Text: Gert Renders (he/him) • ¨Picture: Marcel Lennartz (he/him)
Many elderly LGBTQIA+ seniors, after a lifetime of being open about their orientation, go back into the closet when they move into a care facility. Although much has been achieved in the fight for various LGBTQIA+ rights over the past decades, the struggle for acceptance within this group in our society is far from over.
Rainbow Ambassadors is an organization of dedicated volunteers who want to continue this fight with various awareness campaigns, activities, and policy support for care organizations, care teams, and seniors. They strive for a rainbow-friendly policy in elder care. Photo exhibitions, reports, documentaries, and information sessions are organized. Maggy Doumen is one of the leaders of the organization.
"In 2008, Het Roze Huis founded the 'Janus Working Group.' At that time, funds were
made available, allowing an intern to conduct two years of research into the vulnerability of LGBTQIA+ individuals in elder care. To prevent this accumulated expertise from being lost after the project subsidies ended, several volunteers decided to continue the project. In 2015, upon my retirement, I joined this group. Until then, it was all quite small-scale, and little promotion was done. It was led by someone who certainly did not do a bad job, but it was all rather narrowly defined to keep it manageable with the available volunteers.
Little was done to let it grow on a larger scale and to exchange knowledge between different initiatives, while the issues we fight for are the same everywhere. From this volunteer work, we then established the operations of Rainbow Ambassadors with a few people in 2018. When someone from Brussels crossed our path a bit later, we joined forces with Antwerp and Brussels initiators in 2020 and founded the non-profit organization ‘Rainbow Ambassadors’ to gradually build a network across the country. The bilingual organization aims to give a face to the often-forgotten or invisible LGBTQIA+ seniors. We immediately launched a website and created brochures to publicize our work and the issues we want to address.
The work is aimed at both staff and residents of residential care centers, day centers, service flats, senior associations, home care, doctors, and care and nursing students, among others.
Older LGBTQIA+ individuals are not very visible in our society. Yet they form a substantial group in Belgium. There are estimated to be more than 250,000 LGBTQIA+ seniors. Some of them live in care centers or assisted living facilities, others attend service centers and day centers. Still others are active in senior associations and live at home. Unfortunately, there is still often a taboo surrounding sexuality and intimacy among seniors. I am a member of the senior council in Hoboken, but those activities are still exclusively heteronormative.
In a residential care center or association, people should feel at home. For many people, it is their (only) social network. It is the place where everyone should be able to be themselves fully.
LGBTQIA+ seniors often come from a time when their orientation was still unmentionable, where they had to hide part of themselves. Some still came out or lived a modest life with their partner. Seniors often lack the strength to tell who they are again. They are afraid they will not be accepted by the center or association they are part of. They want to feel at home and not be excluded by caregivers, other residents, or members of their association.
Due to heteronormativity, many LGBTQIA+ seniors often feel less welcome in care facilities. Care managers and staff are not aware of the specific background and often intense life stories of these LGBTQIA+ seniors. Conversations with fellow residents are usually about children and grandchildren. As a result, they may find little connection with fellow residents and feel excluded and alone. I know a concrete example of someone who bought a care flat and was then asked to keep quiet about their orientation.
In the Netherlands, our sister organizations are very well supported. They have resources to spread their expertise using modern media and documentaries, which allow you to reach a much wider audience today. Here, there is still work to be done, including by umbrella organizations. We have the idea to start Will Ferdy cafes, an initiative where LGBTQIA+ seniors from senior associations, residential care centers, etc., can come together once a month. But that requires efforts that are currently still insufficiently supported here. We have a committee of about five organizations to provide training for reference persons who are supported by their directors to initiate this within their residential care centers. We also speak to active seniors outside the rainbow family to create broader support for the future and spread our message as widely as possible.
But within our community as well, where many people are already active in the care sector, we spread our expertise. We notice that there is growing attention and goodwill towards the issue. For instance, we had to speak at the Artevelde University of Applied Sciences as part of IDAHOT, but such initiatives are still too much of an 'event.' It should be more structurally embedded in the operations of organizations and society. We are small but do a lot of activities. In 2025, our association will be five years old. We want to celebrate that, both in Brussels and Antwerp, with a substantive event on a Friday, followed by a big party on Saturday. The content of that celebration is gradually
taking shape and will be shared, among other things, through our website. Step by step, we hope to gain more attention for the issues facing our target group, but there is still a long way to go."
For more information about activities for LGBTQIA+ seniors and training, please visit