Chris Almvig is a co-founder of SAGE (Senior Action in a Gay Environment). From its more humble origins in 1977 as a small cluster of individuals, SAGE is now the largest national provider of social services to LGBTQ-identified older adults in the United States.

As Lauren Gutterman writes in her excellent mini-history of SAGE (“Caring for Our Own”: The Founding of Senior Action in a Gay Environment, 1977–1985“), the organization’s humble beginnings were not always welcoming: 

“Economically privileged white, cisgender men formed a majority of SAGE founders and board members. Because of this limited demographic, people of color and transgender people felt unwelcome at SAGE events in the organization’s early years.”

The current corporate model has sustained some of those elements, first introduced in the early years:

“SAGE’s founders also initially assumed a hierarchical relationship between SAGE staff, board members, and volunteers, on the one hand, and SAGE “clients,” on the other. Few people over sixty participated in SAGE’s first meetings. Rather, SAGE was an endeavor undertaken primarily by middle-aged gays and lesbians on behalf of older people in ways that mirrored their lack of power within society.”

Almvig, however, would have been at least somewhat of an outlier within this context. She had written her Master’s thesis at Syracuse University on “The Invisible Minority: Aging & Lesbianism” (1982), an early contribution to the literature. The concept of older adults as “invisible” has remained one of the steady tropes with this population, despite the increasing visibility of LGBTQ people overall.

In a 2018 interview, Chris Almvig described how issues of gender non-conformity played a key role in her personal motivation for starting SAGE:

“Dreams seem to start sometimes unconsciously and sometimes through the relationships you have with other people. One of my first relationships was with someone who would’ve wanted to have a sex change if she could have, but at the time they weren’t very available. I started to see the struggles that she had—some of the same struggles we’re having today—about bathrooms. She couldn’t go into the men’s bathroom and she couldn’t go into the women’s bathroom and I witnessed that she could only leave home for short periods of time because she had to come back in order to use the bathroom.

She had a dishonorable discharge from the army. There was a witch-hunt and somebody turned her in. She had problems with employment all through her life just because of the way she looked. “

The role of trans* and gender non-conforming people in early gay rights activism is often overlooked or glossed over, and at the time, was not always articulated in the most sensitive of terms. It seems therefore important that one of the first people to inspire Almvig, to spur the dream of advocacy, was a transgender man.

References

Lauren Jae Gutterman; “Caring for Our Own”: The Founding of Senior Action in a Gay Environment, 1977–1985. Radical History Review 1 January 2021; 2021 (139): 178–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-8822675