Aimé, 75, watches the staff of the Annie Girardot nursing home bring petit fours to those present. The Parisian establishment is, with the Ehpad Harmonie de Boissy-Saint-Léger (Val-de-Marne), the first in France to receive a label certifying that it will welcome gay, lesbian, bi, non-binary elderly people. or trans in a benevolent way. Work by the Gray Pride association with staff and residents which lasted almost a year, and which enabled Aimé, a Catholic from Vendée, to change his outlook: “Before, I would have avoided meeting these people, I would have walked away. Today, if a nurse’s aide is a dyke, I won’t bother her and I’ll talk to her without any problem”, confides to us this former post office executive, who received an education where “the boys were on one side, the daughters of the other”.
The approach is unique in France. “There are LGBT people everywhere, but there has never been any specific training and reception in the Ehpad”, indicates to 20 minutes Francis Carrier, co-creator of Gray Pride. There is another project in Lyon, from the association Les audacieuses et les audacieux, but this one will not see the light of day before 2024, and this is a community habitat, when Gray Pride’s approach is mixed.
“Even if we are gay or lesbian, we have lived with heterosexual people. My idea is not to reduce ourselves to our sexual orientation, we continue to live in the world as it is”, explains Francis Carrier, who also wants to meet the demand of thousands of individuals, when the Lyon approach will concern only about ten people (16 housing units planned). “There are 800,000 LGBT seniors. You have to have a reflection for the whole and have a benevolent speech for everyone” he affirms.
Twelve Ehpad of the City of Paris have already programmed a labeling over the next few years, all in the capital or in the inner suburbs. The association is in contact with a dozen other establishments in Annemasse, Saint-Brieuc, La Rochelle, Nantes, Port-Vendres or Angoulême for new labels without a fixed date, according to Sylvain Guyot, the president of Gray Pride.
Debates around Jean Marais and Jean Cocteau
Changing mentalities, this is the objective of Gray Pride, and for this the association is training hard. The two referents of the Ehpad Annie Girardot followed four days of training in April 2022, and the rest of the staff, two days. The association intervenes with residents with two awareness-raising sessions in the first year, for example by showing a documentary or by organizing a game. And throughout the year, staff are invited to use the tools indicated by the association, to get the message out to residents. “We are committed to this process to make the Annie Girardot nursing home a truly warm and inclusive home”, comments Franck Oudrhiri, the director of the Annie Girardot nursing home.
At the Annie Girardot nursing home, the referent Sandrine Tsong-Chin-Chuen, responsible for the animation, for example organized an outing to the restaurant with the elderly, asking the male volunteers to put on make-up to “put themselves in the skin of a transgender person. According to the facilitator, the idea was to confront the volunteers with the sometimes transphobic looks and remarks of people. In Boissy-Saint-Léger, the referent Nathalie Jacquier, also a facilitator, has chosen to organize debates once a month, addressing the subject through artists such as Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais, the writer and the actor who were a couple for years.
“We have aspirations and desires”
The workshops and events organized had a real effect on the residents, according to the referents. At the end of the outing made up to the restaurant, “some had a much more benevolent point of view”, explains Sandrine Tsong-Chin-Chuen in front of an audience composed mainly of local elected officials, association members and nursing home staff. The training also had an effect on the staff, as recognized by Yao Ettien, kitchen worker in the Boissy-Saint-Léger medical retirement home, explaining that he was “of the Muslim faith” and had “learned a lot of things”. A caregiver, who had previously confiscated naughty magazines found in a resident’s room, “will no longer do so now”, adds the host.
Because the work of Gray Pride is more broadly a work on sexuality, which aims to make people understand that we can have loves and impulses even when we reach old age. “When we amputate people of their sexuality, we put them in the care object box, but we have aspirations and desires”, pleads Francis Carrier. An approach shared by the City of Paris, which wishes that love stories in Ehpad can be lived freely. “We know that it’s a fight as an LGBT person, but old age adds even more difficulties,” says Véronique Levieux, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of seniors. “Everyone must be able to live this common life in the best possible way,” adds Jean-Luc Romero-Michel, deputy in charge of human rights.
The Ehpad Annie Girardot in Paris and Harmonie in Boissy-Saint-Léger were volunteers and already committed to the subject, but it will be more difficult to seek out all those who have not come forward, precisely because the management of these establishments are the most reluctant, believes Sylvain Guyot. This is why the President of Gray Pride would like to make this training mandatory for all establishments. “We have no feedback from the ministry for the moment,” laments Sylvain Guyot, who is awaiting the publication of the next national plan against violence against LGBTQIA + people. Not enough to reassure the president of the association of retired gays, who worried earlier: “What will it be like for us to grow old in houses where we will not be able to say who we really are? ? »