TORONTO – Cuban-Canadian director Rodrigo Barriuso says he decided years ago he needed to draw attention to the difficulties some LGBTQ+ residents face as they enter long-term care homes, including examples he found “devastating and enraging.”
He was seeing a number of media reports abroad about cases of long-term care homes that weren’t equipped to provide identity-affirming care to residents.
“As a result, they were returning to the proverbial closet because the discrimination that they were facing in these place(s) was so rampant that they would rather live in the closet than subject themselves to it,” said Rodrigo, whose film “Neverman” played at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The generation of the LGBTQ+ community that fought for gay and transgender rights is now aging, with some developing dementia and ending up “sharing a living facility with the bullies who — news flash — also age,” said the Toronto-based director.
In “Neverman,” which is also a finalist for the $25,000 Windsor International Film Festival prize, the fictional long-term care home’s staff try to strip transgender activist Lucia Neverman — played by Justin Vivian Bond — of her identity.
Lucia’s nurse, Eleanor — played by Québécois actor Marie-Josée Croze — makes escalating attempts to dissuade her from wearing makeup and to replace her dresses with masculine clothes.
Lucia faces these repeated aggressions while fearing losing herself to her progressing Alzheimer’s disease.
She expresses that fear early in the film when discussing her prognosis with her neurologist, saying with her characteristic acerbic wit that she’d “rather not moonwalk back into the closet” and mentally regress to her youth.
Although the film is a fictional account, it reflects real-life fears among the aging LGBTQ+ population, experts in dementia and those who work with the community say.
Allison Sekuler, chief scientist at Baycrest Academy for Research and Education who specializes in aging and brain health, said bias and misunderstanding continue to exist in long-term care, often when people haven’t had adequate training on how to provide gender-affirming care.
In Ontario, the office of the minister of long-term care says all homes are expected to meet a strict standard of care.
“This includes treating residents with courtesy and respect in a way that recognizes their dignity, worth, and individuality, regardless of, their race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status or disability,” communications director Mark Hensen wrote in an email on Friday.
The ministry said it has supported the development of resources by various agencies to support LGBTQ+ long-term care residents.
One is a guide called “Welcoming Trans and Gender-Diverse Older Adults to Long-Term Care,” which was just published in August.
Sekuler said although resources are available, the “gap” is whether or not individual care homes use them.
“The law says that trans residents’ gender identity has to be respected, but not everyone will necessarily have been trained in detail on how to do that,” she said.
Trans residents often have very specific needs, Sekuler said.
“If someone is trans and requires hormones, will they be getting the hormones that they need? Right? If they grow facial hair faster than they would like, and they’re identifying as a woman, will someone come to shave them, even though they might normally only do that for someone who identifies as a man?”
Sekuler said it’s also important for caregivers helping transgender residents with bathing and dressing not to make assumptions about “what bits” they have, because some people have surgeries while transitioning and some don’t.
Another upsetting possibility transgender people with dementia face is whether they will mentally regress to a point in their life before they transitioned.
“Sometimes when people have Alzheimer’s and related dementias, their memory shifts, the time that they’re living in can sort of shift,” Sekuler said.
Training staff and family members on how to deal with that regression isn’t widespread, she said, and needs to become part of mainstream training in both long-term care facilities and home care.
“It’s really about meeting the person in the place and time where they are then, and doing what you can to make them as happy and comfortable as you can in that moment.”
Staff turnover in long-term care can also be a difficult issue for LGBTQ+ residents, Sekuler said.
“If you have to keep constantly explaining, ‘this is my (same-sex) wife,’ or ‘I’m a trans woman’ or whatever, it’s too much work on the person to have to keep explaining that.”
Part of the solution should be “more care taken to have personal stories embedded in the care plans so that everybody who’s coming into contact with somebody living in long-term care knows that person’s history from the start,” Sekuler said.
It’s also important for that person’s chosen family to help them get comfortable in the facility and provide insights about who they are, she said.
Bond, who has been in films, TV and plays, but now focuses on live queer performance, returned to film to play Lucia Neverman.
“I thought that it was bringing up a subject that I would be happy to talk about,” she said.
When it comes to the fear of developing dementia and regressing to a place before she transitioned, Bond believes there’s no previous version of herself who would not welcome who she has become.
“I didn’t have the words for it, but I knew I was trans from the very beginning of my life,” she said.
“If I were to regress to childhood and look at the body that I have now, I would think that having prayed every night for the body I have now that my prayers had been answered.”
Bond had a late friend who lobbied for research-based protocols to provide affirmative care to trans people in the health-care system.
“In this particular instance there were no protocols in place for my character,” she said.
Bond said that type of training in long-term care would be “very helpful” — as long as the staff themselves are “caring, thoughtful people.”
“I do think that the people that want to do the right thing would love to be told what the right thing is so that they can do it,” she said.
But both Bond and Barriuso also think it’s important to establish spaces in long-term care specifically for LGBTQ+ residents.
As part of his research for the film, Barriuso volunteered and talked to staff and residents at the Rekai Centres’ Wellesley Central Place in Toronto, which has a designated “Rainbow Wing.”
Staff throughout the facility are trained in LGBTQ+ affirming care, said Barbara Michalik, executive director of community academic partnerships and programming at the Rekai Centres, in an interview.
Many take even more extensive training to become “champions,” wearing the rainbow symbol on their lanyards so LGBTQ+ residents know there is always a safe person to turn to.
Michalik hopes to see more long-term care homes create dedicated spaces where residents feel they can be comfortable as a community.
“They wanna walk inside of a place where they feel that it’s their culture. It’s their home.”
“Neverman” does not yet have a theatrical release date.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2026
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