Faith communities are an especially important source for social support among Asian

Faith communities are an especially important source for social support among Asian American LGBT seniors in San Francisco.

So found the July 2013 report “Addressing the Needs of LGBT Older Adults in San Francisco: Recommendations for the Future” based on a survey commissioned by the city’s LGBT Aging Policy Task Force, which finished its work last month.

Of the 616 LGBT city residents aged 60 to 92 years old who took part in the survey, 4 percent identified as Asian or Pacific Islander. Among the 23 Asian American respondents, 60 percent said they relied on social support from religious groups.

They reported attending religious or spiritual activities and services at the highest rate of any ethnic or racial group in the study.

“I do see Asian LGBT people in the Catholic Church,” said Vincent Baduel, 63, who helps run the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance’s 35-Plus group for gay and bi API men over the age of 35. “I myself am Catholic and I see them at the church in the Castro.”

Until he moved to San Ramon in 2004, Baduel had been a parishioner at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in San Francisco’s gay Castro district. He now regularly attends mass at St. Raymond Catholic Church in Dublin and will return to his old parish when he is in the city on weekends.

“I would hazard a guess that Asians in general like structure maybe, I know I do, and I guess religion provides that structure and support by inference,” said Baduel.

The survey finding doesn’t surprise Cecilia Chung, a member of the San Francisco Health Commission and a consultant on LGBT health policy. But due to the numerous nationalities within the larger API community, Chung said it would be helpful to know how Filipino LGBT seniors compared to, for example, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese LGBT seniors who answered the survey.

“Within the API community there are many different nationalities, so for some of the Asian countries where Catholicism or Christianity are more prominent, they tend to seek out support from churches more so than some of the other communities, such as the Chinese community,” said Chung, a transgender woman who also works as a senior strategist at the Transgender Law Center. “It would help to get a better picture in some of the cultural differences.”

The report gave a broad picture of the API respondents to the survey and did not break out responses based on the various ethnic identities captured by the API umbrella. Despite the surveys being made available in Chinese and Tagalog, the researchers fell short of their goal of attracting at least 30 APIs to participate.

As the task force noted in its report released in March, “translation alone was clearly not enough to penetrate hard to reach sub-populations.”

Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center Executive Director Lance Toma reasoned that could be because, similar to many seniors, LGBT API seniors are also dealing with high levels of social isolation and mental health issues.

“Trying to get data from folks who are isolated and struggling with mental health issues, whether you can translate the survey that doesn’t make a difference,” said Toma.

The San Francisco-based agency has partnered with religious institutions, from churches to temples, to reach API LGBT seniors. For example, it has conducted HIV testing at temples in the Thai and Laotian communities.

“In our history at API Wellness Center, our outreach efforts have always included faith-based venues,” said Toma. “When we drill down to other communities, especially Southeast Asian communities, there are different faith institutions that smaller subsets of our communities are accessing for support.”

Because senior demographics are not broken down by race and sexual orientation, it is unclear how many of the estimated 20,000 LGBT seniors living in San Francisco are Asian or Pacific Islander. The same is true of the 40 million adults aged 65 and older in the U.S. based on 2010 census figures; it is unknown how many are LGBT.

Demographers do predict that over the next 40 years, Asian American and Pacific Islander older adults will have “the largest relative population growth among all older adults,” noted a 2013 report on LGBT older adults issued by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

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