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Facing life after 40 Older gay men battle fears of isolation, invisibility July 30 2007 ONE NIGHT EIGHT YEARS AGO, TIM Bergling, a journalist and television producer, was in an America Online “m4m” chat room. He says he was just shooting the breeze, not looking for an online hook up. But when Bergling told a younger guy that he was 36, the man instantly ended their chat, “Too old. Bye,” he said. “Apparently, this young fellow wasn’t remotely interested in where I lived, what I did for a living … if I did drugs … beat up my boyfriend when I was pissed off … Just ‘How old?’ as if my age defined me in total,” Bergling says. That was Bergling’s first encounter with ageism among gay men. The 1996 experience wasn’t unique, say Bergling and other experts on aging. It was like someone pointing out your first gray hair, he says. This “rude awakening” stuck in his mind as he wrote magazine articles on topics ranging from gay youths to retirement. Deciding to explore aging issues more in depth, Bergling wrote “Reeling in the Years: Gay Men’s Perspectives on Age and Ageism,” published earlier this year. To learn about gay male attitudes toward aging, Bergling surveyed about 2,000 gay men in person and another 250 (more in depth) online. The respondents ranged from teenagers to the octogenarians. Bergling learned from the surveys that ageism cuts across the spectrum of generations. MANY YOUNG GAY men don’t like being around older gay men, he says. They think older men, those identified as at least 40 years old, either have nothing to say or just want sex. “Older guys? Forget it,” Jamey, a 24-year-old movie store manager in Detroit, told Bergling. “I get bored out of my skull if one of them walks up to me and tries to start a conversation, even if he isn’t hitting on me, which he probably is.” This generational disdain is often mutual, Bergling says. Many older gay men who responded to his surveys said that they had little use for young gay guys. “All those younger guys … think older guys like me just want to get them all into bed,” Rick, a 45-year-old software consultant in Mansfield, Ohio, told Bergling online. “Please. What an utter waste of time would that be? They could never keep up, and good lord, what the hell would we even talk about?” American culture as a whole, regardless of sexual orientation, remains youth-oriented, but it’s even more evident among gay men, Bergling says. “Youth and beauty is the coin of the realm in the gay [male] community,” he says. To be sure, not every gay man subscribes to that aesthetic, and there are young gay guys who are comfortable around older gay men, Bergling says. But, nationally, “the young, beautiful jock with the slim waist and the hairless chest” is the “single largest gay aesthetic,” he says. The first step aging gay men should take is to avoid beating themselves up over the dilemma, says Raymond M. Berger, author of “Gay & Gray,” a groundbreaking work on gay men and aging first published in 1982. “The preference for youth is particularly strong in Western culture, with its particular emphasis on achievement, and its promise of the future, rather than reminiscence and resting on one’s laurels,” Berger said. “Who can deny that young people are physically beautiful?” But Berger cautions against failing to “look beyond the outer shell.” An octogenarian friend of his served as a volunteer for an elderly nursing home resident. “When my friend entered the room, the resident exclaimed in surprise, ‘Oh, you are so old!’ My friend replied, ‘I may be old on the outside, but on the inside I am the same person I was when I was 20 years old.’ This is the way many of us feel when we get older,” Berger says. ONE REASON why there are so many myths about aging — older people aren’t sexy; people over 40 don’t have relationships; elders don’t enjoy life — is the lack of “homosocial” contact between older and younger gay men, says Michael Shernoff, a New York City psychotherapist. “Gay men who are comfortably entering middle age, [we] move on with our lives,” says Shernoff, who also teaches at the Columbia University School of Social Work. “We’re not doing the same thing as we did during our 30s and 40s — like dancing at gay bars and clubs as much as we used to,” he says. Because of this lack of inter-generational contact, Shernoff says young gay men don’t often get to see older gay men as “sexy or graceful.” Robert Kertzner, a psychiatrist and adjunct associate research scientist with Columbia University in San Francisco, has studied gay men and middle age. He says gay men have some of the same aging-related issues as straight men and women. “Regardless of sexual orientation, men and women, as they get older, spend more time reflecting on [their] identity,” Kertzner says. “There can be a natural distancing from the world of young people.” Finances, health and sexual functioning are concerns for a majority of older people, but gay men also struggle with isolation and invisibility, he says. “Gay men as they get older, are less likely to have children, less likely to be partnered, than straight men,” Kertzner says. And older gay men may be less sexually desirable than younger men to some gay men, and their perception of their undesirability may limit the partners , he says. Between 1998 and 2001, Andrew Hostetler, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, surveyed 94 single gay men in Chicago between the ages of 35 and 82 on their attitudes toward aging. He says the results of his research were a “mixed bag.” “More than two-thirds of the men felt that there were plenty of opportunities for men of their age to get involved in the LGBT community,” Hostetler says. At the same time, more than half of the respondents felt unappreciated by gay people under age 30, he says. About 44 percent said they felt ignored by gay men because of their age, and 42 percent said that gay social services aren’t doing enough for people over 60, according to Hostetler’s study. The men who were less fearful about aging were those who don’t want or expect a relationship, Hostetler says. There is this ideal “developmental life course pathway” for gay men which involves finding partnership in their 30s and then pairing off to do the “domestic thing,” he says. “To the extent that there’s ageism in the community, one part of it is that gay men are afraid of not finding Mr. Right — of being old and alone.” Ageism among gay men isn’t likely to go away any time soon. But there are signs that attitudes toward aging are changing. “Every year, at least one of my gay male students befriends me. He’s not hungry for sex. He wants to have a mentor,” says Shernoff. Gay activism is a wonderful venue for younger and older gay men to meet, he says. “Older gay men have an obligation to bequeath a better world to younger queers,” Shernoff says. “And younger queers need to make the world safe for older queers.” |