In March, the New York Times ran an article about the tragic suicide of popular gay therapist Bob Bergeron. The article made mention of the fact that Mr. Bergeron had recently completed a self-help guide entitled, The Right Side of Forty: The Complete Guide to Happiness for Gay Men at Midlife and Beyond . At age 49, Mr. Bergeron took his own life, leaving friends and family to grieve and wonder: was this man who tried to help other gay men grow old gracefully struggling with his own aging?
Shortly after the article ran, Folsom Street Events Executive Director Demetri Moshoyannis posted a link to it on his Facebook page. More than 60 people (mostly gay men) responded, referencing the unique challenges facing gay men as we age. Some said that as they get older they feel invisible, unattractive, and overlooked. Others were more optimistic, saying they felt stronger, wiser, and better than ever. In either case, it was clear from the thread that there is a genuine hunger to have a community conversation about the ways in which aging impacts our lives as gay men.
It's important to ask this insightful question: as gay men, do we allow ourselves to age? Whether it's feeling the urge to lie about our ages in online profiles or feeling the lack of inter-generational role models who were lost during the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic or trying to find a healthy, sex-positive niche in a culture that conflates youth and beauty – the simple, inevitable process of aging affects us in ways that our straight counterparts don't generally experience. Though this is changing in some ways, conventional wisdom says that there is no well-trod "life path" for us, no norm that dictates that we find a nice boy, get married, and settle down to the serious adult business of career and family. For us there is no timeline by which any of those things should occur, nor even a general consensus that they need to happen at all. Unmoored from those expectations, we can still go to the White Party at age 55 or date a man 30 years our junior without any of our peers looking at us askance.
Freedom from heteronormative expectations about our life trajectories seems like a very good thing. However, that freedom does leave us with questions about how to choose a trajectory and select the metrics by which its (and our) success or failure can be measured. As we inch ever closer to full equality more and more personal and professional options become available. Young people are coming out earlier and earlier and many can attend their proms with their same-sex date with no fear of retribution. Out gays and lesbians serve as anchors on news programs or cable shows: Don Lemon, Thomas Roberts, and Rachel Maddow are three examples. Marriage equality is just around the corner, with even conservative operatives throwing in the towel. Thirty years ago, none of these things seemed possible. Now that so many more doors are open to us how do we choose one?
The luxury of many options is remarkably exciting to some gay men, and a source of tremendous anxiety for others. In a city like San Francisco, no gay man should feel alone, no matter what age they are. We would all benefit from hearing the experiences of other guys about how to get the most out of the decades to come and what resources are available to us, because there are many. So why have this conversation only in social media when we can sit down face-to-face and truly connect with one another? Isn't that what we all owe each other as gay men – to make sure we feel supported by one another as we grow older? Don't we owe it to ourselves to do everything we can to prevent another tragedy like Mr. Bergeron's? There is so much wisdom in our community and we can all become better and stronger by sharing it.
One of the many exciting things to come out of the merger of Stop AIDS Project and San Francisco AIDS Foundation is a new community forum series that we're calling Real Talk. The series will take on emergent and potentially controversial issues as they arise and will provide the community with opportunities for candid public discussions about topical issues. The first in the series, entitled, "Are We Allowed to Age: Growing Older as a Gay Man," will take place on Wednesday, May 23 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market Street. Please join us for what will surely be a robust and informative conversation moderated by acclaimed TV news personality Hank Plante.
Kyriell Noon is the director of prevention services at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.