Christian Halvorsen has barely described one ailment before he is on to talking about the next. He has diabetes, retinopathy and neuropathy. He has also had cataracts removed and had an angioplasty. He takes 22 pills every morning and a total of 37 every day.
The neuropathy, a nerve-damage condition, took hold of his left foot in 2008. In 2011, that foot had to be amputated to save his life.
And so, a man who spent his entire life on his feet is re-learning a few things as he enters his senior years.
"I'm just falling apart," he said, laughing. "I used to be this trim, sexy dude."
Halvorsen is a regular at the Center on Halsted's senior lunch program. At 60, he is one of the younger faces in the crowd. His regular table of friends is made up of both men and women, which makes them a little unusual, according to Halvorsen. They're his kind of people.
"Nobody's got an attitude," he said. "Nobody thinks they're better than anyone else."
Perhaps more than that, the Center's senior program gives him access to a community.
"It's interaction versus being alone," he said.
Halvorsen never had a long-term partner. The New York native married his job young, and he worked until the 12-hour days cost him his health.
He made his living as a restaurant manager working in cities throughout the country, including Chicago, where he first came out as gay. He worked so much he seldom had time for other things.
By 2008, the 10-12 hours Halvorsen spent on his feet each day had started to take a serious toll on his body.
"I would sit down and lock up, and I could barely get up," he said.
One by one, his toes started to darken, a sign of gangrene. The neuropathy took them one at a time, and it set off a chain reaction of other health issues.
Last year Halvorsen moved back to Chicago to retire, and he lost his foot.
Asked if he regrets the toll his work took on his body and his personal life, Halvorsen shrugs.
"You can't have regrets because you can't do it over again," he said. Plus, he is still relatively young, a fact he is reminded of by his 85 year-old mother.
Halvorsen considers himself an outlier, a man of his generation who, despite a laundry list of maladies, never contracted HIV. But that fact also means he is aging with fewer peers. At age 60, he is outnumbered by LGBT people both older and younger than him.
"I wasn't expecting to be here," he said. "I wasn't expecting to live long. We didn't live that way."
Halvorsen lists health issues among the major challenges facing LGBT seniors, but he is also concerned that few LGBT seniors anticipated growing old. They didn't plan retirement money, he said. They lived for the present moment.
And he doubts this generation of LGBT seniors will have a significant impact on younger LGBT people.
"To younger people, we're just old people," he said. "We're not old gay people."
AIDS may have decimated his generation, but Halvorsen anticipates an influx of LGBT seniors down the line that may overwhelm the systems designed to support them.
His own future is equally uncertain. His healthcare over the years has been expensive. He is now on Medicare, and he can't work to supplement his income.
But whatever comes, he anticipates he will be alright.
"My belief is if you can't do anything about it, there's no reason to get upset," he said.
