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Demystifying Gay Men's Adulthood
Media depictions and our own notions of being gay often conjure up
images of young adults coming out and participating in a gay
"lifestyle", although this focus obscures what is, in fact, a
far more significant and varied story of gay lives lived over the decades
of adulthood. Thirty years after Stonewall and almost twenty years after
the recognition of HIV in this country, the adult life course of gay men
remains surprisingly unmapped. It's as if gay men in their thirties
approach a Bermuda Triangle, become lost to follow for unknown years, and
eventually re-emerge as old men.
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the personal meaning of sexual behavior and
feelings may change over an adult's lifetime |
Our radar for detecting these "lost" years, however, is
rapidly improving. In fact, gay men can often be found doing what many
other adults are doing: living lives as part of chosen families and
families of origin, attending to friends, balancing the commitments of
work and leisure, maintaining health, being sexual, and participating in
the larger world of community, activism, or ideas. These scenarios, of
course, are achievable in environments where prejudice and discrimination
do not interfere with daily life, a condition still not applicable to
significant numbers of lesbians and gay men. But assuming a trend towards
greater understanding of gay lives backed up by expanded legal rights and
increased social recognition, we still face the question of why we have
difficulties seeing the rich, expansive tapestry of gay men's lives as
lived across the decades of adulthood.
Clearly, AIDS has greatly obscured a sense of how modern gay lives
could unfold throughout middle age and into old age. In particular, large
numbers of men who pioneered the identity of openly gay lives in young
adulthood are lost to us, and with them the stories of their lives grown
older. And for many HIV-infected gay men today, treatment advances have
only recently permitted the notion of a full adult life course instead of
a course of illness.
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middle-aged gay men said that their recent
years were the best times of their lives... |
Another reason for the dimly perceived life course of gay men is stigma
attached to aging, hardly unique to gay men but arguably a greater force
in our lives. If gay lives are viewed predominantly through the prism of
youthful sexuality, then the image of gay men at various stages of
adulthood is murky, at best. Many younger gay men do, in fact, see the gay
universe as a predominantly sexual constellation and have limited access
to middle-aged and older men in a non-sexualized context.
But what about the perspective of middle-aged and older gay men? For
us, the mystique of youth may reflect something more profound than sexual
desirability. We may miss the navigational utility of gay identity when we
came out and developed a new social and sexual life as fledgling adults.
As older adults, we may find that while gay identity remains integral to
our sense of self, it is also more likely to compete with other sources of
self-definition, for example, that of being a partner, care-giver, or any
one of the wide spectrum of vocational identities. In addition, the
personal meaning of sexual behavior and feelings may change over an
individual's lifetime and take on more personalized nuances, increasingly
independent of the reigning notions of what it means to be gay. It is this
pluralism and idiosyncrasy of identity that becomes more manifest during
adulthood and which, I think, accounts significantly for the difficulty we
have in tracking the adult lives of gay men.
Despite the increasing tendency to think more idiosyncratically about
our lives as we get older, a characteristic of most adults, the divergence
from a common identity can create problems. Human beings rely on social
valuation of life experience, but neither gay nor heterosexually-oriented
culture provides much recognition of the elements in gay lives that are
revealed over time: long-term relationships, non-traditional
configurations of family and friends, or generative relationships with
members of younger generations. This results in the perception of middle
age as defined by land mines of aging without discernible landmarks.
 A
new dialogue about gay lives across the adult life course is beginning
with writers such as Rik Isensee and Harold Kooden documenting the
richness of life experience beyond coming out. These authors emphasize the
importance of flexibility in recognizing the inevitable changes in
personal identity associated with leaving one's youth and the benefits of
greater wisdom that accrues with age. This advice should not be taken as a
pollyannaish remedy to aging nor a dismissal of the difficulties that may
be experienced along the way. Yet in a study of middle-aged gay men I
conducted, over a third said that their recent years were the best time of
their lives, citing deepening relationships with friends or lovers, a
heightened sense of proficiency in work or other endeavors, and a greater
sense of personal autonomy in dealings with the world (including the gay
world). Many men also reported satisfying commitments as volunteers,
advocates, or active members of extended families.
What is missing in many lives of gay men throughout adulthood is a
greater recognition of our highly varied stories, beyond earlier
commonalties of coming out and having a different sexual orientation. Our
heterogeneity of adult life experience resists headlines, sound bytes, and
provocative pictures, but, gay men, as is true of all adults, benefit from
a social context that helps guide the pathways of growing older. With an
increasing awareness and acknowledgment of how our peers navigate life
transitions, find new identities as middle-aged and older adults, come to
terms with the long-term impact of AIDS, and experience their sexuality in
a changing life context, the passage from youth to old age is no longer an
obscure journey but a profoundly human one.
- By Robert Kertzner, M.D.
The author is the training director of a human sexuality research program
at Columbia University and a psychiatrist in private practice in
Manhattan.
He can be reached at rmk3@columbia.edu. |
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