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.

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.

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