Samantha Flores is 84 years old, she is transsexual and when she looks into a camera she transforms into a diva. He behaves with ease, aware of having many admirers on the other side of the lens. She achieved this status through a lot of struggle, wrestling with a cruel reality. A fighter for the rights of HIV patients, who is once again gaining recognition. In her old and modest apartment, she celebrates in disbelief the success of her most recent battle: building a hostel for LGBT seniors in Mexico City. “Senior heterosexuals are forgotten, abandoned, set aside, segregated. But LGBT seniors are simply invisible. Nobody knows we exist. We want to satisfy the most basic of needs: to end loneliness and be able to come together as a big family”, says Samantha, who was honored in Madrid during the Gay Pride events. 80 years of strength - this is the title given by Out magazine to the profile it published about Samantha, which she used to raise 400.000 pesos (around 76 thousand reais) through crowdfunding. With this money, she will open an LGBT community center, which, over time, she intends to transform into a hostel. It is his fight for the rights of a community that the collective imagination associates with youth and parties, but which, when old age arrives, “goes back into the closet to continue living in society”. “We are not married nor do we have children or a family.” We are alone. We need to form a group of elderly people to meet our needs for affection”, explains Samantha. Daughter of a worker at the Moctezuma beer factory in Veracruz, Samantha was born in 1932 in Orizaba, a town in that state, where, 84 years later, reports of crimes committed against the LGBT community continue to be registered. “You already know what it’s like: small town, big hell”, he says. In 1957, after passing through Los Angeles thanks to the sale of a car she had won in a raffle, Samantha arrived in Mexico City. He settled in a city where being gay represented a scar and where the word homosexual was never uttered. “I prefer a criminal son to a queer son”, was what they said, according to Samantha, at that time. Sixty years later, she fights for the rights of a generation that was criminalized in its youth and forgotten in its old age. Contemporaries of Samantha's struggle who, in countless cases, had to break up with their families after exposing their identity. It was a time when coming out of the closet meant facing rejection and becoming part of the sordid side of society. More than fifty years later, those stigmatized young people face old age having to choose between loneliness and returning to homes where prejudices remain in vogue. A generation whose battle provided a mountain of new rights for the LGBT community, but which still has not completely transformed their lives. Now, they are looking to “shine again” thanks to this community center that Samantha plans to open with the support of the Laetus Vitae foundation (joyful life in Latin). “It will be a place for daytime coexistence where we will not solve any health problems. It's about bringing LGBT seniors together to combat our loneliness. But if someone says they have a close friend who isn't gay but wants to go there too, that would be very welcome. Or if someone else has a very macho friend with whom he drinks on the weekends and who says 'I want to see what those deer are doing all together', we will also open the doors to him. We have been rejected for so many years, it is not now that we will start to discriminate”, he says. Samantha looks back and remembers the years of contempt and repression. “Today, she feels like she’s “in a Walt Disney movie.” “We can now get married, adopt, inherit from our spouse…”. Rights gained, such as being able to register with her female name, which Samantha did not exercise until two years ago, when a friend paid her the approximately 30.000 pesos (approximately 5.700 reais) necessary to carry out all the formal procedures. “If I had money, I would have traveled to Europe”, admits Samantha, who now dreams of the idea of this senior living center spreading throughout the world. “Who knows, within 10 or 15 years it will reach other states, even if I’m no longer here to see it.”
