This Impetus to do the Right Thing
"Seeing all kinds of people… people who were experiencing human anguish and confusion and hurt. They had the courage to look at what and where they wanted to be in their lives. I help shepherd them where they want to grow to their best self." – Freeman T. Freeman
Freeman Thomas Freeman was 75 years old and retired when he moved to Rhode Island as an LGBTQ elder with his husband in 2014. To build connections with the LBGTQ community in a new area and to face new challenges for him and his community, Freeman decided to volunteer at SAGE-RI (Service and Advocacy for Gay Elders RI), now known as Pride in Aging RI. He joined others to advocate, teach about and support the needs and concerns of LGBTQ elders aging alone.
Born in Dover, Delaware, in 1939, Freeman was one of 16 living children. After graduating from the University of Delaware, he moved to Rochester, New York, where he met his husband. Together, they parented his nephew Charles from the age of five through adulthood. As he was raised in a segregated town, Freeman found it difficult raising an African-American child within an interracial gay relationship throughout the 1970s in upstate New York.
His advocacy work began at The MOCHA (Men of Color Health Awareness) Center and AIDS Rochester (the AIDS Center at The University of Rochester Medical Center) as a social worker and volunteer for the Buddies Program. In 1988, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) selected The University of Rochester Medical Center as one of the first research sites in the United States to conduct HIV vaccine studies. Freeman volunteered to be a trial patient for the vaccine, and what began as a four-year commitment to regular blood work and interviews turned into a decade-long experiment.
According to Freeman, “When I talked to my Black friends, they were horrified that I was doing this given the history of how the medical community had treated Black people in the past,” but he felt difficult times called for difficult decisions. Still, when he tried to recruit volunteers from the Black community, he would “be thrown out and called all kinds of names and [experienced] abusive behaviors because it was just…such strong condemnation of my participation in… these kinds of vaccine trials.” When a local paper in Rochester interviewed Freeman about his involvement in the trials, he lost friends, associates, and clients.
After moving to RI and becoming a volunteer at Pride in Aging RI, Freeman’s offerings included building programs, joining the board, and helping to organize a conference. LGBTQ elders experience unique needs and issues; according to Freeman, “LGBTQ elders have been separated from their families or have no children and so as we get older, what do we do about long term care?” To address this, Freeman and his colleagues “asked gay elders to look at conversations about funeral arrangements, about social isolation, about who they considered as family, about abusive behaviors that they were enduring from friends and other people.” Pride in Aging RI also hosted training sessions for students in the medical field on how to treat gay elders, as LGBTQ elders still find it difficult to navigate the medical sector and interact with staff.
Since moving to Rhode Island, Freeman has become an invaluable advocate for the community of LGBTQ elders, another chapter in a life of service to others: “I am honored and thankful [for] whatever this thing in the universe that gave me this impetus and this wanting to be helpful to other people.”
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