"Just Say It!" - From Mayo Clinic Conference 2023

 

“I was blind for a long time to the fact that I'm a trifecta, as my friend Pamela puts it, that I have all these categories that make me the perfect advocate for a lot of different groups. I can talk about being gay. I can talk about being a veteran. I can talk about being Latino (even if I can't speak Spanish). But from very early on—being a military brat in the mid to late sixties and seventies on white military bases that were very heterosexual—I've lived in a world where I just naturally conformed. So that's just been part of my personality. But when it comes to dementia research, I'm like, “Well, wait a minute, where are the people of color? Where is the L-G-B-T-Q community? Why aren't we doing more? What are they going through? What happens when a trans person who has dementia suddenly relives a moment 20 years before they changed, gets out of bed and looks in a mirror and sees someone else? What happens to that person who is in trauma?” That's horrific. And so we do need to talk about that, especially when it comes to research, especially when it comes to awareness. Why aren't we bringing it up? Why aren't we talking about it? Why do I sit on certain advisory boards and listen to a bunch of researchers suggest research goals for the next 10 years, and all I hear is about how we should test white Anglo-Saxon Americans for dementia and use them in research? And we didn't talk about minorities. They bluntly said L-G-B-T-Q is too small a community to make a research project with for the next 10 years. Maybe later down the road, they said. That's offensive. And we need to do better than that, especially right now when we are talking about a country that's trying to squeeze us back to a time when we were supposed to be ashamed of what we were and hide what we were and return to the closet. We can’t go backward.”