Part of: Masculinities and Femininities
Abstract:
Gay men born between 1965 and 1980, members of so-called Generation X, occupy a distinct position in the realm of queer life. Although they were not as directly impacted by AIDS as their predecessors, their coming-of-age was indelibly marked by a sense of danger and mortality well into the 1990s, when retroviral treatments first became available. Their maturation was also shaped by new forms of media and popular culture, as well as a concomitant increase in gay acceptance, reflected in an expansion of their rights. In this talk I present findings from 52 in-depth, semi-structured interviews that I conducted with gay Gen Xers from around the United States, illuminating how they make sense of midlife without a coherent model for doing so. As Spieldenner (2024) writes, “there is no map for getting older” as a gay man, “how some parts of our lives shut down and others open up” (p 55).
My talk will highlight the intersecting themes that have emerged in my preliminary discourse analysis of data. Tracing the use of terms of identification, I first propose “gay man” as a generational type, understood by my research participants in relation, rather than opposition, to “queer,” which they often attribute to younger counterparts. Many of them explain their preference for the former by evoking the social and political conditions in which they navigated adolescence. Among those with a strong sense of generational identity, I highlight the characteristics that they most frequently associate with their cohort – self-reliance, adaptability, skepticism, and irony – and show how these characteristics get recruited into narratives about surviving the epidemic and entering adulthood. Lastly, I turn my attention to talk about PrEP, which is described by many in language of liberation that reveals the legacies of coming-of-age sexually in a period of acute distress. This biomedical intervention is largely understood by gay Gen Xers to have facilitated newfound relationships to sex and sexual practices. Such transformations have occurred at a moment in midlife that coincides with widespread interest in the figure of the “daddy” (see Silva, 2023). Analyzing daddy discourse, I shed light on shared understanding of this figure as an embodiment of non-toxic masculinity that enables possibilities of intergenerational transmission.
As Hajek (2015) has remarked, the particularities of middle age among gay men warrant special attention. Navigating this span of the life course, they contend not only with the lasting impacts of a public health crisis, but also a pervasive emphasis on youth and desirability. There are no recent studies that explore their experiences through the potentially intimate exchange of semi-structured interviews between peers. For that reason, I have heeded the call of Goltz (2022), a fellow gay man in midlife, to “tell the stories of aging queers in community with aging queers” and thus to push against “youthist logics” that privilege those you are “young,” however that may be conceived (p. 418).
