EASTHAM — The Chapel in the Pines was a lively scene on the evening of Feb. 1 as seniors arrived from across Cape Cod bringing with them enough walnut and winter greens salad, scalloped potatoes, and spanakopita to feed a small village. A colorful pride flag waved from the porch of the Nauset Fellowship’s 19th-century Chapel in the Pines for the occasion: the Eastham Council on Aging’s inaugural Shake Off the Winter Blues Pride Potluck, a dinner party for LGBTQ seniors.
The event was organized by members of the senior center’s LGBTQ+ Community Coffee and Conversation group, established last year by the council board’s vice chair Cheryl Gayle and then-chair Joan Lockhart.
The coffee and conversations group that convenes on the first Monday of every month at the Council on Aging usually attracts 8 to 10 Eastham residents, Lockhart said. But Saturday’s potluck brought in 55, with people coming from as far away as Yarmouth.
The chapel, which had been converted into a dining hall for the evening, rang with voices and laughter. And local guitarist Beth Terrio led the group in a sing-along of “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”
“It’s events like this that make the Cape feel welcoming,” said Richard Jacobs, who has lived in Orleans for two years and says that he appreciates the opportunity for a gathering like this outside of Provincetown.
Eleni Carr, who moved to Eastham with their partner just before the pandemic, said that it was difficult to find a community at first, but as restrictions loosened, groups like the one in Eastham helped them find one. Carr pointed to the need for older people to find antidotes to social isolation. And “any issue that’s true for seniors broadly is amplified for the LGBTQ community,” Carr added.
Mindy Baransky, president of the Friends of the Eastham COA, said that’s where community comes in. Which in turn is why the friends use money raised at their thrift store on Massasoit Road for a wide range of events at the senior center.
Baransky, who is gay, said that senior centers can sometimes seem unwelcoming to LGBTQ seniors looking to make new friends. “If people don’t see any programming that’s specifically for them, they might not realize that they’re welcome,” she said, and for some seniors, that could mean avoiding community events altogether.
Lockhart, who noted that 55 percent of Eastham’s population is over 55, said the center’s LGBTQ programming has its origins in a study conducted by researchers from UMass Boston in 2022. That’s when the COA board commissioned a community needs assessment from the university’s Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging.
The results, based on interviews and a survey of Eastham residents over 50, showed that the COA’s programming “did not align with the range of interests of residents.” Those interests included woodworking, gardening, and dance — educational and exercise programs were what many people wanted.
Social programs focused on bringing like-minded people together was also a common request from survey respondents, Lockhart said. And that included requests for some activities for LGBTQ people, she said.
Getting funding for the social programs people asked for hasn’t been easy, Baransky said. While senior centers in Massachusetts can apply for state and federal funding in the form of grants, Baransky said those grants are “very specific” in nature and rarely line up with the smaller programs residents want to see.
Besides, those grants — such as the ARPA grant in 2023 that provided the COA with $100,000 for the acquisition of 96-inch TV screens to facilitate programming with presenters who aren’t local and accommodate seniors who can’t leave their homes — are likely to get scarcer, Baransky said. “We hoped they would continue, but we don’t expect it from the new administration.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on Feb. 6, misspelled Eleni Carr’s first name.
