The Audience Choice for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, "Gen Silent" will screen locally at 7 p.m. Dec. 7 at the Emagine Royal Oak. The film, by Stu Maddux ("Bob and Jack's 52-Year Adventure," "Trip to Hell and Back"), asks six LGBT seniors if they will hide their friends, their spouses and their entire lives in order to survive in the care system. Their surprising decisions are captured through intimate access to their day-to-day lives over the course of a year. It puts a face on what experts in the film call an epidemic: older LGBT people so afraid of discrimination by caregivers or bullying by other seniors that many simply go back into the closet.
Unlike any film before, "Gen Silent" startlingly discovers how oppression in the years before Stonewall now affects older LGBT people with fear and isolation.
A local group, the LGBT Older Adult Coalition, is sponsoring the event. Admission is free.
