Joy Silver had never seen a nursing home quite like it: There was pulsating music, a spinning disco ball and, yes, even scantily clad go-go boys.

"I said to myself, `Yeah, that's what I want. I want that party when I get to be that age,'" Silver would say many years later when remembering the nursing home in New York's West Village.

Today, Silver is working to create just that kind of retirement facility--not only for herself but also for hundreds of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people who eventually will move into a soon-to-open community dubbed RainbowVision on the outskirts of Santa Fe.

In many regards, RainbowVision is your typical "after 50" kind of place. It has a mixture of independent-living units, assisted-living units and state-of-the-art medical care for the extremely aged and infirm. There is a social director, a dining facility and residents who range in age from 50 to 94. And the community has been built in the kind of beautiful setting -- on the edge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains -- that makes a lifetime of saving for retirement seem well worthwhile.

But the 146-unit facility is also unique. It is marketed specifically to gay retirees and elderly as a place to spend the remainder of their lives among people who will not judge them for their lifestyles or life partners. It not only will have gourmet cooking classes, but also rowdy drag queen shows and gay pride parades. And it is seen less as a place to quietly savor the golden years than a place to boisterously savor the very way of life that many of the residents have spent decades fighting to have society see as acceptable.

"I think there is kind of the feeling that at the end of a lot of years of struggle, there is now someplace where we can live and be who we are, the way we are," Silver said.

RainbowVision, where the first residents will move in shortly after Thanksgiving, is unique in another regard. While other well-known gay retirement communities exist in places such as California and Florida, all were largely built with pooled capital from the residents who were planning to inhabit them. In contrast, RainbowVision is the first gay retirement community in the United States to be built entirely with investors' dollars.

"It is a very significant difference that, in this case, RainbowVision was conceptualized and built with money--some $35 million--from investors," said Gerard Koskovich of the Lesbian and Gay Aging Issues Network. "Residents just have to purchase a condo or rent an apartment and move in--the way mainstream retirees do in most of their communities."

With the aging of the Baby Boomers--nearly 80 million Americans born between 1946 and 1965--retirement communities have become ever bigger and more profitable businesses in recent years. Although estimates of the number of homosexuals in this demographic differ wildly--typically between 3 and 10 percent--marketing firms clearly are beginning to see great potential in these 2.4 million to 8 million gay Boomers planning for retirement.

Niche market for gays

It is nothing new that retirement communities often are populated by like-minded people. Predominantly Jewish communities are scattered throughout Florida. Golf-centric communities have long been the rage in Arizona and California. And, increasingly, retirement facilities are even more narrowly niche-marketed--to those who want to use their free time to get graduate degrees, to specific ethnic groups, to gay men and lesbians.

The clustering of similar-demographic retirees isn't even always so formal, as with RainbowVision. Indeed, in New York City many buildings in Manhattan have, over time, become almost entirely gay because, as apartments become available, friends of friends move in. So many de facto retirement communities have developed that there is much discussion among social workers in the city that, as people age, elder-care services should simply be brought to these buildings instead of forcing residents to move elsewhere to get such services.

Yet as common as it is to find clusters of similar-demographic retirees, many experts believe that the gay population has additional motivations for choosing to live in close proximity as its members age. The reason cited most often is to prevent isolation. A significant percentage of gay and lesbian couples and individuals have no children; many of them are estranged from their parents and siblings because of tension over their sexual orientation.

There are other considerations as well. Gay residents of mainstream retirement communities would have a much more difficult time meeting people to date. Even more, research on aging shows that one of the most important aspects of living in an retirement community is that it allows residents the opportunity to look back on and talk about their lives.

"Life review--the notion of handing on a legacy of memories--becomes very important to people as they age," said Jeane Anastas, chairwoman of the School of Social Work at New York University. "This is true of people whether gay or straight. But how can people talk about their life story or who they are and have been if they are fearful that it will not be well received by most of the people around them?"

Though no formal studies have been done, anecdotal evidence indicates that many gay men and lesbians who live in more traditional nursing homes often go back into the closet for fear of being ostracized by other residents.

Many experts on aging are curious to examine how the subset of gay elderly responds to the challenges associated with aging.

"There are a couple schools of thought," said Anastas, who is also the editor of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services. "One is that people who are gay and elderly might be far more resilient to the stresses and the hostilities and prejudices that they face because of age since they've faced hostility and prejudice all their lives. But the other thought is that it may all pile on for these people--this might just become a piling on of the vulnerabilities."

Silver, who lived in New York during the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis among gay men, takes that theory even further.

"The truth is that because so many of us watched friend after friend die of HIV/AIDS, we've been thinking about the end-of-life care issue for a lot longer than most people in the mainstream population who are our same age," Silver said.