Moving Toward a Holistic Conceptual Framework for Understanding Healthy Aging Among Gay Men

In the last four decades, we have witnessed vast and important transitions in the social, economic, political, and health contexts of the lived experiences of gay men in the United States. This dynamic period, as evidenced most prominently by the transition of the gay rights movement to a civil rights movement, has shifted the exploration of gay men’s health from one focusing primarily on HIV/AIDS into a mainstream consideration of the overall health and wellbeing of gay men. Against this backdrop, aging gay men in the United States constitute a growing population, for whom further investigations of health states and health-related disparities are warranted. In order to advance our understanding of the health and wellbeing of aging gay men, we outline here a multilevel, ecosocial conceptual framework that integrates salient environmental, social, psychosocial, and sociodeomgraphic factors into sets of macro-, meso-, and micro-level constructs that can be applied to comprehensively study health states and health care utilization in older gay men.     

Gay and lesbian youth, emergent identities, and cultural scenes at home and abroad

This introduction opens up the field of studies of gay and lesbian adolescents, both with regard to past and present studies in the research literature, and by allusion to the new studies collected in this issue. Historical and crosscultural elements of the context of the "coming out" process are discussed. Four preconceptions of gay youth are critically examined, regarding their heterosexuality, inversion, stigma, and heterogeneity. The anthropological construct of life crisis "rites of passage" is utilized as a heuristic framework for deconstructing attitudes regarding change and constancy in homosexual adolescents. Aspects of age, sex, class, and related variables related to the form and content of the coming out process are then examined in the United States and other societies. Finally, the social problems of gay youth, AIDS and its impact in particular, are briefly considered. The author concludes with a plea for new and urgent research.     

The careful balance of gender and sexuality: rural gay men, the heterosexual matrix, and "effeminophobia"

Based on life narratives, this article explores rural gay men's subjectivity in France and the United States. After growing up in rural cultures, these gay men tend to adopt similar hetero-centered ideas about masculinity. We show that these "conventional" ideas impact their sense of self as they express feelings of "effeminophobia." They differentiate themselves from effeminate gay men and emphasize their similarities with straight men. These ideas are both coercive and disciplinary as they homogenize rural gay men's discourse and masculine identities.     

The defense of marriage act (DOMA): its impact on those seeking same sex marriages

Recognition of same-sex marriage has been a goal of many in the gay rights movement. With the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), same-sex relationships will not be afforded the same opportunities as heterosexual relationships. This paper will discuss the process leading to the passage of the DOMA, and will argue that the passage of this piece of legislation was a misuse of Article IV, Section 2 of the United States Constitution, "Full Faith and Credit". The Defense of Marriage Act represents an extraordinary act of Congress, as they have rarely passed legislation under this mandate and have never passed legislation that curtails full faith and credit. Strategies that can be utilized to overcome the constraints of the DOMA will also be included.     

"Maricón," "pájaro," and "loca": Cuban and Puerto Rican linguistic practices, and sexual minority participation, in U.S. Santería

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States are, to varying degrees, practitioners of the Afro-Cuban religion popularly known as Santería. Cuban and Puerto Rican forms of referencing LGBT populations are illustrated in this article, which is drawing from interviews and participant observation conducted in the United States, with close to 30 practitioners, many of whom were Cuban, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican. I discuss the ways in which Santería gatherings produce an alternative use of otherwise stigmatized language for "gay" practitioners. Through the use of distinctive language to reference all of these populations, we may rethink the relationship between identities and practices, and within that, gender presentations vis a vis identities.     

No longer invisible: gay and lesbian Jews build a movement

The organized movement of lesbian and gay Jews took root in the mid-1970s when groups of Jewish homosexuals in the United States, England, and Israel began gathering for religious, educational, and social purposes. After centuries of denial, the Jewish community was faced with the reality of this increasingly visible and vocal minority. By 1989, nearly 30 groups of Jewish gay men and women throughout the world were part of the World Congress of Gay and Lesbian Jewish Organizations, an international body devoted to community education about homophobia and support for both member and newly emerging gay Jewish groups.     

Part 1: HIV as'the line in the sand'

There is a growing rift between HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men, which finds expression in social, economic, structural and political divisiveness that, if not resolved, may 'kill' the "gay liberation movement." While disasters generally tend to create organizational solidarity, the AIDS crisis has operated in reverse, spawning a variety of competitive AIDS service organizations, alienating seropositive gays from the mainstream gay community, and in turn disenfranchising seronegative gay men as human and financial resources are redirected toward persons living with HIV and AIDS. Serostatus has become a social marker of societal status, operating in a bimodal discriminatory manner. Seronegative gay men experience discrimination from within the gay community as funding for and services to this sector diminish. Seropositive gay men (and the organizations that provide for some of their needs) have culturally, economically and socially dismissed the socio/psychological needs of seronegative gay men (survivor guilt, safer sex education, etc.) in favour of providing social and resource-based services to seropositive gay men. As the disparities in service and advocacy increase, the social distance between the gay movement and the AIDS movement correspondingly increases. If this trend continues, the social gap will serve further to push HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men into polarized camps, resulting in a wider separation of the gay movement and the AIDS movement. The stigmatization of HIV-positive people will subsequently increase both within and outside the gay movement, and any ability to present a unified Gay Liberation front will correspondingly diminish. Additionally, the emergent notion within and without the gay communities that to be gay is to be HIV-positive will solidify. This will (a) further stigmatize all gay men in the eyes of the non-gay population, and (b) exacerbate the rift between HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men within the gay community, reversing the stigma of HIV such that to be HIV-negative will be a marker of non-gay identity. In short, seropositivity will become the defining element of gayness.     

Eros underground: Greece and Rome in gay print culture, 1953-65

This essay surveys the building of intellectual community through print culture in the nascent gay movement in the United States and in Europe in the mid-twentieth century. Amateur historians, especially Jim Kepner and W. Dorr Legg of ONE, used Greece and Rome as models on which to base claims for gay rights. Ancient history figured in ONE's educational enterprises, including articles in the magazine ONE, the ONE Institute, and Homophile Studies. The magazine writers and their readership faced problems in the accessibility of knowledge, which the increasing circulation of the magazines corrected, to a degree. Biases surviving from the Victorian period caused the popular idea of ancient homophile culture to favor Greece over Rome, and made Greek a code word. Antiquity also played a large, though decreasing, role in formations of homoerotic fantasy during this period.     

Clubbing masculinities: gender shifts in gay men's dance floor choreographies

This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the intersections of gender, sexuality, and dance. It examines the expressions of sexuality among gay males through culturally popular forms of club dancing. Drawing on political and musical history, I outline an account of how gay men's gendered choreographies changed throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Through a notion of "technologies of the body," I situate these developments in relation to cultural levels of homophobia, exploring how masculine expressions are entangled with and regulated by musical structures. My driving hypothesis is that as perceptions of cultural homophobia decrease, popular choreographies of gay men's dance have become more feminine in expression. Exploring this idea in the context of the first decade of the new millennium, I present a case study of TigerHeat, one of the largest weekly gay dance club events in the United States.     

The Pathos of the Closet and the Generations: Gay Professors and Their Students During and Post Gay Liberation in the United States

This article focuses on gay professor–student relationships in the United States, during and post gay liberation. Exploring personal writings, student periodicals, and academic documents between the late 1960s and the 1990s, I argue that interactions between gay professors and their students illuminate an ambiguous affectionate relationship wherein the closeness was based just as much on different generational sensibilities as the individuals themselves. Further, I show that these relationships suggest a therapeutic potential to education through the articulation of personal knowledge in the classroom, one that was increasingly open to challenge in the 1980s and 1990s.     

Public attitudes toward gays and lesbians: trends and predictors

Public opinion about gay men and lesbians is a popular topic in both the popular press and academic journals. However, analyses of attitudinal trends are rare. Tracing changes in opinion polls on homosexuals in the United States between 1977 and 2003, the first part of the present study showed that public opinion of this minority group has become more positive over time. Part two of this research utilized a recent national survey to identify factors predicting anti-gay attitudes. The best predictors included respondents' sex, stance of anti-abortion and anti-women's equality, and religiosity. Implications for gay rights advocates were discussed.     

Seeking Solace in West Hollywood: Sexual Orientation-Based Hate Crimes in Los Angeles County

Many thriving “gay communities” across the United States report high levels of sexual orientation-based hate crimes every year, raising questions about the level of safety in these gay communities and neighborhoods. This study examines hate crime data from 2002–2006 in Los Angeles County and the relationship those hate crimes have to West Hollywood, the best known gay community of Los Angeles County. Results suggest that although West Hollywood does consistently report high numbers of hate crimes, this does not reflect a greatly increased risk to any one lesbian, gay, or bisexual person. Results suggest that we need to consider other variables as predictors (such as poverty, business density, and population density) in determining safe versus unsafe space, rather than just the percentage of lesbians, gay, and bisexuals in a population.     

Ecological Analyses of Gay Male and Lesbian Partnering in the Metropolitan United States in 2000

This paper has two objectives. Using data from the 2000 census, we develop for each of the 331 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) of the United States in 2000 an index of gay male partnering and an index of lesbian partnering. Drawing on the theoretical perspective of human ecology, we propose and test an assortment of hypotheses relating characteristics of the metropolitan areas with the gay male and lesbian partnering indexes.     

Part 2: Fear of contagion, fear of intimacy

In this second part of the trilogy, I review the concepts of panic, the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, and how internally inconsistent opinions and attitudes can be made consistent (or consonant). The theory explains, in some measure, how AIDS has been socialized into our thinking about identity, and goes beyond a medical condition. The pervasive identification of gay men with HIV and AIDS has resulted for many in an over-identification with fears of contagion and on a societal level in a fear of all gays as pools of contagion. The conversion of dissonance to consonance has taken many forms; within the gay community it has resulted in the rejection of the "100% safe-100% of the time" safe-sex message, and the adoption (for many) of a new form of deviant label-someone who is not in conformity with the social norm of gay community sexual behavior. However, we shall see that this so-called norm is a sham-that many gay men do not, as a rule, practice safe(r) sex on a consistent basis. This information indicates that the educational efforts of the last decade have at best lost their potency, and at worst were less than efficacious to begin with. The dissonant messages have also informed both the construction of the gay community and its interpretation of what it means to be gay. The result has been a tri-lateral perception of HIV and AIDS as either a medical, political or a social phenomenon. This fragmented understanding has exacerbated the already polarized ASOs and GSOs in that each has determined its ideology based on a particular interpretation of HIV and AIDS. This polarization has been operationalized by the GSOs and ASOs primarily in the manner by which they define their target markets, and more importantly, in the manner by which they exclude certain gays from participation. At the extreme, some gay men feel entirely left out of the community, and are consequently unable to convert their dissonance regarding being gay into consonance, if only by developing some associational ties with the community. The central question of the sustainability of the gay movement is thus partly answered by restating the nature of the fractures in the community. Kiesler's determinants regarding change relate directly to the sustainability question-can GSOs and ASOs, given their pluralistic ideologies and constituencies, break free of the constraints that are posed by these determinants? Would the adherents and conscious constituents defect from their organizations, and form new ones (thus reifying the fractures that already exist)? On the other hand, is there a sense of community and identity that will function as a bonding agent to encourage coalition building and social reorganization? The matter may turn on the issue of selective rewards: can a coalition of ASOs and GSOs provide staff, volunteers and clients sufficient motivation for making the inevitable compromises? Given the selective nature of the rewards, as they now stand, the probability of being able to so do is remote. The influence of the non-gay community, as well as the attitudes and beliefs of the majority of gays who do not belong to any gay organizations, hampers success.     

Verification of the ages of supercentenarians in the United States: Results of a matching study

Unprecedented declines in mortality among the very old have led to the emergence of "true" supercentenarians (persons aged 110 and over). The ages of these individuals have been well-documented in European countries with a history of birth registration, but have not been systematically studied in the United States, which lacks similar documentation and where the inaccuracy of age reporting has been an issue. To verify age, we linked records from the Social Security Administration for close to 700 individuals who died from 1980 to 1999 purportedly at ages 110 and older to records of the U.S. censuses of 1880 and 1900, conducted when these individuals were children. This group was a residual group from an earlier file that was reduced by the SSA after data checks that eliminated incorrect records. The results of the matched records for the residual file indicate that over 90% of the whites were accurately reported as supercentenarians, but only half of the blacks appeared to have attained age 110. The verification of age shows that the United States has more "true" supercentenarians than do other nations.     

Barriers to foundation funding of gay organizations: evidence from Massachusetts

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual service organizations in the United States receive a small share of the philanthropic grants awarded by foundations and other institutional donors. A survey of Massachusetts gay organizations provides explanations for this phenomenon and suggests that a variety of barriers impedes foundation giving. The findings are consistent with those of two national surveys of lesbian organizations and a survey of gay service needs in California. The most commonly cited barriers include: a difficulty in finding foundations sympathetic to gay service programs; a lack of paid grant writers; the perceived need for 501 (c)(3) nonprofit status in order to qualify for most grants; foundations' predilection for funding established service organizations, and their reluctance to fund political advocacy, a lack of familiarity with gay service needs; and homophobia. Although the AIDS crisis helped educate foundations about the gay community, consider-able barriers remain.     

Gay officers in their midst: heterosexual police employees' anticipation of the consequences for coworkers who come out

While fear among gay men and lesbians about being out in a masculinist environment is not surprising, this article examines what heterosexuals expect will happen when gay men and lesbians come out. We draw on a unique dataset from a police department in the southwest United States to examine the consequences anticipated by heterosexual police department employees if a gay or lesbian officer's sexual orientation became known in the workplace. We test four main sets of factors: individual-level demographic characteristics and religious background; homophobia; organizational tolerance for discrimination; and intergroup contact theory to explain how heterosexuals expect gay and lesbian coworkers to be treated. Using ordinary least squares regression, we find that characteristics of workplaces, measured by tolerance of discrimination, as well as contact with gay men and lesbians on the job are more significant predictors of anticipated outcomes than are individual-level traits and homophobic attitudes. We conclude by discussing the policy implications of our research.     

Sexual orientation and education politics: gay and lesbian representation in American schools

In what has sometimes provoked a "culture war" over America's schools, gays and lesbians have sought an expanded voice in the making of education policy. This paper explores the factors that promote gay representation on school boards, how this variable in turn influences gay representation in both administrative and teaching positions, and how all three forms of gay representation relate to school board policies regarding sexual orientation education. Three of the four models drawn from the social movement literature help to explain gay school board representation. In a manner similar to other minority groups, gay representation on school boards directly or indirectly promotes the appointment of gays to administrative and teaching positions and the adoption of policies that address the problems faced by gay and lesbian students in the public schools.     

The relative importance of ethnicity and religion in predicting attitudes towards gays and lesbians

Using data from a sample of college students from several campuses throughout the United States, this research examines whether ethnic differences (African Americans versus European Americans) in attitudes toward gays and lesbians are a function of religious attendance. Multiple regressions were run separately for attitudes towards lesbians and attitudes toward gay men. When predicting attitudes toward lesbians, ethnic differences were present in the absence of religious attitudes; however, when religious attitudes were entered into the model, ethnic differences disappeared. In predicting attitudes toward gay men, ethnic differences were never present, while religious attitudes were always statistically significant. We conclude that differences in attitudes toward homosexuals in general, and gay men specifically, are not necessarily a function of ethnicity but possibly of religious attendance and the effect of the "Black church." We end with a discussion of the link between ethnicity, religion, HIV/AIDS, and heterosexism in the African American community.