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‘Take Care of Your Own, As Long As You Can’
For Pride month, The Flytrap visited Durham, North Carolina’s Village Hearth, the first LGBTQ cohousing community in the nation for people 55 and over.
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Credit: Rommy Torrico
It started with a dream: The Old Dykes Home.
Envisioned during beach trips with friends nearly 30 years ago, this is how Pat McAulay first thought of the concept that would become Village Hearth, the first LGBTQ cohousing community in the nation for people 55 and over.
“Any older lesbian you speak to has this dream of living together or living in close proximity and taking care of one another,” McAulay said. “Because people from our generation… come out of the closet and then have to go back in, in old age. That was the biggest fear, the treatment you’d get in a nursing home or some sort of a facility. And so that's where the idea came from: You take care of your own, as long as you can.”

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