Four years ago, during the height of the COVID pandemic, Billy Wiselogel answered his phone to take a call from Sue Fulcher. A volunteer with Little Brothers — Friends of the Elderly San Francisco, Fulcher was checking in to see how he was handling the disruptions brought on by the global health crisis.
Fulcher, 73, mentioned that one of the programs offered by the nonprofit senior services agency partnered older adults in San Francisco with visitors. Because of stay-at-home orders in place at the time, the hangouts were being conducted virtually, and Fulcher inquired if Wiselogel would be interested in being matched with someone.
"We had just a delightful chat," recalled Fulcher, a retired resident of the East Bay city of Pleasant Hill who had begun volunteering with the San Francisco-based agency just as the COVID lockdowns went into effect in March 2020.
Sensing an immediate rapport with Fulcher over the phone, Wiselogel asked if he could be matched with her. It was the start that summer of a friendship which has been going strong ever since, developed at first via phone calls up to three times a week then over monthly meals at a restaurant somewhere in the city and different events they will attend, often with Fulcher's husband, Bill, in tow, as he also has served as a volunteer with LBFE.
"She just kept on calling me. It was the very worst time, I was really sick," recalled Wiselogel, 72, who was recovering from having the then-novel coronavirus. "I realized I had a friend. I was so grateful, because I don't know anybody."
Fulcher told the B.A.R., "We laugh together," as for what has been a key ingredient to their forming a close bond.
Wiselogel, a gay resident of the city's Tenderloin neighborhood, had lost many of his friends during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Over the years, he found it difficult to make new ones, he told the Bay Area Reporter during an interview in October outside of an Asian restaurant at the Embarcadero Center downtown where he and Fulcher were having lunch during one of their routine get-togethers.
"I have a friend," said Wiselogel when asked what the biggest impact has been from meeting Fulcher. Had the two not become acquainted, "It'd be awful," Wiselogel said. "I would be lonely all the time."
Fulcher chimed in that she feels "very lucky to have met Billy through that very first phone call."
To which Wiselogel interjected, "Same here, I feel very lucky. They don't grow people like Sue on trees."
The nonprofit agency is looking for more volunteers like Fulcher to help provide services to LGBTQ seniors and other older adults in the city, especially during the upcoming holidays. It offers a variety of opportunities on Thanksgiving and during Christmas for those looking to volunteer over the coming weeks and, the agency hopes, throughout the rest of the calendar year.
In addition to its Visiting Volunteer Program, LBFE needs volunteers to offer its elderly clientele tech support, rides to medical treatments, or join them on walks in their neighborhood. They also need people willing to make visits on clients' birthdays who otherwise would spend the day alone.
Anyone interested in doing so can sign up online via a special form. Volunteers do need to be at least 18 years of age for the visiting programs, complete a background check, and attend a one-time orientation prior to participating.
On Thanksgiving Day, November 28, volunteers are needed to deliver meals and visit for an hour one of the more than 350 isolated older adults LBFE works with in San Francisco. People have until Monday, November 25, to sign up to volunteer on that Thursday.
"You can do as little as you want or as much as you want and will feel the same amount of self-satisfaction from knowing you did this little thing that is literally going to light this person's day up," said Shannon Kennedy, 55, who joined LBFE's board in 2021 and, since 2022, has served as its secretary.
The South of Market resident, who identifies as asexual but with romantic inklings, works as the director of client services at the BRIO Financial Group, which specializes in working with the LGBTQ community and individuals with a chosen family. She found LBFE searching for volunteer ideas for the firm and ended up signing up herself, first for its "Elf for an Elder" 2021 holiday gift initiative similar to Toys for Tots through which Kennedy bought and hand delivered presents to several seniors via the agency.
"That hooked me," recalled Kennedy, who then became a visiting volunteer like Fulcher.
She was matched with a woman who emigrated from Russia and is now 86 years old. They have celebrated birthdays together, attended jazz concerts, and see each other nearly every Saturday.
"I consider her now part of my family," said Kennedy, who never had grandparents she was close with as a child growing up in Pennsylvania. "For those of us who didn't have necessarily present or healthy older adults in our family lives, this has been an eye-opening and cathartic experience to me, to foster that bond in an organic and not obligatory way."
Kennedy, who first moved to San Francisco in 1995, told the B.A.R. that quite a number of the seniors LBFE works with are LGBTQ. They could use more volunteers from the LGBTQ community, she noted, as those signing up tend to skew female and younger.
"There is so much opportunity to really make a difference in someone's day-to-day. That is harder to come by in your usual working person's adult life," said Kennedy. "To just veer outside of your to-do list and do something that is selfless in a way that has great impact."
Especially during the holidays, providing companionship to an older adult, even briefly, "is absolutely critical," she said.
"The degree of social isolation in these older adults, whether they live in a more shared living facility or are independently living, is huge. Particularly with those who have mobility issues as well, where they literally cannot leave the home," said Kennedy. "I have had the benefit of just seeing the impact in the person with the multiple folks I have visited. It is supremely impactful."
Six-month commitment
For the visiting program, volunteers are asked to make a six-month commitment to start with. There is a current waiting list of more than 100 seniors, noted Kennedy, who added for those who are LGBTQ, the agency coordinates dedicated visits for Pride in June.
Any senior age 65 or older living in San Francisco (or age 60 and up if living with a disability in the city) can sign up for services with LBFE. The agency does ask seniors about their sexual orientation, LBFE Executive Director Cathy Michalec told the B.A.R. Of those matched with a visiting volunteer, 17.78% identify as gay or lesbian.
(The local chapter, which has an annual budget of $480,000, is part of a larger agency that began as a Catholic brotherhood in France but no longer has any religious affiliation. As it works with all seniors, the San Francisco-based organization prefers to go by its acronym and has pushed for a change to a more inclusive name that isn't so male-centric.)
As for its clientele, nearly 82% are heterosexual or straight; 10% are gay; 1.4% are lesbian, 1.4% are bisexual, less than 1% are asexual; and 4% didn't disclose their sexual orientation. The average age of its clients is 82.
"Absolutely, since I started nine years ago, we have more LGBT seniors coming in," said Michalec, 65, a straight ally who lives in Oakland with her husband.
Since arriving at LBFE in October 2015, Michalec has made it a point to let LGBTQ seniors know they are welcome at the agency. She noted they added a Pride flag to their brochure and to the back of clipboards used at events.
"We want people to know we are an ally. Other seniors talk to other seniors," she said of the importance of utilizing that word of mouth within the city's older LGBTQ community. "I think our programs are more visible."
Lost friends to AIDS
Many LGBTQ seniors lost their whole friends group to AIDS, like Wiselogel, said Michalec, or are of a generation of LGBTQ seniors who were ostracized by their biological families when they came out of the closet. Now dealing with isolation and loneliness, it can gravely impact their health, she stressed, leading to depression and higher risk for strokes, high blood pressure and heart attacks.
"The health effect is equivalent to 15 cigarettes a day for prolonged isolation. Can you imagine the health effects of that?" asked Michalec. "People don't think about it."
To meet its current demands for its visiting program, Michalec said they would welcome a pool of volunteers numbering 150 to 200. At the moment, there are 50.
"It would be nice not to have that worry then we can put volunteers on the waitlist instead of our older adults," said Michalec, especially during the upcoming holidays. "So many other social services agencies are closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas; we are not, we provide that service. Everyone wants that Hallmark Christmas, and our older adults don't get that."
Bonded over longtime city connections
Born in Montgomery, Alabama with a father in the U.S. Air Force, Wiselogel grew up a military brat with three siblings. His two sisters live in the Central Valley, while his older brother is in the Midwest; their parents are deceased.
At age 14, while living in San Jose, Wiselogel would hitchhike his way to San Francisco to hang out in the city and crash at the homes of his friends on weekends. He eventually met several sugar daddies, one of whom worked for a local concert promoter who would get him into shows for free.
"I was an experimental kid," recalled Wiselogel, who knew he was gay at the age of 5. "My parents had a second home on the Delta, a houseboat. They didn't know where I was half the time."
After high school, Wiselogel attended beauty school and worked as a hairdresser for two decades at a salon in Palo Alto. Eventually, he moved to San Francisco in the 1970s and has rented an apartment in the Tenderloin for the past three decades.
"Everybody was doing it with everybody else," recalled Wiselogel, noting that the weekly issues of the B.A.R. were "a lot thicker" back then.
Diagnosed with AIDS and unable to continue working, he quit his stylist job in the late 1990s. He qualified for housing subsidies for people living with HIV, which helped cover his then $300 monthly rent payments.
"I had a fabulous group of friends; we would get together on weekends. The Castro used to be a great place to have brunch," recalled Wiselogel. "In the late 1980s, early 1990s, I lost a lot of people."
Now, he gets to share the stories of those days and the people he ran around with back then with Fulcher.
"We both have open minds," said Wiselogel when asked why the two click as friends. "There is nothing I can tell her that would offend her."
Having grown up in San Francisco in the Cow Hollow neighborhood, Fulcher was well aware of the city's then-blossoming LGBTQ community. She, too, gets to reminisce about her experiences in the city with Wiselogel when they meet up.
"We have a lot in common because we both love San Francisco," she said. "We will talk about food. We have a width breadth of things to chat about."
Very early on Wiselogel disclosed he is gay to Fulcher, and the two quickly established a close bond, she recalled. She also lost friends and colleagues to the AIDS epidemic.
"I think he was very comfortable talking with me. I was very open in receipt of that," said Fulcher, who worked in the city in advertising and human resources. "He shared so many stories of, you know, San Francisco in the seventies. The parties, the get-togethers, just that whole era. I was there during all of that."
LBFE works with its counterpart agency On Lok, which also provides services to seniors. One of On Lok's other partner nonprofits is Openhouse, the LGBTQ-seniors focused service provider, and runs a day program for out older adults at its campus on Laguna Street off upper Market Street. For the past year, Wiselogel has been enrolled in it and has begun to meet other LGBTQ seniors via it.
"They kind of set you up so you have a life," he said.
It came about because Fulcher and Wiselogel had played bingo at a party they attended together, and he later expressed interest in playing it more often. Fulcher got a suggestion from LBFE to check out On Lok's website.
"Billy had so much fun playing bingo. A couple weeks later he said he would love to go to a place to play bingo," recalled Fulcher.
Volunteering with LBFE "is a unique opportunity," said Fulcher, to ensure that seniors who may have lost their family, or whose relatives don't live in the Bay Area, aren't alone or feel isolated.
"I think Little Brothers does incredible work. There are so many people in this city who are lonely. They do so much to help in that regard," Fulcher said of the nonprofit. "I would encourage anyone looking for a volunteer opportunity to talk to Little Brothers. Once established, it is so rewarding."
To learn more about LBFE and the programs it offers and needs volunteers for, visit its website. For questions call the LBFE office at (415) 771-7957.
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