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Little Big Brother at The Carlisle: Censorship at San Francisco Senior Living Facility

Life in senior communities has been dissected in two recent shows: Man on the Inside with Ted Danson and The Thursday Murder Club starring Helen Mirren. They have not described the kind of censorship I have experienced at The Carlisle in San Francisco, a city known for  free speech ever since Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl and Judge  Clayton Horn ruled that it was not obscene.

I thought that my experiences with censorship had ended after I retired from Sonoma State University where the president of the school aimed to censor the student newspaper. As the faculty adviser who taught a course on libel, privacy and copyright, I was cast as the fall guy and refused to fall. When I moved to The Carlisle in San Francisco and inherited the position of editor for the residents’ monthly newsletter I discovered that a local version of Big Brother was watching me and the publication. Ouch!

n the Sixties when I wrote for the underground press I took the pen name Jomo. Now I edit and write uder the name Jojo. For a year or so I encountered zero issues with management. Then a new executive director took over and decided he had the authority to act as the censor of the newsletter. He objected to the comments by one of the concierges who complained about the treatment of Black people in Minneapolis. I published her comments uncensored and in a headline described her as “Black and Beautiful.”

The executive director told me “there are no Black people in Minneapolis.” When I asked him what he would do if I didn’t go along with his plans, he said he would “get rid of me and hire someone else to edit the newsletter. “ At that point I censored myself and cut the sentences that offended him. They would have appeared in the March 2026 issue. I would not do that again. Self-censorship is the worst kind. The author or creator does the dirty work of the censor.

When I gave fellow residents news about the executive director, they were incensed. One resident said, “we pay thousands of dollars to live here. We should enjoy freedom of speech and the press.”

An employee at The Carlisle does the layout and design and makes about 100 copies on the copier and puts one in the open mail slot for each and every resident. A retired UC Berkeley professor proofreads. Mostly, residents approve of the newsletter, though they often ask for more news about The Carlisle and less news about the world beyond. Recently, I’ve been asked to publish more articles about longtime residents, not new arrivals. Fair enough.

Under California Health & Safety Code § 1569.269, residents in care facilities for the elderly have “personal rights” protected by state law. They have the right to be free from “interference, coercion, discrimination, and retaliation.” They also have the right to organize, and the right to “uncensored” freedom of communication.

Jill Ellison, the membership and volunteer coordinator at San Francisco Village, a community for seniors, assured me that elders in senior living facilities enjoy the same freedoms accorded citizens in the society at large. That’s how it should be, though censorship has increasingly become a part of the cultural climate in the US. So, I’m not surprised that the executive director at The Carlisle, a little Big Brother, wanted to control the content of the newsletter and use it as a “marketing tool.”

I’m working on the April issue now. This time around I probably won’t cut any content that the executive director dislikes unless it’s blatantly libelous or an egregious invasion of privacy. He never hired me, so he can’t fire me, and if he assumes control of the newsletter, he’ll have to do the work himself. Then no one will want to read it. The residents are already put off by the weekly emails he sends out in which he says how much he does and will do for them and how wonderful they are. That’s the iron fist inside a velvet glove. No thanks.

Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.

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