. It connected the community, especially during the long periods of isolation in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A fellowship with the National Air and Space Museum, where Mary was documenting the life of her great-uncle Emory, one of the first known Black pilots in the U.S., showed how the buildling was making history.
While speaking with a colleague, Mary mentioned her work on the newsletter.
“I sent her a couple of copies, and she calls me two days later and says, ‘We want the whole collection here, because it’s one of a kind. There’s not much out there for LGBTQ+ seniors,’” she said. Now, an archive of the newsletter issues is housed at the Smithsonian.
Looking towards the future, the two hold both high hopes and deep fears.
Both Mary and Suz hope to publish books in the coming years, including memoirs and a novel. They also look forward to meeting their newest grandchild, who was born in mid-November.
They worry for him, too, and the rest of their grandkids—especially after Donald Trump was elected for a second term as president. In the same breath, though, the pair offered a word of advice:
“It’s very dark, but you can’t let that control your life. You’ve got to do what you need to do mentally—we didn’t do that. We disappeared,” Suz said. “I’m terrified. But I can’t live like that either. You can’t live terrified. You have to live your life.”
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