Rosenfeld Dana, Ramirez-Valles Jesus
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom.
School of Medicine, Univeristy of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States.
Front Sociol. 2024 May 15;9:1393607. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2024.1393607. eCollection 2024.
The last century's numerous, rapid social changes affecting gay men make studies of gay male aging a ripe topic for life course theory, which views later life as the product of historical grounded interchanges between individual lives, social change, and structural contexts. That identifying as gay can occur at any point in the life course widens some life course theorists' primary focus on early-life events to include those occurring throughout the life course. Yet most historically-attentive research on older gay men focuses on generations and identity development rather than on cohorts - groups who entered a system or context at the same time - or on the cumulative, concrete outcomes of encountering social change at a particular point in the life course. This article argues for gay male aging studies' use of life course theory, specifically, its focus on cohort membership's implications for later life, including cumulative disadvantage, in addition to more generationally-focused investigations. After briefly reviewing scholarship on older gay men, we introduce the life course approach and its critique by queer gerontologists for adopting a heteronormative view of the LGBT life course and eliding its distinctive contours. With particular attention to later-life concrete outcomes rather than identity formation, we explore key historical events in gay men's lives that have produced (in the case of the AIDS epidemic) or could produce (for example, the Marriage Equality Act, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy) distinctive gay male cohorts. We then consider intra-cohort variation within gay male cohorts before exploring some the barriers to investigating cohorts and cohort effects among older gay men.
上世纪众多迅速的社会变革影响着男同性恋者，这使得男同性恋者衰老问题的研究成为生命历程理论的一个成熟课题。生命历程理论将晚年视为个体生活、社会变革和结构背景之间基于历史的相互作用的产物。由于认同同性恋身份可在生命历程的任何阶段发生，这使得一些生命历程理论家将原本主要关注早年事件的焦点扩大，将贯穿生命历程的所有事件都纳入其中。然而，大多数关注历史的老年男同性恋者研究聚焦于代际和身份发展，而非同群组（指同时进入一个系统或背景的群体），也未关注在生命历程中特定时刻遭遇社会变革所产生的累积性、具体性结果。本文主张男同性恋者衰老问题研究应运用生命历程理论，具体而言，除了更多聚焦代际的研究外，还要关注同群组身份对晚年的影响，包括累积性劣势。在简要回顾关于老年男同性恋者的学术研究后，我们介绍生命历程方法以及酷儿老年学家对其的批评，因为该方法采用了异性恋规范视角看待 LGBT 群体的生命历程，忽略了其独特轮廓。特别关注晚年的具体结果而非身份形成，我们探讨男同性恋者生活中的关键历史事件，这些事件已经（如艾滋病流行）或可能（例如《婚姻平等法案》《不问不说》政策）产生独特的男同性恋同群组。然后，在探讨研究老年男同性恋者同群组及同群组效应的一些障碍之前，我们先考虑男同性恋同群组内部的差异。
