COLOGNE — The rainbow flag in front of the retirement home has already been stolen twice.
But the flags that are inside, on the corner table of the cafeteria, are safe. Once a month, employees put them up for the “Queer Seniors’ Evening”. At the regular meeting, the participants talk in small groups about what they deem important: how do they feel as queer people in the home? What do they need? There is a cross hanging on one wall of the cafeteria, and there is a chapel in the room next door: believe it or not, St. Maternus is a Catholic retirement home. How does it all work?
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Helmut Baumeister, one of the 117 residents, regularly attends both the church service and the regular meeting with his peers. The 81-year-old is bisexual. He says he never used to talk about it. His family didn’t know that he was attracted to men as well as women.
He now talks about his sexual orientation openly, for example with gay nurses and employees in the home. In this text, however, he prefers his name to be changed.
Rainbow flag outside church tower
Baumeister has been living in the Cologne Caritas retirement home for four years. He immediately liked the bright room with a view of the greenery. There is a photo of his parents on a dresser, and a statue of the Virgin Mary with wings, which he was given as a gift by a nun, standing guard on a small table. He often takes the Virgin Mary with him when he spends time outside the home. She is supposed to protect him.
It’s good that things have become more relaxed.
When he moved in, Baumeister did not know that St. Maternus would become part of a pilot project to care for queer people. The Caritas Association for the City of Cologne decided to do this in 2022. “It’s good that things have become more relaxed and that you can talk about it openly,” says Baumeister. For most residents, the project makes no big difference — apart from the rainbow flag outside the church tower. But for those it is aimed at, it is intended to make life in the retirement home more pleasant: people like Baumeister who do not conform to what is considered the norm in society because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
The city of Cologne provided the impetus. It had seen a growing need for care places for queer people and sought dialogue with the facilities, says Ulrich Schwarz, who, as head of care in the Cologne Caritas Association, is in charge of several retirement homes. “We said: we see it the same way, we have to support it.” In two homes, including St. Maternus, he and like-minded people wrote a guide for the new concept. The working group set up regular meetings in both homes and launched other specially-tailored offers, such as pastoral care that takes the needs of queer people into account and workshops for the staff to promote sensitive care.
Where such knowledge is lacking, queer people often have a hard time, says Andreas Heek, who coordinates the pastoral care centers for queers in the German dioceses. “Older queer people in particular have suffered from marginalization and sometimes criminalization in the past.” Paragraph 175 of the penal code, which dates back to the German Empire, criminalized homosexuality between men. Although it was softened in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not completely abolished until 1994. When HIV spread in the 1980s, gay men in particular faced additional stigmatization in addition to a lot of fear and suffering. Women also experienced discrimination, with courts depriving lesbian mothers of custody of their children for a long time. Many older people have had a difficult journey to be able to live their identity openly today. When they enter the new environment of a retirement home, they may feel like they have to start all over again, that they are on their own, says Heek. “That’s why a special focus on the facilities is enormously helpful.”
Free, at last
There are currently two openly queer residents living in St. Maternus. Not all of them want to talk about their orientation. “For some, it is important to maintain the facade that they have carried with them their entire lives,” says nursing manager Ulrich Schwarz. “And that must of course be respected. Others, on the other hand, are grateful that they can live as openly as they did at home. And that is what we want to support with our concept.”
Many residents suffer from dementia. For them, the past is often more present than the present. For example, a simple hug in the presence of others can trigger anxiety because the person feels transported back to a time when they would only have done such things in secret.
The association sometimes feels rejection: the stolen flags, the occasional hate comments on Facebook.
In the next few years, Schwarz wants to expand the project to all seven Caritas senior citizens’ homes in Cologne. So far, there has been no negative feedback from church circles. But the association does sometimes feel rejection: the stolen flags in front of the home or hate comments on Facebook when it publishes a job advertisement with a rainbow flag.
Senior homes run by other, non-Catholic organizations are already placing a focus on caring for queer people. The Workers’ Welfare Association, for example, started a model project in six homes in 2019. From this, it developed a practical manual that other homes could use. But it is difficult to quantify how many of the approximately 16,000 nursing homes across Germany are already looking at the issue. The Berlin Gay Counseling Service awards a quality seal called “Lebensort Vielfalt”. To do this, facilities must meet certain criteria, including training half of their staff in queer-sensitive care. Only 20 senior homes and care services have received the seal so far. The need is great; after all, according to estimates by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Social Affairs, up to 1.8 million queer people over the age of 60 live in Germany.
“I can’t imagine my life without the Church”
Caritas operates more than 3,000 senior citizens’ homes nationwide, but the Cologne pilot project is unique among them. Queer pastoral care coordinator Andreas Heek suspects that many facility managers have simply not come up with the idea of specializing in this target group. And that is no coincidence: “We have a history of making homosexuality taboo in the Catholic Church,” says Heek. “There are still bishops who say: we are a rural diocese, homosexuality does not occur here. What you do not want to see does not exist — this is more widespread in the Catholic Church than in other social and societal contexts.”
At the same time, various groups within the church are working to gain more visibility. In 2022, more than a hundred people working in the Catholic Church in Germany publicly acknowledged that they were queer with the “Out in Church” campaign. In various cities, there are communities founded by queer believers, some for more than 20 years. And when the conservative Cologne Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki reprimanded a priest last year for blessing same-sex couples, priests held a public blessing service in front of the cathedral in protest. The Vatican later allowed such blessings under certain conditions.
Baumeister sees no contradiction in being Christian and queer.
Baumeister sees no contradiction in being Christian and queer. “I can’t imagine my life without the church,” he says. He is actually Protestant, but he prefers to attend Catholic masses, which are more solemn. “Many people don’t think much of the church and leave,” he says. “But I think you have to have something in life that gives you stability. For me, it’s the church.”
For his carer Meik Schmitz, the relationship with the church is more problematic. The 29-year-old trainee used to be an altar boy and attended a Catholic school. But as a gay teenager, he distanced himself from the church. “I’m more open now because the church has also become more open on the subject,” he says. “But we’re not yet at the point where I would say I feel accepted. We still have a lot of work to do about that.”
Crying over rainbow flags
Schmitz is nevertheless happy to work in the Caritas home. His youth in a rural homophobic environment was difficult. His brother still asks why Schmitz “became like that”, i.e. gay. After a few stops, he came to Cologne, began an apprenticeship at St. Maternus — and found himself in a nursing ward where most of his colleagues identified as queer. “It’s just really nice,” he says. “You don’t feel lonely in the house.” It’s a pleasant environment not only for the seniors, but also for queer carers like him.
Meik is often moved by the thought that many residents have lost friends to AIDS.
Many residents are more open than he thought. An elderly lady surprisingly asked him if he was also “from the other side”. Another wanted to know several times when he would find a woman. At some point he answered cautiously: no one would come — if so, it would be a man. “Then she said: ‘It doesn’t matter, as long as you love each other.’ That was nice to hear.”
Schmitz took part in a training course through the pilot project. It was about how to deal with residents with different orientations and identities, and how to react sensitively when someone opens up. It often takes a while for that to happen, says Schmitz. When he talks to older queers, he is often moved by the thought that many residents have lost friends to AIDS. “Even at my age, I often feel lonely with this. When I imagine how they must feel — I can’t get it out of my head.” One moment in particular has stuck in his mind: in the summer, a group from the Caritas homes took part in Christopher Street Day, the queer parade that goes through Cologne’s city center every year. When the seniors walked past with rainbow flags, an older spectator cried.
A broad smile
Baumeister was also at the parade, for the second time. To make it less strenuous, he was allowed to sit in a rickshaw, with the colorful flag over his knees. The 81-year-old talks about it with a broad smile on his face: that’s the face he makes when he is content. For example, when he says that he will watch football in the evening — two small bottles of Kölsch beer are already waiting in the basket of his walker. And when he talks about his first intimate encounter with a man. When he was in his mid-20s, a man approached him in a bar while on vacation in Munich. He said he accepted the offer and it was nice.
But he was then married to a woman. “With her, it was love at first sight.” Later she got breast cancer, a difficult time. Eight years after the wedding, she died. That was in the 1980s. The gay movement had gained momentum and Baumeister began to meet men more often. But he was never one for casual encounters, and he still isn’t.
In the afternoon, Baumeister sits in the back row at the service in the home’s chapel. Even after the mass, he is still happy about the last piece on the organ: Great God, we praise you. Baumeister knows that he wants to be buried in a Catholic way and that this song will be played. But he doesn’t want to think about that yet. He wants to have a few more good years — in which he can be himself freely.
