Aging and Gay Men

As the human population ages, so do gay men, and research into this aging population has been steadily growing since the 1970s, when scholars began to document the distinctive social factors affecting gay men’s later years. Determining the number of older gay men is difficult because same-sex erotic encounters and romantic relationships do not necessarily result in identification as gay, and those who do adopt a gay identity do not necessarily disclose these identities to others. But the fact that estimates of the gay male population at any given time range from 2% to 10% of the population, and the fact that the average life expectancy in the West has virtually doubled over the past century, make the older gay male population a group whose ...