‘Take Care of Your Own, As Long As You Can’

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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.” 

In 2015, McAulay and her wife Margaret Roesch began seriously developing plans for Village Hearth, a sprawling fifteen-acre property in Durham, North Carolina, where lush gardens and 28 accessible, pastel cottages are now home to more than three dozen older LGBTQ adults and allies, some of whom The Flytrap met during a recent visit. Gathered in Village Hearth’s common house for coffee and cake, residents shared their many reasons for choosing cohousing, the challenges of close quarters and cooperative self-governance, and the model that Village Hearth can provide to other queer and trans people who want to support each other through the aging process.

“This isn’t for everyone,” McAulay laughed. “You have to be able to really listen. It can’t just be, ‘I’ve got this great idea to fix this problem and I’m going to do it.’ You have to be able to listen to everyone’s input, and adjust—it’s the only way to live in cohousing and it’s best for creating community.” 

Searching for Home 

By 2030, there will be 7 million LGBTQ adults aged 65 or older in the United States. While aging brings similar concerns, issues, and challenges across demographics, LGBTQ elders are twice as likely as the general population to live alone and experience social isolation. At the same time, one of the most pressing and significant concerns for LGBTQ elders is safe, affordable housing, according to SAGE, a national organization that offers supportive services and resources to older LGBTQ people and their caregivers.

A 2014 report from the Equal Rights Center found that 48% of older same-sex couples applying for elder housing were subjected to discrimination, putting these elders at even greater risk for chronic health problems, social isolation, poverty, and premature mortality.

While Village Hearth does not offer home healthcare, a major selling point for residents is the ability to live in close proximity to other LGBTQ elders and the unique sense of safety and security that is derived from being a part of an intentional community. 

Bridgit, who is only using her first name for this reporting, said that like McAulay, she, and her friends floated around different ideas about how they could take care of each other as elders. Maybe they’d buy a plot of land where each had their own tiny home and in the middle, there would be “a come together place.”

“Not everyone has a great coming out experience and they lose family and friends,” said Bridgit, explaining that she and her wife came to Village Hearth from Texas. “The way things were going, we were talking about going back in the closet. Obviously, we didn’t want to do that. It takes a long time to get to a place where you are comfortable with who you are, and you don’t want to have to go backwards.” 

Bridgit and other Village Hearth residents who spoke to The Flytrap specifically sought out LGBTQ cohousing as they considered the realities of aging where they previously lived, often states where discrimination and anti-LGBTQ laws were ramping up thanks to regressive governors and the wide ranging effects of the Trump administration. 

“We were looking for safety,” Bridgit said. “We wanted out of Texas before things got worse, and we were looking for community. We considered other options, including a cohousing community in New Mexico, but this was the only LGBTQ one there was and ultimately, North Carolina was the right decision for us.”

Some, like Tami and Patricia, a married couple who are only using their first names, did not expect to find the nation’s first LGBTQ cohousing community in their backyard. 

The couple previously lived just a short drive away in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, where they experienced their fair share of homophobia over the years. They learned of Village Hearth before construction even began and they attended a few meetings with the architect on the project.

Patricia was in her late 30s when she and a group of friends first had their own discussion about the possibility of living together as elders. This was around the start of the period she calls her “after life.” In her “before life,” she dated men exclusively until the age of 34. 

“I still remember a group of us sitting around and coming up with the concept on a yellow legal pad,” Patricia said. “It was all drawn up as a big circle, parking was outside, and it was called: Last Lick’s Lesbian Home.” 

Admittedly, the proposed name of the community doesn’t quite convey the seriousness with which Patricia considered the plan. She hung onto the paper for years, hoping to one day turn it into something tangible. She finally threw the paper away the day she and Tami moved into Village Hearth, though their decision to invest in cohousing wasn’t entirely supported. 

Back in 2016, when Village Hearth was still in the planning stages, Patricia and Tami consulted their attorney about the pros and cons of investing nearly half a million dollars into a cohousing community. He sternly advised against it. 

“He told us not to do it; that it was too much of a financial risk and 70% of these kinds of projects fail. So, we paid him for his advice, and the next day we paid to join Village Hearth and break ground in Durham,” Patricia said, a twinkle in her eye.    

It’s not entirely shocking that the country’s first LGBTQ cohousing community is in Durham, a singular city in the American South. 

Known to many outsiders as a corner of the Research Triangle because of the many technology companies and scholarly institutions in the area, Durham’s history as a stronghold for Black organizing and resistance positions the city as a hub for radical organizing work focused on everything from racial and economic justice, to migrant rights, workers rights, and Palestinian liberation. Durham is also one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., which also means it’s one of the most gentrified—a place where Black mothers experience eviction at higher rates than any other demographic.

McAulay acknowledged the lack of BIPOC Village Hearth residents, honestly discussing how prohibitive the price of homes can be. (The cost of a small, one-bedroom and one-bathroom cottage on the property is $339,000, though residents of the community equally own the 2,500+ square foot common house that is equipped with a gourmet kitchen, exercise room, laundry, and a guest suite available free of charge.) 

More broadly, actually getting a cohousing community off the ground can feel like a bit of a miracle, given the amount of visioning, organizing, resources, and work it requires.  

For Village Hearth, McAulay and her wife considered 250 different sites in Durham alone, and the couple walked the land of 75 of these properties. Going into the project, McAulay said that she and her wife “didn’t know anything;” they had “zero experience” tackling a development project.     

“The process is long and arduous—and that’s if you’re lucky enough to have access to resources to even consider it,” McAulay said. “It’s a very risky process. Contracts are drawn up, tens of thousands of dollars are invested by multiple people. We could have failed. At times we really felt in over our heads, especially when it came to permits and having to deal with officials who didn’t take two fat, older lesbians seriously. I don’t think we could have done it without our development consultant.”

Developing the physical space for a cohousing community certainly has its challenges, but so too does actually living with others in a cohousing community that depends on shared values, mutual respect, open communication, and cooperative self-governance. 

As McAulay said: It’s not for everyone. 

The Outside World   

“I would say that shared governance and a participatory process aren’t just common elements in cohousing; they are required elements,” emphasized Trish Becker, the executive director of the Cohousing Association of the United States (CohoUS). 

Considered a leading authority and a primary resource, the nonprofit provides education, directories, guides, and even conferences to those considering or already living an interdependent, cohousing community life. McAulay told The Flytrap that CohoUS was “indispensable” when shaping the policies and community agreements that now structure life at Village Hearth. 

In cohousing, there’s not a property manager that’s making decisions for the community; it’s the community itself that must engage in consensus decision making—an approach that requires structure in order for residents to actually come to agreements. 

“To govern themselves, cohousing communities use a variety of models,” Becker explained. “There’s consensus, modified consensus, or sociocracy. Whatever it is, there has to be a governance structure because if there isn’t, it’s not really cohousing.”

Living in a cohousing community actually requires an extraordinary amount of communication, and a great deal of teamwork. Residents in a community often work together to develop policies around, well, everything—from how they will engage in decision making and conflict resolution, to how committees are formed and common meals and finances are organized. For newly formed cohousing communities in search of policy guidance, CohoUS has a public database of policies gathered from cohousing communities nationwide.

Becker said it’s her firm belief that cohousing has wisdom to offer any type of neighborhood, organization, or community where “humans have to co-exist,” mostly because cohousing provides a framework for “dialoguing across differences” and “working through conflict.” 

“That benefits everyone, but certainly living in this way is not for everyone,” Becker said. “There are people who want more privacy, or who don’t value having to communicate this much or share responsibilities with a larger community. That’s fine, but I also think there are a lot of misconceptions about cohousing.” 

One common misconception is that there isn’t much privacy in cohousing communities. In reality, each member has their own home and they can choose if and when they engage. At Village Hearth, for example, if a member feels like connecting, they can walk out their front door and go to the common house or sit with others in a courtyard or shared garden. 

“Cohousing provides a nice structure for social engagement that can be especially great for older folks, and across the board, it can be really empowering to shape a community from the ground up,” Becker said. “But if you crave a life where you don't have to put in this labor, then cohousing isn’t the model for you because it does take work. It takes investment; it does require learning to talk things out, asking for help when you need it, and offering help when you can.” 

As idyllic as Village Hearth sounds, the community is not without its challenges. Communication breakdowns and avoidant personality types are hard to overcome in a cohousing community, and some don’t realize until it’s too late that they actually don’t want to spend their golden years abiding by community policies, for example, or signing up for committees responsible for cooking a weekly shared meal, cleaning the kitchen, or tackling projects in shared outdoor spaces. Over the years, there have been residents who uprooted their lives to join Village Hearth, only to move out not long after. 

“The best thing about cohousing is the people, and the worst thing about cohousing is the people,” said Patricia, noting that all the “baggage and horrible shit” that exists in the outside world inevitably makes its way into cohousing. “The relationships you’re building can make you feel like you’re flying a hundred miles an hour, or you’re down in the mud. Living this way forces you to become a person that can just go up to another person and straighten things out.” 

This did not come naturally to Patricia, who said that prior to life at Village Hearth, she was like “an ostrich” who buried her head in the sand to avoid problems or otherwise wait for issues to “magically resolve.” But living in a small community means that a tiny misunderstanding can spiral out of control and affect everyone. 

“Believe it or not, over time, it’s one of the things that really made me love this place more. You have to talk; you have to work through your issues—and you are better for it. In cohousing, every voice counts,” Patricia said.

Cohousing’s structure and governance aims to ensure that day-to-day life in the community runs smoothly and efficiently, but this shared labor also tends to deepen members’ relationships and give them a stronger sense of safety. A cohousing community like Village Hearth that’s located in a progressive city lends to the feeling that you’re living “in a bubble,” said Bridgit, making it especially jarring when that bubble bursts. 

On the night of the 2024 election, the members of Village Hearth had a bonfire. Few paid close attention to the news. Around Durham, there were very few signs of Trump support, which only reinforced their feeling that he would be easily defeated. While Durham County and its surrounding precincts did indeed reject Trump, there was another reality beyond the city’s borders, and voters across broader North Carolina overwhelmingly favored Trump.

“The next day was horrible, and a reminder that there’s a world outside our little bubble,” Bridgit said. “At the same time, it felt great to be here because you didn’t have to say anything, you didn’t have to explain what this would mean for people. You could just give someone a look and they’d hug you. It felt good to be in community, but the grief is still really heavy.”

As of this year, there are more than 850 bills aimed at LGBTQ communities, the vast majority singling out trans people. “What we are witnessing now is not a legislative trend,” TruthOut reported. “[I]t’s a coordinated nationwide crusade.” Beginning his first day in office and continuing each month since, Trump has also shat out a series of executive orders strengthening every apparatus imaginable to carry out state violence against marginalized people and further deplete the Earth’s resources. A particular fixation of the administration is LGBTQ people and trans people in particular, with many of Trump’s actions aimed at limiting gender affirming care. 

LGBTQ young people in particular are navigating a harsh reality, often in isolation and without a soft place like Village Hearth to land. Statistics tell us that some LGBTQ kids will never reach retirement age or have the resources to consider a cohousing community. It took a lot for McAulay and her fellow LGBTQ cohousing residents to get here, and as we parted ways, they talked about not taking it for granted. 

Patricia said that living in a community of any kind requires two things that seem in opposition to each other. 

“Strength and vulnerability,” she said. “These are the things that get you through.” 

This piece was edited by Chrissy Stroop and copy edited by Nicole Froio.