Are We Allowed to Age?
Growing Older as a Gay Man
A R E A L TA L K C O M M U N I T Y F O R U M
“Growing older can be a wonderful thing, where we
feel that life just gets better with each passing day.
. . . It can also be a time when we’re not so certain
about where we fit in a culture that is quite often
very focused on youth.”
—Neil Giuliano
CEO, San Francisco AIDS Foundation
“Are We Allowed to Age? Growing Older as a Gay
Man,” held May 23, 2012, marked the first event in San
Francisco AIDS Foundation and STOP AIDS Project’s
new Real Talk community forum series. The goal of the
series is to host timely, interactive dialogs and exchange knowledge and resources around topics at the
forefront of discussions in our community.
As foundation CEO Neil Giuliano observed in his
welcoming remarks, aging is “something we all either
are facing or will face in our lives,” and it can be joyful,
challenging, or both. Forum panelists, each of whom
represented an “age decade”—twenties, thirties, forties,
fifties, and sixties—spoke frankly about their personal
experiences of aging in San Francisco’s gay community.
Panelists included Derek Brocklehurst, nurse study
coordinator at Quest Clinical Research; Demetri Moshoyannis, executive director of Folsom Street Events;
Matt Sharp, writer and longtime AIDS activist; David
Sims, attorney at Saveri & Saveri; and Steven Tierney,
professor of counseling psychology and chair of the
Community Mental Health program at the California
Institute of Integral Studies. For a truly interactive
conversation, audience members were invited to share
their own perspectives, both by taking the microphone
and by texting responses to survey questions throughout the evening.
Moderator Hank Plante, former anchor and
political editor at San Francisco’s KPIX-TV, started
the conversation by recalling the recent death of
49-year-old gay therapist Bob Bergeron, who committed suicide just weeks before the scheduled publication of his self-help book, The Right Side of Forty: The
Complete Guide to Happiness for Gay Men at Midlife
and Beyond. “You never know what’s underneath the
surface,” said Plante.
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Bergeron’s death sparked an intense community
dialog, with some men admitting in Facebook conversations that, as they age in a youth-oriented gay culture, the idea of suicide is never far from their minds.
Indeed, Plante cited a 2002 study revealing that 12% of
urban gay and bisexual men had attempted suicide at
some point in their lives—a figure three times higher
than the population in general.
The purpose of this forum was to continue the
community discussion and create a safe space to
exchange perspectives on aging. “Our goals tonight
are simple,” said Giuliano. “We want to connect,
share some experiences, learn, and hopefully leave
here with a better understanding . . . and appreciation
for the unique experience of growing older as a gay
man.” Following is a summary of key questions and
issues that emerged during the panel and audience
discussion.
Do we, as gay men, allow ourselves to age?
“I think you become aggressive in fighting the battle
against Mother Nature and Father Time. So in a way,
you’re not allowing yourself to age.”
—David Sims
Panelists agreed that gay men fight aging, although
their own experiences varied. “We definitely struggle,
absolutely,” said Derek Brocklehurst, at age 28 the
youngest panelist. To Steven Tierney, now 61, photos
from his younger days speak eloquently of the changes
that come with age. “I have a picture of myself at Fire
Island. We used to go over the summer, a group of
eleven of us, . . . back when we didn’t all have to think
about senior housing or dermatology or anything like
that, which we now have to think about.”
“When I turned 50, it struck me that I’d missed a
lot of my life because of HIV,” said Matt Sharp, who
tested positive in 1988. “There was a big chunk of it
missing, in a way, because I was on the streets being
arrested [for protesting] or I was deeply into my own
illnesses or whatever. So suddenly I turned 50 and I
was doing well—and then I realized, ‘Oh, I’m old.’”
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Demetri Moshoyannis mentioned that he and his
friends of similar age find themselves rethinking their
priorities as they age. “I spent a lot of my twenties and
thirties in the bars, thinking about guys and cruising
and dick, and looking good to do that” he shared. “And
now that I’m 40, I’ve kind of had to stop and think,
‘Well, what now?’ . . . If I’m not spending so much
time concerned about physical appearance and all
those kinds of issues, then how do my values develop
and evolve as I age?”
Moshoyannis’ observations led to an important
question: What does it mean to be an older person in
our community? “For me, it’s always just meant cheering the elders in the Gay Pride parade,” he admitted,
but now, “I’m going to be one of them! That kind of
realization gave me pause to kind of think about who
I want to be as I age, and how my values are going to
change as a result of that.”
An audience member offered his take: “I don’t
know what you’re all talking about. At 60 I felt like
a young spring chicken! I’m 72 now, and I don’t feel
shunned by my gay community.” He had lived in San
Francisco since 1975 and lost three lovers to AIDS.
“Wild sex is not in the cards anymore,” he said, but
“it’s my decision. And I don’t mind just doing things
one does at my age: going to the theater, to the movies, walking a lot, reading a lot, stuff like that. . . . So I
don’t have any problem with being older.”
Moshoyannis, who is 40, said that although he’s
a bit embarrassed to admit it, going out with a much
younger man five years ago changed how he felt about
aging. “The gay community does somewhat embrace
the ‘daddy’ culture,” he said, “and I feel a little more
comfortable getting older in the gay community along
that line. And, yeah, it was a hook-up that led me to
that point! But honestly, I’ve been comfortable with it
ever since.”
Is there a generational divide between gay men?
“The young and old do not mix. . . . It doesn’t feel like
a sense of community.”
—Audience member
The panelists agreed that age often divides the gay
community, although Sharp pointed out that this sense
of division is not unique: “Ageism is pervasive in our
society. We don’t respect our elders in this country.”
What is unique, however, is how the AIDS epidemic contributed to the generational divide among gay
men. As one audience member observed, “There used
to be this huge population of my generation—I’m fiftyseven—and it’s a generation that we lost.” Added Moderator Hank Plante, “It certainly affects your psyche,
doesn’t it?” He spoke of the loneliness that accompanies
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getting older without the friends he lost in the 1980s. “A
lot of us who are here tonight went through that.”
One older audience member suggested that “because of AIDS, and because of acceptance among young
people of ‘queerness’ in general, . . . those who grew
up after the 1980s are different in lots of ways.” For
example, he sees more young gay men today in monogamous relationships. “It isn’t just because we’re bad to
them or they’re bad to us. They have different values.”
Moshoyannis noted that he sees attendees at Folsom Street Events trending older. “San Francisco is an
aging community,” he said. “And that’s great, as there
are more and more people aging and gay men feel
more comfortable . . . but we need a youthful place in
our community, as well.”
One man in the audience offered this example of
his changing relationship to his community: “I used to
be learning stuff about the ‘70s from my friends in New
York, and now people are asking me about the time in
the ‘80s, and it’s like they’re asking me about the past,
like: ‘What was it like before World War I?’”
Another audience member shared feeling excluded:
Looking to meet people online, he found postings for
“‘twenties to forties for fun outings.’ I’m like, ‘Gosh,
I’m not 50 yet, not for a full month. Can I still get in?
Will they kick me out?’” Another man, age 23, related
that it was easier for his family to accept his 37-yearold boyfriend’s HIV status than his age.
A further divide, the panelists suggested, relates
to the age at which individual gay men come out.
Brocklehurst said he and his friends find actual age
differs from “gay age,” depending on how long an
individual has been out. David Sims, who is in his
thirties, agreed, adding, “When you first come out to
yourself, to your family, to your friends, or whatever
you consider coming out, that’s really almost when
your life begins.” People who came out at very different ages can have trouble relating to each other, Sims
said: “They can literally be the same age, but they have
nothing in common because they really are in two different aspects of their lives.”
This idea rang true with audience members, who
suggested that life stage divides the community as
much as age. One man who had recently moved back
to San Francisco lamented, “All my old friends had
disappeared—not because they had died but because
they’d paired off and they wouldn’t come out anymore.
They’d become homebodies.”
Another member of the audience agreed, observing that the divide he notices most is about lifestyles
changing with age, as the people around him couple
off, buy houses, and work steady jobs to pay their
mortgages. “If you think about people in their forties,
who are in midlife, and you make a list of everything
that people tend to be involved in at midlife, and you
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think to yourself, ‘Well, I’m in midlife but I don’t have
any of the accoutrements and the infrastructure of
midlife,’ then the whole question of what generation
you feel part of isn’t so much a function of chronology.” He summed up this concept neatly: “It’s possible
to have a past in common but not necessarily a present in common, even if there are lots of people around
who are your age.”
Calling for solutions, another man remarked that
“we’re always going to have a generational problem;
that’s just the nature of things. We have to create what’s
going to be next, what’s going to bring us together.”
Tierney had a simple suggestion for bridging these
divides and bringing back a sense of shared community: “I think tonight is a wonderful opportunity for us to
take a look around the room, and make sure the next
time you see somebody walking down the street you
just stop and say hello.”
the relevance that you want in a community,” and that
community, he opined, has never truly been about
older people. “We’ve lost a large portion of our population, our older generation, to the AIDS crisis—but you
know what? We didn’t create that culture for the older
people. What doesn’t change in the image that is ‘gay’
is this idea of youth, and beauty, and partying, and
drugs, and stuff like that.”
He raised another interesting point: We are saddened and infuriated by stories of gay, bi, lesbian, and
transgender youth committing suicide or turning to
drugs because they feel alienated by their peers and
communities, “but then we get to a certain age and we
do it to ourselves. We decide to create that generational
gap. Of course you’re going to be anxious if you feel
like you’re not a part of your community anymore.”
Do you feel invisible or irrelevant as you get older?
“I think gay men have to learn this: There is no timeline.”
“As we grow older, gay men are irrelevant. We’re not
even there. We’re not even noticed.”
—Audience member
Plante posed questions about feeling invisible or irrelevant directly to the audience—with lively results. As
one man shared, “I just passed the point of no return
even on sites like DaddyHunt! . . . When you hit that
magic number, you’re gone. Even though supposedly
people are looking for ‘daddies,’ you’re invisible.”
Another man shared his experience re-entering the
dating scene in his sixties. His gay friends told him,
“‘Forget it! Nobody’s interested in you. You’re an old
fart.’” He accepted this verdict for a year or two: “I
became an old fart at sixty-three. And then one day I
woke up and said, ‘This is bullshit. I do five miles on
the treadmill three times a week! I hike!” The realization paid off: “I started taking some chances, taking
some risks—and I haven’t found that much rejection.
Some, but it’s not as bad as what people say.”
In a similar vein, another audience member
questioned what makes gay men feel relevant to their
community in the first place: “Are you only relevant if
some twenty-four-year-old wants to talk to you?”
Plante added that the need for relevance often increases following retirement. “I think a lot of us who approach the dreaded ‘R’ word, retirement (or semi-retirement), are aware what that means,” remarked Plante,
recently retired himself after 25 years as a TV reporter.
“Who are you if you draw that much identity from your
job and suddenly you’re not doing anything?”
“Male, female, gay, straight, whatever, people have
problems with aging, and it’s the ‘relevance’ part,”
stated another man in the audience. “I think here it’s
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Are you where you thought you’d be at this point in your life?
—David Sims
Traditional milestones for straight life stages, like
getting married and starting a family, aren’t always
viable—or even desirable—options for gay men, the
panel agreed. The panelists varied in how much they
had attempted to apply this roadmap to their own
lives, and in how well they felt their current circumstances lived up to their expectations.
“When I first came out, I had this image of me and
my husband and two kids, two dogs, living the gay
dream—or what I thought was the gay dream,” said
Sims. Today, “there’s no dogs. There’s no husband.
There’s no kids. Don’t get me wrong: I am very happy.
I am happy in my life. . . . I learned that I couldn’t live
up to, I guess, the straight scenario of life, of happiness, that I was trying to convert to the gay world.”
For his part, Brocklehurst is content: “I have a
stable job, I have stable friends, stable community,
stable housing. I’m where I want to be at 28.” Tierney
offered a similar perspective, noting, “What gives me
happiness is being involved with the community.”
Sharp’s experience differed: “Who knows? This
question is really difficult for me because I’ve always
gone with the flow; I never made a business plan for
what was going to happen in my life.” Also, HIV and
related illnesses “are going to affect how I get older.
These things are going to impact any dream life that I
could have had.”
Picking up on the issue of HIV, Moshoyannis
shared his perspective: “I seroconverted when I was
23, so I kind of thought I’d be dead by my early thirties. That was pre–protease inhibitors, so back then
[the expectation was], ‘You’ve got ten years.’” Given
this dire early diagnosis, “I never thought I’d actually
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be at this point in my life; I pretty much thought I’d
be dead by now.” Ultimately, he’s happy with his life’s
trajectory, even if he didn’t exactly plan it: “In retrospect, I feel like my twenties were all about exploring
life and having sex and my thirties were about dating.
And [at 40] I have a wonderful husband.”
How have your expectations for romantic relationships
changed as you’ve grown older?
“I’m from the generation where, when you had sex with
someone, they actually had to be in the same room.”
—Hank Plante
Each panelist shared how his relationship expectations
and priorities have shifted over time. “In my twenties,
I was trying to boost my self-esteem; I was having
sex with as many hot guys as I could and exploring
my sexual identity in that way,” said Moshoyannis. In
his thirties, his focus switched to longer-term partnerships—or rather, the lack of them: “I was much more
concerned about, ‘Okay, I’m 30 and I haven’t had a relationship last longer than eight months. What’s wrong
with me?’ . . . So my thirties were really about the
relationship thing. And I’m pretty much married now.”
Tierney picked up on the theme of marriage, noting that before the push for marriage equality, “that
wasn’t a possibility, and there was no way to memorialize our relationships. . . . A lot of people my age are
still in that world,” which informs what they expect
from relationships. Sims shared that his expectations
used to be unrealistic, “like there was this perfect person for me.” As he’s gotten older, he says, “I’m much
more negotiable!”
Brocklehurst came out in his teens and soon
learned that monogamous relationships weren’t for
him. “I think in my twenties I’ve been exploring
sexuality more.” He cautioned that, “with the hookup scene, I think we should be careful not to devalue
or put down people who want sexual satisfaction and
short-term gratification.” He hears other gay men
criticizing the use of Grindr, a mobile app that helps
gay and bi guys locate and meet others nearby, “but
I’m of that generation—you know, ‘I’m horny and right
now I’m at the gym.’ . . . And I think that we shouldn’t
vilify that.”
An audience member piped up with his own
unconventional love story: “My first real relationship
started at a bear orgy when I was 56.” He had a message to older men in the audience: “Love can come at
any time. It never really came throughout the years I
was expecting it to, and it came later.” He also encouraged older gay men to keep exploring both their sexuality and their community: “There are groups where
you can get spanked once or twice a month! . . . You
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don’t need to be limited. I thought I felt my best at 30,
but I was wrong. You can be hot when you’re 70.”
These comments raised another important question: How much do our looks matter as we get older? “I
think we all wish they didn’t matter,” quipped Tierney.
“I was a ballet dancer and I’ve always been athletic,”
said Sharp. “To watch my skin start drooping and my
muscles start fading is difficult. It’s really a challenge, no
matter how you try to not be vain! Plus the HIV comes
in: lipodystrophy, effects on body shape.”
Sims agreed that looks matter. “There’s no doubt,”
he said. “We’re trying to attract what we want, and we
focus on our looks.” He sees this as a greater pressure
on gay men than on his straight male friends: “They
don’t worry!” Moshoyannis joked about this double
standard: “There was actually a very funny Family
Guy skit about this. There’s a gay guy who says, ‘I’m
straight skinny but gay fat.’”
As you get older, how are you getting the support you need?
“Nobody commits suicide because he’s gay. People commit suicide because they’re isolated and alienated. . . .
Some people who are lonely and isolated will consider
that an option. I want us to change that, because if we
as a community and a society stop the isolating and
alienating of gay men, lesbians, transgender folks, and
bisexuals, those suicide numbers go away.”
—Steven Tierney
In terms of support, Tierney emphasized the importance of community connectedness to people who
come out as gay: “I like to think that it’s not so much
coming out as coming in.” Along the same lines, an
audience member shared how important strong social
networks are to him and his partner of 47 years: “This
has actually been the happiest part of our lives that
I can recall ever having,” thanks largely to networks
the pair have cultivated over the years with people
who share their interest in the arts, travel, sailing, and
politics. “That has kept our living together exciting and
thriving and happy. And I wouldn’t change that for
anything else in the world.”
Another audience member expressed fear that lack
of culturally competent social services could hurt gay
people as they age: “If you don’t have services to address the older population in terms of cultural issues
among seniors in the gay community and HIV-positive
community, then it’s kind of a train wreck. . . . I worry
about our growing-older population—that we will turn
to more substance use and alcohol because we’re sitting in our apartments alone and feeling frustrated and
sad and depressed.”
To highlight resources available to people aging in San Francisco’s gay community, a number of
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organizations brought materials to share and spoke
briefly during the forum. Among these were representatives from Alliance Health Project, providing
mental health services to the lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender (LGBT) community, including a support group for gay and bi men over fifty; Bridgemen,
STOP AIDS Project’s community-service volunteer
group for gay and bi men in their thirties and forties;
the San Francisco Therapy Collective, which specializes in mental health for gay, bi, lesbian, transgender,
questioning, and intersex people; the LGBT Community Partnership, serving seniors and people with
disabilities; Openhouse, offering housing and support
services for LGBT older adults; and Positive Force,
another program of STOP AIDS Project, providing
health education and social events for gay, bi, and
transgender guys with HIV.
thirties that things got better. And now I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Sims agreed: “I would say the same thing: not
having fear. I definitely remember a lot of fear about
so many things: being young and gay—and young and
gay and black.”
Tierney’s advice to his younger self? “Just take a
chance . . . and meet people out there.” As he explained, “we often don’t do it because we feel limited
by age or race or size or HIV status—and sometimes
it’s because we’re afraid of what they will think of us.
You know what? So what!” He continued, “The fact of
the matter is, the gay community has always been a
community of lovers, a community of sexual outlaws.
And now we have married folks, as well. It’s all of
that. Just take a chance.”
Resources for Healthy Aging in San Francisco
What advice would you give to your younger self if
you could?
“Just be where you’re at. You’re fine. Love yourself.”
—Derek Brocklehurst
Although the panelists differed in age, their responses
were remarkably similar. “We grow up thinking that
we’re so different and that there’s something wrong
with us,” said Brocklehurst.
“For me, it was really important as I was aging
through my twenties to know that there wasn’t necessarily something wrong with me around dating and
relationships,” added Moshoyannis. “I think there’s a
lot of stigma that guys in their twenties carry around
with them” he said, “and it wasn’t until I was in my
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• Alliance Health Project
www.ucsf-ahp.org
• Bridgemen
www.stopaids.org/programs/bridgemen
• LGBT Community Partnership
www.lgbtcommunitypartnership.org
• Openhouse
www.openhouse-sf.org/about
• Positive Force
www.stopaids.org/programs/positive-force
• San Francisco Therapy Collective
www.sftherapycollective.org
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