| HOME | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
|---|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
BOOK REVIEW |
Professor, and Director of the Gerontology Studies Program Department of Sociology & Anthropology Holy Cross College Worcester, MA 01610
Gay and Lesbian Aging: Research and Future Directions, edited by Gilbert Herdt and Brian de Vries. Springer Publishing Company, New York, 2004, 320 pp., $49.95 (cloth).
Reeling in the Years: Gay Men's Perspectives on Age and Ageism, by Tim Bergling. Harrington Park Press, Binghamton, NY, 2004, 272 pp., $39.95 (cloth).
Sociological Analysis of Aging: The Gay Male Perspective, by J. Michael Cruz. Harrington Park Press, Binghamton, NY, 2003, 138 pp., $39.95 (cloth), $17.95 (paper).
At the beginning of Sociological Analysis of Aging: The Gay Male Perspective, J. Michael Cruz reflects on his own introduction to the study of aging and poses a disquieting comment:
On the first day of class, professors would ask what the life stages in the aging process are... and follow up with questions about the experiences we go through as we age (e.g., dating, college, marriage, family). Time after time, in each class, I thought about how my life was different from the information provided. (p. xi)
In social gerontology, empirical studies of aging have yielded a widespread consciousness of the expected "life course" and a better understanding of the social worlds of the old. This life course perspective is supposed to help account for the trajectories of individuals moving through time while connected to specific others, contexts, and the accompanying cultural meanings of one's generation, gender, regional or geographic location, and religious, economic, political, and racial/ethnic identities. But as Cruz poses, does it?
The fact is, our appreciation of the life course and the aging experience were developed without conscious consideration of sexualities or much consideration of gender. Consequently, over time we have come to take for granted a lifespan development perspective that is what Judith Baker terms "heteronormative," in her chapter in Gay and Lesbian Aging: Research and Future Directions, edited by Gilbert Herdt and Brian de Vries. For example, marriage and grandparenting are regarded as normative activities and meaningful stages within healthy adulthood, yet gay men and lesbians most often negotiate and maintain partnerships in ways quite distinct from those of spousal relationships, and most are not natal parents. Our general cultural illiteracy about sexual minorities makes Cruz's musing important: The custom of framing issues of aging and old age from the conventional "life course" perspective effectively erases sexual minorities—whether gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, or the transgender—from discourses in social gerontology. When one adds long-established cultural prejudices about sexual minorities (Berger 1982/1996) and "a policy of nonrecognition, delegitimization, and overt hostility toward GBLT [gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender] cultural and social needs articulated by conservative American politicians" (E. Michael Gorman and Keith Nelson, in Herdt & de Vries, p. 78), heterosexism has kept gay and lesbian older adults a much ignored population.
The heterosexism eraser also effectively helps hide the complicated and nuanced relationships between aging and masculinities and femininities. The field of gerontology in the post-Parsons and Bales (1955) era has been slow to abandon the single definition of masculinity that stresses how socialization shapes the predispositions and temperaments of men within a culture, whether during their childhood or in late life (Calasanti & Slevin, 2001). The theorized developmental trajectories for both men and women are toward a normative (and normal or healthy) masculinity and femininity (e.g., Gutmann, 1987). Nature is organized socially; hence there are "sex roles."
Because this perspective twists the range of heterosexual masculinities into a single standard and converts the behavioral norm of heterosexuality into normal or healthy manhood, gay men are not identified as a sexual minority, but as sexual deviants. In addition, whenever gerontologists elect to ignore sexualities and presume that everyone is heterosexual, or assume that differences in sexualities have little or no consequence on aging, the field contributes to the maintenance of a hegemonic version of masculinity as much as it homogenizes the sexualities among older adults. Researchers of aging sustain, as Goffman (1963) noted in Stigma, the image that "[i]n an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports" (p. 128).
It is a basic proposition of men's studies that there are different kinds of masculinities evident in society, and we ought not to speak of "masculinity" as a singular term. In the introduction to Men's Lives, Kimmel and Messner (2003) tell us that, in contemporary Western societies, masculinities are organized differently by generation, age, class, race, and ethnic identity, and sexual preference and orientation, and "each of these axes of masculinity modifies the other" (p. xvi). This results in a matrix of masculinities that are visibly "out there" in the culture, embedded in institutions and in social relationships at all levels. Each masculinity is a symbol naming a configuration of gender practice (Connell, 1995). It is also understood within gender studies that masculinity is what men do in interaction with others. It was West and Zimmerman (1987), in their article titled "Doing Gender," who conceptualized gender as a routine accomplishment. Stoller (2001) noted that these actions are seen as routine and relatively unreflective. Thus, the masculinities we witness heterosexual and gay men doing as gender performances reflect and reproduce the multiple, contemporaneous, poignant social contexts of being a man.
Of course "being a man" has changed from one generation to the next, varies across place as much as time, and encompasses a broad range of sentiments and cultural meanings. For example, Tim Berglin points out in Reeling in the Years: Gay Men's Perspectives on Age and Ageism, that middle age and older gay men are at times affectionately addressed within queer communities as "you old queen" (p. 53), though most middle age and younger gays have a seething dislike for the effeminate "cute twink" and a preference for a "military man" or "frat boy" guise (Bergling, p. 19). Gay men who describe themselves or other gays as "old trolls," "circuit boys," "Radical faeries," or "queens" point out the numerous, contested ways in which masculinities are constructed by the men within this sexual minority. Depending on how "out" the gay man is, the masculinities evident among gay men may only marginally or situationally diverge from heterosexual masculinities. But they certainly are not the same as the embodiment of masculinity found among "stone butch" lesbians (Halberstam, 1998) or the "drag king" performances of female-to-male transgenderism.
Systematic studies of the masculinities that old men do in different relationships, places, and times began in the 1990s (cf., Kosberg & Kaye, 1996; Miller & Cafasso, 1992; Thompson, 1994). Still, little has been written. It should be no surprise that the literature on middle age and old gay men is sparser. But it is time that we study the way that the cross-cutting features of sexuality, gender, and aging interact. The dearth of research on gay and lesbian aging is an important point itself. It is 35 years after the Stonewall Rebellion, when outraged gay men fought back against harassment by the New York Police Department and inaugurated the gay rights movement, 30 years after the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, almost 25 years since AIDS was first diagnosed in 1981 and reframed the exigencies of aging among gay men, and decades after Douglas Kimmel's (1978) gay perspective on adult development and aging, Raymond Berger's (1982/1996) landmark study of gay aging, and Keith Vacha's (1985) collection of poignant memoirs of old gay men recalling the days long before Stonewall and "being obvious" about one's sexuality. It is time. And for the first time in history, there is another generation—a generation of self-identified gay men and lesbians—approaching retirement (Herdt & de Vries, p. xii).
These three recent books on the adult development and aging of gay men and lesbians call attention to issues and themes arising from the GBLT communities' own conversations about growing older, and the three strive to tell what gay men and lesbians are experiencing at midlife and later life.
Gay and Lesbian Aging
Herdt and de Vries testify in the introduction of Gay and Lesbian Aging that "[t]he meaning of adult development and aging of sexual minorities is little understood in the United States" (p. xii). Their point is well taken. The heteronormative models of aging and aging well do not cross over well and are ahistorical. Thus they barely specify the flux trajectories of old gay men and lesbians who confronted rigid gender expectations, went underground to develop and maintain their sexual identities, and emerged as survivors in late life. Maybe recognized are the meanings of "chosen families" and friendship communities that old gays and lesbians have built or the competencies developed by having to manage a gay identity and life relative to heterosexuals. But unrecognized is the reality that at least a quarter of the old generation of men are formerly married, once adopted lives consistent with the hegemonic masculinity of their time, and are "off time" in their life passages as they now age as older gays. Also unrecognized is the way the convoys of social supports in GLBT communities have faced more death and live with caregiving and bereavement overload because of the AIDS pandemic than exclusively heterosexual support systems, or how the older generation's life of "discretion" merges with the chipping away of the convoy to, in turn, affect the experience of later life as a voluntary single and one's choice to continue to live or commit suicide.
It was the scarcity of scholarship that moved Herdt, de Vries, and Todd Rawls to organize a research conference in October 2001 on "Adult Development, Aging, and Well-Being in LGBT Communities: Research and Strategic Planning Arising." From the conference come the 10 formidable chapters that make up the Herdt and de Vries volume. The opening chapter by de Vries and John Blando as well as the closing chapter by Douglas Kimmel are vantage points offering basic lessons for social gerontology on why and how to study gay and lesbian aging. The sandwiched eight chapters are great examples and include two that examine lesbian aging and lesbian friendships at and beyond midlife, with the remainder principally addressing men. This is an informative collection that triggers an appreciation for the way that all the authors are willing to move beyond the first generation of scholarship.
That first generation of work (e.g., Berger 1982/1996) was resolute in demonstrating that gay and lesbian communities were not peopled by lonely, isolated, depressed, fully marginalized individuals, or that older gay men become odd and effeminate as they age. Much of the research was designed to set aside such pernicious stereotypes and normalize older gay men. The new generation of scholarship is no longer willing to look past blemishes within or the complicatedness of GBLT communities—such as the intergenerational conflicts or the intracohort differences in well-being. There are several examples: Andrew Hostetler's chapter, "Old, Gay, and Alone? The Ecology of Well-Being Among Middle-Age and Older Single Gay Men," affirms that gay men, and especially older men, are disproportionately represented among the single and are often marginalized from the gay community. He concludes,
Unfortunately, the case of single gay men proves to be particularly effective in illuminating the glaring inadequacies of American community life. The sexualized nature of so much of gay public life, paired with ageism and fear of becoming (or being seen as) "old, gay, and alone," turns out to be a powerful deterrent to community. (p. 169)
His take-home message is that there are common concerns and shared problems of older single gays and single heterosexuals, and both groups of singles likely encounter many of the same problems as they try to construct satisfying social and community ties. But the problems are more widespread for old gay men who have internalized the ageism and more often live "separately."
Bertram Cohler's chapter on "Saturday Night at the Tubs: Age Cohort and Social Life at the Urban Gay Bath" is an ethnographic account of the generational differences in "hooking up" in bathhouses. He details the way the cohort of older men lack much interest in the larger gay community and how they prefer an inconspicuous bathhouse setting and wanted to keep "Boystown" at arms length, whereas younger and middle age men preferred hooking up late at night, after the bars closed, in very visible establishments in the midst of the gay community. The generational differences have consequences. Because older gays' social space is secluded from the gay community, the setting for hooking up markedly differs in its attentiveness to the practice of safe sex; "[the] very isolation of the cohort of older gay men from the larger gay community prevents these men from education in safer sex" (p. 231).
In "From a Far Place: Social and Cultural Considerations about HIV Among Midlife and Older Gay Men," E. Michael Gordon and Keith Nelson expose intracohort differences by detailing the challenges facing older HIV-positive and HIV-negative older gay men. From "the look" HIV-positive men can develop by the secondary side effects of lifesaving antiviral medications, to the not surprising depression that is a frequent complaint of HIV-positive men in the older age group (who are also frustrated by younger gay men's failure to appreciate the lessons learned), to the reality that a majority of older men are not HIV-positive but still absorb the brunt of caregiving, this chapter draws attention to how trenchant the relationship is between HIV and aging in GBLT communities. The authors ask "What can we learn specifically from this cohort... [t]here is a genuine need to comprehend better not only the toll and the needs of those affected by HIV, but likewise the positive lesson, possibly applicable to other aging populations" (p. 90).
In "Narrating Past Lives and Present Concerns: Older Gay Men in Norway," Hans Kristiansen details how the older generation's opposition to "being obvious" and concern with "being discreet" (p. 244) is really a pair of distinct discourses on the meaning of homosexuality among gay men themselves. One is of homosexuality as status; the other is of homosexuality as stigma. These discourses reflect the differential meaning of being a young to middle-aged "gay" man who grew up with rights versus an older "homosexual" man who came of age in times between the end of World War II and the McCarthy witch hunts, when any sexuality but heterosexuality was both illegal and "evidence" of mental illness. These separate discourses reveal the tensions between generations as much as they can help make sense of the ways that the politically quiet past lives of the older generation confront their present situations.
As suggested by these four examples, the predominance of age-segregated spheres of social life, the absence of intergenerational conversations, and prejudices against older men, especially those who once married and who have children and grandchildren, begin to depict the troubles that are being "outed" by this new generation of researchers. An important theme that emerged repeatedly was the profound marginalization experienced by older gays (and lesbians) in all aspects of social and political life, whether it was the heteronormative or GBLT communities. Older gays and lesbians are thus vulnerable for disparities in health status and well-being because they "embody more than one jeopardy" (Baker, in Herdt & de Vries, p. 48). And more than older lesbians, older gay men are likely to be "going it alone," abiding by a masculinity that encourages self-reliance and gay moral concerns of maintaining discretion and sexual dignity (Kristiansen, in Herdt & de Vries, p. 238). The result is the narrowed social worlds as the men age. In late life the multiple tiers of marginalization compound and ratchet down people's options, taxing what upholds their dignity and what makes their lives meaningful or fulfilling.
Another theme running through the chapters was gay men's fear of putting their own self-respect in jeopardy or being exploited and demeaned by younger men. Mistrust was not just with a stigmatized identity in a heterosexual world, it was the older generation's disbelief that younger members of the GBLT communities were willing to respect the older person's sexual dignity. This internalized ageism and generational wariness adds to the ordinary experiences of marginalization that sexual minorities face with employment and health service encounters. Many gay and lesbian older adults keep their sexual orientations secret and maintain a generational divide. Their invisibility creates important barriers to the development of a social and political voice to meet their cohort-specific health care and social service systems needs.
Yet another theme is the issue of aging and aging well or successfully. To begin, the "phenomenology of psychological well-being in gay men's lives may differ in ways that are not tapped [by existing measures or paradigms] reflecting the salience of developing a stigmatized identity, the different configurations of emotional and sexual intimacy characterizing gay men's interpersonal worlds, or the psychological impact of the HIV epidemic" (Robert Kertzner, Ilan Meyer, and Curtis Dolezal, in Herdt & de Vries, p. 111). For aging gay men and lesbians, one's life within a social structure often is in opposition to one's core being. With this in mind, what does it mean to age well (or successfully) when there is a collision of invisibility and living within GBLT communities? Is late life limited to dialectical struggles Erikson envisioned between a sense of generativity and stagnation and a sense of integrity or despair? Are there discrete processes occurring, sometimes accelerating the aging experience but other times extending life passages?
Likely Dissertation, Promises Not Kept
Picking up Cruz's Sociological Analysis of Aging: The Gay Male Perspective, I was hopeful. A small, pithy sociological analysis about aging, framed by the perspective of a sexual minority?
But Cruz's book contrasts sharply with what I anticipated, even though I was forewarned four pages into the preface: "This book is definitely an academic book. I do not pretend that it will be useful and interesting to everyone.... As with any research project, this book is not without it shortcomings" (p. xiv). A partial truth. The book definitely models the template of a positivist research monograph, but it is short of being an academic book. If condensed to a journal-length article, Cruz's opus would remain inconsequential, especially compared to how any chapter in the Herdt and de Vries compendium is informative and often absorbing.
Intended to review the social worlds of aging gay men, Cruz's descriptive report is based on questionnaire data from 125 Texans who have sex with other men (that is, about 115 gay and 10 bisexual men), supplemented with some post-survey interviews. Cruz recognized in a footnote that "[b]eing gay and being bisexual are two entirely different identities and lifestyles [my emphasis]" (p. 30), yet the two sexual minorities are merged. He then broadly examined four "life situations"—the men's living arrangements, employment status, friendships and involvement with siblings, and health. Dispelling the same negative stereotype Berger (1982/1996) challenged, Cruz provided three comparative tables that show that nearly half the men were in a committed relationship, with an average duration of 22 years, and they were happier and experienced less depression or loneliness than those who were single. No other comparative information was ever reported. Men who were out or closeted to their natal family or to coworkers were not compared to see if they had experiences associated with the stigma of being gay. Nor were comparisons made between the men who had and had not been involved in a heterosexual marriage.
The narrowness of Cruz's analysis actively prevents discovery of how gay (and some bisexual) men may differentially navigate the aging process. It should be noted that Cruz's prime quest to know if old gay men are paradigm examples of the disengagement stereotype—being old and gay results in being lonely, depressed, and uninvolved—was thwarted by recruiting his sample largely from Prime Times Worldwide, an organization whose purpose is to provide gay men opportunities to come together in a supportive atmosphere. The promise of a sociological analysis of gay men aging wasn't kept. By extension, Cruz does not use a sociological imagination to assess how history and biography are interwoven or how personal troubles reveal public issues.
Gay Culture and Aging
Reeling in the Years: Gay Men's Perspectives on Age and Ageism is Tim Bergling's second book on gay culture and follows his earlier study of the fear of femininity in men and boys in Sissyphobia: Gay Men and Effeminate Behavior (Bergling, 2001). Bergling is consciously examining the crossroads of sexualities and masculinities. In Reeling in the Years he adds the meaning of age and aging within gay culture. Bergling is a journalist, not a sociologist or social gerontologist. But as a skillful journalist, his work often reveals a sociological imagination such as when he draws attention to cohort effects on attitudes toward and involvement in gay sexual culture or discusses men's willingness to "[fly] their freak flag proudly" (p. 169). The book weds Bergling's own memories, experiences, and the younger generation's ageist prejudices with his more systematic effort to study the meaning of aging among gay men. Integrated throughout are the viewpoints of young, middle-aged, and older gay men obtained through an online poll of about 2,000 men, a survey completed by more than 250 people, and dozens of personal or online interviews "when it became clear they had a valuable perspective or two of their own to share" (p. 15). Yes, the impreciseness and the rounding of frequencies are Bergling's, but this is tolerable since his intended audience was not chiefly academic researchers interested in estimates of the margin of error.
Reeling in the Years is an interesting read. Bergling's intention was to not run from the fact that ageism is widespread within gay and homosexual communities. His question was: Why don't different generations of gay men mix well? He knows much of the research literature, and he knows first hand the epiphany of being classified by younger gays as "too old" when he was in his late 30s. The book vividly illustrates academic research reports that gay sexual culture is both youth oriented and ageist. In between the lines, Bergling's work reveals the extent to which gay sexual culture is a generational phenomenon barely inclusive of the early Baby Boomer gay men and lesbians, and remains an age-cohort phenomenon most inclusive to youngest members of the GBLT communities who have self-identified as gay and are "out," rather than those who self identify as "homosexual" and are more discrete, or much less out. Bergling finds that older men tended to be selectively out to friends, family, and work colleagues, not "totally out;" and their social life did not include the social spaces that younger generations prefer—the bright lights and throbbing music of bars and nightclubs, along with alcohol and drug use.
In Bergling's mind's eye there appears to be a two-tribe "us" and "them" mentality held by both younger and older gay men that pivots on age-segregated activities. On one hand, this intergenerational schism seems to hinge on "ownership" of the gay sexual culture and its activities. Being "old" within the gay sexual culture that Bergling studied is 40, sometimes even mid-30, and the gay men aged 60 and over are painted by younger gays as haunting testament of what is waiting down the road. They fear growing old means being asexual or less sexual. The image constructed is of a gay and gray masculinity that is less bold and open about sexuality as well as wrapped in clothes from "The Decade That Taste Forgot" (p. 24). Older gay men recognize that their interests and lives are unreflected in this "youthism" and "lookism" sexual culture (p. 212, 228), even though they remain as open to "hooking up" as the younger gays (p. 246–247). But few older gay men choose to go to the bars or cruising, and the few that do are negatively stereotyped and openly disrespected.
The intergenerational ageism Bergling discusses also seems to be determined by older gays' "been-there-done-that" sentiments. Many middle-aged and old gay men that Bergling interviewed maintained a dismissive posture toward younger men who are developmentally in the midst of constructing a public gay identity that is congruent with their same-sex feelings and behavior. The older men's "coming out" process is history. Not only did the older men grow up in less socially and legally tolerant times, before the broadened range of gay life was possible, they also have acquired important vocational and social identities while being gay. Volunteering, friendships, church communities, work, and "dozens of entertainment, theatrical, and musical venues to participate in" (p. 190) provide a rich gay life that does not only revolve around the gay sexual culture. As Michael Alvear characterized in the foreword, "Older gay men and younger gay men rarely talk to each other. We're like Italian salad dressing in the fridge. You can shake us all you want but eventually we'll lift, separate, and retreat to separate halves of the bottle (p. ix)." Two caveats: Drifting into age-specific cliques and social spaces isn't unique to gays. It is characteristic of the age segregation that Matilda and John Riley (1994) outlined decades ago. Nor is the ageism that Bergling observed universal within the gay culture, since he frequently calls attention to how plenty of young and older men are dumbstruck by the mean, ageist comments of their peers.
What is troubling about this book is Bergling's tendency to ignore the intracohort variability. Largely because Bergling seems to "accept" the way that the younger generation makes meaning of age and aging, older men are universalized. Inside the social spaces that younger men "own," there is an emergent definition of "old" as near-40, and this definition is one that Bergling tends to use too. Middle-aged and old gay men are homogenized into "outsiders" and portrayed as if they were defensive about their age. Yet it is rare to find an older man quoted as troubled by his aging; rather, as you read you hear men of particular generation cohorts share common outlooks on self, social life, and sexual identity. Bergling's book would be more useful to social gerontologists if he had considered intracohort variability rather than just "us" and "them".
Sexualities, Gender, and Aging
Although the femininities and masculinities that older men and women live by and affirm in their day-to-day lives have been rarely studied themselves, there is a recent and modest literature that has begun to detail the distinct ways older men's and women's lives are gendered. The social constructionist perspective implicit in gender and queer studies has great potential in the field of gerontology for better understanding the experience of aging, whether the aging adults are heterosexual, fully or partly "out" members of GBLT communities, or questioning. This perspective is not itself constrained by the heteronormative paradigm, and as Douglas Kimmel details in the last chapter of Gay and Lesbian Aging, the perspective can integrate and use lifespan models of aging as templates for studying older sexual minorities' gendered lives as much as the meaning of their quieted life experiences.
References
This article has been cited by other articles:
 |
|
 |
|
  E. H. Thompson Jr DO WE INTEND TO KEEP THIS CLOSETED? Gerontologist, February 1, 2008; 48(1): 130 - 132. [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
E. H. Thompson Jr BEING WOMEN, THEN LESBIANS, THEN OLD: FEMININITIES, SEXUALITIES, AND AGING Gerontologist, April 1, 2006; 46(2): 300 - 305. [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 T. O. Blank Gay Men and Prostate Cancer: Invisible Diversity J. Clin. Oncol., April 20, 2005; 23(12): 2593 - 2596. [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
|---|
