LGBTQ Breaking News Service

When Texas couple Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell stumbled onto a 1920s-era photograph in a Dallas antiques shop some 20 years ago, they were startled to see a relationship that looked much like theirs: two men, embracing and clearly in love.

As Dee Swann writes for the Washington Post, the image spoke to the couple about the history of love between men.

“The open expression of the love that they shared also revealed a moment of determination,” Nini and Treadwell tell the Post. “Taking such a photo, during a time when they would have been less understood than they would be today, was not without risk. We were intrigued that a photo like this could have survived into the [21st] century. Who were they?”

In the decades that followed this initial discovery, the pair came across more than 2,800 photos of men in love—at first accidentally and later on purpose. The result of their trips to flea markets, shops, estate sales and family archives across Europe, Canada and the United States is a tome titled Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850s to 1950s. Featuring around 300 photos spanning more than a century, the volume is available through Italian publisher 5 Continents Editions.

According to Vice’s Vincenzo Ligresti, Nini and Treadwell gradually developed ideas about recurring motifs in the photos. They suggest that between the 1880s and 1920s, posing under an umbrella symbolized a romantic union. Over time, the couple posits, jewelry like wedding rings and bracelets became more popular, peaking among sailors and soldiers during World War II.

Some of the earliest images in the collection are daguerreotypes, the first popular type of photographs, which were commonly used to create portraits in the mid-19th century. Others are glass negatives, tin types and photo postcards.

Vice notes that some of the pictures were taken in photo booths, which first appeared in the U.S. in 1924. These devices allowed couples to capture their likenesses without exposing their relationship to anyone else. Other images in the collection were apparently taken by friends and family. In some cases, outside individuals appear alongside the couples, reflecting the fact that their relationships weren’t kept secret from everyone.

Jerry Portwood of Rolling Stone notes that some readers may question whether all the pictures really reflect same-sex romantic relationships.

“You may scoff and think: Maybe it’s just guys horsing around (despite the kissing and legs wrapped around in intimate bedroom or picnic scenes) or that we’re unfairly placing our contemporary notions upon innocent, youthful friendships,” he writes.

But, Portwood adds, this is something the collectors have considered. Nini and Treadwell acknowledge the existence of historical “friendship photos” that might look romantic to modern eyes. But they developed rules to exclude pictures depicting platonic relationships.

“We look into their eyes,” the couple writes in the book. “There is an unmistakable look that two people have when they are in love. You can’t manufacture it. And if you’re experiencing it, you can’t hide it.”

When Nini and Treadwell found that first photo for the collection, they were unofficially married. At the time, they couldn’t get legally married anywhere in the country. In 2006, reports Vice, they married in Massachusetts—the first state to legalize same-sex marriage.

Tremendous changes in U.S. culture’s attitude toward LGBTQ people has taken place in the years since the couple’s initial discovery—and even more since the last of the photos in the collection were taken in the 1950s. Yet some readers say the photo book provides a sense of the continuity in men’s same-sex romances over the past 170 years.

“Flipping through the book, it wasn’t that I felt that I learned a great deal about being LGBTQ, but what gave me comfort was the feeling that we’re not going anywhere,” writes Hrag Vartanian for Hyperallergic. “Seeing ourselves in the past is as much about being certain of our present and, dare I say, our future. When we see them as connected, we feel more whole, and that’s what love is about for many of us anyway.”

Editor’s Note, October 29, 2020: This article previously stated that Loving featured 2,800 images from Nini and Treadwell’s collection. The collection as a whole contains more than 2,800 images, but just 300 or so are included in the book.

After he was diagnosed with HIV during the height of the AIDS epidemic, Ed Miller started living his life in two-year increments.

“In the beginning, they would just say ‘you could have a couple of months to two years,’” says Miller. “That was the extent of my financial planning: I should have enough money for the next two years.”

While one part of him thought he should keep saving, “there was also this idea of why don’t I just spend all my money because I’m not going to be around to retire anyway,” he says. Miller is now 60 years old, with a lifespan and a retirement he once thought impossible.

Ed Miller isn’t alone. More than 3 million LGBT Americans are currently over 50, and that number is estimated to more than double over the next decade as Baby Boomers ride in on a rainbow-hued silver wave.

For many like Miller, the traditional idea of retirement looks increasingly uncertain—and quite different from their heterosexual peers’, even in an era of antiretroviral cocktails, marriage equality and enshrined protection from employment discrimination.

We’ll cover the issues those in the LGBTQ community most often encounter when preparing for retirement here—and how you can tackle them. But to truly understand how LGBTQ Americans disproportionately came to face many of these problems, like the lasting legacy of HIV/AIDS, you have to look backward, which we do in our companion piece here.

LGBT Americans Earn Less and Have Less Saved for Retirement

Heterosexual individuals make more on average than their LGBT counterparts. This means LGBT people have fewer means to achive major financial milestones, like retirement. This is most clearly seen when comparing gay men to straight men, who make 46% more—$56,966 vs. $83,469, respectively—according to data from Prudential. But lesbian women also trail straight women by 11%—$45,606 vs. $51,461, respectively.

Research on the transgender financial wellbeing is much sparser in traditional financial services surveys, but data from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey indicates trans folks are much more likely to be living in poverty compared to the general population: Transgender people are 275% more likely to report incomes of less than $10,000 compared to cisgender people.

These discrepancies show up clearly in retirement savings: Members of the LGBT community are slightly less likely than straight Americans to have an employer-sponsored retirement account like a 401(k)—35% vs. 40%, respectively—and are significantly less likely to have an individual retirement account (IRA)—18% vs. 30%, respectively.

Even when they do have retirement accounts, LGBT people lag heterosexuals 25% on average when it comes to retirement savings, according to an analysis of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

How Can LGBT Americans Address the Retirement Savings Gap?

First, start saving as much for retirement, as early as possible. “For the younger members of the LGBTQ community, time is on their side,” says Christopher Stroup, a wealth advisor at Abacus Wealth Partners. “If they can stash away even a small amount, that can turn into something substantial that they can use in retirement.”

If you are concerned about your ability to contribute even a small amount to retirement, look to your spending and start with what you can.

“In America we tend to be, ‘Hey, let’s just spend what we make,’” says Marta Shen, CFP, CFA, an advisor with Spring Street Financial. “As LGBT people, we need to be smarter than that. We don’t want to be the average heterosexual American, right?… So start where you’re at. If it’s 25 bucks a pay period, it’s a start.”

Because they’re more likely to make less money than their straight peers, it’s especially important for members of the LGBTQ community to take advantage of any employer 401(k) match available to them.

“If you’re making less on average and your employer is offering you 4% or 5%, you definitely need to take advantage of that to get some more money in your market towards your goals,” says Joey Stemmle, CFP, an advisor at Riverstone Wealth Advisory Group.

And for those who are approaching or are already in retirement?

Figuring out ways to cut costs, whether through downsizing or relocation, can help you make the most out of smaller retirement savings. You also may consider delaying retirement a few years to build up larger savings, take advantage of higher 401(k) contribution limits for those 50 and older, and benefit from additional compounding.

“If you retire at 60 versus 67, that’s another seven years of your money hopefully growing in the market,” says Stemmle.

Some people, though, may need to keep working in their retirement years to stay afloat, even with Social Security.

“A whole lot of LGBTQ people, especially people who are single—50% think they’re going to have to work well beyond retirement age. And that’s compared to 27% of single non-LGBT people,” says Jerry Chasen, director of Legacy Planning at SAGE.

LGBT Americans Are More Likely to Care for Family Members

While marriage equality and family planning are leading to a gradual evolution in LGBTQ family units, with legal spouses and children, the tide has not fully turned. Transamerica finds LGBT people are more likely to say they’re single than heterosexuals (40% vs. 22%) and are less likely to have financially dependent children (37% to 43%), a gap that grows when broken down more: Just 19% of gay men indicate they have financially dependent children, compared to 28% of lesbians.

“In this country, the default caregiver is our children,” says Chasen. And that duty may disproportionately fall to LGBTQ children. “The gay son or lesbian daughter are the ones that are looked at because well, you don’t have any kids—you should take care of mom or dad,” he says.

Data backs this up: LGBT workers are more likely to expect to provide support to aging parents in their own retirement (22%), compared to just 15% of heterosexuals, according to Transamerica.

This can have big costs for those who find themselves financially supporting their parents.

“A few sobering statistics from AARP on family members caring for loved ones later in life. 28% have stopped their own savings entirely. Twenty-two percent have used up personal short-term savings and 23% have taken on more debt during the period of care,” says Kyle Young, CFP, senior vice president of Morgan Stanley’s Schmitt-Young Group, one of the largest advisories serving the LGBTQ community with more than $600 million assets under management.

That’s why it’s important to get clear about your financial abilities and limitations, says Jim Marrocco, CFP, an advisor at Thinking Big Financial. “You could do a lot of harm to your own financial situation if you’re limitlessly supporting someone else.”

If you’re providing for an older loved one, you are going to need help, says Jennifer Hatch, CFP, president of Christopher Street Financial. But you do have options. “Medicaid and community services can help with the heavy lifting of care as well as the financial burden,” she says.

LGBTQ Elder Care in Retirement

After caring for others leading up to and during retirement, LGBTQ elders more often find themselves without the same kind of care they’ve provided. This may be because they don’t have kids, or their relationships with their families are strained.

“We’ve been in a situation oftentimes of being a caretaker, but that doesn’t mean that we will necessarily find somebody to do that for us,” says Chasen. “Many of us have what we would consider to be our families of choice. But those families are often the same age we are, and just around the time that we might need them, they might need us as well.”

To put that in context, 21% of LGBT elder adults provide care for friends compared to only 6% of heterosexual elders, according to data from SAGE.

Laura LaTourette, CFP, an advisor at Family Wealth Management Group, has noticed these “circles of care” in her own work, and notes that they often become challenging as more and more members become ill. To help avoid this, she, Young and Stemmle point to financial products like long-term care insurance, hybrid annuities and life insurance products that offer long-term care provisions, all of which can get pricey. They may even be unattainable if you are HIV-positive, as some in the LGBTQ community are. For that reason, Young emphasizes setting aside dedicated savings for future care.

Hefty health care savings or insurance policies that cover long-term care may be especially important for LGBTQ retirees for another reason: Maintaining more control over their late-in-life care to fend off discrimination.

In addition to elder homes largely being run by religious groups, “nearly half of LGBT elders who were in long-term care or had a loved one in long-term care experienced mistreatment, and 23% reported incidents of verbal or physical harassment from other residents based on real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity,” says Chasen.

To help combat this, SAGE has instituted a program called SAGE Care that has trained more than 100,000 professionals at 525 agencies in 48 states on cultural competence and working with members of the LGBTQ community, according to Chasen. In addition to looking into SAGE Care certified programs, LGBTQ elders should consider the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association’s database of LGBTQ-friendly doctors and care providers.

Changing LGBTQ Families and Retirement

Just as politics and technology have enabled better LGBTQ family planning and less discrimination, LBGT elder care in retirement may change over the coming decades. This, however, carries with it the possibility of additional financial hurdles.

“Before building in financing college savings, how will you pay for the upfront costs associated with having a child? There are costs that can easily top $150,000,” says Young.

These additional costs can include adoption, buying sperm or eggs, or paying for a surrogate, and additional family planning costs often occur during people’s prime earning years, which are key for compounding your retirement savings.

For example, paying $150,000 for family planning at age 35 could be equivalent to having $1.6 million in retirement savings at 65, assuming an 8% rate of investment return.

Family planning decisions shouldn’t depend entirely on your finances. But when considering your many financial priorities, including retirement savings, paying off student loan debt, saving for a home down payment and trying to plan for a family, Stroup emphasizes that priorities and values will be key.

“I wouldn’t suggest someone sacrifice their retirement in order to maybe have children first because in the long run, being unprepared for retirement at an elderly age can be a real disadvantage,” says Stroup.

LGBT Americans Are Less Financially Confident

Despite recent efforts by major financial institutions, LGBT Americans are still underserved in the financial industry. This can have big implications for financial planning, successful retirement planning and end-of-life planning.

Those in the LGBT community own fewer financial products than the general population and are less likely to work with a financial advisor, despite feeling like they need more information to make financial decisions, according to Prudential. All of this may contribute to LGBT Americans feeling more pessimistic about their financial futures.

That sentiment may also in part stem from decades of societal neglect and feelings in the LGBTQ community that they could not bring their whole selves to interactions with financial advisors. “I was kind of reluctant to talk about being gay at work or in my finances. It just was never part of the conversation,” says Miller.

That’s an important conversation to have, though, says LaTourette. “With a gay couple, if they are not out to their planner, then it’s half a conversation,” she says. Without information on a person’s spouse or partner, you may not be able to get a full picture of someone’s financial resources.

To help remedy this gap in knowledge and connection with the LGBTQ Americans, most major financial firms have begun conducting research on the LGBTQ community to provide advisors with better insight into how they can serve LGBTQ clients.

And the LGBTQ community itself is working to forge connections between its members and the financial services industry. SAGE recently launched SAGECents, a digital financial wellness platform that assesses users’ financial lives with inclusive language and offers resources designed for the LGBTQ community. In addition to providing education, it can also pair users with LGBTQ-friendly financial advisors.

Miller recently worked with a financial advisor recommended to him through SAGECents. “It was freeing knowing that they knew I was gay and they were coming at [my finances] with that knowledge,” he says.

Outside of SAGECents, those looking for LGBTQ and LGBTQ-friendly financial planners can look toward PridePlanners, a group of LGBTQ and LGBTQ-allied financial planners in the Financial Planning Association (FPA); members listed on the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce; and word-of-mouth referrals from people they know within the LGBTQ community.

You can help make your investments and banking more LGBTQ friendly using our guides here and here.