Gay Men's Relationships Across The Life Course (2013)

Gay Men’s Relationships Across the Life Course
Gay Men’s Relationships

Across the Life Course
Peter Robinson
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Foreword by
The Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG
© Peter Robinson 2013
Foreword © Michael Kirby 2013
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To the 97 men who gave their time to be interviewed
Contents
List of Tables viii

Foreword by The Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG ix
Acknowledgements xiv
Introduction 1
1 Collecting 97 Gay Men’s Life Stories 14
2 Single Men 37
3 Long-Lasting Relationships 62
4 Fatherhood 83
5 Marriage 100
6 Cohabitation 121
7 Living in the Midst of HIV-AIDS 145
Conclusion 165
Appendixes 170
Notes 177
Index 200
vii
List of Tables
A.1 International sample, 2009–2011 170

A.2 Australian sample, 2001–2003 172
A.3 Relationship status 174
A.4 Single men 174
A.5 Fatherhood settings 176
viii
Foreword
In the social sciences, and in the quest for law reform, empiricism reigns.
Having theories and bright ideas is good. But having detailed facts and
collecting detailed data and opinions usually affords a much sounder
basis for judgement and the design of new public policy and law.
A good illustration of these propositions can be found in the life
and work of Dr Alfred Kinsey. Before Kinsey there were many theoreti-
cians who offered postulates about homosexuality and homosexuals.
Of course, some of them had a small sample of specimens upon whom
they based their theories and conclusions. Thus, Sigmund Freud was a
practising psychiatrist. He based his enlightened opinions about sexual
minorities on the small cohort of patients he had treated or observed.
It was on that footing, in 1935, that he wrote his famous ‘Letter to an
American mother’. In that letter he declared: ‘Homosexuality is assur-
edly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no
degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a
variation of the sexual function. Many highly respectable individuals
of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the
greatest men amongst them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci).’
Yet although this had an impact in the circle of practising psychiatrists,
it cut no ice with the general public, or with the politicians who repre-
sented them as lawmakers.
This is where Alfred Kinsey made his mark. A more unlikely marksman
is hard to imagine. He was a professor of zoology at Indiana University,
in a conservative state of the United States, working in the rural set-
ting of Bloomington. He was the world’s leading expert on gall wasps,
a variety of bee. Yet, in his mature age, he turned to the taxonomies of
human beings. He embarked upon an empirical study of the sexual lives
of his fellow Americans. He conducted a huge number of interviews. He
followed a set interviewing pattern. And he came up with most remark-
able data, including about the incidence of homosexuality:
• 37 per cent of the male population had at least one overt homo-
sexual experience to orgasm between the ages of 16 and 45.
• 13 per cent of the male population had had more homosexual than
heterosexual experience over at least a three-year period.
ix
x Foreword
• 10 per cent of the male population had been more or less exclusively
homosexual for at least a three-year period, with 8 per cent being
completely homosexual for at least that period.
• 4 per cent of the white male population was exclusively homosexual
(rated on his scale 0–6) for their entire lives.
Kinsey’s 1948 report on Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male landed like
a bombshell in the United States, dispelling all kinds of ignorant, medi-
eval opinions concerning sexual conduct, and specifically homosexual
conduct. Its impact was enhanced and enlarged by Kinsey’s report on
Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, published in 1953. Armed with
these reports, Kinsey’s flair as a public speaker and protected by the First
Amendment to the United States Constitution, it became impossible
to put the genie back in the bottle. The news travelled far and wide
through the modern media. Specifically, it spread to all the English-
speaking countries, which had been in the forefront of criminalising
adult private homosexual conduct. What had been thought to be the
weird behaviour of a tiny and wilful minority, contrary to scriptural
instruction, was revealed as widespread, natural conduct amongst a size-
able minority that was stable and persistent. It was so even in the face of
cruel criminalisation and vicious religious and social stigma.
It is no coincidence that, a decade after the second Kinsey report was
published, the British Parliament moved, in 1967, to amend the laws
in England. Australia followed in 1974 with reforms adopted first in
South Australia under Don Dunstan. Gradually parliaments and courts
on every continent were getting rid of the fiendish laws that punished
sexual minorities. And once the criminal laws disappeared, pressure
built up to provide affirmative rights: to pensions and social security;
to protection against discrimination; and to legal recognition of stable
relationships. This is what can happen when social science reveals the
realities about human life in all of its variety.
This book by Peter Robinson is another step on the path that Alfred
Kinsey charted. It does not boast of the huge numbers of interviews
conducted by Kinsey and his colleagues. To that extent the sample
(being data collected from 97 gay men living in Auckland, Hong Kong,
Los Angeles, Melbourne, London, Manchester, Mumbai, New York, and
Sydney) is tiny, given the world of 7 billion human beings. Nevertheless,
the author has added a dimension of detail that Kinsey’s methodology
did not permit. He has conducted elaborate interviews that reveal a
rich source of primary data and permit the subjects to offer information
about their experiences and opinions that the statistical approach of
Foreword xi
Kinsey did not allow. Of course, it would have been preferable to have
offered a larger sample for analysis. However, the author explains the
difficulties, interruptions, and obstacles that he encountered even limit-
ing his enquiry to fewer than 100 interviewees.
Another difference from Kinsey is that the author has gone outside
the semi-comfortable circumstances of his own country to foreign
lands, including some of them (India and Hong Kong) that have signifi-
cantly different cultures and social values. This has permitted disclosure
of features of the lives lived by gay men that are common and some
that are different, according to cultural and social norms. It may be said
that the lives of gay men in Mumbai and Hong Kong are significantly
different from those lived by other gay men in different towns and vil-
lages of India and China. But the same can probably be said of the lives
of gay men in Sydney and Melbourne when compared to Deniliquin
and Goondiwindi. Kinsey is still bitterly criticised by his critics for
the imperfections of his data that are denounced as unrepresentative,
selective, and misleading. The same critics would probably attack Peter
Robinson’s sample on the same grounds. However, as with Kinsey,
there is sufficient authenticity to make the study and its disclosures
worthwhile. In Kinsey’s case, the authenticity was achieved by the sheer
volume and number of the interviews. In the present author’s case it is
achieved by the detail that he has gathered. This demonstrates at once
the similarities and differences that exist amongst gay men both in the
lives they live and in the opinions they hold about those lives and the
current issues that affect them. Amongst the important messages that
emerge from the book and its analysis are:
• Almost half the men interviewed lived full and active single lives,
with a strong capacity to build friendships and to enjoy support of
a community.
• A significant number of the men formed long-term relationships
resembling marriage that (except in the early blush of romance) were
not overly sexualised.
• 22 of the men had stories to tell as fathers.
• Although more than 40 per cent of the sample were recorded as
favouring marriage equality, a significant number (20 per cent) were
opposed to the institution of marriage, regarding it as patriarchal
in character and imposing a regime of hetero-normativity that they
wished to escape.
• Most of the men interviewed had lived through crises of various kinds
connected with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. But amongst younger men
xii Foreword
in the cohort, there was some evidence of willingness to take ‘strate-

gic risks’ in sexual conduct, alien to the safe sex messages to which
older interviewees had been exposed at the height of the crisis.
As with Kinsey and his statistical taxonomies, this book challenges a

lot of assumptions about the sex lives of the interviewees. They do not
emerge as particularly sex obsessed; nor as incapable of sustaining long-
lasting relationships; nor as doomed to lonely lives, bereft of friends. On
the other hand, questions are presented as to whether different conclu-
sions would be drawn from a larger cohort; from one that included an
equal number of women interviewees; from one that included trans-
gender and sex-worker participants; and one which was able somehow
to reach out to sexual minorities living their lives in non-metropolitan
areas, in the loneliness of regional and rural communities still very hos-
tile to homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexual, and other queer minorities.
One of the questions which was raised in the recently failed attempt
to secure marriage equality from the Australian Federal Parliament was
whether extending legal equality to those gays who wanted to get mar-
ried would inevitably lead on to other forms of marriage: the marriage
of three or four people to one another; polygamous marriage for het-
erosexuals; marriage to children; incestuous marriage; and even (as one
Australian Senator offensively put it) marriage to an animal. Whilst these
questions were presented politely enough, they revealed the underlying
hostility amongst opponents to contemplating the truth of Kinsey’s
basic discoveries and the consequential need to open marriage to at
least those gay citizens prepared to accept its obligations and assump-
tions. One value of Peter Robinson’s text is that it reveals, amongst the
sample investigated, the boring similarity between most homosexual
and heterosexual lives. If there are differences they would appear to be
differences that predominate between male attitudes to sexuality and
female, rather than between homosexual and heterosexual attitudes to
stable relationships.
The book is easy to read. It makes the reader a kind of voyeur to the
sexual lives of the subjects. But the glimpse that is afforded is depend-
ent upon the truthfulness and completeness of the revelations of the
interviewees. And upon this, Peter Robinson (like Alfred Kinsey) had
no sanction to impose either upon those who exaggerated the sexual
features of their lives or (more likely) those who discreetly revealed only
as much as they thought was desirable for the interviewer to hear.
Because this book is anchored in the empirical principle, it is a useful
addition to human knowledge. It will not have the mighty impact that
Foreword xiii
the Kinsey reports did. And yet it was those reports that, ultimately, led
to many others. And that made it possible for an Australian researcher
such as Peter Robinson to embark upon the enquiry recorded in these
pages. By securing and analysing more data about the lives of sexual
minorities and by making that data available in book and digital form,
Peter Robinson and his generation contribute to the unstoppable glo-
bal move to end the hostility, to reform the laws and to terminate the
stigma that has caused so much pain and misery to so many innocent
and blameless people.
Sydney
21 February 2013
Michael Kirby
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge here the help and assistance I received

from friends and colleagues over the three and a half years that I spent
researching and writing this book. A stalwart was Dr Helen Marshall, who
not only read the book twice in draft form, first as I wrote each chapter
and then again when I brought them together in the shape that you see
now, but also offered sensible and calming advice when I sought to make
sense of my primary data and to plan the architecture of the book. As
well and in particular, I would like to thank Professor Russell Crawford,
Dean of the Faculty of Life and Social Sciences, Swinburne University of
Technology, for his encouragement when I arrived at the University and
the practical support that he provided in the shape of a start-up, research
account, which allowed me in 2011 to finalise transcription of ten
outstanding interviews and in 2012 to employ sessional and casual col-
leagues to help with research assistance, proofreading, and editing. Other
colleagues at Swinburne who gave me support or a friendly smile and
encouraged me on my way were Associate Professor Karen Farquharson,
Dr Paula Geldens, Dr Julie Kimber, Dr Peter Love, and Dr Dean Lusher,
and I thank them here for their kindnesses. Special thanks go to Dr Aisling
Bailey, who often asked me how things were going with ‘the book’ and if
I needed a hand and then helped out with proofreading at short notice
and the checking of chapters when one important deadline was nigh. At
Monash University, Dr John Pardy was ceaseless in his interest and gener-
ous in the theoretical insights he offered as I sought to make meaning of
my data. Universities are nothing without students, and I found in my
students at Swinburne a genuine interest in the progress of this book,
especially those who were enrolled in Qualitative Research Methods in
2012 and Sociology of Health in 2011 and 2012. And here I am think-
ing of Daniel Ashbury, Andrés Carberry, Filip Djordjevic, Ameera Katar,
Stephanie Mathews, and Ashlie Rich, among others.
Together with colleagues, my friends have been a great help. They
know who they are, and I would like to thank them for bearing with me
as I moaned and groaned about this, my second labour of love. The first
labour of love, as they know only too well, was The Changing World of Gay
Men, which was also published by Palgrave Macmillan (2008). Among
my friends, I would like to thank Humphrey McQueen for a great practi-
cal kindness in passing on to me Beatrice Webb’s note-taking method.1
xiv
Acknowledgements xv
It is a reliable system for storing the small and large ideas we jot down
when taking notes from other people’s work, which never failed me
when I wrote my PhD, my first book, and now this my second book. To
my physiotherapist, Jon Park, I probably owe the greatest thanks. Using
his hands and practical knowledge as he did over a two-year period, he
looked after my shoulders and back when they were strained, keeping
them pliable and relatively pain-free as I wrote, edited, and revised the
words that now make up this book.
Other people who helped me along the way, whose help was equally
as important as that which my colleagues and friends offered, were the
acquaintances and strangers and acquaintances and strangers who have
since become friends who helped me recruit the very interesting sample
of 97 gay men whose interviews comprise the data on which this book
rests. Here, I am thinking of people like Rehan Kularatne in London
and Trevor McLean in Melbourne, who helped me get in touch with
men to interview in Melbourne, London, and Hong Kong. I was helped
in Melbourne also by Jack Loder, who put me in touch with a group of
men who were in their 20s. In Mumbai, I was fortunate to meet online
Shivanandra Khan OBE and in person Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil.
Both men kindly helped me recruit interviewees when I visited Mumbai
in December 2009. In New York, Professor Dan Pinello alerted people to
my research project when I was there in June 2009, and this enabled me
to interview more diverse men in New York and Los Angeles than would
have been the case. A Manhattan resident Scott Davis helped me also
to recruit interviewees in New York, in particular gay African-American
men, and for his assistance and that of Dan Pinello I am very grateful.
I made two attempts to interview men in Hong Kong, and these are
discussed in more detail in Chapter 1. On my first trip in December
2009, I interviewed three men with the help of Eric Herrera, organiser
of a gay business and social organisation called Fruits in Suits.2 After
more planning and equipped with introductions from friends and
acquaintances who knew people in Hong Kong, my second research trip
to Hong Kong (June 2011) was a success and I recruited the remaining
eleven Hong Kong interviewees. The success of the second research trip
was due also to the help and support I received from Nigel Collett and
members of the Pink Alliance, whom I thank here.
There were two phases to the interviews I held with Londoners. The
first took place when I was visiting England in July 2010 and held face-
to-face interviews with two men. The second phase was when with the
help of a friend who once lived in Melbourne I got in touch with six
men aged 33–47, some of whom I interviewed on Skype and some of
xvi Acknowledgements
whom sent me ‘written interviews’, the meaning of which I explain

in Chapter 1. I recruited interviewees from Manchester when I was in
England in July 2010. My decision to include gay men from Manchester
arose from the city’s gay reputation and as the setting of the British tel-
evision series, Queer As Folk.3 I spent three days in the field when I was
in Manchester and had one day to enjoy its Indian restaurants and new
light rail system. When there, I was very grateful for the help and advice
I received from Dr John Goldring, Manchester Metropolitan University
and Dr Richard Ward, Manchester University.
My visits to Sydney and Auckland occurred towards the end of my
fieldwork, in October 2010. Peter Trebilco OAM helped me recruit gay
Sydneysiders by passing on to the Pride history group, Sydney, my call
for interviewees. Six men associated with Pride got in touch with me,
and I interviewed them in Sydney in mid-October 2010 en route to
Auckland. The final leg of my fieldwork took place in Auckland. I began
preparations for Auckland early in 2010, when through a mutual friend
I got in touch with Michael Stevens who was then doing research for
his PhD on HIV infection among men who have sex with men. Michael
gave me the names of two people who advertised my field trip and
helped me recruit men for interview. They were Jacqui Stanford, a writer
and subeditor at GayNZ.com and Vaughan Meneses, the manager of
OutlineNZ. I would like to thank Peter Trebilco OAM, Michael Stevens,
Jacqui Standford, and Vaughan Meneses for their kind help in Sydney
and Auckland. Finally, I would like to thank all the men I interviewed
whose first language was not English and who agreed to speak to me in
a language that was not their mother tongue.
At Palgrave Macmillan, Philippa Grand kept a careful eye on my first
book and offered me a contract for this second book. I have found in
Philippa a fair-minded, considerate, and knowledgeable publisher and
would like to acknowledge her help and guidance here. As well, I would
like to acknowledge the work of Andrew James and Naomi Robinson,
who assisted me in the writing and pre-production stages of the book,
and then finally the production team at Palgrave Macmillan for the
great work they did on the book’s cover and in copy editing my original
manuscript. Any faults that remain are my responsibility alone.
Notes
1. B. Webb My Apprenticeship (London: C. Longmans Green), pp. 364–70.
2. See Chapter 2.
3. British television series about a group of gay people living in Manchester. A
North American series by the same name screened also in the early 2000s.
Introduction
What identified me as a gay person when I was younger

was the edginess of what was going on in the com-
munity. And we are not edgy anymore. We are truly
mainstream and that just kills me. … I don’t know if
that is a feature of getting older or the gay community
has assimilated in such a way that we have become
boring.
(Marvin, aged 59, Los Angeles)
Younger gay men in Mumbai have a different kind of

mentality. Their notion of fun or of party are different
from mine and that means I do not involve myself
with [them]. … I would rather go to a house party and
sit around and have conversations and drinks than go
to a nightclub and dance the night away with all that
[naked] skin and smoke and everything.
(William, aged 27, Mumbai)
My interest in the life course is twofold. First, I am interested in how

resilient are gay friendship networks and gay relationships, and whether
they will sustain gay men as they age. Second, I am interested in how
the gay ‘community’ addresses the issue of gay ageing. I lived through
the HIV-AIDS epidemic and, like many others, was impressed by the way
in which as a group gay men responded to the external threat posed by
the disease. I wonder now if gay men can/will respond similarly to the
issue of ageing, which is of concern because of evidence suggesting
that gay men are forced back into the closet the moment they take up
residence in aged-care accommodation facilities.1
1
2 Gay Men’s Relationships Across the Life Course
One of the more important findings reported in this book is that gay
men 60 and older are on the whole fairly content with their lives (most
were in long-lasting relationships) and optimistic about the future. Gay
activists I interviewed were concerned, however, about the prospect
of life in a nursing home – for themselves or for any gay person – and
chiefly for the reason outlined above, that is, that they would be forced
back into the closet. This is an important issue that needs more public
and political discussion, especially when one considers that in a country
like Australia, and I suspect the same is true in most western countries,
the majority of nursing homes and aged-care facilities are operated by
churches or church-based organisations – and not all of these are gay-
friendly. Along with the fact that the gay world, its social institutions
and practices are surprisingly similar the world over, I observed that
in cities where gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) com-
munity organisations existed and were actively involved in social mat-
ters, awareness of gay life course and ageing issues seemed relatively
high.2 This is similar to an observation Dennis Altman made about
the correlation between levels of gay community activism in the 1980s
and HIV-AIDS awareness.3 In Manchester, Melbourne, and New York,
for example, there are gay organisations that work to raise funds and
awareness of gay life course issues and lobby government. In Mumbai,
I found also a high level of interest in ageing issues largely because of
the social and political activism of three charitable trusts – the Lakshya
Trust, which is based in Gujarat, the Humsafar Trust in Mumbai, and
the Saarthi Trust, which is in Nagpur.
This book differs from the first I wrote in two important aspects.4
First, its sample is international, comprising as it does material collected
from 97 gay men I interviewed in nine major cities in six countries.
Second, it is mainly concerned with how gay men understand and expe-
rience relationships across the life course. It is through the twin lenses
of age and ageing that their life stories were examined – life stories that
included accounts of relationships of 20 years’ duration and more, argu-
ments for and against gay marriage, the joys of the single life, and men’s
experience of fatherhood.
The sample
The non-representative sample on which this book is based comprises

97 men recruited from nine major cities in Australia, China (Hong
Kong), England, India, New Zealand, and the United States. Interviews
were conducted between July 2009 and December 2011. The sample is
Introduction 3
somewhat predictable because as an Australian male of my class and

age, it made sense when designing the project to look to England and
the USA if I wanted to recruit an international sample of gay men.5
Because I lived in Melbourne, it made practical, and logistical, sense to
interview men close to home – from Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland.
I would argue, however, that the sample is also eclectic because along
with interviewees from Australia, England, New Zealand, and the USA
it includes men from Mumbai and Hong Kong.
The first city I visited for the purpose of interviewing men for the book
was New York in July 2009, followed by Los Angeles in August 2009,
then Mumbai in December 2009, and Hong Kong in January 2010. In
the first half of 2010, I interviewed men in Melbourne, Manchester, and
London, finishing with rounds of interviews in Sydney and Auckland
in October 2010. Additional interviews were held in Melbourne in
late 2010, and then with men in London to whom I spoke between
December 2010 and February 2011 by the Internet program Skype.
My first book was commended for including gay men from all classes
and in so doing helped challenge a pervasive myth – that gay men are
mostly if not all middle class.6 The fact that this book includes data not
only from men of all classes but also from interviews I had with 30 non-
white gay men will help challenge another popular myth, which is that
the gay identity is largely white and western. The non-white men that
I interviewed for the book comprised an Aboriginal Australian man,
African-American, African-Caribbean and Mexican-American men,
Chinese men, Maori, and men from South Asia. There is more about the
nature of the sample and my reasons for interviewing men from Hong
Kong and Mumbai in Chapter 1.
Rationale
For a study that includes the life stories of a large number of non-Anglo
gay men, it was important from the outset to test whether the inter-
viewees ascribed the same meaning to their social, sexual, and affective
lives. For more than a decade in India, for example, terms to describe
non-heterosexuals have been the subject of fierce debate: ‘a vocifer-
ous constituency … protests the use of terms like gay for India’s male
homosexual population instead preferring the more functional men
who have sex with men (MSM)’.7 Despite the controversy in India about
terminology – largely relating to the work of NGOs and local organisa-
tions involved in the HIV-AIDS crisis to use a terminology that enables
them to contact men who do not identify as gay but who have sex
with men8 – all the men I interviewed from India as well as the South
Asian men who lived in the West declared that they and their same-sex-
attracted friends were ‘gays’. As well, all the Chinese men I interviewed
from Hong Kong understood the term gay and, with the exception of
one man in his mid-20s who called himself ‘queer’, identified as gay.
I would argue that the general acceptance of and identification with the
term gay that I found among this non-representative sample was partly
a result of the plain-language statement that I sent potential interview-
ees, which stated that I was seeking ‘gay’ men to take part in research on
gay age and ageing.9 It was partly a result also of what Dennis Altman
argues is the effect of globalisation on non-heterosexual identities:
The gay world – less obviously the lesbian, largely due to marked dif-
ferences in women’s social and economic status – is a key example of
emerging global ‘subcultures’, where members of particular groups have
more in common across national and continental boundaries than
they do with others in their own geographically defined societies.10
The research that underpins this book rests on four assumptions,

which are examined below. First, a connection exists between sexual
preference and sexual identity so that a ‘gay world’ exists in the West,
comprising bars, sex clubs, community organisations, which many gay
men use in order to socialise or find sexual or relationship partners – and
that similar versions of the same exist outside the West. Second, the
idea of generation exists that often provides individuals with a sense of
personal and collective identity. Third, the self is narratively constituted.
Fourth, that age and ageing can be understood as socially constructed.
Sexual identity and gay world(s)

It is now fairly well accepted in scholarly circles that in the West sexual
preference or sexual desire shapes identity, and that this in turn has
given rise to sexual categories such as gay, bisexual, and transsexual,
that is, that sexual desire and the associated sexual identity are socially
constructed. The connection between sexual desire and sexual identity
is explained by Steven Seidman as follows:
Unless we are prepared to exclude all those sexual constructions that

differ from ‘our own’, or to deny difference by interpreting them as
minor variations of an identical phenomenon, we must concede that
groups evolve their own sexual culture around which they elaborate
coherent lives.11
Introduction 5
This understanding that separate sexual categories exist has taken hold
also in non-western countries where the influence of the West has been
strong or prolonged, such as in the case of India and Hong Kong.
Of all the debates about the connection between same-sex desire and
practice and sexual identity, the one I find most persuasive is James
Boswell’s argument in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.
Boswell argued that gay people have always existed in human societies,
and that evidence of their existence in the past has come to us only from
times that were sufficiently propitious for them to make themselves and
their relationships public.12 That the views and attitudes towards gay
men that non-homosexuals hold are not constant and vary according
to the social context of the day relates to an argument Norbert Elias
made in Civilizing Process – that people born at different times in the
modern period demonstrate different levels of sensitivity to shame and
embarrassment.13 Following Elias’s argument, I have assumed that dif-
ferent age cohorts of gay men experience homosexuality differently,
influenced as they are by prevailing, dominant narratives on sexual-
ity and homosexuality.14 In a similar vein, Dennis Altman argues that
homophobia shadows every move gay men make.15 By this he means
that whenever and wherever they speak up, their opponents also do
so and by the same means. Once anonymous homophobic abuse was
scribbled on walls, in railway carriages, and public toilets. Nowadays,
anti-gay slogans are scrawled in public places on the Internet when
homophobes post abusive messages in response to views they wish to
denigrate or belittle.
The world that many gay men inhabit comprises the scene – bars, sex
clubs, saunas – and then what is generally known as the gay commu-
nity, consisting of community organisations such as those established
to care for people living with HIV-AIDS (PLWHA) and help gay men
come out or improve their relationships.16 In relying on the idea of
a gay world, that is, a sub-culture that is separate from ‘mainstream’
society, I am consciously building on earlier work where I explained the
formation of the gay world in countries like Australia and England as a
response to gay men’s need to socialise and as a safe harbour from the
straight world where they were shunned or worse. For many gay men,
the clubs and bars that it comprised formed a ghetto-like space where
they could socialise in relative safety. During most of the twentieth
century in large western cities like London, New York, and Sydney, the
gay world was important for the formation of gay identity, particularly
during the 1960s and 1970s when the gay liberation movement coa-
lesced. At that time, men exchanged and disseminated new ideas about
themselves and how they understood their identity as based on their

sexual preference; they did so in the same bars and clubs where they
went to drink, dance, meet friends, and look for sexual partners. Since
then, however, the importance of the gay world as a safe haven has
declined as the achievements of gay liberation have been more widely
shared and social tolerance increased. Its raison d’être has declined also
with the growth of the Internet, the dating and quick-sex hook-ups that
it spawned, and the emergence of young gay men whose social lives are
defined not by their immersion in the gay world but by assimilationist
practices.17 Young men with assimilationist values have so reshaped the
gay identity in parts of the USA that Marvin (aged 59) from Los Angeles,
whose views are quoted at the head of the Introduction, said that he no
longer felt any connection to contemporary gay culture. It is possible
that the cultural change taking place in western gay world(s) is as por-
tentous as the change that took place in the late 1960s. Then, the baby
boomers invaded and took over the camp world of their predecessors,
publicly proclaimed the gay man as the new, modern homosexual and
began establishing gay institutions to meet their economic, political,
and social/sexual needs.
How was the gay world in Mumbai similar to or different from that in
a western city such as Manchester? Even though I visited Mumbai and
Manchester to interview men for this book, I did not make or find time
to explore the gay bars and clubs in the cities, and so here use fleeting
impressions, secondary material, and, in the case of Mumbai, draw on the
views of interviewees to describe them. One Sunday lunchtime on Canal
Street is too brief a time to form any but the most superficial impres-
sion of the gay scene (bars and clubs) in Manchester. What I remember
seeing, however, were bars open to the street serving food and drink,
small groups of mostly men, representing most body shapes, and loud,
fairly anonymous dance music. The people in the bars and those eating
from sidewalk cafés appeared polite, relatively affluent, well behaved,
and friendly. Only the absence of children, conventional family groups,
and a greater number of women suggested it was a gay neighbourhood.
Paul Simpson has written at length about the gay world in Manchester
and described the gay precinct as follows:
The gay district itself consists largely of one main thoroughfare (Canal
Street), which … hosts the main bars overlooking the canal. The vil-
lage also extends to two streets running in parallel and three smaller
streets running perpendicular to the main thoroughfare. … The gay
district housed: 35 bars (mainly gay-identified with late licenses,
Introduction 7
though six were advertised as ‘mixed,’ one is mainly ‘lesbian’ and

one is mainly ‘trans’); three nightclubs … seven restaurants … sev-
eral fast-food restaurants; three hotels, two of which are attached to
bars … various businesses mostly targeted at gay men … [and] The
Lesbian and Gay Foundation … situated just behind Canal Street.18
From Paul’s description and my observations of Canal Street, the gay

world in Manchester is similar in nature and composition to gay dis-
tricts in other large, western cities. Because of the preponderance of bars
and clubs with late-night licences as well as cafés, restaurants, and shops
selling dance-party paraphernalia and leather costumes, Canal Street
resembled Soho in London, Le Marais in Paris, Oxford Street in Sydney,
and Greenwich Village in New York.
I did not visit any of the gay districts in Mumbai. Parmesh Shanahi’s
description of Mumbai’s gay world suggests that middle-class, gay men
meet and socialise in bars and clubs, dance until dawn, and use the
Internet for social/sexual contacts in much the same way as do their
counterparts in cities like Hong Kong, London, and New York.19 And as
William from Mumbai reveals, whose quote is one of two that head this
chapter, not all gay men are drawn to the commercial scene of bars and
clubs and, as Shivananda Khan and Jeremy Seabrook have pointed out,
among others, there is a vast network of men from all classes in India
who have sex with men.20 From casual conversations with interviewees
while in Mumbai and observations I made when in their homes, I left
the city with three distinct impressions of the gay world in Mumbai.
My first impression was that the men I interviewed tended to social-
ise in each other’s homes or in cafés and restaurants, which might be
explained by the fact that, with the exception of one man from a poor
village family, all belonged to either the middle or upper classes. My sec-
ond impression was that, as William’s quote suggests, the dance clubs in
Mumbai were crowded and noisy and attracted large numbers of young
men. My third impression was that a lively sex trade existed and that
large numbers of sex workers used the sea wall near the Gate of India as
the central place to meet clients. These impressions reminded me of the
picture that Andrew Holleran painted of the New York gay world in the
late 1970s, that is, a vast, hedonistic, fairly chaotic, and mobile world
populated by young or youthful men.21
I have used the terms ‘gay’, ‘non-heterosexual’, ‘same-sex-attracted’,
and ‘homosexual’ interchangeably in this book to describe men who
love men or have intimate and/or sexual relations with them.22 The term
‘men who have sex with men’ is also used but mainly in the context of
same-sex sexual practices in India where sex between men who do not
identify as homosexual or gay is more widespread.23
Generation identity
The work of Karl Mannheim is generally the agreed starting point for any-
one interested in generations and their meaning.24 Mannheim believed
that an understanding of generations would help social scientists explain
social change, and looked for a means of defining the meaning of ‘gen-
eration’ and enabling us to scientifically separate one generation from
another. The problem as Mannheim saw it was that a general law did
not exist to ‘express the rhythm of historical development, based on the
biological law of the limited life-span of man [sic] and the overlap of new
and old generations’. The problem for anyone wanting to use the con-
cept of generations to distinguish between historical periods was, accord-
ing to Mannheim, in proposing a method to overcome the difficulty that
overlapping births and deaths caused in drawing a dividing line between
two generations.25 The difficulty was in knowing when the social envi-
ronment had changed dramatically enough to identify two birth cohorts
as coming from different historical cohorts. Since Mannheim first identi-
fied this problem, scholars have not stopped using the term to designate
periods of lived experience, as shown by the continued use of the terms
‘First World War’ generation, ‘Depression’ generation, and ‘Vietnam’
generation, for example. In the context of gay worlds, twin defining
experiences for western gay men since the 1950s have been (1) the gay
liberation movement and (2) the HIV-AIDS epidemic.
The gay liberationists’ programme called on gay people to come out,
to proclaim their sexual difference and, until the HIV-AIDS epidemic,
was the most significant, generation-defining event in the history
of modern homosexuality. The act of coming out was not always a
straightforward or painless experience for gays and lesbians from the
‘baby boomer generation’.26 The HIV-AIDS epidemic was a seriously
traumatic event in the lives of more than one generation of gay men.
It marked the generation of men born in the late 1940s and 1950s who
had come of age when the epidemic broke in the West and who had
been sexually active before its means of transmission were known. As
well, as I argue in Chapter 7, the epidemic shaped the identity of later
generations of gay men because by its existence it forced and continues
to force gay men to consider who they are and how they conduct them-
selves, sexually and in other ways.
British gerontologists and sociologists have argued that the term
‘age cohort’ is both better than and preferable to ‘generation’, for four
Introduction 9
reasons. First, as others since Mannheim have noted, it is an inexact

term that cannot and does not define a separate and unique group of
people.27 Second, it is not a helpful tool for understanding or explain-
ing social inequalities.28 Third, it does not reflect the lived experience
of many people, for whom family and family relations are stronger
identity markers.29 Fourth, its identity is created after the event.30 As a
consequence of these arguments, I have mostly used ‘age cohort’ in the
book. The only exception is in the case of Chapter 7 where I discuss
HIV-AIDS and its effect on the identity of two birth cohorts of gay men.
My reason for preferring ‘generation’ over ‘cohort’ in this single con-
text is that the date of the arrival of the HIV-AIDS epidemic marked a
clear and virtually unambiguous watershed between a time when it was
unknown (and great numbers of gay men contracted it unknowingly)
and a time when its presence became known and was made public.
Once its means of transmission were known, a public health campaign
began in Australia (as it did in other western countries like New Zealand
and the UK) to inform gay men about HIV-AIDS and, using the then
novel idea of ‘safe-sex’, to educate them about how to avoid contract-
ing the disease. The most notable consequence of this public health
campaign has been to change the sexual practices of a generation of
same-sex-attracted men.
Narrative identity
To analyse the stories the men told me who were interviewed for this
book, I used a form of narrative analysis known as the life-story method,
which British sociologist Ken Plummer recommended for researchers
working in the field of sexuality. According to Plummer, one of the
advantages of the life-story method was that it provides a scholarly
audience for new stories that were previously not heard – such as those
of sexual-abuse survivors, people coming out late in life, transgender
people, and the relatively familiar coming-out stories of gay and lesbian
people.31 In analysing the data I collected for this study, I was influ-
enced by the work of historian David Carr, who argues that narrative is
‘constitutive’, that is, that the stories we tell about ourselves bring into
being not only actions and experience, but also, and crucially, the self:
‘Narrative … is constitutive not only of action but also of the self which
acts and experiences.’
In regard to the constitutive role of narrative and how it operates,
Carr argues that the self occupies four positions in its own narrative,
which it must occupy simultaneously. The third assumption on which
the research for this book rests is that a person’s life is shaped by the
stories s/he tells about her/himself. Each of us, Carr says, is the author,
storyteller, actor, and audience of the story that together and at once
constitutes the self.32 I would argue that such an understanding of how
the self is constituted is especially useful when analysing life stories of
non-heterosexual people because, for many of us, large stretches of our
lives were and in some cases still are given over to establishing ourselves
as the principal author of our own story, if not also its principal story-
teller, actor, and audience.33 Understanding narrative as constitutive
enables a twofold research process. First, it assumes that the interviewee
will explain by narrative the signal events in his/her life – in the case of
the men interviewed for this book, how they lived their lives as single
men or as fathers, for example. Second, it allows the researcher then to
analyse his/her interviewees’ narrative accounts and shape a larger nar-
rative that tells the story of how, in the case of this book, small groups
of men made sense of their lives as non-heterosexuals.
Social construction of age and ageing

It is generally accepted in sociology and similar disciplines that life
stages such as ‘youth’ and ‘old age’ are socially constructed. The fourth
assumption underlying this book is that a person’s attitude to and
experience of age and ageing are shaped by social factors and not solely
by biology.34. Because class affects gender, for example, working-class
women can experience a harsher old age than women from the mid-
dle or upper classes: ‘the rich simply purchase good and expensive care
for themselves on the “senior services market”, while the less well off
receive no help because they cannot pay for it’.35 At this point I should
explain that when I refer to interviewees’ class position in the book, I do
so in order to give a fuller picture of their lives and that I am not pre-
senting this as a class analysis of gay men’s life stories or relationships.
The low life expectancy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in
Australia illustrates the continuing negative effect ethnicity can have
on a person’s old age, as do accounts from India showing how a com-
bination of class, gender, and caste operate to reduce a person’s life
circumstances.36
The bulk of the poor not only are landless poor peasants and unor-
ganized workers, but are also from the scheduled castes, backward
classes and scheduled tribes. Among the poor households women
suffer more, and also in general, women suffer more from poverty.
Thus, understanding poverty is incomplete without seeing the inter-
face of caste, class and gender.37
Introduction 11
Sexuality as well can affect how an individual experiences old age.

Media reports in Britain and Australia suggest that ageing gays and
lesbians are concerned that they will experience discrimination if they
have to move into nursing homes in old age.38 This will not be the
universal experience of gay men, however, for, as Edmund White has
written, class is a stronger bond than sexual identity: ‘Rich and middle-
class gays are not likely to identify with the poor; they retain a loyalty
to members of their own class, whether straight or gay.’39
The chapters
This book examines the lives of gay men as lived in response to two pow-
erful social impulses, namely, the incentive to conform to heterosexual
norms of relations and behaviour or to create new patterns of relations
and behaviour that match their relationship needs. In the following
chapters, I consider how different facets of gay men’s identity are shaped
by the relationships they maintain and in varying social contexts.
After the account of interviewing men for the book in the first chap-
ter, I look at the life stories of men who lived single lives (Chapter 2),
providing evidence that contradicts a myth about single people and gay
men, which is that single people are invariably lonely and that gay men
are invariably single. After this, the focus moves to the accounts of men
with experience of long-lasting relationships. Among more interesting
findings here (Chapter 3) are that not only were a substantial minor-
ity of the men in long-lasting relationships (10 years or more) but that
the relationships closely resembled the companionate marriage, which
I argue is evidence of gay men’s willingness to mirror heterosexual
relational models based on sustained commitment and longevity.
Fatherhood is the next relationship type to be considered.
My analysis of the stories told by a small group of men who were
fathers (Chapter 4) shows that the majority of these men became fathers
as a result of their earlier heterosexual relationships. Included in this
chapter were five stories of non-heterosexual fatherhood, that is, how
the men became fathers as a result of relations with lesbian couples, sur-
rogacy, or other means. This chapter provides evidence therefore of gay
men’s involvement in one of the relationships most strongly associated
with heterosexuality and of their doing so by both conventional and
experimental means. As well, it shows how social context determined
the means by which two generations of men came to be fathers.
The next two chapters (Chapters 5 and 6) are devoted to the gay
marriage debate. Chapter 5 focuses on the principal reasons that more
than 40 men gave for supporting gay marriage – legal/property equal-

ity, relational equality, and recognition of relationship success through
marriage. The arguments of the men who did not favour gay marriage
are considered separately in Chapter 6. Differences of opinion about gay
marriage were mainly along generation lines. The younger men (aged
31 and under) almost uniformly favoured adopting what many of the
older men from the sample regarded as a failed, heteronormative insti-
tution. The younger men argued for doing so without any of them indi-
cating any apparent awareness of the impact gay marriage would have
on gay identity or relationships and because it suited their personal
needs. By contrast, most of the older men (aged 51 and over) opposed
gay marriage for personal reasons – because they considered cohabita-
tion a satisfactory arrangement that suited them and for political rea-
sons – marriage, they said, is a patriarchal institution and if introduced
would lead to a return to heteronormativity for gay men.
Generation differences were apparent also in Chapter 7, the final
chapter, where the focus was on how two age cohorts of all-Australian
men understood the threat HIV-AIDS posed to them and what effect
living in its midst had on their sense of self and sexual/social lives. My
analysis of the stories from the two generations of men – a pre-HIV gen-
eration of men who were adults and sexually active before the disease
was diagnosed, and a post-HIV generation of men who were adults and
sexually active in the early 2000s – found only minor differences of
nuance between how they were affected by the virus.
The five tables in Appendixes contain a small amount of quantita-
tive material relating to the lives of the men interviewed for the book.
Tables A.1 and A.2 comprise lists of the pseudonyms of the interviewees
from the international sample and the all-Australian sample (for more
information on these, see Chapter 1), together with the men’s ages
when interviewed, the cities where they lived, and their occupations by
broad fields. Table A.3 shows a breakdown of the 97 men from the inter-
national sample according to their relationship status, that is, whether
they were single or in a relationship when interviewed. These data are
discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. Table A.4 provides a list of the pseudo-
nyms of the single men from the international sample (n = 42), their ages,
and where they lived. These data are the subject of Chapter 2. Table A.5
contains information about the lives of 14 men from the all-Australian
sample and eight from the international sample who had experience of
fatherhood. Together with the men’s pseudonyms and ages are details of
their marriages or relationships, their children, and in at least one case
their grandchildren.
Introduction 13
Connecting the chapters that comprise this book is a narrative about

how age and age cohort or generation affiliation affect gay men’s rela-
tionships. In each chapter I have organised my analysis of the men’s sto-
ries around age groups so as to make my findings clearer and underline
the importance of what I believe is crucial to understanding the lives
of gay men – that their identity and the relationship choices open to
them are historically contingent. It is no coincidence, for example, that
the majority of men with fatherhood stories to tell were baby boom-
ers and became fathers as a result of heterosexual relationships with
women. These men decided in the 1960s or 1970s to have relationships
with women because either they were unsure about their sexuality or
the times were not propitious for them to come out or be gay. It is not
a coincidence also that the older men from the sample mostly opposed
the push for gay marriage and on the grounds that cohabitation arrange-
ments had suited them. These men came to maturity in the 1960s and
1970s when the women’s liberation rhetoric was being disseminated
loudly and widely. They grew up in the midst of pronounced public
debates on television, in university cafeterias, pubs, and union meetings
about the value or otherwise of marriage. And they made long-lasting
relationships work for them before homosexuality was decriminalised
and without the need for state recognition or sanction. The younger
men were not prepared, however, to accept anything less than what
their heterosexual friends or siblings could expect to enjoy, and in my
analysis of their stories about gay marriage made it very clear that in
their eyes marriage was a matter of gay rights and they would not stop
calling for marriage equality.
Location and class were less important in the end than I thought they
might have been. I mention them in the book if and when the occa-
sion arises, and do so to provide fuller background for my discussion of
the men’s stories but, as I explained earlier, I do not present this work
as a class analysis or cultural comparison of gay men’s lives or relation-
ships stories. It is a study of the influence of age and generation on gay
men’s relationship experiences and stories, a study of similarity and
difference.
1
Collecting 97 Gay Men’s
Life Stories
Heterosexual people are persecuted on Valentine’s Day

for showing their emotions in public, let alone homo-
sexuality. … I am not saying homosexual people are
second fiddle to them … but if you imagine this is the
condition of the heterosexual community [in India]
what can you expect for homosexual people?
(Kim, aged 23, Mumbai)
Introduction
By its very nature, a qualitative sample can never represent the popu-
lation it purports to study. Qualitative samples can be ‘quite large’, as
was the overall sample I used for this book, or they can be ‘relatively
small’, as are a number of the city samples I used. Typically, qualitative
samples can ‘represent’ or provide a sense of the possible range of views,
experiences, processes found in the wider population but cannot rep-
resent their numerical distribution. For example, in Auckland, I inter-
viewed 12 men who were drawn from a variety of classes and ethnic
backgrounds, including two retired men who had had working-class
jobs in the transport sector and three Maori. In New York, I interviewed
11 gay men, whose ages were from 33 to 72 and included five African-
and Caribbean-American men and two men who were HIV positive. In
Mumbai, I interviewed seven men, four of whom were in their 20s and
five of whom were in relationships.
Gay identity and belonging are strongly shaped by the stories gay
men tell each other about themselves and their life experiences, and
will continue to be until the distinction between gay and straight dis-
appears. For this reason, while a qualitative sample of gay men cannot
14
Collecting 97 Gay Men’s Life Stories 15
represent the ‘infinite variety’ that Alfred Kinsey argued he found in gall
wasps (and by extension Nature more generally) and sought to discover
in his studies of human sexuality, small samples such as I gathered in
New York and Mumbai do represent a reliable range of the views that
gay men in those cities held on the matters I discussed with them,
which form the basis of this book. They do not represent the views of
bisexual men, men who have not yet come out, or men who have sex
with men. Also, they cannot represent the views of other sexual minori-
ties, even though there will be similarities. Finally, they cannot cover
every variety of views held by gay men. They are a reliable representa-
tion, though, of the range of views that gay men held about their lives,
their understanding of what age means to them, and what it means to
age as a gay man.
Two non-representative samples
Drawing on data from two separate sets of interviews can be hazard-

ous. There is a temptation to ‘mix and match’ incongruous sets of data,
that is, material collected for different purposes. For example, if the
researcher has a sample of former railway workers that he interviewed
for a relatively contained, small project, is it appropriate to use these
data in conjunction with data that a local government agency collected
from retired people that included a subset of interviews with former rail-
way workers? The efficacy and ethics of blending two data sets such as
these depend on the following. First, how similar were (a) the questions
the interviewees were asked, (b) the manner in which the interviewees
were recruited, (c) the protocols that guided the researcher’s practice in
each instance. Second, how familiar with the data, which they did not
collect themselves, were the researchers able to get once they gained
access to them and proposed blending them with their own data. There
is nothing mischievous or illegitimate about blending material from
multiple projects as long as researchers devote time to acquaint them-
selves with the full biographical details of the participants from both
sets and can explain to their readers how the sets differ and how they
used them. They must make very clear that they are using two different
data sets, are aware of the hazards, outline what efforts they have taken
to reduce or eliminate them, and where or how the sets are different
and/or similar.
I have tried to avoid hazards such as these when drawing on material
from the two sets of data I collected myself. The first set of data, which
is discussed in more depth below, was a non-representative sample of
80 gay men that I interviewed in Australia in the period 2001–3 for

my PhD. The second set of data, discussed also below, comprised inter-
views with 97 men that I recruited in 2009–11 from nine major cities
in Australia, Britain, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, and the United
States.1 How did I avoid the pitfalls that I argue can arise from blending
data sets? First, on each occasion, I was interviewing gay men on closely
related topics. Second, in the one chapter in this book where I combine
data from both sets of interviews, I used the men’s answers to the same
questions, to provide material for analysis about their parenting past.2
Because I was responsible for recruiting and interviewing the 177 men
from the combined samples of gay men I recruited in Australia and
five other countries, following the same ethical practice throughout,
I would argue the material the men provided in answer to similar if not
identical questions can be used without fear of misrepresentation.
One nagging doubt remains, however, which is whether it is legiti-
mate to blend material collected where there is a significant time differ-
ence, in this case, as much as ten years, notwithstanding similar if not
identical questions. One approach to dealing with this was to use the
interviewees’ dates of birth as a means of sorting them by age and to
look for differences. At first, this seemed a commonsensical approach,
but doing so would mean having to choose a single year from which to
reckon the men’s age, for example 2006, which was midway between
2003 when I completed the interviews for the first data set and 2009
when I began interviewing for the second data set. There was one seri-
ous problem with this approach. It would mean forcing consistency
on the two separate data sets in such a way that would affect the one
unchangeable fact of the interviews I held with the men – the fact of
who they were at the time of interview. A 51-year-old man interviewed
in 2003 remains forever 51 in the data set to which he belongs. His
age at the time of interview means that his views and opinions remain
forever the views and opinions of a man who was 51 at the time of
interview, in his case, in 2003. It would be wrong to adjust these facts
for the sake of neatness or consistency, that is, to use his date of birth,
in this case 1952, and present and analyse material from his interview as
representing those of a man who was 54 or 58 or 62 in 2006. This relates
to the question of age cohorts that I discussed in the Introduction. If,
for example, I had been interviewing during the 1990s – when HIV-
AIDS was still a life-and-death health risk to gay men in the West but
included also the year when an antidote was discovered (1996) – I could
have been dealing with two groups of men separated by ten years who
effectively belonged to two different social cohorts. One social cohort
comprised men who lived with HIV-AIDS before the antidote, the other
social cohort comprising men who lived with HIV-AIDS in the era when
the antidote existed. When using two different data sets the methodo-
logical solution is to retain the integrity of each set and to be clear about
where and when one’s interviews were held and to check for differences
by date of interview.
One of my data sets (the ‘all-Australian’ set) is from my home country
and was collected between 2001 and 2003; the other is international,
collected after 2009. The Australians, recruited from capital cities, coun-
try towns and districts in south-eastern Australia, were aged between 20
and 79. With the exception of three Aboriginal men and a man who
was Thai by birth, the men were of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic descent
and, with the exception of 13 working-class men, who were employed
in the transport and hospitality sectors, all were tertiary-educated and
had jobs in middle-class occupations such as law, the care professions,
education, or the public service.3 The international data set consisted of
interviews that I collected from 97 men recruited in nine international
cities, namely, Auckland, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Manchester,
Melbourne, Mumbai, New York, and Sydney. The interviews took place
between 2009 and 2011, and the men were from all social classes and
a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Their ages ranged from 19 to 87.
Ethnically, while the bulk of men from this sample had Anglo-Saxon
or Anglo-Celtic backgrounds, interviewees included five distinct ethnic
minorities, consisting of one Aboriginal Australian man, five African- or
Caribbean-American men, 10 Chinese men, three Maori, and 11 men
with a South Asian background – or a total of 30 men.4 In Chapters 2,
3, 5, and 6, I used the international sample exclusively. In Chapter 7,
I used the all-Australian data set exclusively. And in Chapter 4, I used
interview transcripts of 22 men drawn from the two data sets: 14 from
the all-Australian sample and eight from the international sample.
The choice of English-speaking cities is predictable because as a white,
Anglo Australian who was born in the 1950s, it made sense to me when
designing the research project to recruit interviewees from England and
the USA if I wanted an international sample of gay men. And because
I live in Melbourne, I looked for interviewees from cities I knew and
could get to without too much difficulty, namely, Sydney, Melbourne,
and Auckland. Two factors shaped my decision to seek potential inter-
viewees in India and Hong Kong. The first was a promise I made my
editor to address a failing her reviewer observed in the original publica-
tion proposal – that it was too western – and include non-western gay
men in the sample. The second was more practical and concerned the
need to conduct fieldwork in non-western countries where English was

spoken. I had visited India in the mid-1980s and had strong memories
of Mumbai as a colourful, friendly, and accessible city – largely because
at the time an Indian friend acted as my tour guide. And geographically,
it was close at hand. I chose Hong Kong because, like Mumbai, it was
relatively close at hand. I imagined also that it would share the values
and practices of most port cities and have a history of tolerance and
easy-going morals. In the end, it was in Mumbai and Hong Kong that
I experienced the greatest difficulties in recruiting potential interview-
ees, for reason that are explained in the discussion below.
The interviews
Recent advances in interpersonal communications such as e-mail and

social networks have made getting in touch with people in other coun-
tries easier and more immediate. But unlike when a researcher arranges
face-to-face interviews, making on-line connections can be more diffi-
cult, time-consuming, and less certain. As anyone who has used either
will know, it is easy for a respondent to ‘go missing’ or simply forget
to reply to an interlocutor’s requests. In New York, I experienced the
demoralising experience of waiting for potential interviewees who
did not turn up as arranged. Although it occurred in New York only
twice, I did lower my expectations and was pleased when strangers
I had arranged to meet on the steps of the New York Public Library or
in Bryant Park showed up and we made contact. The only other city
where this occurred was Los Angeles. In Auckland, Hong Kong, London,
Melbourne, Manchester, Mumbai, and Sydney, I met the men I arranged
for interviews as planned. On two occasions, however, I forgot to meet
interviewees. The first was on a rainy, summer’s day in Washington
Square, New York in July 2009 and the second on a sunny day in early
spring 2010 in Ponsonby, Auckland. On both occasions, I tried to make
alternative arrangements but without luck.
My experience in large cities left me wondering if fieldwork is easier
in urban centres than in the Kalahari or Borneo. From my experience,
I would say that it is no easier because in vast urban conglomerations
like Los Angeles and New York, researchers can get lost and interviewees
can forget appointments without loss of face, that is, without experienc-
ing any social consequences for dishonouring an arrangement. Even
though Melbourne is a city of almost 4 million people, I never worried
that interviewees would break appointments I had made on e-mail or
by conventional mail, partly because I was more sure of my place in
the city that is home. That said, I was fairly sure also that interviewees
would keep their appointments in Auckland, Hong Kong, Manchester,
Mumbai, and Sydney, because in each of those cities mutual friends
or colleagues had introduced us. There is more about urban fieldwork
experiences in the city-by-city accounts that follow.
I have written elsewhere about interviewing and compared my expe-
riences to that which Richard Sennett and Jonathon Cobb described
about interviewing automobile workers in the USA 40 years ago.5 I argued
that once I overcame the social distance that my identity as an academic
and researcher created between my interviewees and me, the familiar-
ity that I have found to exist between gay men of all classes facilitated
an easy exchange. The only time I recalled any difficulties was when
I asked a man in his 30s about how his coming out affected relations
with his father. The act of recalling his father’s response appeared to
make the interviewee angry. His reaction to my question led me to
examine more closely young men’s coming-out stories and using my
findings to develop an argument about an aspect of gay men’s coming-
out difficulties.6
Since the early 1970s, when Sennett and Cobb wrote The Hidden
Injuries of Class, technological innovations such as the advent of the
Internet and social sites such as Facebook have changed ordinary
people’s understanding of their autobiographical selves. In particular,
Facebook has encouraged a generation, their parents, and in some cases
their grandparents to make more public than ever before the details of
their everyday life. I suspect that because so many of us have got into
the habit of posting story-like accounts of our lives and daily doings on
sites like Facebook, it has become a lot easier for people to reveal their
life story when interviewed. While this is the same for gay people as it
is for straight people, I would argue that what I call gay men’s ‘auto-
biographical ease’ – the casual way in which a gay man can talk about
the signal moments in his ‘gay life’ (or the ‘new’ life that begins after
coming out) – derives from first, the experience of coming out, which
usually means that the gay man must rewrite his social/sexual life story
and second, the long history of confessional narratives that gay men
since the late nineteenth century have been obliged to tell the medical
and legal professions and which have been recorded in the form of case
studies.7 These two experiences of telling his life story first to friends
and family and second, to doctors, psychologists, solicitors, police,
social workers or priests, means that gay men have a well-developed
capacity to recall important moments in their life history and relate
them.
In the next section, I explain how I conducted face-to-face inter-

views in a variety of urban settings, including large and small parks
in New York City and Melbourne; hotel lobbies in Los Angeles, Hong
Kong, Manchester, Sydney, and Auckland; my hotel rooms in Mumbai,
Manchester, and Auckland; interviewees’ homes or nearby cafés in
Melbourne and Manhattan. The great bulk of interviews were face to
face, which I recorded in the presence of interviewees and later had
transcribed. I did use the web-based application called Skype for some
of my international interviews. Skype allows people to speak to one
another via the Internet. Microphones and speakers built into comput-
ers allow spoken communication. For the researcher, an advantage over
the traditional telephone is the ease with which an interview can be
recorded, as well as the fact that Skype is a free service. I held interviews
this way with 10 men from England, Hong Kong, India, and the USA
between December 2009 and May 2011. I did not use a web-cam but
had I done so, the interviews would have been similar to a conventional
face-to-face interview.8
In principle, the idea of an interview on Skype would seem fairly
straightforward, and it is once arrangements are made and the day and
time are agreed on and confirmed. I found Skype interviews time-
consuming, however, compared with face-to-face interviews. This was
because it was my responsibility (a) to establish my bona fides and (b) to
arrange and then remind, cajole, sometimes plead with potential inter-
viewees to finalise the preliminary exchanges and settle on a mutually
convenient time for an interview. And then because I did not use a web-
cam for the Skype interviews, I had no visual contact with interviewees,
the effect of which was that interviews were more like a telephone inter-
view in that I could not rely on facial cues or eye contact to enhance the
interview, and so had to depend more on my imagination to bridge the
gap that time and distance created. I found Facebook useful for estab-
lishing my bona fides and setting up the basics of a trusting relationship
with the men who expressed interest in giving an interview for the book,
especially in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and New York.
When interviewing in Manchester (see below), I met an academic
who said he would be willing to take part in my study but long-distance
and by e-mail. I called this a ‘written interview’. More like a survey,
I sent the academic in Manchester and another academic in Swansea
copies of my interview questions, which they answered in writing and
returned by e-mail. Hence the term ‘written interview’. While this style
of interview tends to produce more studied, less spontaneous answers,
I was impressed with the liveliness of the replies they sent.
Nine cities
I made contact with many of the interviewees through personal intro-

ductions and recommendations and via tentative links I made on the
Internet. In the USA, the website called Craigslist was useful for mak-
ing preliminary contacts, but it was a chance connection with another
author in the field that put me in touch with the majority of American
men I interviewed. After that, my personal e-mail account and Facebook
were the means I used to keep in touch and confirm appointments. In
Australia, England, Hong, India, and New Zealand, I made contact with
potential interviewees through introductions from academics and activ-
ists. Again, once contact was made, both my private e-mail account and
Facebook were helpful for maintaining contact and setting up meetings
for interview. I used a 16-question structured interview schedule for
each interview. On average, the interviews lasted 45 minutes. After tran-
scription, I analysed them with the help of the basic Microsoft Word
software program, looking for narratives about the men’s experience of
age and ageing as well as evidence of conventional relationships and
relational attitudes, and evidence for relationships that followed less
conventional, gay life projects. In the following sections, the cities are
discussed in chronological order of my visits, beginning in New York
in July 2009 and finishing with a return trip to Hong Kong in June
2011.9
New York
The first set of interviews for this book took place in New York in July 2009.
Before departing Australia, I made contact with potential interviewees
through advertisements that I posted on the website Craigslist. Craigslist
enables members to buy and sell or exchange goods and services such as
furniture, accommodation, tutorials, sex and romance, and neither buyer
nor seller is charged a fee. I posted advertisements under the ‘community’
category, asking for responses from gay men who lived in New York.
A number of men replied asking if I paid for interviews. A quick reviews
of other advertisements posted in the community category showed that
a number of other researchers, mainly affiliated with North American
universities, were offering to pay respondents for interviews. I did not
pay men in Australia when I interviewed them for The Changing World
and had not planned to do so for this book, so I replied in the negative.
Several people who seemed promising interviewees and with whom I
was beginning to establish a research relationship broke off contract with
me at that point. Once on the ground in New York, I was surprised also
by the number of men with whom I arranged to have an interview who

either did not meet me as planned or ceased replying to my e-mails after
we had made fairly definite arrangements, including setting a date and
place to meet.
In hindsight, one of the shortcomings of trying to arrange inter-
views on the Internet, whether by e-mail, a market-exchange site like
Craigslist, or a social-network site such as Facebook, is the ease with
which arrangements can be forgotten or dishonoured. I believe this is
chiefly to do with the tentative nature of relationships that individuals
can create when they use the Internet. It is easier to miss an appoint-
ment made by e-mail when e-mail is the only means of communication
with the other person because the consequences of doing so are not as
serious as they can be when the other person has your telephone num-
bers, home or work addresses, or knows your friends or family.
The importance of local knowledge cannot be underestimated when
planning fieldwork in international cities like London, Mumbai or
New York. And here I am not referring to the type of local knowledge
that Edmund White relied on when researching States of Desire, that is,
on contact with leaders or critics of the gay scenes, though local knowl-
edge of this nature is invaluable and on reflection would have made my
work easier in New York.10 I am referring to local knowledge of a more
mundane kind, such as how to use an underground rail system or the
community bus service, and how to grasp the lie of the land in short
time and at short notice. Should I walk, take a taxi, use the underground
to get to the public library or believe the hotel staff when they say that
it is only a short walk through the Friday market? – and having to learn
all of this while balancing limited time and funds. While these obstacles
are nothing compared to the difficulties with which an anthropologist
has to contend who is working in Sawarak or Colombia, it is worth not-
ing that fieldwork and holidaying in a foreign city are entirely different
activities, and it would be a mistake to assume that, because a city was
trouble-free to negotiate when on holidays, it will be so when conduct-
ing fieldwork.
On arriving in New York, I had seven interviews logged and hoped that
I would leave the city after a two-week visit with at least a dozen com-
pleted interviews. Five of the pre-arranged interviews went ahead; two of
the men who had agreed to an interview did not show up as arranged.
The contingency plan that I had devised before arriving in New York
was to recruit the additional five interviews I had planned for by way of
personal contacts I had with two friends living in New York. My inten-
tion was to ask them to put me in touch with their gay friends, hoping
therefore to increase the number of interviewees in the New York sample

by making use of an informal network of ‘friends of friends’. But before
having to resort to this plan, I met by chance an academic who lived in
New York who offered to post my recruiting advertisement on the gay and
lesbian social network of his alma mater, an East Coast university. This
serendipitous connection allowed me to make contact with a number of
potential New York interviewees, six of whom I interviewed.11
Manhattan resident Scott Davis helped me also recruit gay African-
American men as well as men who were recovering addicts. All gave their
time freely and provided extremely rich data for this research. During
the two weeks I was in New York, I interviewed 11 men in total. Six of
the interviews were held in the open air – chiefly in or around Bryant
Park in Manhattan – while, of the five interviews that were held indoors,
two took place in interviewees’ apartments, two were held in cafés, and
one was in the office in a university building in Manhattan.12 The
New York sample comprised one man from the old age cohort (60 and
over), eight men from the middle age cohort (40–60), two men from the
young age cohort (40 and under). Two men from the New York sample
were HIV positive. The occupations of men interviewed in New York
were in the main middle class and included two senior university aca-
demics, one unemployed man, and one clerk. Four of the interviewees
from New York were men of colour.13
Los Angeles
I spent three days in Los Angeles in August 2009. This was originally
intended to be a holiday after my fieldwork in New York but, as a result
of the interest I received from the Los Angeles alumni of the same East
Coast university whose gay and lesbian social network provided me with
such good connections in New York, and because I had left New York
with fewer interviewees than I had originally intended, I reorganised
my plans and set aside what time I had in Los Angeles to interview
another small group of North American gay men. When I flew into
Los Angeles, I had fairly firm plans to interview six men, all of whom
had agreed to meet me in the lobby of my hotel, which was located in
Santa Monica, about 30 minutes by car from the international airport.
Unfortunately only three of the six men who agreed to an interview
appeared as arranged. Los Angeles can be a daunting city because it
comprises one of the largest urban sprawls on the planet and is difficult
to traverse without a motor car. ‘A city without boundaries, which ate
the desert’, whose urban landscape is dominated by freeways and flyo-
vers, Los Angeles is a city where the rich live in gated communities and
small bands of homeless people are harried by the police and municipal
officers.14 Because of these features and because my time was limited,
I was particularly grateful that the men who agreed to have an interview
met in me in the lobby of my hotel. In the end, three did so. Another
three who had agreed to an interview did not show up, perhaps because
they found it impossible to get to my hotel on the day as arranged.
The small sample gay men that I interviewed from Los Angeles com-
prised two men who belonged to the middle generation and one man
from the young generation. I did not interview any men from Los Angeles
who belonged to the old generation or the very-young generation
(under 30). The men’s occupations were varied. One man worked in
information technology, one man was a postgraduate student from a
rich family, and the third man lived on a disability pension. I had a
fourth interview with a man from Los Angeles in February 2010, which
was conducted on Skype. He belonged to the middle generation, worked
in administration, and was a man of colour. One of the four men from
Los Angeles was HIV positive.15
Mumbai
As mentioned earlier, I decided to recruit interviewees in Mumbai for
two general reasons and two specific reasons. The general reasons for
recruiting in Mumbai were, as already described, to include non-western
men in my sample and to have access to a population where many
would speak English. The two specific reasons for choosing Mumbai
were first, a memory of the city as relatively accessible and second,
Mumbai’s proximity to Melbourne. In preparation for the field trip
to Mumbai, I began in October and November 2009 trying to contact
by e-mail social organisations that were based in Mumbai whose work
involved same-sex health matters such as HIV-AIDS education as well
as social organisations that were involved in same-sex ageing and that
lobbied for same-sex social and political rights. In particular, I sent
e-mails to the Sakhi Char Chowghi Trust and the Humsafar Trust, both
of which had offices in Mumbai, as well as the Lakshya Trust because
of their interest in same-sex ageing issues.16 I tried to contact the Sakhi
Char Chowghi Trust because of the work they do with hijras and other
transgender people, and men who have sex with men. The Lakshya
Trust I tried to contact because of their work in Gujarat with ageing gay
men and because their chairperson, Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, is
an internationally respected lobbyist on matters concerning gay age-
ing. Colleagues whose areas of expertise were South Asia and HIV-AIDS
respectively recommended that I contact the Humsafar Trust.
Initial attempts to make contact with any of the social organisations in

Mumbai were unsuccessful and it was not until I acted on the suggestion
of a colleague, who worked in the HIV-AIDS field in Melbourne and had
knowledge of HIV-AIDS programmes in India, that I contacted Shivananda
Khan, the chief executive of the Naz Foundation International – which
has a registered office in London and a regional office in Lucknow – that
I began to make some headway. Shivananda provided me with the
equivalent of an electronic letter of introduction, which opened the way
for what turned out to be a successful round of interviews in Mumbai. He
put me in e-mail contact with Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, the chair
of the Lakshya Trust, and Vivek Anand, the chief executive officer of the
Humsafar Trust. Both Prince Manvendra and Vivek Anand responded
positively to my request for help in finding potential interviewees when
I arrived in Mumbai.
I had six days in Mumbai over Christmas 2009, three of which I
devoted to fieldwork, collecting five face-to-face interviews.17 My hotel
was in Colaba, an upper-class suburb, five minutes on foot from the
Gate of India and the Taj Hotel, the latter being the site of the terrorist
attack that occurred in Mumbai in November 2008. Mostly, I used taxis
to get around Mumbai or explored on foot the neighbourhood in which
my hotel was situated. On Christmas Day, I was invited to an evening
meal with friends of Prince Manvendra, a number of whom I later inter-
viewed. Prince Manvendra accompanied me on the train from Colaba
to Santa Cruz, which was just as well because I could not speak Hindi
and the station attendants spoke very little English. All the men I inter-
viewed in Mumbai spoke English well and comprised two men from the
upper class, two men from the middle class and one who was born to
working-class parents. All of them were friends of Prince Manvendra or
friends of his friends. I strongly believe that because of their association
with Prince Manvendra, the Mumbai interviewees were not representa-
tive of the variety of men who identify as gay or who have sex with men
in Mumbai and elsewhere in India. As a group, they were more than
ordinarily aware of gay or ‘GLBT’ rights and related issues, articulating
views that were as well informed as any of the western men interviewed
for this book. In part, I ascribed this to the influence of the Internet
but chiefly to the men’s involvement formally or informally with the
Lakshya Trust and the Humsafar Trust.
The Mumbai sample comprised eight men in total.18 Three men were
from the middle generation, three were from the young generation,
and two were from the very-young generation. Six of the interviews
were conducted face to face in Mumbai and two were conducted on
Skype. The first Skype interview took place in mid-December 2009,

before I arrived in Mumbai, and the second was held in February 2011.
I continued trying to recruit Mumbai interviewees on my return to
Melbourne, chiefly via Facebook connections of friends of some of the
men I interviewed when I was in Mumbai in December 2009. Only one
man agreed to a Skype interview. A number expressed interest in having
an interview but either did not have access to Skype or were discour-
aged when I sent them copies of my statement of research and ethics
statement.
Deciding on what pseudonyms to use for the Indian men interviewed
for this book caused a minor ethical dilemma. When I was in Mumbai
and reflecting on the matter, I had first thought to use fictitious Hindi
names for the Indian men until I realised that to do so would make it
much easier to identify them, largely because they would be revealed
as a discreet, small, subset of the larger, international sample. In May
2010 and after some reflection, I changed the Hindi pseudonyms I had
allocated them and instead used English first names. This seemed a
commonsense solution, especially as one of the men I interviewed in
Mumbai told me in December 2009 that many Indian men have English
first names. For all other interviewees I have used English names,
including for a European expatriate I interviewed in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong
I chose to look for potential interviewees from Hong Kong for simi-
lar reasons that I chose Mumbai. First, it promised the possibility of
including non-westerners in my sample, and second, many Hong
Kong citizens had English as a second language. I had also two specific
reasons for choosing Hong Kong, First, I imagined that, as a port city,
it would share the libertine morals and laissez-faire sexual practices of
other port cities, such as existed in Shanghai in the late nineteenth
century and continued long into the twentieth century.19 Second, like
Mumbai, Hong Kong was an attractive location because of its proximity
to Melbourne. I interviewed in two phases.
In phase one I went to great lengths to recruit Chinese gay men
from Hong Kong, but without any success. I posted advertisements on
Craigslist and other social network sites, for example Anglo Info Hong
Kong. And yet despite the presence of a great variety of advertisements
for short- and long-term sexual and/or intimate relations on Craigslist
and other websites, which suggested a lively gay world of clubs and bars
in Hong Kong, my advertisements for potential interviewees generated
nil interest. In the face of this nil response from the advertisements
I posted on the Hong Kong page of Craigslist, I tried posting advertise-

ments for interviewees on its Melbourne page. My reason for doing so
was that I hoped that among some of the young Hong Kong residents
studying at Melbourne universities there might be gay men who would
be willing to have an interview with a Melbourne-based researcher
when I was in Hong Kong. This generated nil interest also, which
only increased my despondency and anxiety. Over the course of three
months I tried to elicit responses to my research from gay men in Hong
Kong, and by early December 2009 had all but given up hope. In the
last fortnight before I was due to leave Melbourne for Hong Kong and
Mumbai, I enlisted the help of a non-Asian gay man who was living
in Hong Kong with his North American partner and organised a social
group for middle- and upper-class gay men. I also contacted a Chinese
academic working in the field and asked him for assistance. The aca-
demic’s response was that without Cantonese, I would have little
chance of recruiting gay men in Hong Kong.
This last prognosis proved correct, for despite a persistent, concerted
effort, I was unable to enlist any Chinese gay men to take part in my
research. I managed to recruit three expatriates, however, two of whom
were from North America, the third from Europe.20 These men do not
and cannot represent Chinese gay men living in Hong Kong. The two
men from the United States, both of whom were in their 50s, had spent
quite a deal of their adult lives in New York City, and I suspect their
views were more representative of affluent East Coast USA than Hong
Kong. The European expatriate I interviewed had spent most of his adult
life living away from his country of birth. He initially left his country
to escape compulsory conscription and homophobia, and then settled
into an expatriate’s existence in the Pacific and SE Asia. He annually
returns to Europe to resume relations with friends. All three of the men
I interviewed in Hong Kong represented views of metropolitan citizens
who happened to find themselves living in Hong Kong – temporarily in
the case of the two North Americans and on a permanent basis in the
case of the European man whose partner of 12 years was Hong Kong
Chinese.
Their interviews did reveal insights into gay life in Hong Kong that
supported the views and arguments of Travis Kong, a Hong Kong
academic whose field of study is gay life in the former British colony.
Kong has examined the difficulties gay men face in Hong Kong. He
considered a combination of historical and personal factors. Among the
historical factors he cited were the city state’s former status as a British
crown colony and the Government’s homophobic policies. Personal
factors that were likely to keep Chinese gay men in the closet included
their preference for unambiguously masculine men and fear of state
persecution or social stigma.21 Concerning the influence of family in
Hong Kong, Kong wrote:
rather than expressing pride in their homosexuality … [gay men

in Hong Kong] want to avoid being labelled a ‘sissy’; and they seek
family acceptance and behave discreetly in order to avoid the shame
that they may bring on their families. They seek to ﬁnd a ‘suitable’
gay identity that can be reconciled with the institution of the neo-
Confucian family.22
A European expatriate I interviewed in Hong Kong, a man in his late

50s, argued that the Chinese government’s policy of ‘repopulating’ Hong
Kong helps to explain the hidden quality of gay life in Hong Kong:
Most of these people are immigrants from the lower classes, without
much education and not much university background. You have to
consider that culture is not something that is well developed in Hong
Kong … [and] you cannot expect those people from farms … up coun-
try … will be open to the gay life when in China it is still not open.
I don’t think the mixing of population, that is, immigrants and expa-
triates, changes the mentality of those people. (Bernard, aged 59)
Later in his interview, Bernard explained that he had a gay, Asian part-
ner and they had lived together in Hong Kong for 12 years. As the fol-
lowing suggests, fear of offending their parents is a very strong reason
gay men in Hong Kong remain in the closet:
My [boy] friend has a lot of Chinese gay friends. … None of them

says anything to their parents and they are in their 40s and 50s. It is
very strict. The parents won’t accept it, so it is … very difficult to be
Chinese in Hong Kong and gay.
When I asked Bernard whether he thought things would be different for

gay men in Shanghai, on the grounds that it had a long history of being
open to the West and western attitudes, he returned to the effect that
Chinese government policies have on the lives of gay men:
I know there is a gay life developing very quickly in China but it is

still secret and very closed. In Hong Kong now there are a lot of gay
associations. … But this is new in the last two or three years. About
five or six gay associations struggle for the right, but this is very new
and they have a lot to do before being accepted by the government,
the law, and the general public. … You are not going to kiss anybody
[publicly] here [Laughs]. You will be arrested by the police.
These factors help to explain the reason why I struggled to attract any
potential interviewees to take part in my research when I was in Hong
Kong in late December 2009 and early January 2010. One thing I could
have done that might have yielded positive responses to my research
was to immerse myself in the thriving club and bar scene that exists in
Hong Kong. But unfortunately at my age and with my experience of the
gay worlds in Asia, Australia, and Europe, I no longer have the stamina
or interest required to go out on the gay scene – where evenings begin
at 11.30 pm and only begin to close around 3 am or 4 am.
My second attempt to recruit interviewees in Hong Kong began in
May 2011 after a chance exchange with a friend in London who put me
in touch with an Australian citizen who with his partner was a resident
of Hong Kong. This led to contact with the Pink Alliance, formerly the
Tongzhi Community Joint Meeting or TCJM. A volunteer-based organi-
sation for people of different sexual orientations, the Pink Alliance is a
clearing house for GLBT ideas and research in Hong Kong.23 Once doors
began to open in Hong Kong, the only difficulty I found was how as a
westerner to interpret ‘non-replies’ from the men I contacted by e-mail.
What I learned in this regard was that non-replies often meant that the
times/days I suggested for an interview were not convenient but the
men were unwilling to say so. I found this frustrating (new city, time
constraints) until I realised that perhaps respect for the scholar and the
nature of the interviews I was proposing (about the men’s sexuality and
private lives) could affect how the men were interacting with me. When
I did suggest alternate times/days and allowed the men more choice,
that is, when I replied to the non-replies by suggesting alternatives, it
was easier to arrange mutually convenient times for interviews. Not all
my Hong Kong interviewees were Chinese men and included expatri-
ates from England, India, and North America.
In retrospect, an important reason for greater success in phase two
of my attempt to recruit interviewees in Hong Kong was that, despite
the best efforts of the men who went out of their way to find poten-
tial interviewees for me in the last quarter of 2009, better connections
exist in Hong Kong through British expatriates than European or North
American expatriates. I suspect this is because of Hong Kong’s former
status as a British crown colony and the longstanding business, educa-

tion, literary, and other cultural connections between Hong Kong and
Great Britain.
Melbourne
After interviewing 24 men from New York, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and
Hong Kong between July 2009 and January 2010, I turned in March 2010
to look for interviewees closer to home. By chance, a cousin of mine
offered to put me in touch with a small group of his friends, all of whom
were gay men in their 20s. As well, a young colleague who was interested
in my research put me in touch with the gay uncle and partner of one of
her workmates, both of whom were over 60. Once I made contact with
the couple, they in turn offered to ask men in their friendship network if
they were interested in an interview. Through personal and work connec-
tions, I was able therefore to recruit men from opposite ends of the life
course, where at the time my sample was weak. In November 2010 – and
again through the agency of some friends – I contacted and interviewed
a small group of six men who were in their 50s, 70s, and 80s, managing
again to ‘plug’ gaps in the sample as they appeared to me then.
My greatest difficulty was in recruiting men over 80. I was conscious
of not wanting Melbourne men to swamp the sample but, because I live
in Melbourne, I was always able to continue recruiting when it was no
longer possible to conduct international interviews by telephone or
travel overseas. As already mentioned, face-to-face interviews are less
time-consuming and easier to arrange than international telephone
interviews, notwithstanding the cost and other advantages of Skype.
This stage in the recruiting phase was not accidental but occurred
because – aware as I was that the sample did not sufficiently represent
very-young men, that is, men born after 1986 or from older age cohorts,
that is, men born between 1926 and 1946 – I purposely went out of my
way to seek help from people whom I thought could put me in touch
with men from the age groups I was seeking. What I found when in the
field was that recruiting these two groups of gay men required quite
different approaches. The young gay men were initially relatively easy
to contact, by e-mail, and responded well to my preliminary inquiries –
because my cousin forewarned them. After contact was made, I sent
the men copies of my plain-language research outline – as I had done
in the United States, India, and Hong Kong – checking after a couple of
days if they were still interested in an interview. If they were, I arranged
a mutually convenient day and time for an interview. As all but one of
the young men in this friendship network were university students and
relatively mobile, I was able to meet most of them in a relatively public

setting in the vicinity of the State Library of Victoria.
By contrast to what occurred with the very-young gay men in
Melbourne, I interviewed the five men from older age cohorts in their
homes and only after explaining to the ‘lynch-pin’ couple the purpose of
my research and the safeguards I used to protect interviewees’ personal
identity. I called the gay couple I first met the ‘lynch-pin couple’ because
after contacting them, the younger of the men asked if I would visit them
so they could get to know me before agreeing to an interview. Once I did
so and once I reassured them that their stories and identities would be
protected, they generously gave up two Sunday mornings and provided
me with tea and cake while I recorded aspects of their life stories for this
book. The older of the men was born in the 1920s, the younger in the
1940s. By their own account, they had lived quiet, discreet lives, partly
because when they met and began their relationship, social opprobrium
against homosexuality was considerably more pronounced and partly
because one of them had been married and had children and grandchil-
dren. After concluding my interviews with this couple, they provided
me with introductions to three of their friends – a couple who had been
together for seven years, aged 82 and 65, and a single man aged 77.
Of the men I interviewed from Melbourne, eight belonged to the
old generation, five were from the middle generation, three were from
the young generation, and eight were from the very-young generation.
Seven of the interviewees were retired (all but one of whom were from
the old generation) and seven interviewees were university students.
The occupations of the men who were in full-time employment at the
time of interview were mostly in education, the professions, the arts,
or the public service. One Melbourne interviewee was Aboriginal and
one was HIV positive. Most of the very-young gay men I interviewed
in March and April 2010 were from upper-middle-class families, while,
by contrast, the men from the old generation I interviewed in April,
May, and November 2010 more evenly represented the middle classes
in Australia. Many of the very-young men were still living at home with
their parents. Finally, in March and April 2011, I interviewed two very-
young men from Melbourne, aged 18 and 19, whom I met through a
work colleague. In total, the Melbourne sample comprised 24 men.24
London
There were two phases to my interviews with men from London. The
first was when I visited England in July 2010 and held face-to-face
interviews with two men in London, the second was when through
the agency of a friend – who once lived in Melbourne and now lived
in London – I was introduced to a group of five men in their 30s, 40s,
and 50s, whom I interviewed on Skype. My field trip to England took
place in July 2010 and coincided with the annual conference of the
British Society of Gerontology (BSG) in London where I presented a
paper on the effect of HIV on the identity of ageing gay males. I arrived
in London with a handful of interviews scheduled, all of which were
with men from Manchester, and a plan to recruit additional potential
interviewees from London, first through the Manchester men who had
agreed to an interview and I hoped would have friends in London, and
second via on-line social sites such as Craigslist, which as mentioned
I had used in New York. At the BSG conference, I met an Australian
academic who was interested in my research. I duly interviewed him as
one of my Australian sample, and he introduced me to a friend of his,
a young man in his late 20s who lived in London, whom I interviewed
before departing England as part of my London sample. The second
London interviewee was a man in his 50s whom an American friend
suggested I contact. I was disappointed to leave the UK with only two
interviews from men in London but rationalised that I might create an
amalgamated UK sample comprising interviews I had with two men
from London, four men from Manchester, and the ‘written’ interviews
two men had promised me – one of whom was from Manchester and
one from Swansea.25
Between July and October 2010, I became more aware that the very
small number of two men from London was a serious fault in my sam-
ple, and it would make more sense to cull the two London interviews.
I imagine one of the characteristics qualitative researchers have in
common is a strong dislike of having to delete interviewees from their
hard-won sample. I certainly felt this. In the southern spring of 2010,
I made contact after 22 years with a friend from Melbourne who moved
to London in the late 1980s. Interested in my research, he was willing
to encourage men from his friendship network to take part in it. As a
result of this serendipitous connection, I increased the number of men
from London from two to eight. The additional London men were inter-
viewed on Skype between December 2010 and January 2011.
Manchester
I recruited interviewees in Manchester when I was in England for the
BSG conference in July 2010. I wanted to include Manchester because
of its reputation as a one of England’s ‘gayer’ cities, a reputation that
mostly grew from its being the setting of the British television series,
Queer As Folk. Before I left Australia, I posted an advertisement on

Craigslist, Manchester, which yielded one expression of interest. When
I replied seeking to confirm where and when we might meet for an
interview, the respondent disappeared and would not reply to any of
my inquiries. Of the four days I had in Manchester, three were spent
in the field. An English academic in his 40s who worked in Manchester
agreed to be one of my interviewees, and then introduced me to three
gay men in their 60s who agreed to be interviewed as well.
I departed Heathrow Airport in July 2010 with six interviews from
gay men in England – four from Manchester and two from London. In
addition, I had promises from two men to send me written interviews.
By March 2011 and after considerable effort on-line and via e-mail, the
England sample comprised 14 men, of whom eight were from London,
five were from Manchester, and one was from Swansea. Of the England
sample, eight men were in their 40s and 50s, and six were aged 40 or less.
Men aged over 60 and 30 or less were absent. Ten of the interviewees
were either middle or upper-middle class; two were working class and
two upper class. The occupations of the men from the middle and upper-
middle classes tended to be in the law, education, media, or business.
Sydney
Sydney is the ‘gayest’ of the capital cities in Australia, both because of
the international reputation of its gay and lesbian Mardi Gras parade and
festival, and the large number of gay men attracted to its well-developed
gay ‘scene’.26 In 2006, it was still the most populous city in Australia.27
It would be foolish therefore to examine gay life stories in Australia and
not include the voices of Sydney men. Help for the Sydney stage of
my research came with the assistance of Mr Peter Trebilco OAM, who
offered to pass on my call for interviewees to the Pride history group,
Sydney.28 As a result, I received invitations for interviews from six men
associated with Pride in Sydney. I visited Sydney in mid-October 2010
en route to Auckland, and over a weekend interviewed seven men.
The Sydney sample consisted of eight men, six of whom I interviewed
there in October 2010, as well as an Australian academic I met at the
BSG conference in July 2010, and a retired member of the legal profes-
sion who agreed to have an interview with me when I contacted him
through a mutual friend in November 2010. Of the eight men who
comprised the Sydney sample, four men were from the old generation,
one was from the middle generation, and three the young generation.
By comparison with other city samples, interviewees from the middle
generation were poorly represented in the Sydney sample; also, not one
Sydney interviewee was from the very-young generation. Two of the

men from the Sydney sample belonged to the upper class. The remain-
der were either middle or upper-middle class; the majority being middle
class. Most the middle-class men from Sydney were employed in educa-
tion and a couple in business.
Auckland
In October 2010, I flew to Auckland to interview gay New Zealand
men. Given our proximity, it seemed silly not to include a sample of
gay men from one of Australia’s closest English-speaking neighbours.
Preparations for this field trip began early in 2010 when I contacted
Michael Stevens, the mutual friend of a colleague.29 I contacted Michael
in October 2009, and then again in the southern autumn to ask if he
would help me find potential interviewees when I was in Auckland. In
the six weeks before flying to Auckland, Michael put me in touch with
two people who prepared the way for my field trip: Jacqui Stanford
a writer and subeditor at GayNZ.com, a gay and lesbian website, and
Vaughan Meneses, the manager of OutlineNZ, a GLBT support agency
based in the Auckland suburb, Ponsonby. Jacqui wrote a piece alerting
gay New Zealand men to my arrival, and Vaughan kindly offered me
the use of an office at OutlineNZ. I also posted an advertisement on
Craigslist Auckland and, unlike my experience in New York but similar
to my experience in Hong Kong, received nil replies.
New Zealand men who responded to notice of my research trip pub-
licised by GayNZ.com and OutlineNZ included three men in their 70s,
three men in their 50s, and three men in their 40s. Thus I was able to
restore some age balance to the sample. As well, three of the Auckland
men were Maori and four were retired. Having an office from which
to work at OutlineNZ in Ponsonby, a fairly central, inner-city suburb
of Auckland, made interviewing straightforward and one of the easiest
field trips. Like my research experiences in Hong Kong (phase two),
Manchester, Mumbai, and Sydney, my fieldwork in Auckland was made
possible and easier with the assistance of locally based gay organisations
and/or academics or activists.
Conclusion
Pre-planning is crucial if the researcher intends fieldwork of this nature.

I hope that what I have described of my adventures in the nine cities
where I recruited and interviewed 97 gay men shows the advantages
of having a local guide or contact person, especially in non-western
countries or in large, international cities. Also, I hope that my accounts

of fieldwork underline the importance of allowing plenty of time,
having reserves of funds for when things go awry – for they always do –
as well as acknowledging the importance of making arrangements as
water-tight as possible before departure while at the same time knowing
that people will cancel at short notice or not show up for an interview
as arranged. And finally, it is worth noting that the contemporary form
of a letter of introduction, which today comes in the form of an e-mail
copied to a person known to only one interlocutor, is as vital now as
it was in Hamlet’s day, perhaps even more so given the ubiquity of the
Internet and the many unwanted requests for assistance to which it
gives rise.
The locations from which the men interviewed for this book were
recruited consist therefore of two megalopolises (New York and
Mumbai), two metropolises (Los Angeles and London), two large cities
(Sydney and Melbourne), two smaller cities (Auckland and Manchester),
and a port city (Hong Kong).30 All interviews were safely arranged in
advance. I did not explore gay ghettoes with my digital recorder in
hand and collect the voices of gay men that way. Eliminated therefore
from this sample was a range of gay men that would have been more
commonly found in the samples sociologists collected in the 1960s and
1970s in large, western cities before the advent of gay liberation.31 To
my knowledge there were no hustlers or male prostitutes in the sam-
ple. Absent from the sample also were transsexual men, who now are a
separate sexual identity but who for many decades mixed with gay men,
shared the same bars and clubs, and were often subsumed in the slang
epithet, ‘queer’.32
The only observations I feel qualified to make about the effect of
place on the sort of lives gay men lead is that in Hong Kong and
Mumbai where homosexuality is not yet as open and accepted as it is
in many western cities and where high rents mean single accommoda-
tion is available only to the very rich, gay men have to lead slightly
different lives. In Hong Kong, for example, a man in his late 20s told
me that he and his partner have to rent a hotel room or go to a sauna
to have sex, and that this was so because both men still lived at home
with their parents. Anecdotal evidence from informal conversations
with men in Hong Kong suggested the city had an extremely busy gay
sauna and sex club sector. In Mumbai, as Jeremy Seabrook has shown,
sex between men can take place as publicly, as it once did in New York
and other western cities in the early twentieth century.33 One of my
interviewees from Mumbai explained that he and his boyfriend would
find a secluded seat on the harbour (far away from the sex workers) to
maintain their intimate life.
I interviewed gay men from all classes and a variety of ethnic back-
grounds, and, in the cases of some men, on extremely sensitive topics
to do with their sexuality, health, and life-threatening illnesses. Among
this last group were men who had been recently diagnosed with HIV
and others who had lived with it for more than 30 years. I interviewed
men who had personal histories of drug and alcohol addiction, men
who had spent time in prison, as well as men whose lives had been
relatively trouble-free and men who had successful careers and relation-
ships. Included in this sample of gay men were men who shaped their
lives around the sexual adventurism that longstanding institutions of
the gay world make possible. On the other hand, it includes also men
who have lived monogamous or serially monogamous lives. There is
also a substantial minority of men in this sample who have lived single
but not necessarily lonely lives. Men interviewed for this book include
those who lived double lives in the decades before the 1970s, some of
whom then left their wives and established relatively open gay relation-
ships. And still others there are in this non-representative sample who
continue to live discreet, somewhat closeted lives – employed as they
are in senior management positions. These are some examples of the
varied material included in the next six chapters. In them is evidence
also of consistent themes in the men’s lives, such as their capacity to
practise well the single life, friendship, and fatherhood, and their abil-
ity to maintain long-lasting relationships and continue to seek social
recognition and relational equality for their relationships and ‘everyday
experiments’.34
2
Single Men
My mother and father had a friend … when I was

very young. They decided to invite him to dinner …
because poor Barry was single [and] would be missing
out on good, home-cooked food. … One of my fears
about being gay was that it meant you were single
which meant that you did not get to eat as well as
everybody else did.
(Isaac, aged 56, Melbourne)
Introduction
At least two different narratives have circulated at different times in the

West regarding the single life and how it is valued. On the one hand,
there is a narrative that depicts the single life as incomplete and single
people as invariably lonely. On the other hand, there is another, pos-
sibly more powerful narrative, its origins dating from the 1950s and
1960s, in which the single life is represented as exotic, perhaps even
threatening because the presence of single people challenges the con-
ventional path from teenage, heterosexual romance(s) to married life
with its associated duties and familial responsibilities.
In their discussion of single lives in the 1990s, husband-and-wife soci-
ologists Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim paint a cruel picture
of lonely singleness, which they argue is one of the consequences of
increasing individualisation:
Everything is planned round avoiding feeling lonely: all kinds of

contacts making different demands on one’s time, daily habits, a
37
well-filled calendar and carefully planned moments to recover from

social life, all designed to alleviate any fear of being left out.1
The image their description conjures is of an individual too aware of

his/her aloneness to derive any meaning or joy from the unoccupied
spaces in his/her weekly life, and who has more spare time than s/he
knows how to use. The time that hangs heavily on the hands of single
people is presumably not experienced in the heteronormative world
where it is put to good use by the person’s partner or children. Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim argue also that, the more accustomed to a life alone the
individual becomes, the less likely he/she is to achieve success in the
quest to secure a partner:
A private cosmos can be created around one’s own ego with its idi-
osyncrasies, strengths and weaknesses. The more successful this effort
proves, the greater the danger that is will prove an insurmountable
obstacle to any close partnership, however much one longs for one.2
According to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, the likelihood of more people

leading lives such as the one they describe will only increase if both
sexes continue to demand equal rights. ‘This road does not lead to a
happy world of co-operative equals but to separateness and diverging
interests.’3
As the quotation that heads this chapter suggests, there is a similar
but possibly more destructive myth about gay men that has been cir-
culating for at least 60 years in Australia, and I suspect also in similar
western countries, which is that they are destined to spend their later
years alone and lonely. I would argue that this myth is more destructive
than the myth about the single life because of the assumption on which
it is based – that to be alone and lonely is the gay man’s inevitable des-
tiny. In an earlier work, I began questioning this myth and provided
fairly compelling evidence from an all-Australian sample that on the
whole gay men aged 60 and above lived relatively well-rounded, con-
tented, and positive lives, whether single or not.4 As I explain below,
this chapter continues that work, challenging the myth that gay lives
lived alone at any point in the life course are destined to be eked out in
a sad, pathetic state such as the one suggested in the Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim sketch.
The myth of the single person as exotic and a threat to the settled
normality of married life in the West was perhaps strongest in the
decades following World War Two, when the state worked very hard to
Single Men 39
persuade men who had been soldiers to take up peacetime roles as hus-
bands and fathers, and to coax women from paid, wartime work in fac-
tories and on farms to accept the unpaid role of wife and mother. North
American historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman argue that a
connection exists as well between valorisation of the exotic, single life
and the hyper-commercialisation of sex that began in the United States
in the 1950s.5 This narrative of the single life was paradoxical and over-
laid with a very basic, double standard. In the first place, the single life
for women was presented in love stories and soap operas on radio and
television as a much less validated alternative to that of housewife and
mother; in the second place, ‘single women’ occupied a dubious posi-
tion as a central focus of heterosexual men’s sexual fantasies – which
Hugh Heffner’s Playboy magazine empire exploited and popularised.
The single heterosexual male was often depicted as a loner and preda-
tory, and in need of feminising. Single women threatened the couple
ideal as much as did single men because their presence had the poten-
tial to unsettle the fidelity and trust on which pair couples depend for
their success.
The single homosexual male was and is a different type of single per-
son. His presence did not upset the dominant place of straight couples
but could threaten the couple bonding that took place in the gay world.
The hyper-commercialising of sex that occurred before the outbreak of
HIV-AIDS was possibly more widespread in the gay world than in the
straight world, and the market and facilities it created for easy, anony-
mous sex, such as sex clubs and back rooms, helped solidify the image
of (single) gay men as licentious and sex-obsessed. Australian theorist
Denis Altman argued in the mid 1980s that the market for the com-
mercialisation of sex was extremely large and would only continue to
grow, for, ‘as the emphasis in capitalism moves more and more towards
consumption, sex inevitably becomes big business’.6
I have discussed elsewhere the nature and practices of the gay com-
mercial ‘scene’ and that the Australian gay men I interviewed had
mixed views about their worth, many describing them as impoverished
and sexualised.7 In much the same way, the single men interviewed
for this book were divided over how they regarded gay bars and clubs.
They connected with them in varied ways, in much the same way that
straight men’s relationship with institutions vary. Some of the men said
that they contributed to their enjoyment of full and active social lives,
while other men said that they avoided them altogether.
The stories that single men from the international sample told of
their social lives are the focus of this chapter. In all, 41 men from the
international sample (or slightly more than 40 per cent) were single at
the time of interview. In this chapter, I continue to question the myth
of the old, gay man as alone and lonely, and propose in its place an
alternative narrative, which is that gay men are as able as any other
group of people to live gregarious and socially fulfilled, single lives.
They are only one of many subsets of a growing number of one-person
households that western demographers and scholars have identified
over the past two to three decades as an increasing, notable trend.
While the attention of policymakers has often been on the number of
elderly people living alone, data from countries like Australia, Germany,
and the UK show also that greater numbers of people in their 20s, 30s,
and 40s are living alone and that this trend is only likely to increase.
In the UK, for example, official data showed that in 2011, more than
seven million people lived alone, of whom more than 1.5 million
were aged between 25 and 44. In Australia, while there are not directly
comparable statistics, government data showed that the proportion of
one-person households increased from 16 per cent of households in the
1976 Census to almost a quarter of households in the 2006 Census, and
that the Australian Bureau of Statistics has projected that by 2031 one-
person household will represent more than one quarter of Australian
households.8
While these changes suggest that more people will be single in the
twenty-first century, the trend might represent a return to the long-
standing patterns that existed in the twentieth century before the post-
war baby boom, when marriage was often delayed and when single
people were a more common sight and less stigmatised identity. At the
height of the baby boom in the 1950s in the West, there were unusually
high rates of marriage and in particular youthful marriage.9
When writing about gay men’s communities in the West in the late
1970s – before the advent of the HIV-AIDS epidemic and when gay men
were beginning in greater numbers to enjoy of the benefits of increased
individualisation – Michael Pollak noted that many young people were
willing and able to take part in life experiments that combined ‘fleet-
ing sexual relations with a social and affective life based on a variety of
relationships, not necessarily destined to last long’.10 Edmund White is
an American novelist and social commentator. He is also a man who has
been living with HIV-AIDS for a very long time. White’s explanation for
the separation of affective life and sexual life to which Pollak referred is
that it is a function of negotiated intimacy that people who live in big
cities are required to make. He writes of the style of life that he observed
Single Men 41
in New York in the late 1970s, and which I would argue continues today
among certain classes of people in New York, as well as in other mega-
lopolises, such as London, Los Angeles, and Mumbai:
[T]he conventional conflation of sex, romance and friendship into

marriage has been exploded and the elements separated out. Sex is
performed with strangers, romance is captured in brief affairs, friend-
ship is assigned to friends. In this formula … the only stable element
is friendship.11
White does not distinguish between gay people and straight people in
his account of the way that sex, romance, and friendship were compart-
mentalised in New York. What Pollak and White observed in the late
1970s among communities of gay men later became the research inter-
est of Beck, Beck-Gernsheim, and Giddens, as well as Zygmunt Bauman,
whose attention focused on the shape and nature of contemporary
intimate and personal life. In later chapters in this book on long-last-
ing relationships and gay marriage, there is more detailed discussion of
some of the defining features of contemporary relationships, includ-
ing discussion of Giddens’s work on what he calls the ‘pure relation-
ship’.12 Elsewhere, I have argued that apart from celibacy and episodic
sexual encounters, the pure relationship is the intimate relationship
most practised by gay men and that friendship is the relationship they
most value.13 If White and Pollak are correct – and the work of Beck,
Beck-Gernsheim, and Giddens suggests they are – and young people in
advanced western democracies are experimenting more and more with
the relationship, getting involved in partnerships of varying length
and meaning when it suits them, they must accept also that there will
be times when they are single, as well as those times when they are in
relationships.
Theorist Henning Bech argues that coming out creates difficulties for
gay men in sustaining friendships. In order to become who and what
he wants to be, the gay man must leave behind what Bech describes as
the warm familiarity of his previous life. ‘The homosexual … must leave
the safe and self-evident socialness he has otherwise become embod-
ied in.’14 According to Bech, a gay man’s world is turned upside down
when he comes out; he must re-examine and reassess his relationships
and affective relations. Some of these will not bear close scrutiny: some
friends will rejoice, others will disappoint. Some relatives will support
him, others will be indifferent. And then there will be others who call
him a ‘poofter’ or ‘faggot’ to his face or behind his back. Bech explains
what he understands as the effects of coming out and how it can cause
social relations to rupture:
He can never be one with … friendships. He carries around the basic

experience that togetherness can come to an end, that it is not cov-
ered by a guarantee. He can be thrown back on ‘himself’; this empty
‘self’ remains outside. To this extent, he is doomed to be alone.15
This grim prognosis was not borne out in my previous research on

Australian gay men. What I found instead were stories showing that
men of all ages valued friendship above other relationships including
pair relationships. Among the reasons they gave for the value they
found in friendship were (a) the social interaction it provided and (b)
the mutual exchange of care and support it afforded.16 I have drawn
similar conclusions from the research for this book, and found in the
main that friendship was the crucial, signal relationship for gay men.
One of the focuses in this chapter is on the friendship networks single
men foster as part of first, an active involvement in the gay scene and
second, the social distance they actively maintain from the gay scene.
I identified two groups of single men from the international sample
who said they had full and active social lives. The first group said their
social life was full and active because they regularly went out on the
scene; the second group said that theirs was so because they avoided
contact with the scene.
Who were the men from the international sample who were living
their lives alone and singly at the time of interview? As mentioned,
slightly more than 40 per cent of men from the international sample
were single when I interviewed them.17 The single men came from all
nine cities where I held my interviews.18 The age group with the highest
proportion of single men was the 70-plus age cohort.19 This is not so
surprising because as life expectancy for men in the West is 78–82, men
aged over 70 are more likely to be living alone because of the death of
a partner.20
In summary, increasing individualisation in the West has allowed for
greater choice about when and how people conduct couple relation-
ships, as a result of which we now see more single people. Gay men
have been experimenting with a form of intimate life that combines
casual sexual encounters and couple relationships of varying durations
and intensity since at least the 1970s – and probably, as I suggest else-
where, for a lot longer because their relationships were until recently
Single Men 43
the subject of mockery if not scorn.21 My argument is that gay men

who experiment thus have to experience times when they are in pair
relationships and times when they are not and must live singly, just as
do heterosexuals who experiment similarly.
There are two parts to the chapter. In the first part, the stories that
a group of 18 men told are examined for their evidence of full, active
social lives. In the second part, the stories that a group of 14 men told
are examined for their evidence of contracted social lives. The 18 men
who recounted stories suggesting full, active social lives were predomi-
nantly aged 23–53; the majority were in their 40s and 50s. The 14 men
whose accounts suggested contracted social lives were aged 38–81, and
the majority were over 60.
Full social lives
I found evidence of full, active social lives in the stories that 18 men
told me when explaining the effect that growing older had had on their
social life.22 If the men said or signalled that they had well-developed
friendship networks, I assumed that their social lives were full and
active. The majority of these men were in their 40s and 50s, with a
smaller group aged less than 40. The 18 men comprising this group used
two narratives to explain why their social lives were full and active and
had not been affected by age. The chief narrative was that their social
life was full because they regularly went to gay bars and clubs, circuit
parties, and mass events, in other words, were strongly scene-focused.23
The second and minor narrative, mostly preferred by men under 50,
was that their social lives were full and active precisely because they
avoided gay bars, clubs, and mass events, were not scene-focused.24 The
evidence these two groups provided of gay men’s varied engagement
with the scene does not cancel out or negate the value of the two sets
of stories they told. Rather, what it suggested is that gay men connect
with the scene in varied ways, just as straight men’s relationships with
institutions vary.
Seven men used the chief narrative, showing a strong scene focus,
when they described their social life.25 Seventy-two-year-old Colin
from New York was the oldest man in this group. In our interview in
his Manhattan apartment, which was not far from Christopher Street
in Greenwich Village – where gay bars and businesses have operated
since the 1920s and the location of the Stonewall Inn – he declared that
he had had ‘five husbands’ and was a reformed alcoholic.26 He was a
vibrant, provocative interviewee, who when we talked explained how
he had overcome addictions and prejudices of various kinds and now

felt much closer to other men:
You see a lot of love between gay men and straight men in Alcoholics
Anonymous, a lot of connection because … we have all crashed, so
a lot of prejudice gets taken away. I have come to appreciate a lot of
straight men beyond the stereotype …
At Body Electric … we would have these circles. You would spend

two or three minutes with each man and you had no choice. Some
would be young; some would be old and fat. I had always had a hor-
ror of touching somebody I wasn’t attracted to. But that all changed.
As soon as I started touching all these men and making some sort of
personal connection, it was different. It’s a horrible prejudice in gay
men. They don’t want to touch someone who’s not beautiful. I don’t
know. It’s like [they are worried] they will catch it.
Colin reckoned that at 72 his life was better than it had ever been and,
as this extract above suggests, also he was particularly proud of the rela-
tions he developed with straight men at Alcoholics Anonymous. Colin
was proud also of the relations he made at Body Electric – a self-help
group that focuses on erotic and physical improvement – with men
from different social and sexual backgrounds, overcoming as well some
of his fears about body shapes and types.27 Elsewhere in his interview,
he boasted also of varying relations he maintained with gay men of all
ages through the S&M world in New York. His recently acquired views
on men’s fears of saggy skin or old bodies directly challenge powerful
gay narratives in which youthfulness is valorised, as a consequence of
which, with the exception of the leather and S&M scenes, men over 50
can be marginalised in gay social spaces.28
Included in this group were four men in their 50s. Fifty-three-year-
old Ryan from London said that he had formed a large group of friends
through travelling, sex, and work, and that maintaining his extensive
friendship network was not easy:
I travel a lot and … I have got more and more friends. I also meet people
sexually and they become friends and I also meet people through work. …
At the same time, I’m getting to the age where I am really wondering
how long I can maintain this, and that is one of the problems I’m going
through at the moment because I am still quite promiscuous and have
been for the last three years, a bit less now, but now I am beginning to
feel I am getting older and I cannot quite keep up with this.
Single Men 45
Ryan said he thought his friendship group had become so large that he
might have to shed ephemeral friendships:
If I decided to cut down my friends … I would just have to make the

decision with some people who are not really as good friends and
who … [have] not responded to me in the same way. I would keep
all my old friends, a handful of new friends but all my old friends are
largely the ones who are actually most faithful.
Because I did not ask him a follow-up question at the time, I wonder
in retrospect if the concern Ryan expressed about the size of his friend-
ship network and the inconstancy of some friends was an inevitable
consequence of a life lived on the move. His very thorough interview
suggested a highly mobile life. The constant movement that was a stan-
dout feature of his life took the shape of being physically on the move,
as result of his regular travelling and psychically/sexually on the move,
as a result of his fairly persistent hunt for new sex partners.
Hilton, who lived in New York, was also 53. His interest in younger
men was the cause of his full social life. In the following extract, Hilton
explains that while he liked and was attracted to younger men, he knew
that they were not always reliable relationship prospects. He was aware
as well, however, that in Manhattan there were and always have been
young gay men seeking older men for social or sexual relations, which
might explain his continuing interest:
I know a lot of gay men who are mature enough not to be fixated
on wanting younger men as partners. I have not reached that stage
yet. I am still fixated on 20-somethings and 30-somethings, and the
older I get, the more I realise how tenuous that can be, although not
always. There’s still guys out here looking for older guys.
Hilton’s dilemma regarding young men is, as I have discussed else-

where, peculiar to gay life in very large, international cities where young
gay men appear prepared and willing to put on hold ageist prejudices
that can be common in young people’s friendship circles in exchange
for the material advantages that often accrue from relationships with
older men.29 There is nothing new about the nature of this exchange
for intergeneration relations between same-sex-attracted men have a
very long history. Henning Bech says that in Ancient Greece, ‘at least
in the sixth to fourth centuries BC it was customary … that men had
relations with “boys” or “young men”’.30 Stephen Murray argues that
courtship rules for ‘age-stratified homosexuality’ were formal and

clearly understood, and operated according to a social script where the
role for the older man was to desire and for the younger man to feign
interest, which if successfully done would often attract from the older
man ‘interest and worldly goods, ranging from presents and payments
to long-term support’.31
From the 1970s until quite recently, the gay world in New York had a
reputation for its highly specialised, commercial scene where, according
to one of my interviewees,
you used to go to a bar and knew exactly what the bar was for. You
want a black guy and you are a white guy, you went to this bar.
You want a Latin, go to this bar. You want a chubby, you go to this
bar. But I’m not sure that exists anymore … youth have become
more diverse so when you go to a bar, it has a bit of everything,
straight in it, women, lesbians. In New York, everything [once] had
a specialty so you could avoid some of that stuff. (Parry, aged 63,
New York)32
The two remaining men in their 50s were from Melbourne. Both men
regularly went to bars and clubs in inner-city suburbs where there were
gay venues that catered for older men, particularly the baby boomers, as
well as the leather and S&M set. Mike, who was 52, said that, as a result
of developing a less judgemental attitude to other people, his social life
was richer than it had been when he was in his 20s:
I would have to say the circle of people I know is as eclectic … as any

gay man in Melbourne and … [some] people allege that I know every
gay man in Melbourne by one degree of separation. … I [now] open
myself to engaging with people much more comfortably and I find
it’s just amazing who I meet.
The other man in his 50s from Melbourne was Calvin (aged 51). Like
Mike, Calvin was gregarious, with an open, accepting approach to stran-
gers. He was aware also that at his age he no longer had the stamina of
a man in his 20s or 30s, and that as a result could no longer participate
as fully as he once did in mass parties and other events that are fixtures
in the gay social calendar of any city the size of Melbourne:
Nowadays, for social activities, I still go to the venues, I still go to

dance parties. I still go to the sauna if I want to. In terms of not going
Single Men 47
to situations, ageing has not affected me. It may when I am in my

60s but at the moment it has not.
It was clear from Calvin’s interview he had no intention of allowing

ageing to affect his involvement in the gay scene. It was evident also
that he had adopted strategies to allow him to continue his participa-
tion, such as taking part less often and more carefully husbanding his
physical energy levels, diet, and consumption of alcohol and recrea-
tional drugs. Like many gay men over 35, Calvin was aware of the bal-
ance needed to participate in the youthful activities of the gay scene
and to work nine to five on weekdays.
One principal narrative connecting the stories that these men told
of their full, active social lives in the context of regular participation
on the scene was that its bars and clubs provided all that men needed
who sought social/sexual contact with strangers, a practice with a long
history in the West.33 It was clear that the scene enabled the oldest
interviewee (Colin from New York) to continue making less fearful
connections with other men, of all ages. His ability to do so came as
a result of the psychic healing he undertook of his own accord with
AA and Body Electric. The stories from the men in their 50s revealed a
similar tale of enjoyment to be had from contact with strangers. Where
the scene can be most useful is in its ability to draw together a wide
variety of men interested in having sex and/or social intercourse with
other men, and this facility is of greatest benefit for men who like to do
so with strangers.
Strongly woven in the narratives of the men in their 50s was a refusal
to be affected by ageism on the scene, to continue to use its bars and
clubs as a place for social/sexual exchange. For gay men who enjoy
anonymous relations with men and do so by compartmentalising their
lives as Edmund White saw sexually active people doing in New York in
the 1970s, the scene, with its sex clubs, saunas, and back rooms, caters
for all their needs.
An interesting aspect I noticed in the men’s stories was that those who
structured their lives in order to enjoy social/sexual contact with stran-
gers lived highly organised lives. It could be argued that their highly,
even over-organised lives suggested a need to fill empty spaces – in line
with the argument made by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim; an equally valid
argument is that the demands of a compartmentalised life require a
high degree of planning and organisation. These findings about the
social practices of a group of men chiefly in their 50s, from a variety
of backgrounds and locations, contrast with what Arlene Stein found
regarding the social practices of middle-aged lesbians. She argued that

as the lesbians she studied grew into middle age, their attachment to the
non-heterosexual sub-culture changed, and they tended to lead what
Stein calls more ‘decentred’ lives.34
As certainty about their lesbian identity grew, they … feel ‘at home’
in the community with which they mainly identify, but also in
numerous other contexts in which they participate and with which
they feel some sense of identification.35
One reason for the difference between gay men’s and lesbian’s social
practices might lie in the men’s avowed interest in a gay scene-oriented
social life for the sexual encounters it promises and their continued
interest in these.
Six men, almost all of whom were under 50, provided accounts of
full, active social lives that largely or entirely avoided contact with the
gay scene.36 Two of these men actively shunned it;37 three of them were
acutely aware of its limitations and mostly stayed away from gay bars
and clubs;38 and one man had no need of it because of an extensive
network of friends and how he socialised.39 Earl was 51 and lived in
New York. He turned his back on gay bars and clubs after the death of
his older partner, and shaped a private social life with men who lived
in and around fairly exclusive parts of Manhattan.
I don’t go out … late-night clubbing. I stay out late but don’t go out
to the same places. In terms of my public social life … I think I do
more sophisticated things [like] smaller parties in richer locations
[such as] Park Avenue apartments. Even though I always had access
to very wealthy venues, now it is more [the case] that my friends are
older and have these places.
The other man who shunned the gay scene was Charlie, who had just
turned 40 and lived in Hong Kong. He said that because he was satis-
fied with his friendship circle, he had no need for more friends: ‘I don’t
really want to meet strangers for the sake of knowing more people.’
Elsewhere, I have written on the nature of the social venues that
have been available to gay men since the 1950s, and even earlier in
the West when homosexuality was illegal. Two conclusions I drew
about gay bars and clubs were first, that they have a strong youthful
orientation and second, as their chief purposes were the consumption
of alcohol and recreational drugs and as a site of sexual exchange,
Single Men 49
meaningful social interaction was unlikely, especially between different

generations of gay men.40
Three single men from the subset of this sample said that they were
aware of the scene’s limitation and so largely avoided gay bars and clubs.
Two men in their early 30s gave very similar reasons for their dislike of
gay social sites. The first man was Anton, who said that he avoided gay
venues in London because he did not like ‘going to noisy, crowded, gay
bars full of 12-year-olds in muscle vests’, that he preferred being able to
speak to his friends and hear what they were saying.41 In addition, he
said that, as he was now earning a better salary, his idea of socialising
had changed: ‘very often my social life revolves around going to rather
nice restaurants’. The second man, Leo, who was from Sydney, made a
connection also between the change in his material circumstances and
how he socialised:
I earn more money as I have got older so I can afford to go out a little
bit more and also do some nicer things like go to nicer restaurants
or can afford tickets to a show or something that I could not afford
before. … I think I’m moving into a different phase where I tend
to go out more for dinner with friends rather than partying in a
nightclub. I get more out of spending fifty or a hundred dollars on a
really nice meal, good company and some nice wine than fifty or a
hundred dollars on beer and gin and tonics [Laughs] at the pub.
Like Anton also, Leo was both aware and critical of the loud, noisy
presence in gay venues of a new generation of young men. To illustrate
the sense of social obsolescence he felt, Leo described his experience at
a mass music event in Sydney where at 31 he had the impression that
he was one of the oldest people there, both in terms of the age and
behaviour of many of the people in the crowd:
I am getting to the point where if I attend some events, I actually

feel a bit old for this now. In January this year … I went to a straight
music festival … and there were lots of kids … lots of 16- 17- and
18-year-olds on ecstasy and running around like idiots. … They have
announced the line up for next January’s gig but I would not con-
sider going again. … I am a bit bored with them but also a little bit
old amongst the crowd.
The fact that both these men were in their early 30s and not ten or
twenty years older indicates the speed at which social obsolescence is
now taking place. While it might have taken twenty years or more for
the baby-boomer cohort to feel that young people were invading their
social spaces, taking their place, if the accounts of these two men living
in London and Sydney are any indication of a more general percep-
tion and/or experience, the age cohort who are now in their 30s might
already be aware that they are losing social place to younger people.
The sole man who showed little interest in or need for the gay scene
was 47-year-old Teddy from Mumbai. He worked as the senior manager
of a community-based organisation, and through his links with gay
men’s organisations in the West and western colleagues, was aware of
how the gay scene operated in the West as well as in Mumbai. During
our interview, he explained why he believed a strong friendship net-
work is crucial if gay men are to maintain a strong sense of self and to
ride out life’s emotional storms:
Whether men like it or not, you cannot only rely on your relationship
or your lover. Your life goes beyond that. We have friends who have
had relationships for 15 years now, and they are together yet they
rely on the support system. They need friends because in the straight
world, their relationship is not accepted so this [network of friends]
is the family from where they gather their emotional support.
The value Teddy recommended gay men place on friendship as a foil

against relying too heavily on a pair relationship to meet their needs
supports the findings from my research on the importance of friendship
to Australian gay men.42 Teddy’s comments are significant also because
they suggest an awareness of the effect increasing individualisation can
have on pair relationships.43 When a straight friend asked Teddy why
he was closer to his gay friends, he explained how friendship operated
in his circle:
If I am feeling a little down and out in the night, I can just pick up
and call one of my close gay friends and he will come home and
spend the rest of the night talking to me, and I will do the same for
any gay friend of mine. But if I am going through rough weather at
two in the night … I would think twice before calling you because
you have a wife sleeping next to you and two children. … It is how
we are made. … These [gay friends] are my brothers, my children and
that is my family so I have this support system around me. … We
fight, we scream, we shout, we yell … and yet we manage to stick to
each other, be with each other.
Single Men 51
In the Indian context, it is not surprising that Teddy used a family

metaphor to explain how gay friendship networks operate in Mumbai.
With the exception of ruling-class families, in most western countries
an individual’s birth family is now far less important as a source of iden-
tity than it once was. In India and other South Asian countries, such
as Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, it remains one of the central
sources of an individual’s identity. ‘In South Asia, a person’s position
in the joint and extended family, marriage and children, are central to
social definition and personal identity.’44
Although not a single man, an Indian contemporary of Teddy,
Edmund (aged 44) referred also to understanding gay friendship circles
as modelled on the traditional extended family. In the following extract
from his interview, Edmund added another level of meaning when he
compared friendship circles that gay men arrange to hijra, or transgen-
der, networks in India:
Pseudo family is a unique thing in India which has been borrowed

from the transgender system, is developing relationships between the
older and young men, in a sense of having a mother, having a father,
mother–daughter relationship, then aunts. For instance, if you take
my own example, I am a mother to several daughters. I am 44 now
and have daughters as young as 18 years. I have nieces because I have
sisters, and I am the aunt to their children. … This networking is
unique in India, and this bonding has brought the community closer
to each other, and in this we don’t see who is old and who is young.
There is actually a ceremony performed where the mother makes a
younger gay man his daughter in Gujarat.
In using the transgender or hijra system in India as an analogy for gay

friendship circles, which he called pseudo families, Edmund most likely
had in mind the local social organisation of hijras, which Serena Nanda
describes as follows.
The effective working group of the hijra community is the local

level communal household, consisting of anywhere from 5 to 15
members …
Each house within a region has a leader, called a naik (chief). … For
any important occasion within a locality, whether the initiation of a
new recruit or the resolution of a dispute, the naiks … get together
in a jamat, or a ‘meeting of the elders’.45
The organisation of hijras by households makes perfect sense in India

where communal groups and groupings are central to the country’s
social organisation. ‘The person has a family and community identity
in which personal identity is subsumed.’46 Among the characteristics
that the pseudo family to which Edmund belonged share with the hijra
household are a mixture of people of different ages and a hierarchy that
is based on age. Even though Edmund says age is overlooked – ‘we don’t
see who is old and who is young’ – it is clear from his account of its
familial structure (he is both a mother and an aunt, has daughters and
nieces) that a mentoring role is implicit in the relationships that exist
between family members.
When Teddy was describing relations in his family of friends, it was
clear also that a hierarchy operated and that the mother was the most
powerful figure: ‘We are known as family. … If mother decides to crack
the whip, then all the kids have to shut up.’ Teddy made clear also in his
interview that he was free to call on members of his family whenever he
was in need of support or aid. The family he described and the nature of
their affective relations were similar to a form of alternative family that
non-heterosexuals have created in the West – which British historian
Jeffrey Weeks has called ‘family of choice’.47 An important similarity
between the family that Teddy described and the western family of
choice is that in each case the surrogate family provides gay men with
a haven and defence against homophobia in the straight world. One of
the more important differences between the Indian and western ver-
sion of the non-heterosexual family is that, whereas the western fam-
ily of choice can include an individual’s former and/or current sexual
partners, Teddy was quite clear that this was not and never the case for
his family of friends in Mumbai: ‘We are a family. We do not believe in
incest. We do not sleep with each other.’
Three narratives were common to the stories the six men told whose
full, active social lives included nil or only fleeting contact with the
scene. The first narrative related to a preference for spending time with
friends, not strangers. It was captured in Charlie’s brief statement that at
40 he did not need to go out to meet more strangers, and was implicit in
the other men’s observations. A second and related narrative concerned
friendship and its importance to the men. Charlie said that he had no
wish to meet more strangers because he was content with his friendship
circle, and for him the bars and clubs of the scene were places mostly
populated with strangers.
The importance of friendship and practising the art of friendship well
was most apparent in the stories that Edmund and Teddy told of how
Single Men 53
they sustained their private lives in Mumbai. Their accounts of pseudo

families pointed to how differently gay friendship can operate in differ-
ent locales. Their concept of friendship and friendship circles modelled
in the first place on the Indian family and in the second place on the
hijra communal household were to a certain degree comparable to the
western idea of families of choice, with the notable exceptions that the
Indian pseudo family does not include current or past sexual partners,
that it operates hierarchically, and actively provides more security and
support for the younger and weaker members.
The third narrative these men drew on is one that I have examined
elsewhere in the Australian context, and related to men’s dislike of
the impoverished physical environment of the scene. The men who
were in their 30s and 40s explained that they disliked the noise and
juvenile behaviour of younger gay men, and in doing so revealed also
an unsettling experience for people so young – of accelerated social
obsolescence.
Contracted social lives
Fourteen men described contracted social lives when they explained if

age had affected their social life. Eight of these men were at least 60,
while six men were under 60 years old.48 The men drew on one principal
narrative when explaining why their social lives had contracted. Used by
men in their 70s and 80s and (almost counter-intuitively) also by men
in their 30s and 40s, this narrative was that things simply slowed down
at their age or stage of life. The men over 60 said that a contracted social
life was normal for their age because they had fewer friends and fewer
opportunities for socialising with them. The men under 60 said that a
contracted social life was normal for their age because of the increasing
importance of careers and changes in the social practices of their straight
friends. Finally, both age cohorts said that they were less socially active
because gay bars and clubs had either changed or lost their appeal, and
they had no interest in socialising there. In neither group – the over 60s
or the under 60s – was there any evidence of the men being alone and
lonely or sad or overly affected by pathos. In other words, there was no
evidence to support the myth of single men as sad and alone even when
they gave evidence of contracted social lives.
Two age groups of men said that a less active social life was normal for
their age. The first group comprised men in their 70s and 80s, and the sec-
ond group men in their 30s and 40s. Interestingly, the men did not always
regard a contracted social life as a less fulfilled one. The men in their 70s
and 80s seemed both reconciled to it, as a natural part of the ageing proc-
ess, and accepting of it and what their life comprised – possibly because
of their greater life experience. Eighty-one-year-old Godfrey from
Sydney said without drama or any hint of self-pity that ‘one’s social
life of its own accord slackens off. … I’m quite happy to be at home
and to go to bed at half-past nine and read my book.’ At the same time,
Godfrey pointed out that his social life was not wholly home-bound,
that he had been out the night before our interview, and has fairly
regular dinners with friends:
I have a … subscription and was at a concert at the Opera House last

night. But that is really my only social life in a way, unless I have
dinner with friends periodically, and then that’s always an early affair
out of deference to me, I think in some cases. There’s no imperative.
It’s just the way it goes. You don’t go out as much, you don’t need to
go out as much and you have less friends, you know.
Godfrey’s account of how and why his social life had contracted
is significant for three reasons. First, his use of concert subscriptions
suggested a degree of self-awareness, that is, that living on one’s own
requires external structures such as pre-arranged social events to avoid
feelings of loneliness or apathy. Second, his reference to dinners with
friends was another example of a semi-formal external structure. The
fact that he believed his friends arranged dinner at an early hour to
make things easier for him suggested their friendship was based on
mutual regard and consideration, which I have discussed elsewhere
as a valued feature of friendship, or the moral economy of giving and
receiving.49 Third, Godfrey’s common-sense observation that a person’s
life invariably contracts with age as her/his friends decline in number
suggested an acute, lived understanding of the life course and his place
in the penultimate stage of life, an often painful transition that Norbert
Elias described as follows:
Most people in our society have before retirement formed affective

ties not only within their families by with a larger or smaller circle
of friends and acquaintances. Ageing itself usually brings with it an
increasing withering of such ties outside the narrowest family circle.50
The second of three 81-year-olds from the international sample was

Clancy, who was also an Australian and lived in Melbourne. His experience
of a contracting social life differed from Godfrey’s in that Clancy had
Single Men 55
learned relatively early in life to shape a social life that would suit him
into old age. His embrace of a less socially active life began when he was
relatively young: ‘I learned that the theatre and dining and all those
things were important in my social life.’ As a young man, Clancy sought
to advance himself socially. He found an influential mentor, which was
crucial in his view if a young man expected to get ahead in the camp
world of the 1950s and 1960s in Australia. Still cautious and discreet,
Clancy described his former mentor in the following terms:
I was mentored by a beautiful person who was in love with me but

I was not in love with him. … He was older, not that much older
though. It would have been about 12 years. … He was a down-to-earth,
intellectual, high-up person. I won’t go into any more detail, though.
On the social status of mentors, Clancy said a young man had to

choose carefully: ‘A lot depends on your mentor as to which way you
go. If I had have been mentored by a wharf labourer, I might have been
a bit different.’ As it was, Clancy spent most of his working life as man-
ager of a clothes shop for men.
Along with Godfrey and Clancy, four other men aged over 60 said
that their social life had become more home-based as they aged.
Ambrose who was 75 and, like Clancy, lived in Melbourne, said that
while his younger friends visited him, friends his age rarely did so
because they were no longer confident or willing to travel out of their
suburb. A New Zealander who was 75 and whose life was more home-
based said the exception was when he went out to classical music recit-
als, and a 61-year-old Melbourne man (Anselm) said that his social life
was now more solitary because gay venues were not welcoming: ‘grow-
ing older has contracted my social life in that I don’t feel as confident
as I might have even ten years ago about going out by myself’. Anselm
belonged to a small group of men who explained that their social life had
contracted because they were not longer willing or able to participate on
the gay scene. Their accounts of a social life that contracted because of
the nature of gay bars and clubs are examined in the next section.
A widespread assumption concerning ageing is that a person’s life
slows down as he/she ages because he/she has less energy and mobility
and, if living on the state pension, less opportunity to engage with
the outside world. As a general statement, this picture mostly applies
to people after retirement or people in their mid to late 60s and 70s.
I was surprised therefore when a man as young as 38 and others in their
40s and 50s said that life had slowed down for them, almost as a matter
of course, and that their social lives were now less full and active.51 Three
men from this group explained that their social life slowed down as they
and their friends began to concentrate on their careers and they assumed
more prominence in their life.
Everett, a 49-year-old man from New York, told me that he had less
time for socialising with strangers (by which I assumed he meant men
at gay bars and clubs), because he spent more time with this work col-
leagues outside work, and because he believed that as a person’s person-
ality becomes more defined he/she has less time or interest in meeting
strangers. In the context of gay socialising, Everett added that he was
increasingly aware that apart from sex he had very little in common
with men in their 20s.
Another man from New York, Timothy (aged 46) said that while he
had not gone through a period of ‘heavy socialising’ on the gay scene,
growing older meant he went to bars and clubs much less often, perhaps
only once every six months. Interestingly, he did not say that he yet
felt too old to go ‘clubbing’. In his interview, Timothy emphasised also
the importance of career in contributing to a change in his social life, as
well as the time of life changes that his straight friends were experienc-
ing, such as marriage followed by children:
And then the other thing is myself and other friends investing more in
careers. A number of my friends are either in long-term relationships,
married, or some have children so our collective social life is different.
Forty-year-old Kyle lived in Auckland and came from a family of

Pacific Islanders. While still relatively young in terms of the gay life
course, he said that because of his job, which involved dealing with
people in different settings every day, he was no longer interested in
meeting strangers.52 He now rarely went on the scene and was fairy
content with the company of family:
I have probably closed it up myself. I have closed off. I find it easier. For
instance going out, I hang out with my family. It’s easier. I don’t have to
explain. Going out and meeting new people, I just can’t be bothered.
Of the three remaining men from this group, the first, who was 56
and from Los Angeles, said he had withdrawn from the sex-based social
life because it was a waste of time. The second man, who was 40 and
lived in New York, said that life in New York could become wearing and
that he had retreated from actively socialising in order to maintain his
Single Men 57
equanimity. The third man was 38 and came from London. He said that
like Timothy (above) his social life had changed because his straight
friends were having children and therefore socialised less often.
It is significant that most of the men who noted a change in their
social life said it represented a withdrawal from the world of gay bars
and clubs – whether this withdrawal was a reason for or symptom of
their contracted social life was not clear from their oral testimonies.
The age range of the men in this group was 38–81, including five men
aged over 60.53 A paradoxical aspect of the commercialised gay world is
that while ageist attitudes mean that some gay bars and clubs are not
welcoming of men over 45, there are venues where men in their 60s can
feel quite at home. In particular, this applies to gay men who belong to
the bear or leather scenes, which are far more accepting of men over 40
and men in their 60s and older. One of the oldest men from the sample,
81-year-old Godfrey, had once been a fairly regular participant on the
gay scene in Sydney but now doubted how he would be received:
I wonder what would happen if I rocked up to Oxford Street one

night and tried to get into one or other of the gay bars. They would
probably knock me back as an oldie, you know.
Author: some bars are more accepting than others.
I wouldn’t know because I just don’t do it now, but I used to love

going to the bars.
For those age cohorts of gay men who came out before or during the
gay liberation period in the West, bars and clubs were as important as
meeting places and sites of social change as were ‘gay lib’ conscious-
ness-raising meetings at universities and work places. This political
aspect of gay socialising during the era of gay liberation explains the
signal importance the bars and clubs held and continue to hold in the
memory of gay men who were in their 20s or 30s between the late 1960s
and early 1980s. Before homosexuality was legalised, the bars and clubs
provided both a sanctuary from a hostile world and a venue for dissemi-
nation of alternative beliefs and practices, social and sexual.
I interviewed 72-year-old Jeffrey in his home town, Auckland. Like
Godfrey, he had enjoyed going to bars and clubs in his youth as well,
and until quite recently:
I used to enjoy them … [but] it is different now to what it used to

be. When I first came out, there was the Alex Hotel which was a bar
we could go to. It closed at ten and then we’d go from there to the
Staircase and stay til 1 am or 2 am which was a different social atmos-
phere, totally. It’s different now. Urge is okay but it is not the same as
what the Alex was, which was lights on, open talking, chatting. Urge
is lights out and I cannot hear anybody for the noise and there is
no real dance club like the Staircase where you could go somewhere
and talk to people. But anyway, if I go to Urge now, I seem to be left
standing in a corner.
This extract from Jeffrey’s interview suggests a layered experience of gay

bars and clubs in Auckland. First, there is evidence that he had been
on the scene at various points in the recent past and had knowledge
of changing fads. Second, it is clear that in his view the bars and clubs
that once operated were superior to those that now comprise the scene,
because none of the current ones allows ‘open talking, chatting’ or is a
dance club. It is worth noting that despite my findings elsewhere that
ageism in gay bars and clubs often dissuaded older men from participat-
ing in the scene, Jeffrey at 72 was still willing to go to a gay bar on the
odd occasion even if the experience was neither welcoming nor particu-
larly enjoyable: ‘I seem to be left standing in the corner.’54 That Jeffrey
and other gay men in their 60s and 70s are willing to risk rejection in
this way underlines the signal importance of bars and clubs as convivial
locations in the eyes of many gay men, for the reasons I mentioned
above, that is, that they were sites of foundational importance in the
men’s youth when they formed their identity as gay men amidst regular
social/sexual encounters with other men like them.
The final account of the mixed appeal of gay bars and clubs came
from Connor, a 41-year-old Londoner. His experience of gay bars and
clubs in London combined elements of what the men preceding him
had said. Like Kyle (above), Connor was still relatively young in gay
terms when interviewed. He explained that in his late 20s and again in
his mid-30s, he and some friends had gone out on the scene:
I used to go clubbing a lot. I did two stints of the clubbing scene. One
was relatively later on. I suppose I would have been about 27 or 28. It
was around about 1996–7, when my two good gay friends both dis-
covered the scene … and we would go out clubbing probably almost
once a week. But you cannot do that for very long. I think we did
that for … about a year and then we had other things in our lives. …
But then through an on-line networking thing called Jake, which was
a social and professional network … I met another circle of friends
Single Men 59
and with a couple of those I had another little stint of clubbing in the
mid-2000s, again, for a relatively short period of time.
Nowadays, Connor does not go on the scene, largely because, as he

explained, its appeal waned and other things became more important.
Interestingly, his second experience of the scene occurred when he was
in his mid 30s and as a result of meeting another group of friends via
an on-line social site called Jake.55
Now, I really could not think of anything worse than in the wee
small hours of the morning, when I would want to be tucked up in
bed, bouncing up and down to mindless banging music in a brightly-
lit strobe lighting environment. It chills me now. I couldn’t imagine
doing that any more.
Connor’s first experience of the scene in London occurred at a time when

was in his late 20s. He would therefore have been socialising with men
who were younger by about ten years and older by as many as 20 years.
His second experience occurred seven or eight years later. On each occa-
sion, it would seem that he and his friends went to gay clubs and bars
briefly and intensively. At 41, his view of the scene was, however, of barely
concealed disdain. Unlike Jeffrey, the 72-year-old New Zealander, who
was still willing to test his luck in an Auckland gay bar, Connor showed
no sign of wanting to do the same in any of London’s gay bars or clubs,
chiefly because, as he said, he preferred being asleep after midnight.
The principal narrative common to the accounts these men gave was
that a slower social pace was to be expected at their time or stage of life.
Included in the stories the men over 60 told were (a) the importance
of an organised structure to a person’s social life, such as concert sub-
scriptions and regular contact with friends and other social outings; (b)
an acceptance that a person’s social life invariably contracts as his/her
friends reduce in number; (c) the realisation that the gay scene operates
at hours that are not convenient to older men.
The group of men under 60 made a different set of observations
about a slowing social life, which they understood as being appropri-
ate to their stage of life. Included in their stories were the following.
First, their social life began to slow down as their careers assumed more
importance. Second, those men for whom it was important to socialise
with their heterosexual friends found that their social life naturally
slowed down in their 30s or thereabouts when their friends began
having families. Third, for a number of reasons the men found that
they were less interested in socialising with strangers at bars and clubs,
though, as mentioned, there was a 72-year-old New Zealander who per-
sisted with the gay scene, even when disappointed by his experience.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have examined the stories of 41 men from the interna-
tional sample who were single at the time of interview and did so in the
context of, first, increasing numbers of people in their 20s and 30s living
single lives, and second, two powerful myths about intimacy in general
and gay intimacy in particular. The first myth is that gay men are des-
tined to live alone and be lonely, and the second myth is that the single
life is deviant and a threat to normative adult behaviour. The fact that
single gay men are depicted either as lonely, both in popular image and
by researchers such as Henning Bech, or as deviant and therefore danger-
ous because their single status challenges the norm of ‘settled’ gay cou-
ples, are features of a homophobia that transforms to counter the new
circumstances of non-heterosexuals and the homonormative push from
white, affluent, gay men in the West (and their counterparts in develop-
ing countries as well) who see secure couple and property relationships
as desirable expressions of gay intimacy. ‘The dominant signs of straight
conformity have become the ultimate measure of gay success.’56
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue that individualisation will make
couple relationships harder for everyone; hence we are seeing more
singles or more people being single more of the time. They do not pre-
dict more loneliness, but the image they painted in their discussion of
singleness was not a happy one, suggesting single people spend most of
their spare time (spare because they do not have partners or children)
making excuses for their existence and trying to fill empty hours. Their
claim that fewer people are starting couple relationships might be less
significant than they claim because it could instead be evidence of a
return to what was more usual before the intense pair coupling that
occurred after the end of World War Two. Increased individualisation
might make coupling less straightforward, but some of the changes
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim identify could suggest a return to longstand-
ing patterns of delayed marriage. Couples’ decisions to delay marriage
and childbirth are often affected by any change toward increased job
or income insecurity; these in turn are brought about by the type of
changes to local and global economics that have been destabilising the
world of work since the 1990s.57 Job insecurity affects gay men as well
as straight men and women, but is less likely to affect couple formation
Single Men 61
because, as I have argued here and elsewhere, gay men began experi-
menting with short-term relationships alternating with singledom in
the 1950s and 1960s, in other words, some decades before the trend
became more common among their heterosexual counterparts, and for
reasons that specifically related to their need to remain closeted and
keep safe their identity.
This chapter yielded three findings of interest. The first was that a
group of men representing almost half of the single men said that their
social lives were full and active. A smaller group of slightly more than a
third of the single men said their social lives had contracted. The second
finding was that age was not a crucial factor in the men’s experience
of being single, avoiding loneliness, or practising friendship well. The
older men demonstrated a resilience and competency in whatever social
sphere they circulated. The picture of gay men as lonely is therefore
more mythic than real because the men practised the art of friendship
well and conscientiously in their full private lives. The third finding
was that where there was evidence of friendship operating and being
practised differently in different locales, and there was a nice compari-
son here between the stories men from Mumbai told of gay friendship
circles, for example, Edmund’s pseudo family, and the stories that men
from New York and other western cities told of their friendship net-
works or families of choice.
Finally, I think the place the gay scene assumed was of interest in
explanations men from the two groups gave for the quality of their
social life, whether full and active or contracted. The men who had full,
active social lives and continued to engage with the scene mostly did
so because they enjoyed the prospect of social/sexual exchange with
strangers. Those men who had full, active social lives and avoided the
scene together with those men whose social lives had contracted and
avoided the scene also mainly gave two reasons for doing so. First, they
were not interested in social/sexual exchanges with strangers, and sec-
ond, the impoverished physical environment of the bars and clubs of
the scene held no allure and positively discouraged their participation.
What this shows is that the men connected with the scene in varied
ways, in much the same way that straight men’s connections with insti-
tutions vary, and that only some of them had developed the decentred
lives that Arlene Stein found among ageing lesbians. The next chapter
explores the stories told about long-lasting relationships – the direct
opposite of the single lifestyle.
3
Long-Lasting Relationships
We are one and the same person I think now. … We

have turned into the same person – grumpy, difficult,
intolerant [laughs] shouting at the TV.
(Bryce, aged 63, Manchester)
Introduction
This chapter looks at the life stories of a group of 24 men whose long-
lasting relationships resemble the companionate marriage in all but
name. It is remarkable that, despite persistent, public stereotypes of
youthful promiscuity or loneliness in old age and despite a long history
of minimal social recognition of or support for gay, couple relationships,
a substantial minority of a quarter of the men from the international
sample (n = 97) provided evidence of gay men’s capacity to conduct
stable, long-lasting relationships. It is remarkable also that these men’s
relationships should so closely resemble the companionate marriage
when in the five decades since the 1960s the couple relationship has
undergone radical changes, becoming at the same time more flexible
and subject to change and more fragile, less permanent.
That such a substantial minority of men with experience of endur-
ing relationships was present in the international sample is remarkable
again because I did not purposely set out to recruit men whose life
stories would demonstrate histories of long-lasting relationships. As I
explained in the Introduction, my original plan was to collect stories
from a wide age-range of same-sex-attracted men living in nine interna-
tional cities in the hope of gauging their experience of age and ageing.
It is worth mentioning at this point that the 24 men in long-lasting
62
Long-Lasting Relationships 63
relationships, who are the subject of this chapter, were part of a larger
group of 55 men, or almost 60 per cent of the international sample,
who were in relationships at the time of interview. This relatively high
proportion of gay men with a high level of pair relationship experience
compares favourably with earlier findings from an all-Australian sample
regarding the proportion of gay men in relationships.1
The central argument of this chapter is that a significant minority
of men from this sample provided evidence of gay men’s capacity to
commit to stable, long-lasting relationships. This runs counter to an
increasing tendency in the West toward less durable, more fragile couple
relationships described by Zygmunt Bauman, Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim,
and Ulrich Beck, among others, as due to increasing individualisation.2
From my analysis of their stories, the relationships the men described
closely resembled the companionate marriage, which until quite
recently was a fairly widely accepted model for marital relations, based
as it was on an understanding that the couple would be companions,
friends, lovers, and sexual partners, even if the household division of
labour remained strongly biased in favour of the male partner.3
Evidence to support the argument that long-lasting gay relationships
closely resembled companionate marriage was found in men’s relation-
ship stories revealing two prominent companionate traits – companion-
ship and partnership. As well, there was evidence in the men’s accounts
of fairly conventional storylines about sexual relations and relation-
ships. The first storyline concerned the place of sex in long-lasting,
monogamous relationships, and the second referred to the space that
some men negotiated in long-lasting relationships for one or each part-
ner to participate in adventurous sex. The companionate traits and the
sexual storylines are examined in two separate sections of the chapter.
Introducing these sections are two preliminary sections. The first pre-
liminary section deals with the couple relationship, a brief survey of
relevant literature, and the second preliminary section provides a brief
sketch of the couples who provided the data for this study.
Couple relationships
Dating from eighteenth-century England, where it first developed

among the upper classes and was then taken up by the middle and
working classes, the companionate marriage broke from the impersonal,
functional style of marriage that preceded it because of its emphasis on
the love and companionship that a couple could expect to experience
in marriage. Before this marriage was a social institution principally
providing for the transfer of property with varying provisions for the
security of wife and children.4
It is important to note that companionate marriage did not and does
not exclude a romantic or sexual dimension, and is not a euphemistic
term to describe marriage when sexual relations have waned or are
absent. In her study of contemporary personal life, Carol Smart observed
a tendency among scholars working in the field to distinguish between
four categories of love, namely, romantic love, sexual love, maternal
love, and companionate love. She argued, however, that these distinc-
tions were not helpful because the boundaries between the four types
were fluid and that people understood that sexual love and/or romantic
love generally preceded companionate love.5 Before the western sexual
revolution in the 1960s, the companionate marriage was recommended
as the appropriate place for sexual relations between a woman and a
man. For example, when it was revived and popularised in the USA after
World War One, social conservatives accused advocates of the compan-
ionate marriage of encouraging loose morals in the general population
because sexual satisfaction in marriage was one of the arguments they
used to recommend it. ‘Men and women sought happiness and personal
satisfaction in their mates; an important component of … [which] was
mutual sexual enjoyment.’6 And, as Andrew Cherlin noted in the North
American context and John Murphy in the Australian context, during
the 1950s companionate marriage was the only socially acceptable place
for couples to enjoy sexual relations.7
Although some of … [its] features had antecedents in nineteenth

century ideals … the companionate marriage … [was] recognizably
modern: a female sexual desire as strong as, even if different from,
that of the male; the need to have it satisfied; the availability of
birth control so that couples could enjoy sex without the worry of
unwanted pregnancies.8
Of course, not everyone conformed to convention, and in the 1950s

and 1960s there were couples who defied social norms by cohabitating
instead of marrying. Cherlin argues, however, that while this was the
case, cohabitation was not widespread, that only the poor or avant-garde
practised it, and that it was not until the 1970s and later that cohabi-
tation became a widely accepted alternative or prelude to marriage in
western countries.9
One of the more persuasive arguments concerning changes that have
taken place in personal intimacy and relationships since World War Two
is that because of declining traditional attachments and community

obligation – consequences of increasing mass individualisation – couple
relationships are subject to forces that tend toward their disintegration.10
The first disintegrating force is the abundance of choice individuals face
in personal lives and a tendency toward obsolescence that this can
produce. Eva Illouz describes this as a ‘“shop-and-choose” outlook’ and
Zygmunt Bauman uses the following terms: ‘since present-day commit-
ments stand in the way of the next day’s opportunities, the lighter and
more superficial they are, the less is the damage’.11
Almost a decade before Bauman observed the effect of obsolescence
on couple relationships, Anthony Giddens identified a similar trend,
which he argued was brought about as a result of the separation of love
and sex in intimate life. Separating love and sex in relationships meant
that couples were engaged in what he called ‘pure relationships’.12
Giddens’s definition of a pure relationship was one that was
entered in to for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person
from a sustained association with another; and … continued only in
so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions
for each individual to stay within it.13
The second disintegrating force that can affect couple relationships

is an expectation that partners will meet personal needs that in former
times would have been satisfied by interpersonal exchanges with a vari-
ety of people, both closely and distantly related, such as priest, siblings,
relatives, friends, work mates, neighbours, and colleagues. ‘[O]ne is sup-
posed to seek and find in the macro-microcosm of life with the beloved
everything that society previously assigned to various professions and
often different parts of town.’14 In the face of increasing individualisa-
tion, the companionate marriage ceased some time ago to be the most
common form of pair relationship, but continues to be one among a
number of models for marriage and, as this chapter shows, was the pre-
vailing model for long-lasting relationships among a significant minor-
ity of gay men interviewed for this book.
Since the 1980s, when research on gay and lesbian private lives was in
its infancy, scholars have cited a tendency toward short-term, temporary
relationships as a typical, though not universal feature of gay relation-
ships.15 A summary of the literature suggests three reasons for this. First,
as same-sex relationships were not recognised until recently in the West,
gay men were forced to experiment with relationship types that were
different from the heterosexual norm.16 A second, related reason was
that the separation of love and sex that Giddens observed in contempo-
rary couple relationships was a feature also of gay relationships, which
hostile commentators have used to label gay men as ‘sex-obsessed’ and
incapable of conducting committed relationships. Third, if gay men
preferred to conduct short-term relationships it was often because of
strategic decisions they made to cope with social opprobrium. ‘The most
effective defense [sic] against oppression lies in fleeting and clandestine
relationships which do not attract attention or provoke suspicion.’17
If there is truth in Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s argument that a prin-
cipal feature of couple relationships today is the expectation that one’s
partner will meet all one’s affective and sexual–social needs, then I would
argue that while this continues to be the case for some gay men now,
it was especially so for many gay men in times of social hostility, when
their partner became trusted confidant, little brother, as well as lover,
closest friend, and sexual partner.18 In light of the fragility of mod-
ern-day relationships and the conditions under which gay men have
arranged and conducted couple relationships in times of varying social
acceptance, it is notable that a significant minority of 24 men from
this sample of 97 men showed clear evidence of managing successful,
long-lasting relationships. And in addition, that these relationships of
10 years and longer should so closely resemble the companionate mar-
riage in terms of commitment and longevity.
The couples in my study
For the purposes of this study, I defined a ‘long-lasting’ relationship as

one where the couple has been together for 10 years or more. On the
basis of this definition, 24 men, or one-quarter of the international
sample of 97 men, were in long-lasting relationships. Of these, seven
were in relationships of more than 30 years’ duration;19 eight men were
in relationships of between 20 and 30 years’ duration;20 and nine in
relationships of between 10 and 20 years’ duration.21 As mentioned, the
24 men were from a larger group of 55 who were in relationships at the
time of interview.22 It is worth mentioning also that of the 42 men who
were single at the time of interview, 30 had previously been in relation-
ships of on average six and a half years’ duration. Included in each of
the age cohorts mentioned above was a small number of couple pairs,
that is, pairs of men in relationships together. Their stories are occasion-
ally discussed separately, without reference to what their partner said
and sometimes jointly so as to compare what each partner said about
the same topic.
This main body of the chapter has two parts. In the first part, I look at
the evidence in the men’s relationship stories to support the argument
that their relationships closely resemble the companionate marriage. In
the second part, I consider the place of sex in the men’s stories of their
relationships. Its relative absence from the men’s stories suggests that
long-lasting gay relationships are no different from long-lasting hetero-
sexual relationships and marriages where similar stories are told of the
relative insignificance of sexual relations after time.
Togetherness, companionship, partnership, and love
The focus in this section is on the relationship stories of eight men that
showed traits of companionate marriage. Three of the relationship stories
were from men in the 30-plus group,23 four were from men in the 20–30
group,24 and one was from a man in the 10–20 group.25 My analysis of
these eight relationship stories suggests two principal narratives, the pres-
ence of which I argue is evidence of companionate relationship. First,
there is evidence in the stories of a togetherness and companionship that
suggests a sense of equality.26 Second, there is evidence of a regard for the
personal qualities in the other man, suggesting a partnership that is not
necessarily merely economic, that takes the shape of a mutual sharing
of the load both metaphorically and literally. Underlying each of these
narratives is evidence of the men’s capacity and willingness to commit to
their partners and their relationships. In the following sub-sections, the
two principal narratives I identified as features of a companionate rela-
tionship are discussed in turn, that is, (a) togetherness and companion-
ship and (b) partnership, before considering a third and minor narrative,
which is about love and the means by which the men expressed feelings
of love toward their partner.
Togetherness, companionship
For the purpose of the discussion that follows, I have understood
‘togetherness’ to describe that close, personal, almost animal-like inti-
macy that develops between two people who have shared lives together
from young adulthood until late middle age or older. I have understood
the term ‘companionship’ to mean a mutual understanding between
two individuals such that each is willing to sacrifice his/her time to keep
the other company. It is a relationship where affection is often present
that is not only sexual and where each person has a reasonable expecta-
tion that the other will come to his/her aid, is accepted for what he/she
is, can be relied upon, and is dependable.
Evidence of togetherness was found in the life stories of three men,

two from the 30-plus group and one from the 20–30 group. Two of the
men referred to sleeping together – that is, that they still shared the
same bed after all those years – as a sign of the success and quality of
their relationship. The first man to cite the fact that he and his partner
still slept together as evidence of the success of their relationship was
Ashton (aged 70) from Sydney. The second man to do so was Bryce
(aged 63), who was from Manchester and before retirement had worked
in the entertainment industry. He had lived ‘tolerably happily together’
with his partner, Alfie (also 63), ‘for 39 years’:
We’re quite happy to go to bed each night comfortably and snuggle

up … [and] if people were ever to ask me what I see in the relation-
ship, well, you care for one another. And, if we’ve been together such
a long time, it’s because we continue to care for one another. We’re
anxious about one another’s welfare.
Not only was the fact that they still went to bed together to ‘snuggle
up’ a sign of the companionate nature of their relationship but also and
importantly that they cared for each other and were anxious about the
other’s wellbeing. In many ways, these two men maintained an old-
fashioned relationship where the other’s wellbeing was each partner’s
prime concern, an essential ingredient of a companionate relationship
in both theory and fact.
Importantly, Alfie and Bryce’s relationship was a civil partnership:
We both said quite clearly that we don’t see it ‘as marriage as such’
[because] we’ve lived together long enough to not have to do it but …
it is significant in terms of inheritance and rights. We are one anoth-
er’s next of kin and that is very important. And certainly in terms of
pension considerations, you know. … We only asked about a dozen
friends. … The majority were straight.27
When describing their relationship, Alfie said that they had become
‘one and the same person’, that when they went on holidays, people
often asked if they were ‘brothers’. To confuse his fellow holidaymakers,
Alfie would refer to Bryce as his ‘next of kin’. A popular, negative view
of gay relationships is that they are invariably narcissistic because, in
looking for another man to be his partner, the gay man must be seek-
ing his ‘mirror image’. This is not what Alfie meant when he said he
and partner had become ‘one and the same person’. What I found in
his account of their close relationship was evidence of the natural grow-
ing together that occurs in many relationships when the partners have
shared lives from youth to early old age.
In the next part of the discussion, I draw on the accounts of five men
for evidence of the importance of companionship in their couple relation-
ships. One of the men was from the 30-plus group; three were from the
20–30 group; and one from the 10–20 group. Christian (aged 72) was from
Sydney and had been with his partner for more than 40 years. The only
man to refer to his partner as his ‘companion’, he said that he regarded
him as ‘a wonderful friend … and lover’: ‘It is a very blessed thing in my
life. … I have been very lucky to have … [received] such wisdom and sup-
port [from him].’ In the eyes of 70-year-old Ashton, one of the two men
(above) who cited sleeping with his partner as evidence of the success of
a long-lasting relationship, the companionship that he and his partner
shared could be measured by the absence of abuse in their relationship:
And the most amazing thing is that we have never had a punch
up. … I have never hit him and he has never hit me. We still sleep
together but that is about it. But we have never had an out-and-out,
screaming, nasty, unnecessary fight.
Ashton’s partner was a younger man by at least 20 years and they had
been together for 25 years at the time of interview. Ashton struck me
as a manly man. His career had been in agriculture and small business,
and he was used to working around men and horses. That he should
boast that he and his partner had never had ‘a punch up’ said a great
deal about the unspoken care and concern that he understood to exist
in their relationship. When I asked him why his relationship worked,
he said, ‘we go our different ways to a certain degree’ and then noted
the absence of ‘punch ups’.
The third man whose life story contained evidence of companionship
in his long-lasting relationships was Zachary (52), an expatriate work-
ing in Hong Kong. He and his partner, also an expatriate living in Hong
Kong, had been together for 22 years. In his account of their relation-
ship he explained its success in the following terms.
[W]hen I talk to younger people today … I feel … they are very impa-
tient with relationships. They want it to be perfect and want their
partner to be perfect and have little patience with humanity with …
learning to live with another’s quirks and are in too much … [of a]
rush … [to] move in together
For Zachary, the quality of the partnership that he and his partner had
achieved was as a result of patient acceptance of each other’s personal
flaws. And that, while they did ‘fall into a very natural long-term rela-
tionship’, it had occurred over time, developing as the result of a mutu-
ally cautious approach.
Buck (aged 51) was an expatriate also working in Hong Kong when
interviewed. The relationship he had with his partner of 22 years, also
an expatriate living in Hong Kong, Buck described as, ‘not perfect but …
for the most part … everything I have dreamed of’. Expanding on the
worth of their relationship, Buck said he was surprised at the ease with
which couples, straight and gay, fall out of love: ‘I run into people who
after a couple of years of marriage … [are getting] a divorce.’ And he was
puzzled why couples with emotional difficulties do not ‘stay in love and
overcome the problems’ they have. Finally, he explained the reason for
the success of his relationship, citing in the following what he felt for
his partner.
I admire my partner very much. I respect him and when I have to

do … [important] things … I ask him what … [he] thinks of it, just to
get his opinion. It is … the chivalry that comes out because whatever
I do affects him, so it is important that he is part of it.
Buck has a traditional view of the responsibility of the companion in a

relationship. He hints that he owes his partner a chivalrous obligation
and vice versa. When he seeks his partner’s view on important matters,
he does not see this as a sign of dependency (which it might also be)
but as a courtesy.
The fifth man whose life story includes evidence of companionship
and its qualities is Eddie, aged 45, from Manchester. He and his partner
had been together for more than 18 years, and in the following quota-
tion he provides an honest, nuanced account of their relationship:
We get on … we fight … not physically but we argue and are combat-

ive. … I think you get like that when you get older, when you’ve been
together so long. … It’s a loving relationship … based on getting on
with each other and chatting but … also based on independence.
The robust companionship that Eddie and his partner enjoyed does not
include physical violence, and is similar in this respect to the compan-
ionship that Ashton from Sydney described (no ‘punch ups’, in Ashton’s
language) but Eddie goes further than Ashton. He admits to a combative
relationship, arguing that verbal jousts are a feature of any long-lasting

relationship and then, after reassuring me that he and his partner have
a loving relationship, goes one step further to point out that their bond
comes from the open communications they enjoy ‘getting on with each
other and chatting’ and also, crucially, the independence they allow
each other. For many men, independence or the idea that they may
exercise or enjoy a degree of independence is a crucial part of being
male, which Eddie made clear in the story of his relationship.28
The extracts I examined from the life stories of five men aged 44–72
suggest the following about companionship in long-lasting relationships.
First, that it exists where a partner is a supportive advisor (Christian, 72,);
second, that it exists where abuse is absent (Ashton, 70); third, that it
is present where there is mutual respect and consultation (Buck, 51);
and fourth, that it is present where communications are good and each
man enjoys a degree of independence (Eddie, 45). If the characteristics
of male companionship include the mutual exchange of qualities such
as acceptance and dependability as well as affection, I would argue that,
from the accounts of their relationships, these four men seem to have
experienced it in part or in full and with varying degrees of emphasis.
On a related question, I am not sure whether gay men are more likely
to experience companionship in their relationships than heterosexual
men are in their friendships, that is, that gay men experience a closer
male bond in their relationships than straight men do in their friend-
ships. A great deal has been written about the social construction of
masculinity, competitiveness between males in general, and how the
demands of hegemonic masculinity affect relations between straight
men – they may get close to their friends but not too close in case it
is misconstrued as homosexual attraction, which is taboo.29 Gay male
relationships are not devoid of conflict or competitiveness, however,
but the erotic, emotional, and sexual closeness that gay men often
achieve in their relationships can mitigate the need to dominate, which
Pierre Bourdieu argued is the learned behaviour of most males.30
Partnership
I have understood partnership to connote a joint enterprise or mutual
effort, a sharing of the load (emotional and material), suggesting a will-
ingness and ability on the part of each person to work together for the
good of both. It was in the story of one man, Duncan (aged 47), that
I found strongest evidence of the partnership that I argue connotes a
companionate relationship. Duncan was an expatriate living in Hong
Kong when interviewed. His business career had included work for
companies in Europe and the Middle East, and he and his partner of
21 years had had a fairly ‘mobile’ or peripatetic private life, the inter-
national travel it involved largely influenced by the demands of multi-
national corporations for whom Duncan has worked and the separate
demands of his partner’s career.
The way Duncan and his partner managed frequent long periods apart,
as each pursued his career, strongly underlined the partnership aspect
of their companionate relationship. In spite of long periods of separa-
tion, beginning when they were in the full flush of youth, Duncan and
his partner conducted their relationship on the understanding that its
future was guaranteed and that each separation would come to an end.
I would argue that a couple’s ability to manage separation as Duncan
and his partner did is evidence of an enduring partnership, especially,
as the following shows, enforced separation created difficulties for their
private life and did not necessarily get easier with experience:
After six or seven years together, I assumed … that two years apart
would not be difficult. I underestimated how difficult it would be.
We survived it … but it was traumatic.
An associated problem their international careers caused was that they

were no longer sure where they felt most at home: ‘we have lived in
lots of different places but neither one of us wants to fully live [in any
of them]’.
At the start of this section, when discussing the elements of compan-
ionate relationships, I argued that for partnership to exist there must
be evidence of a joint effort or mutual enterprise. Duncan’s story of his
relationship of 21 years suggests how important it is that each partner is
willing to conduct relations with his partner on the basis of partnership,
especially where separation is involved or is to be expected because of
the competing demands of separate careers. The practical difficulties
that separate, global careers can cause underlines also another narrative
that is familiar in the published accounts of life stories of gays and lesbi-
ans, which is that, like increasing numbers of straight couples, they too
are capable of ‘living apart together’ and maintaining affective bonds
while physically separate.31
Presence of love
When discussing the nature of companionate marriage, historians such
as John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman and Lawrence Stone argue that
it is the presence of love and companionship that distinguishes the
companionate marriage from its pragmatic, functional predecessor.32

What, then, did the stories of the 24 men who were in long-lasting
relationships say about love? Its presence, which can be expressed in
practical terms as well as in poems and love songs, was the crucial, new
ingredient of the companionate marriage when it emerged in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, evolving as it did when love
began to speak its name, claim its place in marriage.33 Eight men from
the group of 24 who were in long-lasting relationships used the word
‘love’ or something similar when recounting their relationship stories.
While this finding is better than findings from my all-Australian sample
of gay men – where only one man out of a sample of 80 Australian men
said his relationship was important because of the love he experienced
with his partner34 – it is still the case that the men whose relationships
stories were the subject of this chapter were reticent to refer to love
when speaking of their relationships.
When analysing the all-Australian data, I inferred its presence in
relationships if the men spoke of companionship or intimacy. In regard
to the data used for this chapter, I would argue that the accounts of
companionship or partnership the men told in their relationship stories
were practical expressions of love for their partner. When, for example,
Ashton (aged 70) announced (above) that his relationship was on a firm
footing because of the absence of ‘punch ups’ or when Buck (aged 51)
said (above) that he sought his partner’s opinion whenever he had to
make an important decision, I believe they were expressing those deep,
affective bonds for their partner that are generally known as love. The
bigger question of men’s fear of expressing their feelings, with which
women in heterosexual relationships are all too familiar, can be com-
pounded in same-sex, male relationships. But fear of expressing feelings
does not mean that those feelings are absent, and evidence of love can
be found even if people do not use the word.
Analysis of the men’s relationship stories revealed that eight men (or
one-third of the 24 men in enduring relationships) spoke of love in
their relationships. The first was Christian (aged 72) from Sydney, who
said (above) that having his ‘lover’ in his life for 42 years was ‘a very
blessed thing’. The second man was Parry (aged 63) from New York,
who explained love as commitment and loyalty, both of which were
tested quite considerably when his lover was sent to prison:
That relationship has been full of all sorts of things I would never
think of … [it has] been a challenge for me but also a challenge for
me to see how committed I am to loving someone … when he was
gaoled and going through all this stuff, when my friends were asking,
‘Why are you bothering?’ And you know I’m too loyal.
Although Parry affected a casual response when speaking about the time
his partner was in gaol, I would argue that his decision not to discard his
partner or break off the relationship was a fairly dramatic expression of
love and loyalty, in anyone’s terms. The third man was Hugh (aged 62)
from Melbourne, who said the strong spiritual and emotional bonds he
felt for his partner were a type of continuing ‘in-love-ness’. The fourth
man was Eddie (aged 45) from Manchester, who said (above) that he
and his partner had a ‘loving relationship’. And the remaining four men
referred to love when they distinguished between romantic love and
sexual relations in their relationship.35
In short, there was evidence of one or all of the traits of companion-
ate marriage in the men’s stories. I found examples in their relationship
stories of togetherness, companionship, or partnership. In addition, I have
argued that the accounts the men provided of companionship or part-
nership in their relationship stories were evidence of love’s presence, as
it also was if the men used the word ‘love’ in their stories or a similar
word or phrase.
Sex and the long-lasting relationship
Earlier in the chapter, I observed that the term ‘companionate marriage’

was not a euphemism for a marriage where sexual relations had waned
or were non-existent and that, on the contrary, the couple’s sex life was
seen as an important element of the companionate marriage. The focus
of this section is the sex life of the men in long-lasting relationships
that resemble the companionate marriage in all but name.
In total, only six men, or a quarter of this sample of 24 men, referred
to sexual relations when telling their relationship story.36 On the surface,
this might seem to suggest that sexual relations occupied only a relatively
minor place in the men’s relationships, with the notable exception of a
small number of men who conducted their long-lasting relationships
as open relationships at some point. Of course, the absence of a sexual
storyline does not mean that sexual relations were absent from the long-
lasting relationships under study. Perhaps some of the men were shy
about discussing this aspect of their relationship in an interview, or some
of the men had low sex drives and sex did not play an important part
in their relationship. Perhaps also some of the interviewees overlooked
any mention of sexual relations because it was a taken-for-granted aspect
of their private life, and I did not probe sufficiently tenaciously or the
place of sexual relations in the relationships had diminished – as it does
over time in most relationships, straight and gay – and occurred only
occasionally. In any case, its relative unimportance was instructive and
contradicted powerful, public narratives that portray gay men as prima-
rily sexually oriented if not sex-obsessed.
The six men who spoke about sex in their relationships fell into
two groups, drawing on two familiar sexual storylines. The first group
consisted of three men, who when they spoke about sex referred to (a)
an early period in their relationship when they had a lot of sex, or (b)
the fact that their relationship was now not solely based on sex or had
evolved so that sexual relations were only one of the means through
which they expressed their affective bond. This is a fairly conventional
narrative about the waning but not extinguishing of the sexual fire that
can occur in monogamous relationships. The second group of three
men who referred to the sex in their relationship did so in the context
of the sex that they or their partner had with other men, that is, when
they gave details of their open relationship. This is a less conventional
yet familiar storyline, reminiscent of the swinging couples of the 1960s
or key parties which, before the onset of herpes, were a feature of the
suburban avant-garde in the 1970s when married couples incorporated
a degree of extra-marital sex into their sex lives, without jeopardising
their marriage. It is a storyline that permeates gay relationships as well
and suggests gay men’s capacity to incorporate a transgressive ele-
ment in their sexual/social lives without putting at risk their primary
relationship.
All three men who belonged to the first group were in their 40s, from
Britain, and had been in relationships of between 10 and 20 years.37 The
three men did not describe their relationship as ‘open’, and I did not
ask them if they had sex or were having with anyone other than their
partner. What they did say about their relationship is instructive for
what it reveals about distinctions people make between affectionate and
sexual relations. Fred (aged 47) said that his relationship began sexu-
ally, ‘we met illicitly and shagged, had fantastic sex’, slowly evolving
into a romantic relationship, after which it became companionate in
nature when they ‘moved in together the following year and have been
together ever since’.38 His partner, Jonathon (aged 45) agreed with Fred’s
recollection of the early days of their relationship: ‘we saw each other in
a sexual but not in a romantic sense’. The romance in their relationship
began, in the story each told of the relationship, between 18 months
and two years after they met.
That the romance in their relationships followed an initial period

of sexual fervour confirmed what Michel Foucault observed in the
early 1980s about gay relationships. In the following excerpt, Foucault
distinguishes between sex and the romantic longing a person weaves
when his lover has departed. While the distinction between a period of
frantic sexual attraction and activity and a period of quieter romantic
contemplation is common to most couples, Foucault’s point was that,
in the late twentieth century and before homosexual law reform was
achieved, it could be especially poignant for gay men considering the
circumstances of their meeting (clandestine, at short notice, for exam-
ple) and whether a second meeting was guaranteed:
For a homosexual, the best moment of love is likely to be when the

lover leaves in a taxi. It is when the act is over and the guy … is gone
that one begins to dream about the warmth of his body, the quality
of his smile, the tone of his voice.39
The third man from this group, Eddie (aged 45) was interviewed in
Manchester. He and his partner met in ‘a sleazy gay bar’. It was nice
in his view because they just got on and ‘it wasn’t just based on sex’.
Although I did not interrogate Eddie further at this point in our inter-
view, I now suspect that what he meant by the shorthand, ‘we just got
on; it wasn’t just based on sex’, is that their relationship came into exist-
ence because they knew one another more than sexually.
The second group of men that spoke of the place of sex in relation-
ships comprises three men. The oldest one in this group is Drake (77)
from Melbourne; the next in age is Parry (63) from New York; and the
youngest is Ben (52) from Manchester. As mentioned, all three men
spoke of having conducted or of still conducting an open relationship.
Drake is from the group of men whose relationships were 30 years or
longer, and Parry and Ben from the group whose relationships were
between 20 and 30 years in length. The reason and the occasion when
each man opened up his relationship differed and reveals that there is
no standard pattern as to why, when, or how gay men in long-lasting
relationships agree that one or both may have occasional casual part-
ners. In Drake’s case, he and his younger partner had recently agreed
that the partner could meet for casual sex with ‘fuck buddies’, and for
two reasons.40 First, while Drake and his partner were interested and
capable of having sex with each other, they could not, according to
Drake, ‘get it together at the moment’; second and more importantly,
Drake was concerned that his partner might struggle to find a new part-
ner after his death:
At my age, I could drop off any day or any year and … [my partner]
can’t be left … at, say 60, wondering how he finds a friend. I’d rather
it were smoother in that area, which is pretty important for … us.
Allowing his partner to have casual sex was not a new arrangement for,
according to Drake, during the course of their 31 years together, they
had been ‘sexually active … while having other partners’. This time,
however, the agreement was strongly altruistically motivated, inspired
as he said it was by a desire to ensure his partner would not have to
lead a life alone after his death, suggesting Drake’s companionate con-
nection to and regard for his partner. Drake’s assumption was, of course,
that he would predecease his partner who was 21 years his junior. He
made it clear, however, that he would not allow a friendship with a
casual sex partner to threaten their relationship:
I don’t want him to fall for anybody. I’ll fight him about that but
having a range of ‘fuck buddies’ or whatever you want to call them
would be more social for him.
In Parry’s case, his open relationship arose from a desire to have more
satisfying sex than he was able to have with his partner. At the time
of interview, Parry had been with his partner for 25 years, the first 14
years of which they lived together; while for the last 11 years, they had
been living apart. When Parry sought more satisfying sex outside the
relationship, it was because his partner meant a great deal to him, or as
he said in his own words, ‘I couldn’t give up on our relationship’:
It’s 25 years of growing old with someone … I absolutely adored from

the moment I saw him. The night I met him at a cocktail party, I said,
‘he’s the person I want to spend the rest of my life with’, and I am
still committed to that.
After having casual sex three or four times over a period of about six
months, Parry met a man who wanted to start a relationship with him.
Because he regarded his original relationship as enduring, Parry decided
to conduct a separate relationship with the second man. In order to
make this possible, he made arrangements with his first partner to
continue their relationship, obtaining his partner’s permission to begin

a parallel relationship with the second man. He and his first partner
began living apart together when Parry began this second relationship.
An unusual aspect of Parry’s account of the two relationships is what
I understood to be his genuinely stated belief in monogamy: ‘I was
monogamous for so many years and I believe in a monogamous relation-
ship.’ One possible explanation for the disjunction between his belief in
monogamy and his affective practices is that Parry understood that each
of his relationships, which he conducted separately with each partner, to
be monogamous and that, by keeping the men apart and their affective
lives separate, he was being faithful to each. It was clear to me at the time
of interview and later when listening to the recording of the interview
and analysing the data from the written transcript that Parry genuinely
believed he was conducting two independent and monogamous rela-
tionships. His partners knew of the other’s existence but this was not a
ménage à trois. The three men kept two separate establishments in order
for Parry to conduct his relationships separately and, I suspect, maintain
the impression that he was being monogamous when in fact each of his
partners was having a monogamous relationship with him.
Barry Adam’s study of the relationship scripts of a non-representative
sample of Canadian gay men provides another possible explanation for
the apparent disjunction between Parry’s beliefs and practices. Adam
argues that gay men will often use monogamy for building trust in the
early phases of relationships. He argues also that a tension can exist
between the gay ‘relationship trajectory’ of romance and monogamy
and gay men’s pursuit and enjoyment of ‘outlaw sex’, or what Adams
calls ‘male-gendered scripts of sex as adventure, pleasure, and explora-
tion without commitment’.41 In other words, it is possible to under-
stand Parry’s decision-making in the following terms. He practised the
monogamy of which he spoke in the first 14 years of his relationship
with his first partner. At that point, he sought more satisfying sex
outside the relationship on the understanding with his partner that
in his words, he ‘would not give up on the relationship … [even if]
we seemed to be going sexually in different directions’. On meeting a
man with whom he found satisfying sex and who wanted a (possibly
monogamous?) relationship with him, he negotiated to continue one
relationship, which had operated monogamously, and to start another,
which he conducted on a similar basis.
I did not interrogate Parry about the sexual dissatisfaction he had
experienced with his first partner, so it is not possible to know if the
setting up of the second relationship occurred because he could not
reconcile the tension that Adam identifies between romance and

monogamy and the pursuit of outlaw sex. From my understanding of
Parry, gleaned over the course of two hours only, I suspect he honestly
believed that he can and does conduct his relationships without seri-
ously compromising a belief in monogamy.
The third person in this group of three men who spoke about sex in
his long-lasting relationship is Ben. He was 52 and had been with his
partner for 21 years when interviewed. Ben related the conventional
story of the open relationship – where he and his partner agreed to
open their relationship after they had been together five years so that
each could have separate casual sexual encounters outside their primary
relationship. Their decision to do so at that point supports Barry Adam’s
argument that in some gay relationships the purpose of monogamy is to
build trust in the early years, and also his other argument that monog-
amy can conflict with men’s pursuit of sex as a recreational pastime, an
adventurous, pleasurable hobby or interest.
Ben and his partner took a while to adjust to their open relationship:
‘It was difficult at first. We still felt jealous and fearful that the other
would abscond with someone else. We still do!’ An interesting sideline
to the story of Ben’s open relationship is that at one point his partner
had a relationship with another man that ran for three years, with Ben’s
consent. It ended, however, when, said Ben, ‘the other man decided that
he really wanted a monogamous relationship’. An aspect of this sideline
story is reminiscent of Parry’s second relationship, except that the man
Ben’s partner was seeing did not have the power, was not in a position
to insist on a monogamous relationship, and Ben and his partner were
no longer conducting their relationship monogamously.
A fairly standard story of open relationships is as follows. Two men
start seeing one another regularly; in line with Barry Adam’s study of
Canadian gay couples, the two men conduct monogamous sexual rela-
tions, often living apart until they decide to live together. In most cases,
it is once they have lived together for a period of time – five years in
the case of Ben and his partner, 14 years in the case of Parry and his
partner – that they will discuss how and when to open their relation-
ship. In his Canadian study, Adam found one of the more common
arrangements was ‘two plus one’, where a third man is invited to have
sex with the primary couple, and that these third parties were often
only a temporary addition to the primary relationship, thus helping,
he argues, to distinguish between sex with love and recreational sex.42
I found no evidence of ‘two plus one’ in the stories that Drake, Parry
or Ben told of their open relationships, but again this could be because
I did not interrogate them intensely when they were telling me about
their sexual relations.
Ben’s open relationship more closely conformed to the conventional
understanding of an open, gay relationship because each partner made
use of the new arrangement to seek sexual variety outside the primary
relationship. By contrast, Drake and Parry’s stories of opening their rela-
tionships were a variation on this theme, involving only one partner
from each relationship. Drake said, while telling his relationship story,
that both he and his younger partner had had casual sexual encounters
(‘fuck buddies’) ‘on the side’, and that recently they had reached an
understanding that his partner could continue having sex with ‘fuck bud-
dies’ because doing so might increase his circle of friends. Drake made it
clear, however, that he would not allow a friendship with a ‘fuck buddy’
to threaten their relationship and that he had agreed to or suggested (his
meaning was unclear) the new arrangement because he wanted his part-
ner to avoid loneliness in the event of his predeceasing him, a reasonable
and altruistic motive given the 21 years that separate them in age.
Parry, on the other hand, was conducting two separate and possibly in
his mind simultaneously monogamous relationships when I met him for
an interview in his lower Manhattan apartment. In a sense, he was doing
as many men before him have done and maintained two separate house-
holds, one for the wife and one for the mistress, which understanding
is underlined in the quotation from Parry’s interview that heads this
chapter. What made Parry’s story so interesting was that sex outside his
primary relationship had not become routine when he arranged with his
partner to look for more satisfying sex with other men, and that within
six months of making that arrangement he had met a man who wanted
a relationship with him. As mentioned, it was at this point that he set
in place arrangements to conduct separate relationships with two men
who, in his words, ‘bring out … different parts of me’.
In summary, then, what these three accounts of open relationships sug-
gest is that there is no one uniform or universal tale of polyamory in the
gay world. And that like heterosexuals freed of the restraints of marriage
banns, gay men can invent a variety of creative sexual/social relationships
to suit their erotic needs, about which there is more in the chapters that
follow later in the book on fatherhood and then on gay marriage.
Conclusion
Based on an analysis of the stories of 24 men in couple relationships of

10 years and longer, I have argued in this chapter that the companionate
marriage is the model for long-lasting, gay relationships. This subset of

24 men from the international sample comprised men aged 47–87 who
were interviewed in Auckland, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Manchester,
New York, and Sydney in the years 2009–12, and included men who
had been previously married or in relationships with women, men who
were in civil unions, and men who were gaily married. It is significant
that a quarter of the 97 men from this international sample showed
evidence of sustained, long-lasting relationships, especially so in light of
published research that shows that, as a result of individualisation, the
couple relationship is subject to forces tending toward its disintegration –
evidence for which can be found in divorce figures and rates of remar-
riage. One possible reason for this achievement is that same-sex couples
can have a greater capacity for companionship and partnership in their
relationships because relations between partners are more inclined to
equality and more closely approximate Anthony Giddens’s notion of
the ‘pure relationship’.
The 24 men whose long-lasting relationships were the focus of this
chapter were from a larger group of 55 men who were in relationships at
the time of interview. To provide a clearer picture of relationships prac-
tices among gay men, I explained that of the 42 men who were single
at the time of interview, 30 had previously been in relationships of on
average six and a half years’ duration. The picture this sample paints is
of gay men’s strong propensity to enter into and maintain relatively sta-
ble relationships that are subject to similar forces affecting heterosexual
relationships, with the companionate marriage as the pervasive style for
those couples in long-term relationships. In light of the political pressure
for ‘marriage equality’ that is occurring in many western countries, it is
worth remembering that one factor that might help explain the success
of long-lasting gay relationships is that they have never been subject to
the same level of public expectations that affect heterosexual marriage,
and as well are often free of the gendered assumptions about roles and
divisions of labour that can affect many straight relationships.43
In support of the argument that long-lasting gay relationships closely
resemble the companionate marriage, there is evidence in the men’s
relationship stories of companionate traits – identified as companion-
ship and partnership. Evidence for companionship was found in men’s
accounts of the emotional support their partner provided, which one
man gauged by the absence of physical violence, their ability and will-
ingness to accept their partner, to tolerate his personal flaws, and to
sacrifice time to keep him company. Partnership connotes a joint enter-
prise or mutual effort, a sharing of emotional and material loads, and a
willingness and ability of each person to work together for the good of
both. Evidence for this was found in the relationship story of one man in
his late 40s whose relationship of 21 years included periods of separation
when both partners were working on different continents and/or work-
ing out how to live together. Such stories of enforced intimate separation
are not uncommon among people who work for large, global corpora-
tions. I have argued also that accounts of companionship or partnership
were evidence of love’s presence in the men’s relationships, as it also was
if they used the word ‘love’ in their stories or a similar word or phrase.
The relative insignificance of sexual relations in the stories the men
told of their relationships was the subject of the final section in this
chapter. This finding is notable for two reasons. First, it is often assumed
that sex plays a prominent role in gay men’s relationships, that gay
men are highly sexed and sexualised. For example, when I told a class
of final-year students that one reason many older gays and lesbians
feared having to go into nursing homes was because it would mean they
would have to go back into the closet, one student said that was only as
it should be because sexual relations were problematic for all residents
of aged care facilities. Her assumption was that gays and lesbians were
highly sexed and sexualised individuals, and she equated celibacy with
going back into the closet. Second, the relative insignificance of sexual
relations in long-lasting, gay relationships reflects the experience het-
erosexuals have of long-lasting relationships and marriage, suggesting a
similar experience over time for couples who are determined and com-
mitted to remain together ‘until the bitter end’.
Two groups of men did speak of the sex in their relationships. The
first group spoke about sex when referring to an early period in their
relationship when they had a lot of sex or to the fact that their relation-
ship was now less sexualised or had transformed so that sex was only
one means of expressing their affective bond. There is a fairly standard
story in the literature of gay and straight couples that points to a ten-
sion between sexual love and romantic love; the former is often seen
as excessive, if not destructive, and certainly at odds with the need to
conform to the routines and rhythms of the adult world of work, while
the latter represents affect of a calmer, kinder nature. The second group
of men referred to sex in the context of their relationship as an open
relationship. And here evidence from three men’s stories showed three
distinct, different approaches to polyamory, suggesting that no single
narrative of open relationships can be said to exist in the gay world and
reflecting gay men’s capacity to incorporate a transgressive element in
their intimate life without jeopardising their principal relationship.
4
Fatherhood
I probably slightly envy straight men because … being

a parent is one of the richest experiences in my life
and one I would not have missed. … I would like to
have had more children.
(Hector, aged 81, Melbourne)
Introduction
This chapter examines the fatherhood settings and fatherhood stories

of 14 gay men from the all-Australian sample and eight men from the
international sample.1 When these 22 men spoke about relations with
their children, they mainly did so by first, explaining the means by
which they came to be parents, which I call ‘fatherhood settings’, and
second, describing in more detail the nature of relations with their
children, which I call ‘fatherhood stories’. My analysis of their stories
revealed two fatherhood settings and four main fatherhood stories. The
fatherhood settings and fatherhood stories the men told are examined
in the context of generation difference, where applicable, and in light
of gender assumptions about masculinity and care.
I identified two fatherhood settings in the stories the 22 men told
about being fathers. The first setting was that which occurred when
17 of the men were married to or in a relationship with a woman,
later transforming when the men came out and, in the case of most,
embarked on gay relationships. This fatherhood setting, which I have
called ‘heterosexual fatherhood’, and which represents the experience
of the majority of men interviewed for this study, was also the usual
means by which gay men experienced fatherhood for the greater part
of the twentieth century – as a result of the double life many led in
83
response to fairly widespread homophobia in the West.2 The mar-

riages or heterosexual relationships of these 17 men ranged in duration
from 7 to 55 years. The second fatherhood setting (‘non-heterosexual
fatherhood’) occurred in the case of five men whose fatherhood arose
not as a result of a heterosexual relationship. In the case of the five men
interviewed for this study who experienced fatherhood in a non-hetero-
sexual setting or context, two men became fathers when they arranged
to have children with lesbian couples; two men did so as foster parents,
and the fifth man became a father by adoption. Similar settings have
been discussed in relation to the fatherhood experiences of British and
North American men.3
When the men described the quality of their relationships with their
children, they related four fatherhood stories, which I distinguished
by the level of closeness they maintained with their children. The first
story was used by a group of 13 men who said they kept very close
relations with their children,4 and in doing so demonstrated what
researchers call ‘involved fathering’.5 The second story was used by a
group of four men who were in regular contact with their children.6
A third story was used by a group of three men who spoke of fairly
distant relationships with their children.7 And a fourth story, which
was in fact a negative fatherhood story, was related by two men who
made no mention of their children at all.8 None of the interviewees
expressed their parenting closeness quantitatively, that is, in terms
of daily, weekly, three-monthly contact, for example, and I did not
ask them to quantify their relationships with their children. The four
fatherhood story types are discussed in the section below under the
following headings, ‘Very close relations’, ‘Regular contact’, ‘Distant
relations’, ‘No contact’.
The sample used for this chapter differs from the sample I have used
for the other chapters in the book because it comprises two sets of data
that I combined so as to locate a sufficient number of men who had
been fathers. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the two data sets consist of
an ‘all-Australian’ sample of 80 gay men that I interviewed in 2001–3
and an international sample of 97 men that I interviewed in 2009–11.9
In this combined data set of 177 men, there were 22 men who had
been fathers; 14 of these men came from the all-Australian sample
and eight from the international sample. The 14 men drawn from the
all-Australian sample were aged 33–75 and, with the exception of one
Aboriginal man, were of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic descent. The eight
men drawn from the international sample were from all social classes
and a variety of ethnic backgrounds, and were aged 43–87.
Fatherhood 85
I argue in this chapter that gay fatherhood is tied to heteronormativ-

ity because the majority of men whose interviews were analysed for this
chapter came to be parents in heterosexual settings. They tended to be
older men who were young adults in the 1970s and most likely mar-
ried as a result of social pressure, uncertainty about their sexuality, or
because marriage was the conventional place for adult sexual relations.
Their parenting was ‘involved’ or less involved, and often this related to
their experience of coming out and the behaviour of other family mem-
bers when the news was received. A minority of men whose interviews
were analysed for this chapter parented in a homosexual setting, in the
context of the ‘everyday experiment’. These men tended to be younger
and relatively advantaged.
Fatherhood settings
The men used two settings or contexts when speaking about their expe-
riences of fatherhood. The first setting was one with which most males
are familiar, coming about as it did when 17 of the men from this sam-
ple got married to or began a relationship with a woman and became
fathers as a result of sexual relations with their female partners. These
marriages or de facto relationships later transformed when the men
came out and then began gay relationships of one sort or another. Not
surprisingly, I have called this setting, and the form of fatherhood it rep-
resents, ‘heterosexual fatherhood’. It was the experience of the majority
of gay fathers interviewed for this study and was the usual means by
which gay men became fathers for most of the twentieth century and
earlier – as a result of a double life many had to lead because of varying
levels of homophobia in the West. Oscar Wilde being one of the best-
known examples of a same-sex-attracted man who came to fatherhood
this way. The second setting occurred when men became fathers not as a
result of sexual relations with a woman but instead by artificial insemi-
nation, foster parenting, or adoption, in other words, by everyday
experiments. These two fatherhood settings are discussed in order.
Heterosexual fatherhood
Seventeen men said that they their experience of fatherhood began
when they were married or in a relationship with a woman, that is,
as a result of heterosexual sexual intercourse and then childbirth. The
families of choice the men then established varied according to how
and when they came out, the nature of the gay relationship(s) they
created, and their children’s place in them. Aged between 45 and 87 at
the time of interview, the heterosexual relationship histories of these 17

men can be divided into three groups according to how long they were
married or in a relationship with a woman. The first group comprised
six men who were married for more than 30 years, and included a man
who had been married for more than 50 years and still was at the time
of interview.10 The second group comprised four men who were married
between 20 and 30 years.11 And the third group consisted of seven men
who were married less than 20 years.12
For me, two questions immediately arose from these data. The first
was, Why did the men marry in the first place? And the second was,
When and how did they cease being married and begin their gay inti-
mate life? In answer to the first question, social pressure to conform
to the heterosexual model of marriage was the principal narrative they
used to explain why they married or began a heterosexual relationship.
It is significant that men from all classes said that social pressure caused
them to begin a heterosexual relationship in their youth, which in a
number of cases lasted into middle age. Coming out late in life does
not necessarily mean that the men purposely exploited the women
they married or with whom they conducted a relationship. It is possible
for men who are homosexually attracted to continue an emotionally
significant relationship with a woman because of their shared, intimate
history and, if parents, the bond that they formed with each other
when bringing up their children under the same roof.
It is significant also that the period during which these men con-
ducted their relationships with women stretched from at least the 1940s
until the early 1980s – with the notable exception of two men who were
still married at the time of interview.13 In other words, the compulsion
the men felt who came out later in life to conduct heterosexual rela-
tionships was not confined to the period of acute homophobia in the
West, which occurred in the 1940s and 1950s, even into the 1960s,14
but extended well beyond it, underlining Norbert Elias’s argument that
reduction in shame affect and increased social tolerance do not occur
uniformly but in spurts as people become more tolerant of behaviours
their parents or grandparents would once have shunned, been too
ashamed to practise or admit practising.15
When explaining why their heterosexual relationships came to an
end, the men said that either their relationship broke down irretriev-
ably or they experienced a gradual drifting apart that led to separation
and/or divorce. A small number made no mention of how or why their
marriage or de facto relationship ended, and the majority described
amicably separating from their wives or female partners or being still
Fatherhood 87
married at the time of interview. Accounts from five men suggested

that they had had difficulties bringing to an end their marriage or
relationship. Two of these men spoke in fairly general terms about the
termination of their marriage, implying that the breakdown in relations
involved more than incompatible sexual preferences. Gerald (aged 75)
said: ‘We were married for 31 years until various circumstances broke
that marriage irretrievably,’ and Henry (aged 50) explained that he and
his wife had, ‘a series of family deaths and traumas, and the combina-
tion of these and my [sexual] ambiguity … was enough to break up the
marriage’. For at least two men, their heterosexual life came to an end
when their wife died. A third man described more traumatic events sur-
rounding the breakdown of relations with his former wife. Drake said
that he had wrestled with his emerging sexuality and, after a period of
intense personal self-examination, helped by lots of alcohol and poring
over Dennis Altman’s Homosexual,16 he came out to his wife. It was the
early 1970s and he was in his late 30s. Their separation was dramatic
partly because, like many men in his situation, he felt guilty about
being gay and betraying his wife, and partly because he discovered that
his wife was having an affair.
Non-heterosexual fatherhood
The idea of non-heterosexual fatherhood presupposes a number of things,
the most important of which is that gay men are ready and willing to
take on fatherhood, that it is one of the many everyday experiments in
which they, along with others, are involved in the suburbs of large cities
the world over. To check the strength of the narrative underlying these
everyday experiments, that is, that gay men were willing and able to take
on fatherhood, to parent children with lesbian couples, by surrogacy
or adoption, for example, I examined the answers the men from this
combined sample gave to the question, ‘How would your life be differ-
ent if you were not gay?’ It is both a simple question and an extremely
significant one. Slightly fewer than half (81 men) of the combined
sample of 177 men said that they would have had children if they had
not been gay. The remaining men did not mention children, or indeed
heterosexual marriage or a relationship with a woman, but commented
on the qualitative differences between their gay life and an imagined life
as a straight man. Their answers varied between those who said life as a
non-gay man would be less interesting, more interesting, boring, easier,
less adventurous, more socially aware than as a gay man.
What was significant about the men’s answers is that almost all of
them associated parenting and fatherhood with heterosexuality and
heterosexual couple relationships. Only one man, a 25-year-old from

Melbourne, said that being straight would have made having children
easier, in other words, that he intended having children but that
doing so would have been easier if he had been heterosexual.17 Of the
81 men from the combined sample who mentioned having children,
99 per cent associated it with the heterosexual married ideal.
If this non-representative sample in any way mirrors the intimate and
parenting desires and practices of gay men, I would argue that alterna-
tive parenting narratives are not yet widely incorporated into narratives
of the self by which they understand themselves or the relationship
possibilities available to them. While alternative parenting practices
might be common knowledge in some districts of Manhattan, some
parts of north London, as well as in some pockets of some suburbs in
Auckland, Los Angeles, Manchester or Melbourne, it is likely that only
small cliques of privileged gay men share a similar awareness of father-
hood choices and possibilities in the major cities of the developing
world – in Hong Kong or Mumbai, for example. The strong impression
I have from analysing these data in light of other published research is
that alternative fatherhood is a practice only available to certain groups
of gay men in some parts of the First World.
Five men experienced fatherhood in settings not as a result of
sexual relations with a woman. These comprised three different non-
heterosexual settings. Gabriel and Tony belonged to that subset of gay
couples who arrange to father children with lesbian couples. Joseph
and Neville fostered children, and Bernard adopted a son. These three
non-heterosexual fatherhood settings are discussed in the context of
five men’s stories of fatherhood. Three of the men were in their 30s, and
their stories are discussed in turn.
The first non-heterosexual fatherhood setting is the ‘everyday experi-
ment’ that Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan identified as one of the ‘sto-
ries of choice’ available to gays and lesbians today. This is where a gay
couple and a lesbian couple conceive a child by insemination (other
stories of choice include surrogacy).18 From my sample, two men,
Gabriel (aged 43) and Tony (aged 33), arranged to have children with
lesbian couples. Gabriel was from Auckland and worked in the health
sector. During the course of our interview, he mentioned his son only
in passing, and did not give the impression when he did so that he
regarded gay fatherhood as exceptional. When analysing his transcript,
it occurred to me that his relationship with his son might have been
complicated by a number of factors. Looking over Gabriel’s account of
his working life and relationship history, I got the impression that at least
Fatherhood 89
three factors would have affected his parenting, and these were: (1) his
relationship with the boy’s mother(s) – for example, he did not mention
access or any of the other sorts of shared arrangements that one would
normally expect to hear about in cases of this kind of joint parenting;
(2) whether he was in a relationship at the time his son was conceived
and born and what involvement, if any, his former partner had with
his (their) son; (3) he did not say and I did not ask him to tell me if he
had been a sperm donor only and/or only marginally involved in his
son’s life.
Gabriel was well into another, stable relationship when I met him.
His relationship with his son would have been affected therefore by his
relations with the boy’s mother(s), his former partner, and his current
partner. Blended families such as this are becoming more common in
some parts of some cities in the West and, as they do, they will affect
conventional understandings of family and familial relationships.
Tony (aged 33) was the second man to have parented a child with
a lesbian couple. As I have discussed elsewhere, Tony and his partner,
who was 38, had been together nine years when they and a lesbian cou-
ple began making arrangements to have a child together. The detailed
arrangements they made included plans for conception, birth, and the
upbringing of their daughter – the seriousness of their intent starkly
contrasting with the casual ordinariness in which so many new infants
are conceived and born each year. Tony and his partner had been
together for nine years when they were introduced to a lesbian couple
who were interested in co-parenting a child. Both couples took some
time to commit, and both agreed they wanted full involvement in their
child’s upbringing. As other research has shown, some gay men are con-
tent simply to be sperm donors and have nothing more to do with the
child they helped conceive. Tony and his partner and the lesbian couple
spent months getting to know each other and took part in joint couple
therapy to make sure they shared common parenting values. Only after
this extensive orientation process did they then formally document
when and how often the parents would see their child, how holidays
would be shared, and where the child would go to school.19
The second non-heterosexual fatherhood setting was that which two
men and their partners had as foster parents. The first man was Joseph
(aged 35). Together with his ex-partner, Joseph had looked after two
teenage boys for three and a half years. The nature of the parenting and
the manner of the care they provided the boys is discussed in the next
section on fatherhood stories. The second man was Neville (aged 37),
who had a fatherhood experience that was similar to the foster parent
relationship of Joseph, except that the children Neville and his partner
were fathering were related by birth:
I tend to have a lot of my family living with me at various points

of time. We have got a couple of young girls that have lived with us
for most of their lives, from when they were three years old. … The
oldest girl spends every second weekend with us, and it’s essentially
a parental relationship. They are my nieces.
As an Aboriginal man, Neville described the relationship he had with

his nieces and other relatives as familial, but ‘not in a white-fella sense’.
He did not describe it as foster parenting, which is my term, but sim-
ply as ‘parental’. In Neville’s view his relationship with his nieces was
parental because he was able to provide and care for them in a relatively
conventional family setting. Elsewhere I have described as ‘gay nuclear’
the type of family Joseph and his ex-partner and Neville and his partner
provided for the children living with them.20
The third and final non-heterosexual fatherhood setting was revealed
during the course of my interview with a 59-year-old expatriate living
in Hong Kong. Bernard had a partner of 12 years, and when discuss-
ing the changed circumstances many gay men now enjoy, compared
to how things were in the 1960s and 1970s, Bernard told me about his
adopted son:
It was very easy to adopt even as a single man and … I hope it will
become law very soon in open [-minded] countries. I adopted him
when he was three weeks, so he grew up in a gay environment which
had no influence on his [sexual] identity.
Bernard’s experience of adopting, as a single man, was relatively trouble-

free, and his musing was apposite as to whether the same could be said
for the situation gay men now face who want to adopt a child. On
this, George Chauncey writes that, while polls taken in the late 1990s
in the USA showed fairly consistent opposition to gay marriage, they
were beginning to show increasing support for the right of same-sex
couples to adopt children. Popular support for non-heterosexual adop-
tion has not always been reflected, however, in court decisions in state
jurisdictions in the USA. Martha Nussbaum cites, for example, the case
of a lesbian who lived with her daughter in a committed relationship
with another woman. On the grounds of ‘fitness’ to be a parent, a
Virginia court awarded custody of her child to the child’s grandmother.
Fatherhood 91
In the UK, Weeks et al. observe that non-heterosexuals may adopt but
only as single parents,21 while, in France, the situation is set to change.
As mentioned in the following chapter on gay marriage, in 2012, the
French government signalled its intention to introduce legislation
in 2013 to allow same-sex couples the right to marry and to adopt
children.
Fatherhood stories
I divided the men’s fatherhood stories into four categories on the basis
of the closeness of their relationships with their children. The first
group of men maintained very close relationships with their children,
and in doing so demonstrated what I call ‘conscientious fathering’.22
In the stories that these men told of their conscientious fathering, they
revealed two things. First, they revealed the ordinary, everyday nature
of fatherhood as they understood it, and second, they revealed a dedi-
cation and commitment in doing it well for the sake of the children in
their care.
The second group of men was in regular contact with their children.23
On the whole, these men were as interested in their children as were the
men from the first group, but saw them less often because their children
were adults and had their own familial responsibilities and duties.
The third group, which comprised two men, spoke of fairly distant
relationships with their children.24 They did not see their children often
for two quite distinct reasons. In the case of the older man, his adult
children had not warmly welcomed his coming out to them as a gay
man, and in the case of the second man, who was living a double life,
it suited him to keep his children at a distance so that he could conduct
his clandestine gay relationship without undue surveillance.
The fourth group of men either made no mention of their children
at all or said they never saw them.25 It was difficult to be absolutely
certain that two of the three men from this group were estranged
from their children. Their interviews were remarkable, however, for
the absence of any mention of their children, except to say that they
existed. The third man had a sad story to relate of being prevented
by his divorced wife from seeing his children before they reached
adulthood.
Very close relations

The group of 12 men whose stories revealed very close parenting rela-
tionships included four of the five men who were non-heterosexual
fathers, at least one of whom (Tony) showed signs of having developed

very strong, long-lasting bonds with his new-born child – ‘I want her
all the time. I want to be a full-time parent’ – thus exhibiting what
Anthony McMahon calls the ‘joys of fatherhood’.26 For Tony, familial
relationships had always been important and he, ‘never imagined …
[he] could not be a parent’.
Joseph too valued familial relationships, as experienced in his birth
family and his ‘family of choice’:27
My biological family, that is, my parents and my sisters have always

been important people to me. … But I see my family as broader than
that. I include in it some of the heterosexual friends I have had for
decades.
The remaining eight men who had very close relations with their chil-
dren became fathers in heterosexual settings. Included in this group of
eight was a man in his 50s who despite the break-up of his 20-year mar-
riage, ‘had really nice relationships with … [his] kids’. There were also
two men who not only had very close relationships with their children
but also maintained good, strong relations with their former wives, and
a man who had resumed very close relations with his children after a
separation his wife forced on them.
The first example of a gay father who had very close relationships
with his children and also his wife was 64-year-old Clive from Canberra,
who provided the following description of his merged family:
It’s curious because … my wife from whom I have been separated for
many years now, is a lesbian and living in a lesbian relationship. We
have between us five children … [and] having seen aspects of my life …
they seem to be remarkable and accepting of it.
In a brief story about relations with his children, Clive related how the
family had gathered to mark his teenage son’s premature death. All the
members of Clive’s merged family took part in preparing for the event
and were present on the day:
It was very sweet. There was no great ceremony. We just gathered.

We had our lunch and … my granddaughter watered the plant and
we parted. I was happy and felt contented. When relations with my
family work out … I am happy.
Fatherhood 93
Elaborating on the chance nature of good relations with his family,

Clive explained how the imminent birth of another grandchild had
affected him:
My son and his wife are having another baby next week, and I have got
a mobile telephone for the purpose, which I never had before, so they
could call me when the baby is due, so I can go and look after their
granddaughter. I think this is very nice. I also worry about it and think,
‘Will I do it okay and how will I feel about it?’ This is the cautiousness
[I experience] even though they are loving towards me. As I described
before it’s curious because of the nature of my family. … It is not your
barbecue-in-the-backyard family, which is what the heterosexual life
might have been.
The stories Clive told of the relationship with his children and wife
were not of uniformly close relations. They did suggest, however, that
good relations with family members were vital to his sense of self and
wellbeing. Moreover, the transformation that they reveal – from hetero-
sexual family man to gay father and a member of a fairly well-function-
ing, merged family – suggest a degree of mutual love, regard, and support
between family members, as well as significant personal evolution and
maturity on his part, especially in light of a confession Clive made in
his interview about being a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
The second example of a gay father who had very close relations
with his children and former wife was Hector, an 81-year-old man from
Melbourne. Hector was self-employed when I interviewed him, and in
the 25th year of a same-sex relationship. He was not divorced from his
wife and, as he explains below, regularly saw her on Sundays. Together
they had had a daughter, who was in her 30s. At one point, Hector’s
wife had wanted to start divorce proceedings but, as he said, ‘she’s
quite gone off the idea. And I never wanted to get a divorce. I didn’t
care. I didn’t want to go off and get married to anybody else.’ Relations
between the members of Hector’s merged family were both friendly and
polite, as this extract shows:
[My wife] has got a better brain than I have. … She comes here most
Sundays and … always brings a computer which is sitting on her
knee. As soon as we get busy with a job somewhere else or down
in the garden she just goes on with her own work. … She and [my
partner] mercifully get on very well together … and they have similar
tastes in flowers and interest in and knowledge about flowers and
plants. They’re both very good cooks and … have conversations

about flavour that I go to sleep in because I don’t know what they’re
talking about. … I haven’t got the palate to perceive the subtleties
that they’re talking about.
As the quotation from Hector’s interview that heads the chapter makes
clear, relations with his daughter was the great joy of his life. ‘Being a
parent is one of the richest experiences in my life and one I would not
have missed.’ All things considered, Hector must be considered a lucky
man. At 81, he had a daughter whom he loved, a wife with whom he
had maintained a close and harmonious relationship, and a male part-
ner of 25 years who, according to Hector, went out of his way to keep
good relations with Hector’s wife and daughter. The picture he paints
is of a quaintly old-fashioned, affective triangle that persists and has
meaning because of the goodwill of three people in their 70s and 80s.
The man who resumed close relations with his children after a sepa-
ration that his wife forced on them was Austin who lived in Auckland.
Austin said that as a 20-year-old man, he had no choice but to get mar-
ried. The pressure to marry that he faced as a young man in rural New
Zealand in the 1970s, he explained as follows:
My old man was a Korean [war] veteran. He would watch Are You
Being Served? on television and say ridiculous things like, ‘Look at
that queer there! Shoot the fucker!’ … Was I going to come out to
him? The hell I was … ‘You got balls boy! Use them! I want a grand-
child!’ … So I married this woman.
Austin’s marriage fell apart when news of his same-sex desires became
public in the small, country town where he lived with his wife and chil-
dren. He was taunted and threatened with violence at work. When he
came out to his wife, she forbade his from seeing their children:
Their mother got a bit angry when I jumped out of the closet, but
time went on and sometimes I think life’s about Karma. It comes
round and bites the person who is so nasty. … They have nothing to
do with her now because she was so nasty and kept them from me as
they grew up. Anyway, she has to live with that.
Austin’s life story was punctuated with experiences of cruelty and rejec-
tion at the hands of family members and in the workplace. When his
children became adults, however, they sought him out and re-established
Fatherhood 95
good paternal relations. Now, according to Austin, the bond he has with
his sons is very strong:
I now know the meaning of care, love, support now … from where
it matters. Yeah, one hundred per cent. I was with them in the
weekend. They are all boys. Yep. Well-rounded. I didn’t see them for
12 years.
There is a strong redemptive theme in Austin’s story. After many experi-

ences of rejection and mistreatment, he was able nonetheless to rebuild
his self-worth via renewed relations and regular contact with his sons.
Regular contact
Five men maintained regular contact with their children. These included
one man who had been married for 20 years and in a same-sex relation-
ships for more than 20 years (Terrence, aged 64), and two men who
were married for more than 35 years and had been in same-sex relation-
ships for 20 years respectively (Leslie, aged 74 and John, aged 65).
Terrence said very little about his adult children, but what he did say
was significant: ‘My children are important. They saved my relation-
ship.’ There are occasions in any interview when in retrospect it would
have been beneficial to ask the participant to pause. This was one such
occasion, but I did not interrupt Terrence’s narrative. From memory it
was because he had taken charge of the exchange and was explaining
who or what were important in his life. He mentioned his children,
explained that they saved his relationship, and in the next sentence said
that their friends were important as well and, without drawing breath,
told a brief story about their frequent get-togethers with their friends.
Leslie described his relationship with his children as positive and
supportive, which he attributed to ‘coming out over a number of years’.
John was still in touch with his wife and children: ‘I am very lucky
because … there is a lot of friendship there.’ If the relationships these
men had with their children were less close than those of the men
from the previous group, this can be explained by the men’s age. Their
children were adults whom they saw regularly but not frequently. In
the natural course of events, adult children are more removed from
their parents than are young children, teenagers, or children in their
20s – this greater distance most often being as a result of their own
familial or relationship obligations and duties. In many families, it is
often grandchildren that become the compelling reason for increased
frequency of contact between first and second generations.
Distant relations
Two men saw their children only occasionally. The first of these, 75-
year-old Gerald, told a poignant story of his children’s mixed reac-
tion to news of his homosexuality. One of Gerald’s daughters at first
responded aggressively:
She cross-examined me, ‘Am I gay? How long have I been gay? Why
did I not tell the family? And, if I was gay, how could I father chil-
dren?’ And questions like that, which was unbelievable.
In the end, and after more acute difficulties with his son, Gerald rec-
onciled with all his three children. The response of Gerald’s daughter
underlines the fatherhood difficulties of earlier generations of gay men,
many of whom were forced to choose between a double life and mar-
riage in order to maintain relations with their children, or separation
and divorce and the risk that they might see their children only occa-
sionally – life choices that Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan call ‘stories of
impossibilities’.28
The second man who kept only distant relations with his children
was Douglas, a 63-year-old who lived in Melbourne. His intimate life
was not straightforward. Divorced from his first wife, Douglas was still
married to his second wife and had children from both marriages. His
same-sex partner was a man in his 30s who lived in a flat that Douglas
had bought for him. As mentioned in an earlier footnote in this chap-
ter, Douglas identified as gay. When I asked him about relations with
his children, he thought for a while, and then cautiously and carefully
explained that one daughter suspected him of being gay, had asked
some probing questions, and that on the basis of that experience he
was determined to keep his sexuality hidden from them. Running twin
households and keeping one of them secret as he was; being more
emotionally and sexually involved with his same-sex lover as he was;
and having adult children from two marriages, it is understandable that
Douglas maintained only distant relations with them.
No contact
A fourth group of three men made no mention of their children or had
no contact with them. Two of the men, Roy (aged 58), who was from
Hobart, and Trevor (aged 49), from Melbourne, made no mention of
their children during the interview, and I have assumed that because
of this they had only minimal if any contact with their children. The
third man, Hilton, who was aged 53 and lived in New York, spoke about
Fatherhood 97
his children and former wife. Hilton was 53 when interviewed and
surprised me with his story of a relatively late-in-life coming out, short
period of drug addiction, and a prison sentence.
When I met him, Hilton was working as a social worker in a
predominantly African-American neighbourhood of New York. In his
former career he had worked in the finance sector and enjoyed a successful
life as a high-achieving white male, married with children. When he
came out to his wife, she, like Austin’s wife, stopped their children from
having any contact with him. Coming out relatively late in life, Hilton
was particularly aware of the fact that the new life he was leading was
more varied and interesting than his former life as a married man:
When I go back to college reunions … I would see a lot of very bored

straight men in … very affluent situations … I mean with all the
crazy stuff I’ve done and all the places I have been, I have met really
a far more interesting group of people.
He was aware also of missing out on seeing his children and being able
to develop a relationship with them:
I have not seen them in four years, and we have never really had a
conversation about me being gay … [and] one thing I fear is growing
old and dying without ever being able to reconcile with them.
Hilton’s fear of being estranged from his children for the rest of his
life was not a melodramatic claim for I suspect that his recent experi-
ences of drug use, prison, and becoming HIV positive had painfully
coloured his outlook on life and inner calculations about his life
expectancy.
What the fatherhood stories revealed of the men who maintained very
close parenting relations with their children were their ordinary, every-
day nature and the men’s explicit understanding of what fatherhood
entailed and their determination to undertake it as well and diligently
as they could – for the good of their children or the children in their
care. The evidence the men’s stories revealed of a high level of conscien-
tious fathering is in line with other published research.29 The stories of
regular contact, distant relations, and no contact revealed a number of
different types of stories. The men who maintained regular contact with
their children often showed an interest that varied only slightly from
the close contact the previous group of men demonstrated. The reason
I categorised the second group of men as being only in regular contact
with their children is because their children were adult and, as I argued,
it is a fairly accepted social fact that adult children see their parents
only infrequently because they have their own lives to lead and often
their own children to look after. The two men with what I described as
‘distant relations’ with their children provided their own idiosyncratic
explanations for the relations they had with their children. The first
man saw his children infrequently because they had not easily accepted
his coming out as a gay man. The second man led a double life, and it
suited him for that reason to keep the children of his two marriages at
a distance and to see them at significant family functions only, such as
Christmas or birthdays.
It was difficult to come to any strong conclusion about the three men
whose relations with their children I described in the negative, that is,
who had no relations with them. Two of the men, both of whom were
from Australia, did not mention their children in their interview except
to say that they had children. My assumption was that they rarely saw
them, either because the children had not accepted their father’s gayness
or because the children were estranged for some other reason, as often
occurs after divorce. There was a third man, however, who did speak
about his children and his yearning to reconcile with them after divorc-
ing their mother. This man lived in New York and had been through a
confronting time, which included extensive drug use, a prison sentence,
and a diagnosis that he was HIV positive. His longing to repair relations
with his children was both natural and possibly also a consequence of
the extreme life-changing events he had experienced since coming out.
Conclusion
Heterosexual fatherhood represented the experience of the majority of

the 22 men interviewed for this chapter. The heterosexual relationships
that these men began when they were young men most likely occurred
as a result of social pressure to conform to heteronormative values,
being unsure about their sexual identity, or because marriage was the
conventional means for channelling sexual desire. The omnipresence of
heterosexual fatherhood was in evidence when a substantial majority
of men from the combined data set said that having children would be
easier if they had been straight. If these findings are representative of
the average gay man’s views on fatherhood, they suggest that alterna-
tive fatherhood narratives have not yet won widespread acceptance and
that a strong, pervasive story continues to associate parenthood with
the heterosexual married ideal.
Fatherhood 99
It is reasonable to assume, however, that the incidence of non-

heterosexual fatherhood will increase, representing as it does everyday
experiments on which young gay and lesbian people are increasingly
prepared to embark in advanced, western democracies like Australia,
Britain, and the USA. The speed at which this change will occur is
unclear. There will be pockets of rapid change, neighbourhoods or sub-
urbs in major cities in the West, for example, where a greater preponder-
ance will be found of non-heterosexual couples engaged in alternative
parenting arrangements. Findings from the research for this chapter
showed that the men most likely to engage in everyday experiments
involving conception with a lesbian couple or through surrogacy or
artificial insemination were from the younger age cohorts and relatively
advantaged, and that the men who were fathers as a result of previous
heterosexual relationships tended to be from the older age cohorts, who
had come out relatively late in life.
The fatherhood stories that men interviewed for this chapter related
ranged from accounts of intense, involved fathering – including those
from four of the five non-heterosexual fathers, as well as men in their
50s and one in his 60s – to relationships that were regular and close,
to more distant relationships and no relationship at all. Factors that
affected the men’s level of involvement with their children included,
for example, experiences associated with coming out and the behaviour
of other family members. The accounts the men related of intense,
involved fathering reflected an explicit dedication and willingness to
commit to fathering, which is in contrast to two prevailing stereotypes:
that men are generally unwilling to devote time to caring for their
children unless asked to do so by their wife or female partner, and that
gay men are notable for their self-centredness. The men’s accounts were
remarkable also for the evidence they showed of their casual accept-
ance of the ordinariness of their involvement in and commitment to
their children’s care. Finally, what the stories analysed here show is that
the growing number of successful non-heterosexual fatherhood experi-
ments are opening up all sorts of gay fatherhood possibilities that were
not available to previous generations of gay men.
5
Marriage
As friends my own age who are heterosexual get less

and less into the idea of traditional marriage … the
gays have really embraced … [the] bluestone church
and black and white tuxedo. … Gays are pretty much
the only ones who really care about marriage these
days. If you took away the right of marriage from het-
erosexual twenty-somethings, they would not care.
(Denis, aged 27, Melbourne)
Introduction
In an earlier chapter on long-lasting relationships, I referred to evidence

showing how in the West, as well as in cities like Mumbai and Hong
Kong, gay men were capable of conducting stable, long-term relation-
ships resembling the companionate marriage in all but name, and had
a history of doing so. This chapter and the next are paired because
they both consider the views of the men from the international sample
regarding the push for marriage equality or formal recognition of same-
sex relationships. In this chapter, I examine the arguments of those men
who favoured marriage equality, and in the chapter that follows will
examine the arguments of the men who opposed it. These two chapters
most clearly reflect aged-based differences of opinion among gay men.
As the discussion in this chapter shows, it is men aged 31 and younger
who most uniformly support marriage equality; while, by contrast, in
the next chapter, the strongest arguments against gay marriage are to be
found in the views of men aged 51 and older.
The evidence presented in Chapter 3 to show gay men were able and will-
ing to maintain relatively stable relationships, resembling companionate
100
Marriage 101
marriage in all but name, contrasts with the picture of the fairly radi-
cal change sociologists Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth
Beck-Gernsheim argue has taken place in the couple relationship since
the 1960s and 1970s. The change these authors identify in couple rela-
tionships, of increased flexibility and fragility, they argue, was brought
about by mass individualisation and its twin consequences, rising rates
of divorce and rates of remarriage. The paradox here is that despite the
serious structural changes that have affected heterosexual marriage, a
substantial minority of men from an international sample of 97 men
showed strong evidence of a capacity to commit to and maintain com-
panionate-like relationships. In this chapter, I consider the arguments
that men from the international sample made in favour of gay marriage
or civil union and civil partnership, in the context of (a) the greater
freedom that western heterosexuals now have to make and break rela-
tionships and then to try all over again, and (b) the enthusiasm with
which young men regard gay marriage – men like Denis who is quoted
at the head of this chapter.
Social agitation for same-sex marriage rights gained momentum in
the mid 1990s when the worst of the HIV-AIDS epidemic was over in the
West.1 Canadian historian Angus McLaren argues that at that time, the
‘havoc of AIDS’ created for many gay people in North America a ‘nostal-
gia for family life’, and US historian George Chauncey maintains that it
was the lesbian and gay baby boom together with the AIDS crisis that
provided the impetus for the gay marriage project in North America.2
Regarding the effect of HIV-AIDS on gay men’s personal and communal
lives, I would argue that the experience many gay men had during the
HIV-AIDS crisis in countries like Britain and New Zealand – of being
shut out from their lover or partner’s funeral or when hospitals gave pri-
ority to members of dying men’s birth families and not their partners –
contributed to the determination of gay-marriage activists to seek
legislative certainty and security for same-sex-couple relationships. A
Melbourne man in his 50s said during his interview that as a result of
gay men’s experiences in the 1990s he learned that gay people must
influence the movement for same-sex marriage:
When AIDS was about … I saw some very ugly family behaviour
around money and property then. … I saw people move in on the
partners of people who had died. And to me that’s a big part of
what the whole [gay marriage] argument is actually about, and I …
wish the gay and lesbian community would keep making that
point.3
The Dutch historian Gert Hekma makes a stronger political argu-

ment, which is that, as the HIV-AIDS epidemic created what he calls a
‘struggle for monogamy’, the irony for gay men was that, being denied
the right to marry, they were thus shut out of the ‘institution that
belongs to monogamy’. It was this realisation in the 1990s that spurred
on the movement for marriage equality in Europe.4 As has often been
the case when social reform has been required in the West, it is the
Nordic countries that lead the way, followed by more socially enlight-
ened countries elsewhere. In 1989, for example, Denmark passed leg-
islation to provide ‘registered partnership for same-sex couples’–which
was followed by Norway, Sweden, and Iceland in the 1990s and Finland
in 2001. In 2005, Britain did the same, creating ‘civil partnership’
status for same-sex couples. The first country to provide for same-sex
marriage was Holland, which did so in 2001. By 2008, the following
countries had passed legislation allowing same-sex marriage – Belgium,
Canada, South Africa, and Spain.5 In 2013, the same rights will apply
to same-sex couples in France, who will have the right also to adopt
children.6
In countries where neo-liberalism has a stronger hold, such as Australia
and the United States, the response has been to pass legislation restat-
ing the heterosexual nature of marriage and its primacy. For example,
according to Canadian historian Angus McLaren, when Scandinavian
governments passed laws in the late 1980s and early 1990s to allow
same-sex unions, ‘the United States House of Representatives pro-
posed a Defence of Marriage Bill which strictly defined marriage
as the union of one man and one woman’.7 This moral panic that
same-sex marriage aroused in parts of the USA was, in the view of
anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, the result of deeply felt concerns about
social change as well as political expediency in Washington. Herdt
argues that the resistance that developed to the push for same-sex
marriage occurred because of (a) middle America’s fears about chang-
ing gender roles in marriage and the pace of social reform and (b) a
game of ‘wedge’ politics that former US President Bush played with his
liberal opponents:
The great fear of ‘gay marriage’ in the United States is associated in

many people’s minds with … President George W. Bush’s January 20,
2004, State of the Union address … [in which] he … referred to the
1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), that restricts marriage to a
man and a woman, as ‘the most fundamental, enduring institution
of our civilization’.8
Marriage 103
In addition to political and social factors in the USA, historian Nancy

Polikoff argues that the legal status of the family there presents an
obstacle to marriage reform. She explains that a central reason for the
difficulties same-sex reformers face in the USA is that in that country a
set of important legal rights are exclusively attached to marriage and the
married couple, namely, ‘retirement and death benefits, healthcare …
family leave, immigration, taxation, and dissolution of relationships’.
Unlike the USA, in a number of other western democracies legislation is
in place to provide couples in civic partnerships with equivalent rights
to married couples. In Canada, for example, same-sex couples are now
permitted to marry and cohabiting couples of all variety, according to
Polikoff, have ‘virtually all the legal consequences of marriage’.9
The situation in New Zealand and Australia is different from the
approach the Canadians adopted in relation to same-sex marriage. In
New Zealand, same-sex couples and heterosexual couples can enter civil
unions, but only heterosexual couples may marry. In contrast to what
applies in the USA, cohabiting couples in New Zealand enjoy virtually
the same legal rights as do married couples. Same-sex marriage is not
legal in Australia, but Federal laws allow cohabiting heterosexual cou-
ples the same rights as married couples and state laws recognise same-
sex couples on the same terms as cohabiting heterosexual couples.10
In 2009, after the matter was referred to the Australian Parliament, a
committee of the Senate recommended against allowing the legalisation
of same-sex marriage and that the original definition of marriage be
retained as between a woman and a man.11 This decision disappointed
many, as does the fact that both major political parties in Australia seem
afraid to support gay marriage for fear of a negative electoral response
at elections. The Honourable Michael Kirby, former justice of the High
Court of Australia, summed up the situation in Australia as follows:
Whilst so many countries have leapt ahead to ‘open up’ marriage

to same-sex couples, Australian governments have refused even to
contemplate civil unions and civil partnerships. Even Spain and
Portugal and Argentina have same-sex marriage. But in Australia
we’ve banned civil unions and civil partnerships. This is a humiliat-
ing and outrageous denial of civil equality. According recognition
in matters of pensions, money and material things is good and fit-
ting. But denying equality in a matter that concerns the dignity and
respect due to precious long-term relationships is hurtful and against
society’s interest. Money is not enough. Dignity, recognition and
acceptance are precious in their own right.12
When in 2012 members of both major political parties in Australia

voted against a private member’s bill to legalise same-sex marriage, it
was defeated in the Australian Parliament.13 The defeat of this bill means
that federal law in Australia will not change and that marriage firmly
remains as between a woman and a man. Legalisation of same-sex mar-
riage might yet occur in Australia, however, because some state govern-
ments are preparing to introduce same-sex marriage legislation.14
By 2011, seven European states, namely, Norway, Spain, Belgium,
Portugal, Holland, Sweden, and Iceland allowed gay couples to
marry, and civil partnerships or civil unions were legal in Britain and
Germany.15 In Britain, the public debate was complicated by opposition
same-sex marriage proposals aroused from churches, other religious
bodies, social conservatives, and some gay and lesbian groups, while
attracting support from traditional conservatives such as the Tory Party
leadership and metropolitan newspapers including The Times.16 When,
for example, the Scottish Parliament decided in 2012 that it would
legalise gay marriage, allowing gay couples to marry in civil ceremonies
or religious ceremonies, where religious institutions allow such ceremo-
nies,17 a spokesperson for the Catholic Church in Scotland said same-
sex relationships were dangerous and should not be encouraged:
We … believe that same-sex relationships are profoundly harmful

both physically, biologically, mentally, emotionally and … spiritually
to those involved.18
And yet, despite the considerable opposition from churches and social
conservatives in the UK, in February 2013, the House of Commons voted
by a considerable majority to pass a bill legalising same-sex marriage.19
In contrast to the push for gay marriage in Australasia, Europe, and
North America, and the public debates it has generated, a recent study
of Chinese gay men suggests that in Hong Kong, a significant interna-
tional metropolis and financial centre, gay men are less interested in
same-sex marriage than their western counterparts and more intent on
enjoying the many other relationships types and/or sexual scripts with
which gay men in the West have been experimenting since the early
1920s. According to the study, this is largely because Chinese gay men
are neither willing nor prepared to upset the power of the traditional
Chinese family, which continues to prevail in Hong Kong.20
Broadly speaking, three principal arguments are made in favour of
legalising same-sex marriage, all of which relate to equality in terms of
property, relational, and ceremonial rights. The first of these arguments
Marriage 105
concerns equal property and legal rights, and is a strong feature of the
work of North American legal scholar Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum
argues that a common-sense approach to marriage equality ought to
lead reasonable people to accept that gay men are entitled to access
to the same financial benefits that married heterosexuals enjoy. In the
USA, these benefits are connected with an individual’s marital status,
so, she argues, it is inequitable that gay people are denied them because
their relationships are not recognised in law in the same way as mar-
riage.21 From my analysis (below) of the interviews of many of the
young men in this sample, it is clear that this discourse has seeped into
debates in western countries other than the USA.
The second argument centres on equal relational status and recogni-
tion and has its genesis in the work of the sociologist Georg Simmel.
Simmel wrote that marriage’s chief purpose was for the care of children.
He argued also that by its existence as a privileged social institution,
marriage creates a hierarchy of relationships, ‘a direct superiority of
the [married] group with respect to a group without marriage’.22 As
mentioned, Gert Hekma argues that marriage has pre-eminent status
because it is the institution of monogamy, while Martha Nussbaum
maintains that legalising gay marriage would validate gay relationships,
thus countering the stereotype that gay people live transient, promiscu-
ous lives. In addition, it would encourage them to form what she calls,
‘stable domestic units’, ordinarily associated with marriage.23 Support of
the kind that Hekma and Nussbaum make in favour of same-sex unions
is what Michael Warner calls the ‘normalized movement’, which other
commentators describe as ‘assimilationism’.24
The third argument in favour of legalising same-sex marriage concerns
the sense of ceremonial prestige that has come to be associated with mar-
riage in the eyes of many young straight couples, and by extension many
young gay couples. Andrew Cherlin argues that since marriage has been
transformed into a status symbol, the ceremony is no longer organised by
and for the family, and that ‘the wedding … has become an important
symbol of the partners’ personal achievements and a stage in their self
development’.25 I would argue that in a desire to register by marriage the
success of their relationship achievement, gay couples are no different
from straight couples. As well, I would argue that this desire – to make pub-
lic the success of their relationship – is likely to be even stronger among
gay people for the very reason that they have had to achieve it often in the
face of public apathy, antipathy, and, in some cases, hostility.
On this last point, there is plenty of evidence below in my discussion
on the ‘ceremonial’ argument that men in their 40s and younger make
for gay marriage to support Cherlin’s argument that marriage is now

regarded as a marker of prestige and status, and my argument that this
applies equally to gay couples and straight couples. In the sample I used
for this chapter, it was among men aged 31 and younger that I found
strongest support for gay marriage, while men over 51 were most likely
to oppose it. These generational differences between gay men’s attitudes
to gay marriage are an important, recurring focus of this chapter and
the next.26
Everyday lives and gay marriage
My analysis of the men’s interviews showed that gay marriage was of

greatest importance to young men, in particular men aged in their 30s
and younger, and was less important to men aged 51 and older. Each
interviewee was asked if he was married, intended to marry, or would
like to marry. Set questions notwithstanding, I allowed the men to
explain their views on gay marriage very generally, and did not insist
that they answer each part of each question separately. At times, their
answers included a short explanation as to why they favoured formal
recognition of same-sex relationships but not marriage; sometimes they
did not. On other occasions, some men conflated gay marriage with civil
union (as it is known in Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United
States) or civil partnership (as it is known in Britain and Hong Kong).27
And then again, there were times when men spoke specifically against
marriage because they associated it with Christianity or religion and
were agnostic, atheist, or anti-religious because they were disenchanted
with formal religion, which was particularly the case with men from
this sample and others with whom I have had informal discussions who
were brought up Catholic.
The breakdown of men’s views on gay marriage is as follows: 62 men,
or almost two-thirds of the sample, said they were in favour of formal
recognition of same-sex relationships, including gay marriage.28 For the
purpose of analysing the data, I divided these 62 men into three age
cohorts on the basis of their views on gay marriage.29 The first group
comprised men aged between 18 and 31, who turned and will turn 21
after 2000; all these men reached and will reach social maturity at a
time when HIV-AIDS was relatively contained in the West. Almost all
of these men favoured gay marriage. The second group was made up
of men aged 32–51, who turned 21 between 1980 and the late 1990s,
and thus reached social maturity when the HIV-AIDS epidemic was at
its most virulent and socially stigmatising. The third group consisted of
Marriage 107
men aged between 51 and 87, who turned 21 between the mid1940s
and late 1970s; what these men shared in common is that all reached
social maturity before the advent of HIV-AIDS.
I have used the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the West as a cohort marker
because, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter 7, apart from the gay
liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s, it was the single most
important, life-changing event for hundreds of thousands of gay men
and its effects are still being felt. In the sections that follow, the views
of each group are discussed in turn.
In brief, three main themes arose from my analysis of the men’s
arguments about legalising same-sex relationships. The two younger
cohorts mainly drew on two narratives when explaining their support
of gay marriage. These were a strong desire for first, relational and legal/
property equality, and second, recognition of relationship success along
similar lines to the affirmation that young heterosexual couples receive
when they marry. The men from the old cohort drew on these narra-
tives as well but also included a third narrative to explain their support
for gay marriage, which was the continuation of an involvement in
social politics that began in the days of gay liberation.
Men aged 31 and younger
A total of 22 men, or slightly more than one fifth of the international

sample of 97 men, were aged 31 and younger at the time of interview.30
Of these, 19 said they favoured formal recognition of same-sex relation-
ships, two men were unsure, and one said he opposed gay marriage;
in other words, a significant majority of younger men favoured formal
recognition of same-sex relationships. A breakdown of the 19 men
who supported formal recognition of same-sex relationships showed
14 unequivocally favouring gay marriage and five men supporting civil
union or civil partnership, but not marriage.31 More than two-thirds of
these men were in relationships when interviewed, and seven were sin-
gle.32 None of the men was in a civil union or gay marriage, and none
was formerly married to or had been in a relationship with a woman or
was a parent.
A majority of men aged 31 and younger were therefore in relation-
ships, which, by their duration, suggested they were fairly success-
fully experimenting with couple relationships. Because none of these
younger men was in a civil union or gay marriage, their views on and
attitudes toward formal recognition of same-sex relationships more
strongly represent expectations and beliefs than lived experience.
The rest of this section is devoted to the three principal narratives

that the 14 men drew on who supported gay marriage, which are as fol-
lows. First, the men referred to a rights discourse. The second narrative
concerned a less frequently stated desire for ceremonial equality, while
the third narrative concerned the extent to which marriage equality was
linked to social rights. Each of these narratives is discussed in turn.
Legal and property rights

The practical benefits of marriage ran through the reasons four
Melbourne men in their 20s gave for gay marriage.33 All four men had
been to elite, private schools, were enrolled in university courses and
were from upper-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds. The social
practices they revealed elsewhere in their interviews were markedly dif-
ferent from those of earlier cohorts of gay men, who tended to be more
fully involved in the social institutions of the gay world and to include
gay friends in their friendship group after coming out.34 As the stories
of the four show, only a small proportion of their close friends were
gay; most of them avoided the gay scene, and their preference was to
socialise with straight friends.
Underlining these men’s arguments for marriage equality was a keen
awareness that they should not be denied the same rights and privi-
leges that their heterosexual siblings or cousins could expect to enjoy
or that their sexuality should affect the privilege of class – about which
they were well aware, as the following extract from Garth’s interview
shows:
I can see the benefits [of gay marriage] for tax purposes and division
of estate … if someone dies … [which] makes it completely under-
standable as to why you’d want to. And if two people want to show
that they are committed to each other like that, then they should
be able to.
One reason young men from middle- and upper-class backgrounds can
be so aware of property and legal rights is because these are likely to
be topics of conversation when they are living with their parents or in
houses shared with friends as they move into adult life. Garth’s argu-
ment in favour of gay marriage neatly combined the legal/property
strand and the relational strand of an equal-rights narrative, referring
to as he did considerations relating to tax and property (inheritance) as
well as an expectation that same-sex couples were entitled to marriage
equality when they ‘show that they are committed to each other’.
Marriage 109
Ceremonial
Four men from the young cohort made a special point of arguing in
favour of relationship equality because they wanted to be able to have a
marriage similar to their parents’ and/or a white wedding or ceremonial
occasion similar to a wedding. All these men were in their 20s. Three
were from Melbourne, and one was from Hong Kong. The two youngest
men – who were from Melbourne – were at university; the third man
from Melbourne worked in the entertainment industry, and the man
from Hong Kong worked in health.35
Denis (aged 27) worked in entertainment in Melbourne, and was
positive about his life and future prospects as a gay man. His coming
out had not been easy, but his parents now accepted his gayness. He
travelled when he was in his early 20s and had a group of supportive
friends, gay and straight alike. Denis was very pleased that he might be
able to marry and, as the quotation from his interview that heads this
chapter shows, he believed that gay men’s enthusiasm for marriage con-
trasted with the declining interest of young heterosexuals. Published
research shows that today in western countries, cohabitation is more
popular with people in their 20s than it was for their grandparents’
generation and possibly their parents’ generation, and that heterosexual
couples are marrying later, which means that while it might appear to
a person like Denis that his straight friends show no sign of wanting to
marry, the reality in 10 years’ time could be quite different when they
begin to marry in their mid to late 30s.36
Curtis (aged 29) lived in Hong Kong and worked in Health. In his
spare time, he worked as a sex educator, spending Friday and Saturday
nights doing the rounds of nightclubs and saunas to hand out condoms
and spread advice about safe sex to gay men. His views on gay marriage
were multi-layered. In the first place, he said that gay men in Hong
Kong regarded gay marriage as the ‘gold standard’. In the second place,
while as a document on its own, the marriage certificate was of little
importance to him, he was strongly attracted to the ceremonial aspect
of marriage. ‘I like the wedding ceremony,’ he said, ‘and a party and the
couple promising a life in the future together.’
Two university students from Melbourne, Todd (aged 21) and Jarrad
(aged 23), shared similar views about wedding ceremonies. Like other
men his age who were interviewed for this study, Jarrad was excited by
the prospect of his own marriage, drawing on an age-old story of love
and romance when he said: ‘I would like to find someone and get mar-
ried and spend the rest of our lives together.’ His reason for so keenly
wanting the opportunity to marry appeared also to have its origins
in the relationship history of his parents and grandparents, which he

revered: ‘I come a family where both my parents are together, my grand-
parents on one side just had their 60th wedding anniversary and … are
still very much in love.’ Jarrad seemed to assume a link between the
longevity of his parents and grandparents’ relationships, their relational
happiness, and the fact that they had married. Implicit in his assump-
tion was a link between marriage and the promise of a life-long romantic
and sexual relationship.
Jarrad’s views and those of Curtis touch on twin themes associ-
ated with the ceremonial aspect of marriage as one of the reasons
young gay men so strongly favour gay marriage. The first theme is
the picture of a white wedding representing the romance and love
components of successful, life-long, couple relationships. The second
theme is that, white wedding or not, marriage is important to young
people for the reasons that Cherlin outlined, as marker of prestige and
achievement.
Social rights
Two men referred to broader social change when explaining why they
supported marriage equality. Both the men were in their early 20s; one
was from Mumbai, the other from Melbourne.37 Their views are notable
for two reasons: first, because of the belief that the man from Mumbai
expressed in political activism as a means to effect social change, in this
case, to bring about greater acceptance of homosexuality in India, and
second, an associated belief, which the man from Melbourne expressed,
in the inevitability of change toward greater acceptance of gay men in
the West.
Giles was a 23-year-old university student who lived in Mumbai.
Following a holiday in a northern city, where he had a brief affair with
a political activist, he had returned to Mumbai and resumed his studies.
In the following extract, Giles explains why gay marriage is important
to middle-class, educated, Indian men his age:
If you want people to change and accept you, you have to accept that
marriage is the only way to change the perception … that if you are
gay or lesbian, you only want to sleep around, go partying, you just
want to hook up, you just want to do one-night-stand, you just want
to fuck around. They [heterosexual people] think like that if you
are gay. But if you really want to change your image in front of the
straights or your community, you have to accept you are gay and you
have to marry a guy. Then they will accept that you are a normal-life
Marriage 111
guy who will be with one guy only. I am totally into the marriage
scenario. I am one guy who believes we have to marry.
Not all the Indian men in their 20s made the same connection as
did Giles between gay marriage and the project to achieve greater
acceptance of homosexuality in India, but all that I spoke to were
aware of the size of the task they faced in working toward greater
acceptance of GLBT people in India. It is notable also that no western
gay man (of any age) made the same connection between marriage
equality and the struggle against homophobia. I believe the acute
awareness that Giles revealed can be explained by the unique historical
situation in which Indian men who identify as gay find themselves in
the 2010s. They are uniquely placed because of a conjunction of three
important changes taking place in how same-sex desire and same-sex
relationships are understood in India. First, same-sex-attracted Indian
men are living at a time when the Indian middle classes are increas-
ingly aware of homosexuality as a personal identity and way of life.
Second, educated Indian men are well aware and informed of gay
liberation as it occurred in western countries in the 1970s, including
its histories, ideologies, and practices. Third, educated men in India
who identify as gay are well aware of the political agitation for mar-
riage equality that is taking place in countries like Australia, Britain,
New Zealand, and the USA, news of which is spread via the Internet
and the large number of same-sex support groups and information
websites that it hosts. All the Indian men interviewed for this book
demonstrated a sophisticated knowledge of gay liberation rhetoric,
ideologies, and current web-based discussions and debates affecting
same-sex-attracted people.
Zane (aged 22) was living in Melbourne when I interviewed him in
2010; like Giles from Mumbai, he too was a university student. In the
following extract Zane explained why he believes gay marriage is inevi-
table in Australia.
In another five years, it will be so accepted and if the law hasn’t

changed here by then I’ll be very surprised. And even under the current
government … [there are] Penny Wong … in cabinet … [and] she’s an
‘out’ lesbian … [and] people like Bob Brown … in the Senate. … This is
something that will change and it is literally just got to take another …
five years worth of deaths up the top for it [opposition to gay marriage]
to fall down. I am at one of the best universities in Australia, studying
with people who all share the … same opinion as me. … These are the
people that are going to get power next, so there’s no way that this is
going to stay the way it is.
Zane’s understanding of marriage equality in Australia is based on two

assumptions. His first assumption is that because two prominent politi-
cians in Australia – the Hon. Penny Wong and Senator Bob Brown – have
made public their homosexuality, marriage equality will follow.38 His
second assumption is that marriage equality will occur because people
like him, who are ‘at one of the best universities in Australia’, favour it; in
other words, social change is both generational and likely to occur when
it is supported by people who belong to the privileged classes.
At the time of writing, the only Australian political party that sup-
ported marriage was the Australian Greens, the leader of which was
Senator Brown. The two major political parties in the country, the
Australian Labor Party and the Liberal Party of Australia, formally
opposed gay marriage and were on record as stating that they under-
stood marriage to be a union between a woman and a man. One nota-
ble exception to this is the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull, former Leader of
the Opposition and former leader of the Liberal Party who as Shadow
Minister for Communications gave a speech in July 2012 in favour of
legalising civil unions for gay people.39 As mentioned, state govern-
ments in Australia have already legislated to provide same-sex cou-
ples with equivalent rights to those enjoyed by de facto (cohabiting)
heterosexual couples.
In summary, then, a majority of the young men (31 years and younger)
favoured formal recognition of same-sex relationships. Support for gay
marriage evoked three main narratives: the right to legal and relational
equality, the ideal of the wedding day, and marriage linked to social
change. It is significant also that no one from this group argued for
marriage because they wanted to have children. I mention parenthood
in this context because research into heterosexual couple relationships
suggests that couples are more likely to consider moving from cohabita-
tion to marriage when the prospect arises of pregnancy or childbirth.40
Men aged 32–51
A total of 34 men, or slightly more than a third of the international sam-

ple, were aged 32–51 at the time of interview, the bulk of whom were
in their 40s.41 In this group 24 men said they supported formal recogni-
tion of same-sex relationships, five said they opposed gay marriage, and
five men were unsure. In other words, slightly less than three-quarters
Marriage 113
of this group favoured formal recognition of same-sex relationships – a

lower proportion than for the previous group, but still a majority. Of
these 24 men, 16 unequivocally favoured gay marriage and eight men
said they would support a civil union or civil partnership, but not gay
marriage.42
Half of the men in this age cohort were single, and half were in rela-
tionships at the time of interview.43 Three of the men were in a civil
union or civil partnership, and three men were in a gay marriage.44 Two
of the men were formerly married, and one man had an adopted child. In
other words, half the men aged between 32 and 51 were in relationships.
The duration of their relationships suggested a strong degree of relative
permanency, which it is reasonable to assume would be the case for peo-
ple this age. And, of the 17 men in relationships, slightly more than a
third were in either a civil union, civil partnership, or gay marriage.
The remainder of this section is devoted to the two narratives these
mainly middle-aged supporters of gay marriage drew on. Like the
younger men, their first narrative concerned a belief in the right to
relationship equality with heterosexuals, and the legal and property
rights attached to heterosexual marriage, which they said underlined
the need for gay marriage. Their second narrative centred on the type
of ceremonies appropriate to a same-sex marriage or civil union. In
contrast to what the younger men said, the options the men from this
group considered did not include a ‘white wedding’.
Legal and property rights

Three men spoke in favour of marriage equality and associated legal
and property rights; two of these three were in their 40s, and the third
was in his early 30s. Two of the men were from Hong Kong, one was
from London, and all were born in Asia or South Asia.45 Ethan, who
was 49 and lived in London, said that if he owned property and were
in a relationship, he would be want to be married: ‘just for the sake of
inheritance and … next of kin, things like that’. His preference was for
same-sex marriage because it promised each partner the same rights that
came with heterosexual marriage:
I would want to be the same, not equal and different. … I think there
should be just one thing and that’s it … [because] if I were to get mar-
ried, I would want it to be the same as my heterosexual neighbour.
One possible reason for Ethan’s preference for marriage and not civil
partnership might be that, as he had been born outside Britain, he was
more attuned to the rights the British government guaranteed a married

couple: ‘the UK doesn’t insist that … [civil partnership] is recognised by
the rest of the world, which it does with marriage’.
Felix, who was 41 and lived in Hong Kong, was fairly pragmatic also
about how marriage would be of use to Chinese gay men his age. He
discounted the link between romance and marriage, and instead focused
on the rights that married couples enjoyed, arguing that if gay marriage
were introduced in Hong Kong, ‘or any kind of … civil union, if it does
not have equal rights, it does not mean anything to me’. Alexander,
who was 34 and also from Hong Kong, put forward a neo-liberal rea-
son for supporting gay marriage. He first said that he viewed marriage
functionally, as, ‘a licence the society gives you as a recognition to live
together and have a family’. He then said that providing gay men with
relationship equality was the only purpose that made gay marriage
worthwhile in his eyes: ‘if it is not for equality and it’s for something
else, I don’t really see how it’s adding any value’.
Ceremonial
The men in this age bracket held varying views on the matter of wed-
dings and ceremonies for same-sex marriages or unions. They are repre-
sented here by accounts of four men, three of whom were in their 40s,
the fourth in his early 30s. Two of the men were from London, one was
from Hong Kong, and one was from Sydney. One of the four men was
strongly in favour of the idea of gay men ‘putting on a show’ for their
marriages, and had done so for his own marriage;46 one man strongly
opposed anything that resembled a wedding;47 and two men said that
they preferred an understated event.48
Danny and his partner were married and lived in Hong Kong. They
had had two services, one was in Hong Kong and one in the United
States. Danny’s thinking on the matter is captured in the following
extract:
Weddings are quite interesting. A gay wedding [is interesting] because

its story book is written too and … as you approach a gay wedding you
have to ask, ‘What’s the formula; are you going to use the religious
angle, are you going to have the bride and groom, are you going to
follow the straight format for a wedding or are you … creative again
and write your own chapter?’ We had a beautiful wedding. … We held
it in a great space … but we handed all the keys to this wedding to
our friends. The decorations were done by certain friends … someone
would get up and sing a song and someone would dance, and we had
Marriage 115
no idea what was going on. So we broke the model of what a wed-
ding was because we … created an experience that we were into and
our friends were into instead of having a church, a bride and a groom
and … formality … and it was beautiful.
At least two points stand out in Danny’s extract. Aware of the dominant
wedding story and its heteronormative variations, he and his partner
decided to create one of their own. The second point of interest is that
in order to rewrite the dominant wedding story, Danny and his partner
asked their friends to take a major role, if not the major role, in the cer-
emonies to celebrate their marriage. And, according to Danny’s account,
their decision to do so meant the event was a surprise for everyone who
attended, including the two grooms.
In research conducted in the mid-2000s, Carol Smart identified four
different types of same-sex wedding ceremonies: ‘regular’, ‘minimalist’,
‘religious’, and ‘demonstrative’. The only one of these categories that
described the wedding ceremony of Danny and his partner was ‘demon-
strative’ wedding, the features of which are as follows:
Weddings … that took an incredible amount of planning, becoming

almost military campaigns in some cases. …Couples in this category
often planned to have complementary or matching wardrobes,
often had rings especially made, invited large numbers of people
and might hire a wedding planner. They set the ceremony or party
in a very grand or unusual setting (e.g. a museum), the celebrations
might go on for several days, unusual cakes would appear, or the
whole affair would simply be tasteful but terribly expensive.49
Where Danny and his partner’s ceremony differed from Carol Smart’s
demonstrative type was in their decision to hand responsibility for
decorations and entertainment to their friends, which meant therefore
that the planning was undertaken in a more democratic or anarchic
manner. In other respects, their ceremony fitted her criteria because
their wedding was highly organised, held in ‘a great space’, and ‘created
an experience that … [their] friends were into’.
In contrast to Danny’s account and experience of a celebratory
service were the views of Ethan and Jonathon, both of whom were
from London, and Dylan, who was from Sydney. In the earlier section
on equal rights, Ethan explained that he preferred marriage over a
civil union because of the property rights that the former guaranteed.
On the matter of marriage ceremony, however, it was very clear that
he opposed anything resembling a marriage service: ‘I have not the

slightest desire to have or even attend a religious gay marriage. I think
it is absolutely ridiculous.’ Ethan did not expand on why he thought
a religious gay marriage ‘absolutely ridiculous’, and I forgot to ask him
to explain. My impression at the time of interview, however, was that
Ethan disliked the idea of a marriage ceremony on the grounds of
class and taste, which are intertwined, and that in his view the white
wedding, which is reified in women’s and men’s fashion and gossip
magazines, was something he would neither attend as a guest nor
celebrate as a man marrying. It was not something someone from his
class would do – because in his view it is a clichéd practice, and for this
reason kitsch and to be avoided.
While Jonathon from London and Dylan from Sydney did not
object to the idea of a ceremony, each said he would prefer something
understated. Jonathon said that he and his partner, who had been
together for ten years, understood the commitment service to be a
private affair:
We will get married but it’s very much about us and the two of us. …
It’s not about making a big statement to the world. We have been
together for such a long time, everybody knows about it.
At the time of interview, Jonathon and his partner had been cohabiting
for 10 years. Their experience is evidence for Lynn Jamieson’s argu-
ment that couples will now often spend years cohabiting before they
marry, and that the numbers of couples doing so has increased as the
trend to marry early declined. Their behaviour is similar to what many
of their straight counterparts do and have been doing for some time.50
The views of Jonathon and his partner on ceremony and service were
evidence also of Andrew Cherlin’s argument that marriage is now ‘a
status one builds up to’ and has become an occasion, which is he says,
‘centred on and often controlled by the couple themselves, having less
to do with family approval … than in the past’.51 Dylan was 32 and sin-
gle when I interviewed him. He said that if he were to get married, and
he hoped he would, he would not try to mimic a heterosexual wedding.
‘I would intentionally not want to present it to people that I care about
as … trying to be a straight wedding. I would make sure it was probably
less showy, more low key.’
The plan of Jonathon and his partner for an understated and private
ceremony, as well as Dylan’s wishes for a ceremony that did not mir-
ror heterosexual weddings, are evidence of one of Carol Smart’s four
Marriage 117
categories of wedding ceremony, the ‘minimalist’ wedding, the charac-

teristics of which are as follows:
Those who wanted a minimalist wedding tended to be couples who

had been together for many years and … did not want their personal
feelings made public … [or were] worried about recreating a hetero-
sexual practice through … display.52
In summary then, slightly less than three-quarters of men aged 32–51

favoured formal recognition of same-sex relationships – a lower propor-
tion than for the men aged 31 and younger, but a decided majority
nonetheless. The men who supported gay marriage drew on two nar-
ratives. The first narrative concerned the rights to relationship equality
with heterosexuals and to enjoy the same legal and property privileges
that attached to heterosexual marriage. The second narrative related
to ceremonies appropriate to a same-sex marriage. In contrast to what
the men aged 31 and younger wanted, the options the men from this
group considered did not include a ‘white wedding’. At one end of the
spectrum, their alternatives included a ceremony organised by a small
group of friends involving participation from friends and family that
was a complete surprise for the couple – in the style of Smart’s ‘demon-
strative’ wedding – and, at the other end, an intimate ceremony that
held a very private meaning for the couple – in the style of Smart’s
‘minimalist’ category.
Men aged 51–87
A total of 41 men, or slightly more than two-fifths of men from the

international sample, were aged 51–87.53 Almost half of the interview-
ees from this age cohort (n=19) said they supported formal recognition
of same-sex relationship, but only 12 unequivocally favoured gay mar-
riage, while seven men said they preferred civil union.54 Of the remain-
ing men, 17 opposed legalising same-sex relationships and five were
unsure. In other words, more than 70 per cent of the men from this age
group did not support gay marriage. Because many of the men from
this cohort came out in the decades prior to gay liberation in the West,
their relationship histories were more varied than those from the other
age cohorts and included more men who had experienced heterosexual
marriages and parenthood.55
Of the 12 men from this age cohort who supported gay marriage, four
were aged 70 and above, two men were in their 60s, and the remaining six
men were in their 50s.56 Seven men supported gay marriage on principle
and without further elaboration. Two men understood gay marriage as
an extension of the broader gay liberation movement that began in the
1970s, and the remaining three men referred to property security and
the HIV-AIDS experience.
Referring to his involvement in the early gay liberation movement in
England, Alfie, a 63-year-old man from Manchester, said, ‘It was a state-
ment and we have been involved in gay rights groups since the early
’70s. How could we not to do it?’ Raymond, an English expatriate who
lived in Hong Kong and was 58, used a similar argument to the one
that younger men drew on who were in favour of gay marriage, saying,
‘we need gay marriage to make us equal. It’s a question of … showing
ourselves as being the same and being treated the same.’
One man referred to the question of property, which he said he
believed marriage would safeguard. He referred also to many gay men’s
experience of the HIV-AIDS epidemic when they saw families of dead
lovers or friends behaving badly. This man was Cam, aged 56. I inter-
viewed him in Santa Monica in early 2010:
I don’t think people should be allowed to legitimise their relation-

ships and [then] not be allowed to inherit property and insurance
policies or be barred from seeing their dying spouses and have their
families come in and kick them out of their condo[minimum]s and
swoop in and carry all the possessions away and all these other hei-
nous things that happen.
At the beginning of the chapter, I referred to the link a Melbourne

man in his 50s made between the HIV-AIDS epidemic and the push
for gay marriage. He was one of the few interviewees, from either the
international sample or the all-Australian sample, who, like Cam from
Los Angeles, saw a link between the way gay men were treated during
the HIV-AIDS epidemic and the desire of many from that generation to
achieve security for their relationships, a connection that US historian
George Chauncey strongly emphasises in his book, Why Marriage?:
Couples whose relationships were fully acknowledged … by their

friends suddenly had to deal with powerful institutions – hospitals,
funeral homes, and state agencies – that refused to recognise them
at all.57
In summary, then, slightly less than 30 per cent of men aged 51 and
over were in favour of gay marriage. Those who supported it argued that
Marriage 119
it was a continuation of their gay liberation commitment, and secured

property, and that relationship security was vital after their HIV-AIDS
experience. The reasons given by the great majority of men from this
age cohort for opposing gay marriage are covered in the next chapter.
Conclusion
The push for gay marriage has had a polarising effect on gay people
and, as this chapter has shown, the dividing lines can be strongly
generational. I examined the views of the men who supported gay mar-
riage in the context of discussion in an earlier chapter on long-lasting
relationships about gay men’s capacity to conduct companionate rela-
tionships in much the same way as do their heterosexual counterparts,
and the tendency for couple relationships nowadays to be more flexible
and fragile as a result of increasing individualisation. Notwithstanding
the trend to less-permanent couple relationships, a movement for mar-
riage equality began in the West in the decades following the HIV-AIDS
epidemic.
As North American historian George Chauncey has argued, one of
the important social effects of the epidemic was that it showed gay men
that their relationships were not secure and thus provided them with the
impetus to demand state recognition of their relationships.58 During the
epidemic, men discovered that their relationships had no standing when
families forbade lovers and friends from attending their son’s funerals
because they did not want to acknowledge the cause of death or hospitals
allowed siblings and parents access to dying men but not lovers because
they were not kith or kin. The other important effect of the HIV-AIDS
epidemic, which I have written about elsewhere, that has bearing on the
push for marriage equality, was that it showed that gay men were capable
of acting communally and altruistically in the face of a health crisis that
threatened lovers, friends, and others like them.59
A majority of the younger men from the international sample
(aged ≤ 31) supported the push for gay marriage. They argued for it on
the grounds of equal legal and property rights, relational equality, the
ideal of the wedding day, and marriage linked to social change. Most of
the men aged 32–51 were in favour of gay marriage also and, like the
younger men, argued for gay marriage on the grounds of equal legal and
property rights. Their views on the ideal of the wedding day diverged
from those of the younger men. Their options, for example, did not
include the ‘white wedding’ but did include alternatives ranging from
‘demonstrative’ to ‘minimalist’ weddings. In contrast to the younger
men, very few of the men aged 51 and over supported gay marriage. Of
those who supported it, most did so on principle and without further
comment. Among the few who gave reasons were men who saw it as
an extension of their gay liberation politics, property security, and the
HIV-AIDS experience. The views of men who opposed gay marriage are
the subject of the next chapter, ‘Cohabitation’, together with the views
of those who favoured civil union but not gay marriage, and those who
were unsure.
6
Cohabitation
I think marriage as an institution is passé. And we

are trying to conform too much to a heterosexual
norm. … My closest friend … and [I] have made a pact
that, when we reach our diamond age, we both will
start living together as friends. … For me, sharing my
old age with this friend seems … a better possibility
than being with a lover.
(Teddy, aged 47, Mumbai)
Introduction
In the previous chapter, I examined the views of 42 men who supported

gay marriage. In this chapter, the focus is on the views of the 23 men
who opposed gay marriage, the 20 men who supported civil union but
not gay marriage, and the views of the 12 men who were unsure what
they thought about it. Analysis showed that men aged 51 or older
were more likely to oppose gay marriage and that the older men who
opposed gay marriage tended to argue that it was a concession to het-
eronormativity and that gay culture had become too mainstream in a
‘family values’ way.
Present-day social agitation for gay marriage has overturned under-
standings of gay relationships that were axiomatic ten or fifteen years
ago.1 When discussing the features of the lives of people who did not
marry, for example, Martha Fowlkes wrote in 1999 that among all those
whose lives she examined, gay men were the ‘marriage nonconformists’.2
Since then, things in the West have considerably changed. They have
changed also in cities like Mumbai and Hong Kong, where I found an
understanding among the men interviewed for this book of the signal
121
if not symbolic importance of gay marriage – even while they acknowl-

edged its eventuality was not likely soon in India or China.
One of the paradoxes of contemporary demands for marriage equal-
ity is that they are, as historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman
observe, in direct opposition to what gay liberationists campaigned for
in the 1970s. Forty years ago, the call was for people to free themselves
from the family and to engage in social experiments such as alternative
families and urban or rural communes: ‘A generation ago, radical gay
liberationists presented themselves as exiles from the American family.’
This was largely because in the 1960s and 1970s, feminists and social
reformers viewed the family with suspicion, regarding it as an institu-
tion where women and children were likely to experience physical vio-
lence or abuse, which was not part of the life course for most adult gays
and lesbians. Non-heterosexuals’ desire to have children and seek rec-
ognition for their relationships, according to D’Emilio and Freedman, is
evidence of the ‘trend towards mainstreaming’ of gays and lesbians.3
Opponents of gay marriage roughly fall into two groups. On the one
hand, there are traditionalists and religious conservatives who oppose
gay marriage because they believe marriage to be a union between a man
and a woman. Catherine Frew explains that in the Australian context
opponents of gay marriage used natural law to argue that marriage was a
static social institution, ‘defined by scriptures, confined by gender differ-
ences and, in its traditional form, the building block to a stable society’.4
Opponents in Australia of gay marriage, such as The Australian Christian
Lobby, have used longstanding, anti-homosexual prejudices to support
their campaign, arguing that relations between men are ‘unnatural’
and that therefore marriage could not include such ‘unnatural relation-
ships’. Frew says also that opponents of gay marriage made offensive
claims:
In 2009, the Australian Family Association (WA) made the absurd sug-
gestion that the legislation of same-sex marriage could lead to mar-
riage between ‘two women and a dog; or a man, a cat and a car’.
In September 2012, Senator Cory Bernardi, a conservative member of

the Liberal Party of Australia argued during a debate in the Australian
Senate that supporting gay marriage would lead to the legalisation of
bestiality:
There are even some creepy people out there … [who] say it is OK to
have consensual sexual relations between humans and animals. Will
Cohabitation 123
that be a future step? In the future will we say, ‘These two creatures
love each other and maybe they should be able to be joined in a
union’. I think that these things are the next step.
In response to the public furore that followed his speech, Senator Bernardi
resigned as an Opposition parliamentary secretary and cancelled an
address he was scheduled to make to the European Young Conservative
Freedom Summit at Oxford University.5 At the time of writing, a New
Zealand Parliamentary Select Committee had heard evidence from two
churchmen who argued against gay marriage because it would encourage
incest and lower the prestige of marriage – similar arguments to those
Catherine Frew identified about natural law in the Australian context
and to those Georg Simmel made about the status of marriage and a
relationships hierarchy.6
Opposition to gay marriage has come also from non-heterosexuals
who have queried the value of marriage, seeing the programme for
marriage equality as an impulse towards heteronormalising gay people.
In the USA, the fact that Log Cabin Republicans support gay marriage
gives credence to gay people’s suspicion that it represents another
mainstreaming impulse.7 Some opponents use an argument similar to
Simmel’s – that marriage as a social institution sets up a hierarchy of
relationships with it as the dominant model,8 which others argue over-
looks the dominance of men over women, the dominance of heterosex-
ual over homosexual, as well as the abuse of children and women that
can occur in families of married couples.9 Finally, as my work in this
book and other published research shows, gay men who have no wish
to marry regard marriage as a patriarchal institution, and, according to
Gilbert Herdt, view the movement for marriage equality as a normalis-
ing impulse and return to heteronormativity for non-heterosexuals – a
view shared by Teddy (aged 47) from Mumbai, who is quoted at the
head of the chapter.10
In the previous chapter, I divided the international sample into three
age cohorts so as to take account of an increasing proportion of men
aged 51 and over who opposed gay marriage and an increasing propor-
tion of men aged 31 and younger who favoured it. The first age cohort
comprised men aged 18–31; the second cohort comprised men aged
32–51; and the third cohort comprised men aged between 51 and 87. In
the sections that follow, the views of these groups are discussed in turn.
Some readers might want to skip the introductions to each of the age
groups where numbers are recapitulated that were cited in the previous
chapter of men for and against gay marriage.
Men aged 31 and younger
Twenty-one men, or slightly more than one fifth of the international

sample, were aged 31 and younger at the time of interview.11 Of these
men, two were unsure, one said he opposed gay marriage, and five said
they supported civil unions but not gay marriage. As stated in the pre-
vious chapter, an overwhelming majority of men from this age group
favoured formal recognition of same-sex relationships, and the group
of five under study in this section represents less than a quarter of men
aged 31 and under. Fifteen men, or more than two-thirds of the age
group, were in relationships at the time of interview and seven were sin-
gle.12 None was in a civil union or gay marriage, and none was formerly
married to a woman or a parent.
Against gay marriage and unsure

Three men did not favour gay marriage or civil union for gay couples
and yet were not fiercely opposed to formalising gay relationships. Two
of the men were in their 20s, one was in his early 30s, and they came
from New Zealand, Britain, and Hong Kong. All men were more focused
on marriage in their own lives than in gay marriage as a political issue.
Gavin was 31, lived in Auckland, and had been in his relationship for
three years when interviewed. He was the only man from the age cohort
of young men who was not in favour of gay marriage. The reason he
gave was that marriage was unnecessary because his relationship was
strong, and he ‘could not see the point in it’.
The two men who were not sure if they supported gay marriage gave
different reasons. Kenny, aged 24, lived in Hong Kong, and had been
in a monogamous relationship for a little under a year when we had
our interview. He said that while the laws in China would not quickly
change to allow gay marriage, if they did, they were likely to do so
first in Hong Kong. He was neither eager to be permitted to marry nor
opposed to gay marriage, and was more interested in working toward
removal of the discrimination that gay people experienced in Hong
Kong. Bailey was 26, a postgraduate student from Britain, and had been
in his relationship for almost two years when I interviewed him. He
said that he had no intention of marrying but would ‘not rule it out as
a possibility’.
Civil union but not gay marriage

Although an overwhelming number of interviewees from the cohort of
young men supported gay marriage, there were five men who regarded
Cohabitation 125
marriage with suspicion and said they would support only civil union.
With the exception of a 19-year-old from Melbourne, all these men
were in their 20s.13 Three of the five said that they would support only
civil union because they objected to the religious aspects or overtones
that were associated with marriage.14 Two men said that the experience
of their parents’ separation or divorce had shaken their belief in the
institution of marriage.15
The views of the men who opposed marriage because they were anti-
religious are represented here by an extract from my interview with
Eamon, a 28-year-old man living in London. Eamon explained that his
recent experience of the dissolution of a long-term relationship had
caused him to reflect on and question his beliefs about the permanency
of relationships. In the following extract, he reveals the many layers of
experience and self-reflection that underlie his views about same-sex
marriage.
Neither of us really believed in marriage as a construct and I think

a lot of it was born out of watching my parents’ relationship evolve
over the years and the fact that both of them had been married
previously. People change and marriage is this kind of forever thing,
and I think we thought we were both too smart for that. Having said
that … if I end up having kind of a long-term sort of very meaning-
ful relationship with somebody, I’d like to draw a line in the sand
somehow and say this is it. This is you and me. … [It will not be]
marriage because marriage for me just has too many sort of religious
connotations. If the civil benefits were meaningful, then yes [to civil
partnership]. But, you know, if there wasn’t anything financially to
gain or in terms of social services, then I am just as happy having a
commitment ceremony or something like that.
This extended extract from Eamon’s interview, which took place in a

noisy McDonald’s café behind Oxford Street in London, strongly indi-
cated a thoughtful, considered approach to the matter of the personal
life he hoped he would enjoy with another man. It shows as well that
the doubts he experienced after the break-up of his relationship added
to a scepticism that already existed because of his parents’ divorce and
one of his parents getting remarried to a divorced person. As well,
Eamon revealed a strong preference for cohabitation with perhaps a
commitment ceremony only. He could change his mind about this, he
said, if the British government legislated to provide appropriate benefits
to accompany civil partnerships.
As mentioned, two of the young men who preferred a civil union

to gay marriage gave as reasons arguments that did not include anti-
religious beliefs or the effect of parents’ separation or divorce.16 At 19,
Brody was the second youngest man from the sample. His views on
relationships were possibly still forming at the time of our interview
and, I sensed, strongly influenced by his six-month relationship with
an older man.
I am like, ‘Fine, give it a different name. Like, do not call it marriage

but give me the exact same thing in a different name. I will go for
that. If that is what you are going to be hung up on, that would be
fine.’ Right now it is really out of the picture for me.
Unsure whether at 19 he wanted to commit for life, Brody was fairly

certain, however, that he would consider partnership of some kind at
some stage but only for as long as it was not called marriage.
The other man was Curtis, a 29-year-old from Hong Kong, whose
views on relational rights equity were discussed in the previous chapter.
He said at the outset that he did not believe in marriage but knew that
many other gay people did. In his view, the system in Australian state
jurisdictions (discussed above) where de facto gay and straight couples
enjoyed the same legal rights as married couples was attractive:
I like the concept of Australian government about de factos. … I

think it can be worked out in all the developed countries. I’m not
sure about China or India or other more conservative countries. I
believe the de facto concept works out in those developed countries
with marriage law.
Author: It guarantees legal rights?
Legal rights, yeah. And also the immigration rights. When I told my
colleagues … [at work] about the de facto concept, they quite liked it
and we also tried to talk about if it [would] work in Hong Kong.
Immigration rights is an important aspect associated with marriage

or partnership rights because it affects the ease with which men who
marry or commit to a civil union in one country may return home with
their partner and expect to enjoy the same rights and privileges as mar-
ried people.17
While the men who were against or unsure about gay marriage argued
on personal grounds – Gavin from Auckland could not see the point
Cohabitation 127
of it – those who supported civil union but not gay marriage did so
from family experience or anti-religious grounds. Cohabitation suited
the men who opposed gay marriage or were unsure, possibly because
they had no desire to formalise their relationship or seek any form of
external sanction for it. By contrast, the men supporting civil union
seemed to be seeking acknowledgement for their relationships, but only
as long as it was not in the form of a religious service and was not called
marriage.
Men aged 32–51
Thirty four men, or just over a third of the sample, were aged 32–51.18
Five men from this age group said they opposed gay marriage, five
men were unsure, and eight supported civil union but not gay mar-
riage. In other words, slightly more than 50 per cent of the age group
opposed gay marriage or were unsure – a larger proportion than for
the young age cohort. Half of the men in this age cohort were single
(n = 17) and half were in relationships (n = 17) at the time of interview.
By their duration, the men’s relationships suggested a strong degree of
relative permanency, which is to be expected from people in this age
bracket. Of the 17 men in relationships, more than one-third were in
either a civil union or gay marriage. In summary, then, half the men
aged between 32 and 51 were in relationships and just over half did
not support gay marriage.19 The sections that follow include discus-
sion of the views of the men from each of the categories – those who
opposed gay marriage, were unsure, or supported civil union over gay
marriage.
Against gay marriage

The five men opposing gay marriage held strong views against marriage
in general. When speaking about the matter, they did not discuss and I
did not prompt them to discuss civil union as an alternative to gay mar-
riage. Three of the men were in their 40s and two were in their 30s. Two
men came from Mumbai and one man came from each of Melbourne,
New York, and Sydney.20 The two men with the strongest views against
gay marriage were Teddy (aged 47), who was from Mumbai where he
worked in health, and Callum (aged 43), who was from Melbourne
and worked in education. Teddy said he believed that marriage in gen-
eral was obsolete and that it was a backward step to expect same-sex-
attracted people to conform to a heterosexual social institution that was
languishing. In his view, apart from HIV-AIDS, the more pressing issue
was to provide gay people in both developing and developed world with
a stronger guarantee of security in old age. Callum worked in education
and was acutely critical of what he saw as a vocal minority of privi-
leged gay men in the West advocating for a form of social change that
held little value for him and was insignificant alongside previous gay
social–political projects, such as ‘gay liberation in the ’70s and … the
HIV health and political crisis in the ’80s’:
I do not know why people want to be the same. I just think what a …
stupid thing to do. If … marriage is your one special day, I do not want
one special day. I want a lot of special days so I do not want to get
married, ever.
Callum opposed not only the idea of marriage equality but the grow-
ing, powerful narrative of homonormativity or the values of white,
middle-class ‘good gays’ that lie behind it.21 His arguments were similar
to those that English actor Rupert Everett used against gay marriage
when he spoke to the Guardian in September 2012, an excerpt from
which follows;
Why do queens want to go and get married in churches? Obviously

this crusty old pathetic, Anglican church – the most joke-ish church
of all jokey churches – of course they don’t want to have queens
getting married. It’s kind of understandable that they don’t; they’re
crusty old calcified freaks. But why do we want to get married in
churches? I don’t understand that, myself, personally. I loathe heter-
osexual weddings; I would never go to a wedding in my life. I loathe
the flowers, I loathe the fucking wedding dress, the little bridal tiara.
It’s grotesque. It’s just hideous. The wedding cake, the party, the
champagne, the inevitable divorce two years later. It’s just a waste of
time in the heterosexual world, and in the homosexual world I find
it personally beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that
is so clearly a disaster.22
The remaining three men who opposed gay marriage were from
Mumbai, New York, and Sydney. Edmund, who was 44 and owned a
large holding of agricultural land in India, had formerly been married
to a woman. He doubted marriage would guarantee happiness and
he and his male partner had settled for cohabitation: ‘We believe in
being together, living in a relationship and I don’t think we would like
to get married in the future.’ Liam, who was 37 and lived in Sydney,
Cohabitation 129
said he had no wish to be married, partly because of his Catholic

upbringing:
I do not understand marriage as a concept and maybe this goes back

to the whole Catholic Church thing. I identify marriage as being …
based in that world and I do not have any desire for that kind of
validation and or that kind of structure to the relationship. … We
have made a commitment to each other and … if it keeps being as
good as it is now, great. If it does not that [would be] sad but that sort
of thing happens. I don’t have any desire to make a commitment …
before any kind of institution.
Liam was satisfied with the personal commitment he and his partner of
eight years had made to each other. He opposed marriage because of its
association with the Catholic Church, had no wish for that church or
any similar religious institution to validate his relationship.
Finally, there is Findlay, who was a 33-year-old African-American I
interviewed in New York. At the time of our interview, he was in the
early stages of a new relationship with a 41-year-old man. Like the men
before him in this section, Findlay seriously doubted marriage’s worth,
his concerns relating to some questionable practices he had observed in
heterosexual couples;
The institution of marriage is false … and it holds no weight. It is a

money-making institution. I will marry you. I will stick with you for
four or five years. I will say you cheated on me and file for irrecon-
cilable differences and I will take half when I leave. I do not see any
truth in it and maybe it is because of what I have seen marriage do to
my mother and father and other members of my family. I just don’t
see any truth in it.
Findlay was aware, however, that gay marriage would bring with it
improved social security arrangements for gay couples. As he explained
in the following extract from his interview, because of the way health-
care operates in the United States, these could be life-and-death consid-
erations for many men in his situation:
I advocate us as a community receiving each other’s benefits. Say …

I need to go to the dentist. I know that my boyfriend’s dental care is
going to cover me as well. That is something I understand because a lot
of people cannot afford insurance. It is what it is. … [If] my insurance
is better than his, will my partner be able to get the med[ication]s that
he needs? The person I am seeing is HIV positive.
The men from this mainly middle-age group who opposed gay mar-
riage did so for a number of reasons. All seriously doubted the value if
not the validity of marriage as a social institution, and as such were the
first group of gay marriage opponents to involve the idea of marriage as
a bad institution. For at least one, his experience of Catholicism soured
his regard for marriage, while at least two men strongly resented the
heteronormalising of gay relationships, which they saw as the inevita-
ble consequence of marriage equality.
Unsure
The five men who were unsure what they thought about gay marriage
were three men in their 30s, one man in his early 40s, and one man in
his early 50s. Two of the men were from London and there was one man
from each of Hong Kong, Melbourne, and New York.23 The man in his
early 50s was Calvin, who lived in Melbourne and worked for a large
corporation. Single at the time of interview, Calvin had previously had
two long-term relationships. Like a number of men whose views were
discussed in the previous part of this section, Calvin objected to the
heteronormative impulse behind gay marriage activism and said that it
was not necessary, ‘to mimic the marriage situation for heterosexuals …
in order to recognise the committed gay relationship’.
Charlie was 40 and lived in Hong Kong. Also single at the time of
interview, his confusion about gay marriage was more pronounced than
Calvin’s. On the one hand, he believed marriage unnecessary, ‘just a
piece of paper’, because ‘if you get along well, are going to be together,
you will do it anyway, without getting married’. And yet, on the other
hand, Charlie said, laughing, ‘but I would not mind if someone pro-
posed to me and I would not say no’.
I interviewed two men who lived in London, both in their mid 30s.
Aiden, who was 33, said he was not sure at the moment and had other
bigger things on his mind, such as resolving problems he and his part-
ner were having with their sex life. Anton was 35 and knew a little
about marriage from the sort of work he did in the City. He argued that
marriage could be tax efficient, in terms of reducing the tax on inherit-
ance, but that if he had his way he would abolish marriage altogether
and introduce something far more radical:
I would … just have civil partnership … divorced from any religious

connotations and I would probably extend it … so that a couple of
Cohabitation 131
old, non-married spinsters or sisters could award each other the right
to responsibilities in a civil partnership and then if people want to
get married in a church and have the whole blessing thing, then they
can do it themselves.
What Anton described is similar to what the French Government

introduced when it passed its pacte civil de solidarité or civil solidarity
pact, which provides benefits for varying households, including two
siblings who live together.24 Underlying the French civil solidarity pact
is an egalitarian understanding of the various forms of relationships
people have created to satisfy their intimacy needs, and more fully rep-
resents the different types of households that exist in large cities in the
West, with echoes in privileged circles in the large, westernised cities of
the developing world.
Jackson was the last of the five men aged between 32 and 51 who
said he was unsure what he thought about gay marriage. Born in the
Caribbean, Jackson was 32 when I interviewed him, and in a relation-
ship of four years. From his experience, he said he believed his relation-
ship with his partner was, ‘a lot like what people who married do’. His
uncertainty about marriage dated back to his childhood: ‘I did not grow
up with my parents being married, so I don’t think it is something I
have considered very important in my life.’
In contrast to the younger men who were unsure about gay marriage,
these men who were mainly in middle age were more politically aware
about the programme in favour of marriage equality and its likely con-
sequences for gay men and their relationships. The younger men drew
on their personal situation, family experience, or anti-religious views,
whereas the men from the middle cohort questioned the value of mar-
riage, its usefulness for gay men, and whether better relationship mod-
els were available such as the French civil solidarity pact, which could
suit the needs of a variety of couple types.

Eight men said that they were in favour of a civil union but not gay
marriage. All were older than 40.25 A number of these men opposed
marriage but favoured civil union because of their Catholic back-
grounds. The reasons the men gave for opposing gay marriage but not
a civil union fell into two broad categories. First, they rejected marriage
as a social institution in its entirety; second, they were anti-religious.
The views of the eight men are represented here by those of three men –
Nathan from Auckland, Jacob from Melbourne, and Connor from
London.
Nathan was 50, worked as a small businessman, and was in a relation-

ship of six years. He said he would follow the example of some of his
friends who had civil unions:
I know ‘civil union’ sounds rather clinical but it is better than mar-
riage. … I am against the whole marriage thing … because the mar-
riage institution is something that has … kept gay men squashed. …
It has controlled a lot of people’s lives … especially the religious
aspect.
Later in his interview, Nathan explained that while he had been will-
ing to take his partner to his sister’s wedding in the South Island of
New Zealand, he was aware that his gay and lesbian cousins did not
take their same-sex partners to family gatherings. He understood their
decision as a reaction to homophobia in his wider family, as a result
of which they hid their sexuality. While Nathan said that he was anti-
marriage and anti-religion, I sensed his dislike of religion was stronger
and was the chief reason why he opposed gay marriage and would pre-
fer a civil union. He seemed to distrust marriage because of its religious
connotations, and his dislike of religion stemmed from a belief that it
gave rise to homophobia. In his view, religion was therefore the cause
of the sort of dishonest behaviour he had seen gay men and lesbians
adopt in the face of the homophobia that is common in isolated, rural
communities. And for this reason he would prefer a civil service if and
when he wanted to formalise his relationship.
Jacob (aged 42) worked in social research in Melbourne. He and his
partner had been together for more than 10 years and were happy living
together with the recognition their relationship received from family
and friends. Jacob said he was surprised that gay people were interested
in marriage at all:
I am sometimes horrified that some … gay people want to go down

that avenue. My attitude is, ‘Why should we be as unhappy as the
rest of them?’
Although dubious of marriage’s benefits, Jacob favoured relationship

equality, citing relationship legislation that existed in Victoria and
other Australian states providing gay couples with the similar status
and rights that heterosexuals enjoyed in de facto (that is, cohabiting)
relationships.
Cohabitation 133
Like Nathan and Jacob, Connor, who was 41 and lived in London, did
not believe in marriage:
I don’t believe in gay marriage. I certainly believe in equal civil part-

nerships and a civil union in secular law. … I don’t know whether
this is from a Catholic upbringing … but I am vehemently atheist
and vehemently anti-religion. … I certainly wouldn’t want to ape
marriage … but if the situation were right, I would consider a civil
union, or partnership, yes.
Connor’s reasons were both similar to and different from those that
Nathan and Jacob gave, raising as they did the matter of religion.
Connor was not the first man from this international sample to raise
the matter of his past (unhappy) religious experience as a Catholic, and
as a result his antipathy to anything religious in nature.
Among those who did not want gay marriage, opinions varied as did
reasons for the opinions. To some extent, the opinions of the young-
est cohort were more personal and the opinions of the middle cohort
more political. One explanation for this could lie in the men’s dates of
birth. The men from the middle cohort grew up and came to maturity
at a time when homosexuality was forbidden or at the least not easily
tolerated. As a result of the influence of the women’s liberation and
gay liberation movements they had come to understand their sexuality
as political, and that political action was needed to bring about social
change and greater relational and sexual freedom. As well, these men
will have had longer experience of cohabitation, perhaps have even
grown used to the idea that cohabitation was the only relationship
option available to non-heterosexuals. As ordinary as cohabitation has
come to be seen in the last 20 years, at one point in the final quarter
of the twentieth century it represented a simple means of defying mar-
riage’s hegemony. I suspect that among some of the men from the mid-
dle cohort cohabitation still retained its anti-establishment, alternative
meaning and significance.
By contrast, the men from the youngest group grew up and came to
maturity at a different time, when greater social tolerance prevailed and
homosexuality was not frowned upon or scorned. For many of these
men, being gay was something they anticipated from an early age, and
the idea of a same-sex relationship was not regarded as something to be
conducted in secret or avoided. In the next section, the opinions of the
oldest group are considered, the age cohort where men who opposed
gay marriage were in greatest number.
Men aged 51–87
Forty-one men, or slightly more than 40 per cent of the sample, were
aged 51–87, with many of them in their 50s.26 Seventeen men from this
age group said they did not support gay marriage, five men were unsure,
and seven preferred civil union. As explained in the previous chapter,
70 per cent of the men from this age cohort opposed gay marriage,
which was considerably more than those from the younger cohorts who
opposed it. In terms of relationship experience and status, the majority
of the oldest men were in relationships.27 As I argued in Chapter 3 on
long-lasting relationships, it is remarkable that so many men showed
evidence of a capacity to conduct long-term, couple relationships.28
Because many men from this group came out in the decades prior to
gay liberation in the West, their relationship histories were more varied
than those of the men from the other age cohorts, and included more
men than who were formerly married, still married or in relationships
with women, as well as more men with children from previous hetero-
sexual relationships, and more men in civil unions.29
I would argue that these men’s relationship histories help to explain
why gay marriage had less to offer them and other men like them in this
age cohort, and why a majority opposed it. A great many of them were
in settled, long-lasting relationships. Both this and the fact that more of
them were in civil unions than the younger men suggest that cohabitation
had worked for them and they were happy with it. As well, it makes sense
that, at their stage of life, they would possibly have less interest in get-
ting married in order to mark the status of their relationship or relational
achievement. It makes sense also that gay marriage would be of more
interest to young men in their 20s or 30s embarking on relationships.
Against gay marriage

The 17 men who opposed gay marriage used two narratives to explain
their opposition. First, they argued that marriage was unnecessary
because cohabitation was satisfactory and met their relational needs.
Second, they made a political argument similar to what some of the
men from the middle cohort argued, which was that they opposed gay
marriage because marriage was a failed social institution.
Eight men drew on the first narrative. They comprised a man in his
80s, four in their 70s, two in their 60s, and a man in his 50s.30 These
men were content with their cohabitation arrangements and said gay
marriage was unnecessary because of the legal implications of marriage
or because marrying would jeopardise their existing relationship.
Cohabitation 135
Three men spoke about the legal implications of marriage and why it
turned them against gay marriage. The first was Randall, an 87-year-old
man who lived in Melbourne and had been in a same-sex relationship
for 37 years. In answer to the question about gay marriage, Randall said
that he would not want to confuse marriage and a gay relationship, that
he was ‘happy to live beyond the law if … [he] was satisfied that what …
[he] was doing was right’. Randall had begun and maintained his same-
sex relationship through periods of social hostility, when being gay was
a criminal offence, but because his conscience told him that what he
was doing was not wrong, he had come to believe that it was all right to
live ‘beyond the law’. For this reason, and I suspect because he had been
formerly married and a husband and was a father, gay marriage held no
appeal to him or his partner.
Two other men used quasi-legal reasons for opposing gay marriage.
They were Hugh (aged 62) from Melbourne and Hilton (aged 53) from
New York. Hugh said that the relationship that he and his partner had
was sufficient and they did not need ‘legal documents to say that …
[they were] committed to each other’. Hilton’s situation was somewhat
different from the other men because he had been married to a woman
and was divorced. He objected to the idea of gay marriage because of
the ‘legal and civil connotations’ as well as the notion of monogamy,
against which he said he would struggle because he still enjoyed having
adventurous sex.
Because they were happy with their existing relationships, five of
these older men said they found it difficult to consider the idea of get-
ting married. Their views are represented here by two men in their 70s,
Drake and Christian. Drake was 77, and lived in Melbourne with his 56-
year-old partner. They had been together for 31 years. In the following
extract from his interview, Drake explains why same-sex-attracted men
can find themselves struggling with heteronormative institutions like
marriage and heteronormatively framed romance:
When [my partner] and I first fell in love … I would have done it …
I would have done anything to be able to walk down the street
holding his hand, to walk along with my arm around his waist, not
the whole time but because the gesture felt right. … I could become
angry at the pressures not to do that or to do it … [so that] it becomes
a pretentious act, whereas everybody else is doing it and it is natural.
Had it been [available] back then, I probably would have wanted to
rush into marriage. … Now I don’t think we’d bother to get married.
We do not know what it would mean. I think we are both a bit proud
of the fact that … [we have] something that has lasted so long. We
wonder if we got married if we would break up [laughs]. Why that
would happen I don’t know.
This account of aspects of the romantic and intimate history of two

men is significant for what it says about the compromises gay men
have had to make and continue to make because of heteronormative
assumptions that influence couple relationships and intimacy in west-
ern countries like Australia. When Drake and his partner met, which
was in the early 1980s, neither gay marriage nor open demonstrations
of affection between gay men were possible. Afraid of arousing homo-
phobic abuse or appearing forced or phoney, Drake found it impos-
sible to publicly express his natural feelings for his partner – by, for
example, holding his hand – and, as he said, this made him angry. By
the 2010s, both Drake and his partner were proud of what they had
achieved and sceptical that marriage would bring any benefit to their
relationship.
On this last point, their view of gay marriage and its effect on their
relationship coincided with the views of Christian and his partner, two
men in their early 70s who lived in Sydney. In the following extract,
Christian explained why he and his partner would not marry even if the
option were available to them:
We are perfectly happy as we are and have been for such a very long
time up till now. We have even talked about the danger that get-
ting married at such a late stage would be changing the dynamic.
Therefore neither of us wants to do that. We are very happy with
things as they are.
When Drake said that he and his partner feared marriage might cause
their relationship to break up and when Christian said it would change
‘the dynamic’, I assume that they and their partners feared that the
formality or arrangements that accompany any act of marrying, even
in a park or town hall, would upset the balance they had achieved in
their relational and intimate practices over the years. The four men who
comprised these two couple relationships had been together for 30 years
and more.
The second, more political narrative that the older men used against
gay marriage was that marriage itself was a flawed social institution. This
group of five comprised two men in their 60s and three men in their
50s.31 All the men used relatively passionate language when explaining
Cohabitation 137
why they rejected what they variously described as a ‘failed’ system or

institution.
Zachary, who was 52 and an expatriate living in Hong Kong, said that
he and his partner were not in favour of marriage because they came,
‘from families where the marriages broke up’:
At one point when I was at high school, I remember stopping to think

and … only one out of my group of friends had their original set of par-
ents and may be it was our generation … but … marriage is not a flaw-
less institution. It was never anything that held much esteem for us.
When the interviewees answered the questions on gay marriage,32 I did

not explore any connection between the marital status of their parents
and their views on gay marriage. In the case of Zachary and his partner,
however, and at least one other man, Jackson, aged 32, from New York
(see above) the marriage history of their parents strongly influenced the
negative views they held and related about gay marriage. The remaining
men argued against gay marriage on similar grounds to Zachary, that it
was not ‘flawless’.
Sean (aged 67) from Auckland was not in favour of civil unions and
said he did not respect heterosexual marriage, and by association, gay
marriage, because the institution was, ‘ephemeral and value-laden in
negative terms’. As well, he said: ‘I don’t … need the ceremony or the
thing to validate the relationship that I have.’
Marvin, who was 59 and lived in Los Angeles, argued in a similar
vein, making one of the more cogent, impassioned cases against gay
marriage and in favour of the cohabitational relationships with which
gay people have been experimenting for at least the last 180 years.33 In
making his argument, Marvin drew on the experience of a relatively
long-term relationship he had with a former partner who died more
than 15 years earlier;
I also don’t for the life of me understand why the gay community has
decided to emulate an institution that doesn’t work for even straight
people. … My relationship with [my partner] did not have that kind
of global definition. We operated really fine. We had to take care of
ourselves legally … so that, if anything happened between either
one of us, the other person was taken care of. … I love the idea of
two people professing their love for one another but emulating that
model to me is just another way of whittling away that thing that
made us unique in the first place.
Like many men his age, Marvin was proud of his ‘outsider’ status and
the relationships that he and other men were forced to create when
they lived at some emotional and cultural distance from the hetero-
sexual mainstream. This was particularly the case in the decades of the
HIV-AIDS epidemic when in the USA few politicians or social com-
mentators embraced any aspect of the gay lifestyle. He explains in the
extract above that he and his former partner were able more than 15
years before to set their relationship on the right legal footing so that, in
the event of one of them dying, the other would be looked after, which,
Marvin said, did happen when his former partner died. Again, like
other men his age, Marvin resists moves to draw gay men’s lives into
the mainstream, the effect of which he said was ‘of whittling away the
thing that made us unique’, which resonated with what Timothy from
New York (aged 46) said in relation to gay marriage: ‘I am old enough
to remember the idea that being gay was an alternative, a different kind
of life,’ Later in his interview, Marvin admitted that few of his friends
shared his view of gay marriage:
I do not get it … [or] get fired up about it the way a lot of my friends
do. I have not had arguments with my friends about it but certainly
discussions when they don’t understand where I’m coming from …
[and] I don’t get why they are asking for that [gay marriage].
Like earlier political movements such as gay liberation in the 1970s

and ACT-UP in the late 1980s,34 the push for gay marriage has had a
polarising effect on gay people, and, as this and the previous chapter
have shown, generation may be one dividing line. One effect of the
polarising influence of the political debate can be that each side is left
feeling incredulous about the views of the other, which was certainly
the experience of the men who made articulate arguments against the
push for gay marriage.
The last man in this group of five was Arthur, a 62-year-old man who
lived in London. Arthur said that he was satisfied with the level of social
acceptance that gay people had already achieved in the West, and that
he believed the divorce rate for gay men who were gay married was
higher than the divorce rate for straight men. He reiterated the premise,
which the other men in this group used to underpin their argument
against gay marriage, that ‘the marriage … they are fighting for … is
unnecessary. We are mimicking a failed system.’
One final point regarding opposition to gay marriage is the arguments
that four men made, which fell into neither of the principal narratives.
Cohabitation 139
Two men, who were separated by 20 years in age, said that, as it was
too late for them to worry about marriage, they were not in favour of
it.35 A third man said he opposed it because he was anti-religious: ‘I do
not think there would be any need for a ceremony for us. I am a lapsed
Catholic and I do not believe in church.’36 And the fourth man said he
would not support gay marriage because, as a man with property, he
feared the financial losses a divorce might cause him: ‘If we broke up,
I have no means of replacing anything in my time of life, so I would
lose big time.’37
Unsure
Five men from the oldest cohort were unsure what they thought about
gay marriage. They comprised three men in their 50s, one man in his
60s, and one man in his 70s. Two of the men were from Melbourne, two
were from New York, and one man was from London.38 Two of the men
were unsure what they thought about gay marriage because of compli-
cations in their personal life; the three remaining men had individual
reasons for being uncertain about it. All are discussed below.
The two men with complications in their personal life were Parry, a
63-year-old New Yorker, and Arran, a 70-year-old man from Melbourne.
Readers will be familiar with Parry because the story of his long-term
relationships was discussed in some depth in the chapter on long-lasting
relationships. When asked about his views on gay marriage, Parry said
that he and one of his partners wear rings on their non-marriage hands,
‘as part of a protest that we’re not legally married’.
Unfortunately, I did not ask Parry to explain which partner’s ring he
wore, but assumed because of how he spoke about the special status of
their relationship that his first partner had given it to him. I did not
investigate this detail at the time of interview because I was having
difficulty hearing Parry and struggling to make sense of the story of
his relationships. It was only after his interview was transcribed that I
began to make sense of what he had told me. Because I had not heard
a similar story before and wanted to make sure I understood what he
said, I often had to return to the recording to confirm the meaning of
what Parry told me.
Readers will recall that, in Chapter 3, I described the details of Parry’s
intimate life and that he was conducting what he understood to be
separate, monogamous relationships with two different men. Parry
explained that the decision not to marry was his partner’s choice, and
that he was ‘still betwixt and between about marriage’ even though he
had ‘no problem with being committed’. When I pressed him, saying
that marriage would preclude his second relationships, he replied as

follows:
It would just be adulterous. … In some ways I guess [my second part-

ner] is my mistress and I don’t see anything wrong with that. I don’t
see any problem with being loved by many people.
The second man whose personal life made a gay marriage or civil
union impossible was Arran, who lived in Melbourne, and was in a rela-
tionship of 25 years with a man who was 11 years his senior. According
to Arran, the fact that his partner was still married to a woman he mar-
ried meant that gay marriage or civil union was out of the question.
The complications of life for these two men in their eighth and ninth
decades is clear from the following:
We do have a wife and she has this huge apartment which is filled
with furniture and … she thinks that the three of us could live
together and rent a house. She imagines that we will be able to rent a
house somewhere nice and big enough to live independent lives, you
know. I am not easy about that. I do not like … renting particularly.
The three men with their own individual reasons for feeling uncertain
about gay marriage were Isaac, a 56-year-old from Melbourne, Tate, a
51-year-old from London, and Earl, a 51-year-old from New York.
Isaac was unsure if he supported marriage reform because while he
believed gay people should argue in favour of marriage equality – to
ensure that what he observed during the HIV-AIDS epidemic never
recurred – he and his partner of 31 years were satisfied with the privi-
leges and benefits they already received from the state. To underline
the last point, Isaac said that Centrelink, the Australian government’s
social security system, recognised their relationship and that when he
was recently in hospital, ‘there was never the slightest … problem that
our relationship would be recognised’. His personal experience meant
that he and his partner had no need of gay marriage.
Tate, who was an expatriate living in London, was not sure what gay
marriage meant or what use it would be to him. A rich man who grew
up and was educated on the East Coast of North America, at the time
of our interview, Tate had recently begun a relationship with a man 25
years his junior. Like other men his age, his views on gay marriage were
split between the personal and the political or the public, and in the
following extract from his interview, Tate revealed his political belief in
Cohabitation 141
the desirability of marriage equality and his relative uninterest on the

personal level:
I think there is no question that gay couples should have all the
access to the same sort of legal rights that straights have. I have
never been particularly concerned about whether it is actually called
marriage or not but … the real question you are asking is whether
I personally would [get married]. … I would not rule it out but it is
something that never in my life have I really thought about … so
clearly it is not terribly important.
The third man was Earl, who lived in New York. When his partner of
22 years was alive, the two of them were regarded as a couple in their
friendship circle as the following extract from his interview shows:
[W]e eventually moved in, travelled together, went to Europe. It was

not the most sexual relationship … but a very loving, platonic rela-
tionship. I was never really drawn to him sexually but we became a
couple and were known as a couple at the Temple and were asked to
things. We were invited everywhere that people knew us. … We never
filed the domestic partnership agreement. … We had it all completed
but we never got it down so I got bought out of the apartment.
From the little that Earl revealed in his interview – and the extract
from his interview cited above is all that he said about his previ-
ous relationship – it would seem that the absence of sex from their
relationship – and a 19-year age difference – might explain why Earl did
not take the next step and have their relationship officially registered.
The fact that they had completed a domestic partnership agreement but
omitted to file it suggests uncertainty on the part of at least one of the
men. As Earl was the younger man and as he had more to gain from a
registered partnership, which his comment about losing the apartment
suggests, I wonder if the absence of something stronger than their
friends’ approbation explains his uncertainty and his unwillingness or
inability to formalise their relationship.

Seven men from the oldest cohort said they would support civil union
but not gay marriage.39 Of these, three said without going into more
detail that they thought the idea of marriage ‘strange’ or unattractive;
they said also and without elaboration that the idea of civil union
appealed to them more than did marriage. As I explained when previ-

ously describing responses such as these, I did not always test the men’s
views at the time or ask them to elaborate, the responsibility for their
brief answers being therefore more mine than theirs. The remaining four
men drew on two familiar stories when explaining why they preferred
civil union to gay marriage. The first narrative was that a civil union
ensured that a couple’s property rights were protected; the second narra-
tive was that the general public was not yet ready for gay marriage.
Property rights and the desire to protect them have recurred in this
and the previous chapter as an important reason for supporting gay mar-
riage or civil union. In the case of the three men from this age cohort,
their explanations were both similar and different from those already
considered. The most colourful explanation came from 72-year-old
Jeffrey, who lived in Auckland and was a retired railway worker. He
argued that a civil union most likely provided protection in law: ‘There
should be a way of protecting yourself from nasty families.’
Bryce from Manchester was nine years Jeffrey’s junior, and already
securely settled in a civil partnership with his partner of 39 years. From
his point of view, the civil contract, which they had, protected their
inheritance and other matters concerning, ‘the next of kin and … pension
considerations’. The third man, Bernard, was a 59-year-old from Hong
Kong. His views about civil union were that it provided the same rights as
marriage but without the connotations that accompanied marriage;
Marriage seems a bit strange for me, I do not reject the idea. I under-
stand that some people can marry but there is something strange.
I prefer the idea of a civil union, which gives you the same rights
without the official aspect.
The second narrative the men drew on who favoured civil union
concerned public opinion, and was the expressed view of 81-year-old
Clancy from Melbourne. He said he believed that a contract was a
good idea but that gay marriage was too radical an idea for citizens of
Australia:
I do not think the population is ready for it. … We are a middle-class

country and … I am afraid the middle-class government is not going
to be too radical. … Hopefully gay marriage will come in but I do not
particularly agree with marriage whether it is a heterosexual one or a
gay one. … I think a contract is the way to go. If the world wants to
be married, it is okay by me.
Cohabitation 143
Clancy’s views mirror many of those of the younger men from this
international sample of 97 men. He argued that gay marriage might be
too radical for mainstream, western society. And while acknowledging
that marriage itself has its shortcomings, it is clear that he was willing
to support the push for gay marriage, saying that, ‘if the world wants to
be married, it is okay by me’. He is more sceptical about the institution
than the pro-marriage youth (whose views were discussed in Chapter 5),
but shares the idea of individual choice that is so important to them.
The group of seven men from this cohort who said they would sup-
port civil union but not marriage used three arguments to explain their
views. The first was that marriage was ‘strange’; the second was that
same-sex couples needed binding agreements to secure their common
property; and the third that the general public would accept civil union,
but was not yet ready for gay marriage.
Conclusion
As shown in the previous chapter and here, very few young men
opposed gay marriage. A small number said that they preferred civil
union, citing anti-religious sentiments or personal experience as reasons.
Some middle-aged men used anti-religious sentiments also as a reason
for opposing gay marriage, while another group said they would not
support it on the grounds that legalising gay marriage would result in
heteronormative values being imposed on gay men and their relation-
ships. Making a more political argument, other men from the middle
cohort said that gay marriage would be a foolish experiment since mar-
riage was a failed institution. At least one of the men who opposed gay
marriage for these reasons said that he preferred the varying relational
possibilities that sexual libertarianism allowed and which had been a
feature of western gay life since at least the late nineteenth century. He
enjoyed his outsider status and vehemently opposed what he regarded as
the embourgeoisement of gay life, mocking, like Rupert Everett, the idea of
church or white weddings. Among the men from the middle cohort who
were unsure about gay marriage were some who queried the purpose of
marriage if cohabitation arrangements were satisfactory. Less revolution-
ary than the libertarian who could not understand why some gay men
wanted to get married, these men shared a view similar to his – that gay
marriage would restrict the relational possibilities that were open to gay
men, have a limiting effect. As mentioned in this chapter and the previ-
ous one, the older men opposed gay marriage in greater numbers than
the younger men, giving reasons that were also personal and political.
The personal reasons that the older men gave were that cohabita-
tion arrangements were satisfactory and suited them, and that they
saw no need to change. I argued that their view of gay marriage most
likely formed during the mid twentieth century, when in the faces of
varying degrees of homophobia they had to make strategic decisions
about what sort of relationships to experiment with and how to con-
duct them. In line with the work of scholars such as John Boswell and
George Chauncey, I argued that gay men often had to lead clandestine
lives or marry and live double lives in order to survive during in times
of hostility or repression. I suspect also that many of these older men
were already set in their ways when the level of social tolerance began
to increase, as it did in the 1970s in the West, when men like them
were able to experiment with living more openly as gay men and in gay
couple relationships.
The political reasons the older men used to explain their opposition
to gay marriage mostly concerned their negative view of marriage. Some
of the men explained that they would not support the move toward
gay marriage because of marriage’s legal standing or legalities associated
with it; others argued that they thought it bizarre that gay men would
want to copy ‘a failed system’, to use the words of Arthur (aged 62) from
London. Like the libertarian from the middle cohort, at least one of the
older men strongly opposed what he regarded as the ‘mainstreaming’ of
gay life, believing that it would erase what was unique about gay men.
In general, older men who were unsure where they stood in relation
to gay marriage said that they were content with their cohabitation
arrangements. I suspect that a common thread uniting these men’s lack
of interest in marriage generally can be found in the women’s liberation
rhetoric of the 1970s. Many of these men, having formed views about
marriage when they were in their 20s, saw no reason to change them
or to embrace an institution that in their view had lost its value or held
no value for them.
7
Living in the Midst of HIV-AIDS
I think it is probably one of those things that kind of

made it a fraction harder to be homosexual. I have
never felt really at risk of contracting the virus, so it has
always been … something that has happened outside
my life. Although of course like every homosexual in
the early days I had a test, I worried, and then we were
not sure how easy it was to contract and so there was
that anxiety that went on for a long while about it.
(Michael, aged 52, Melbourne)
I have a rule about safe sex, and generally I have kept

that rule fairly strictly, but in some ways it is a very
scary proposition as well. I have never been tested [for
HIV] and that has been a cause of concern among my
friends … who have said that I am basically an idiot. I
have been making commitments for over a year to do it.
I do not think that I have put myself or anyone else …
[at] risk of anything … to the extent that I know that I
am not HIV positive but it is a big psychological thing.
(Jack, aged 22, Sydney)
Introduction
For most of the final decades of the twentieth century – and until
HIV infection rates began to increase in 19991 – the focus of HIV-AIDS
policy and debate in countries like Australia was on the sexual health,
practices, and wellbeing of the initial age cohort of gay men who were
affected by it, the so-called ‘baby-boomer’ generation.2 These men were
145
born in the late 1940s and 1950s and grew to social maturity in the
mid to late 1960s and early 1970s. They either participated in or were
strongly influenced by the social movements of the time, such as the
anti-war movement and the women’s and gay liberation movements.
By a cruel irony, just as many were enjoying the freedom of expression
that accompanied a growing tolerance towards non-heterosexuals, the
HIV-AIDS epidemic began.
In Australia and similar western countries, gay men and intravenous
drug users appeared particularly vulnerable in the early years of the
epidemic. And while medical and scientific establishments struggled
to understand its mode of transmission and moral conservatives con-
demned sexual nonconformity as the cause of the disease, gay men in
their hundreds were succumbing and dying. In the midst of the crisis,
Dennis Altman argued that while AIDS affected gay sex, it would not
alter the ‘fundamental reality of homosexuality’. On the whole, he was
proved right for many gay men chose celibacy, monogamy or ‘safe sex’
to ‘protect’ themselves from the virus,3 and, even if their response to
AIDS was to be celibate, as it was for some, their identity was still gay:
any sense of gay identity [is] quite meaningless if we try to deny it is

an identity clearly based upon sexual preference, even if this prefer-
ence is not always acted upon.4
Most commentators agree that a notable, positive effect of AIDS was to

revitalise gay communities in western countries. Groups of gay men drew
on their own labour, time, and communal leadership and then, in the case
of countries such as Australia and New Zealand, worked with governments
to formulate health policy, notably to insist that education was most likely
to effect the kind of change required in gay men’s sexual practices.5 A first
age cohort of gay men experienced the onset of the HIV-AIDS epidemic
in Australia as both a time of extreme fear, loss, and recrimination and a
time of a notable communal response in the gay world.
More recently, however, a second age cohort of gay men has shown
signs of being affected by the disease just as the first age cohort was
in the early 1990s.6 Men from the second age cohort were born into
a world where HIV-AIDS already existed and its mode of transmission
was public knowledge. They were the beneficiaries of sustained, publicly
funded health messages emphasising the importance of safe sex in any
sexual encounter outside a monogamous relationship. This chapter
compares the generation of gay men who experienced HIV-AIDS as a
new fact of life to the generation who grew up with it.
Living in the Midst of HIV-AIDS 147
The first generation whose experiences of HIV-AIDS are discussed

in this chapter comprises men who were young and in their 20s and
30s when AIDS was first made public, in the early 1980s. The second
generation are young men now. They were in their 20s and 30s when
interviewed, and grew up and came out with some knowledge of the
virus and its implications for the sexual health of sexually active, young
people. The central questions at the heart of this chapter are how a
second generation of gay men understood the threat of HIV-AIDS and
whether their understanding differed from or was similar to the first
generation’s experience and understanding of the disease. The 58 men
whose stories form the basis of this chapter were, with the exception
of three interviewees, HIV negative at the time of interview.7 The pur-
pose of the chapter is not to explain how HIV-positive men have been
affected by the virus but to return to an old story, rarely told nowadays,
which is how the presence of the threat of HIV affects the identity or
sense of self of gay men who are HIV negative.
These 58 men came from the all-Australian sample and were divided
into two age groups.8 The first age group I called the ‘pre-HIV’ genera-
tion, and it comprised 30 men aged 40 to 59, half of whom were in
their 40s. and half were in their 50s9 The majority of these men were,
in other words, mature adults and likely to have been sexually active at
the time of the onset of the HIV-AIDS epidemic in Australia, and in the
1980s would have seen more people dying fast of AIDS.10 The second, or
‘post-HIV’ generation comprised 28 men aged 22–39, 10 of whom were
in their 20s and 18 in their 30s.11 In November 1982, the great major-
ity of these men were aged 16 or less. Nearly all of them were therefore
young teenagers or children at the onset of the HIV-AIDS epidemic in
Australia.12 They would have seen the Grim Reaper advertisements on
television as they were forming views about their sexual identity or
coming out.13 By comparison with the experience of the older cohort
of men, the post-HIV men would have seen people living with HIV, not
dying of AIDS so often.
My rationale for focusing on a mono-culture to discuss the effects of
HIV-AIDS on two age generations of gay men was twofold. First, the var-
ying cultural understandings of HIV-AIDS in the developing world and
the developed world were beyond the scope of this book, and beyond
the purpose of the interviews I held with men from the international
sample in 2009–11. Second, I had a strong sense that the recent focus
on HIV-AIDS prevention that has taken place Australia deserved more
attention for what it showed about memory and understanding in a
sub-culture at risk, which is the underlying theme in this chapter.
Three principal narratives
When interviewed, the men from both generations seemed to shrug off
or dismiss the seriousness HIV-AIDS represented. Most accepted without
alarm the threat HIV-AIDS posed to their lives and/or the lives of their
friends, partners, and acquaintances. For example, one of the interview-
ees, Patrick, who was in his early 50s, said the following when explain-
ing whether or not HIV-AIDS had affected his sense of self:
Well, none except that my partner is HIV positive and so it’s had
a big effect on my sense of security, … It’s like the calm before the
storm. I look around myself now and think, ‘everything in my life is
so good, when is it all going to come crashing down?’
Patrick’s immediate response was to say that HIV-AIDS had no effect

on his sense of self. Then, without pausing, adds that his partner is
HIV positive. How does one understand such a response? One possible
explanation lies in the last sentence of this excerpt from Patrick’s tran-
script. Perhaps a greater fear existed that prevented him from dwelling
too closely on his partner’s present circumstances, which is that at some
point in the future the disease will kill him and then their life together
will ‘come crashing down’.
Patrick was not the only interviewee who responded this way to the
presence of the disease. When asked about the effect of HIV-AIDS on his
sense of self, another man, Bill, who was also in his early 50s, answered:
‘Very little … a lot of the people that I know died. The gay group I knew
from the early ’70s was just decimated.’ And then a man in his late 50s,
with a long history of caring for people living with HIV-AIDS (PLWHA),
said in regard to its effect on his sense of self:
Most of the guys I knew in my 20s and early 30s died of AIDS; very
few of them are left. It doesn’t have a lot to do with my identity. I
have just lost a lot of friends through it. (Samuel, aged 56)
To some readers it might seem strange that some gay men can accept
such personal losses so calmly. There are, however, many reasons for their
doing so. For instance, as a number of interviewees testified, messages
about HIV-AIDS have been heavily and regularly disseminated in the gay
world for more almost three decades; also, in the face of large-scale tragedy,
one typical human response is to play down the enormity of traumatic
events. Alternatively, the men’s calm response to the threat the disease
poses might be evidence of gay men’s refusal to admit to any conflation of

gay identity with HIV-AIDS; or, as almost all the men interviewed for this
chapter were HIV negative when interviewed, their automatic response
might have been to distance themselves from the virus, despite what
friends, partners, or lovers might have experienced or be experiencing.14
The question the interviewees answered was ‘What effect has HIV-
AIDS had on your sense of self?’ In reply, the 58 men drew on three
principal narratives. I called the first narrative ‘fear, vulnerability, and
stigma’, the second narrative ‘changed sexual practices’, and the third
narrative ‘loss and solidarity’. Almost two-thirds of interviewees (or 36
men) used the first narrative – fear, vulnerability, and stigma – to explain
the effect HIV-AIDS had on their sense of self. Half the interviewees
(or 29 men) used the second narrative – changed sexual practices. And
slightly more than 40 per cent of interviewees (or 24 men) drew on
the third narrative – loss and solidarity – to explain the effect of the
disease. My analysis showed broad similarity but differences of nuance
between the two generations’ understanding of the disease’s effect on
their identity. The three narratives are discussed in turn.
Fear, vulnerability, and stigma
The first narrative concerned the interviewees’ emotional responses to

the threat of the virus. In all, 36 men (or 62 per cent of the sample) said
they were frightened, felt vulnerable and/or experienced greater stigma
once they learned of HIV-AIDS and its mode of transmission.15 This was
so both for men from the pre-HIV generation who were in their late 20s
when HIV became public knowledge in the West, and the men from
the post-HIV generation who grew up in its midst from when they were
children or teenagers.
Feeling frightened or vulnerable are fairly natural, human responses
to news that one could run the risk of being infected with a life-threat-
ening illness. A diseased body, however, is not always a stigmatised
body and, with the exception of two men in their 30s and one man
in his late 40s, the overwhelming majority of men interviewed for this
chapter were not responding to personal experiences of HIV infection.
They were speaking about how the virus affected their identity, their
sense of self as gay men, and how they understood living in the midst of
an epidemic where men like them were ill or dying from the disease.
As Susan Sontag and others have shown, HIV-AIDS is a disease with a
marked capacity to stigmatise its sufferers and people who ran the risk
of contracting it or coming into contact with it.16 In relation to HIV-AIDS,
gay men have always faced a particularly acute stigma because of preju-
dice against the type of sex some have and transmission of the disease,
that is, the contact that can occur between semen and blood when men
have unprotected anal sex.
Middle generation
Twenty-one men, or more than two-thirds of those from the pre-HIV
generation, reported feeling afraid, vulnerable, or stigmatised because
of HIV-AIDS.17 This was the principal narrative. Of these, slightly more
than half (12 men) mentioned its stigmatic effect.18
The men from the middle generation gave two reasons for why they
felt frightened or vulnerable in the face of HIV-AIDS, and both con-
cerned transmission. Many recalled how, as younger men in the early
1980s, they were afraid because neither government health authorities
nor scientists were sure of the virus’s origin or means of transmission,
and gay men and intravenous drug users seemed especially vulnerable.19
These uncertainties understandably caused the men some anxiety, an
example of which is represented here by the account from a man aged
45, who was 29 in 1985. Scott said that news of HIV-AIDS and its mode
of transmission ‘cast a shadow’ over his life and that then, ‘people
talked about five or ten years being the period when you judge whether
you are going to be [HIV] positive or not, whether you are going to
come down with it’.20
Another man from the pre-HIV generation, Lionel (aged 59) said
that news of the disease made him feel vulnerable – because of the risk
of infection associated with sexual encounters and the conflation of
homosexuality and the virus in the media and more generally:
It scared me shitless when it happened. It … changed the way I felt

about sexual encounters. … [But] I do not know that it has changed
my sense of self, except that you feel vulnerable … suddenly you are
vulnerable. I guess the other thing that happened is that it brought
up a whole lot of anti-gay sentiment in certain sections of the
community and the media.
The other reason men from the middle generation gave for feeling
frightened and vulnerable was a retrospective fear of infection. From
their accounts it is clear that in the time between when (a) news of the
disease was made public and (b) its mode of transmission was known
and the test for antibodies became available, many of these men
were afraid because they had no way of knowing if they were already
infected as a result of previous sexual encounters. Their sentiments are
represented here by an extract from the account of Neil (aged 46), who
recalled that learning of the disease, in his own words, ‘frightened the
shit out’ of him;
It was not that the sort of sex I had done was risky but it did not take
much. When it first came out in 1983 and the news became more
widespread about how it spread, there was a possibility that because
of the few occasions of risky sex in the past I was walking around
with it. But once I was over that hurdle, it certainly changed forever
my sexual habits.
It is instructive that Neil first said he was not in the habit of having risky
sex. As he continued to recall his sex life 20 years before, he admitted
feeling frightened at the time because of previous sexual encounters
when he had had ‘risky sex’ with men. Once he was certain that his
prior sexual practices had not put him at risk of sero-converting, he
stopped having risky sex – unprotected anal intercourse, for example.
Twelve men from this generation referred also to the stigmatic effect
of HIV-AIDS. Among the stories they recounted were the following. Two
men in their late 50s said the response to HIV-AIDS caused many gay
men they knew to return to the closet. One of these men, Roy (aged
58), described the public then private effects of the stigmatising that
occurred when he was younger;
I was 40, fully out and ready to be a very active gay man only to find
that everyone had gone back into the closet. I felt as though I had
been cast aside. … To top it off, I went through a period of depres-
sion and I felt as though I had the symptoms of HIV. I started to get
the night sweats and … made up my mind that I was HIV positive.
I saw a doctor and he tested me for a number of different things. …
[Waiting for the results] were the worst three or four days I have ever
had. … When he told me I was clear … I realised that HIV had trig-
gered a psychosomatic exercise with me.
Another man in his late 50s described the early 1980s as a period when
feelings of, ‘threat, menace and contagion … were very strong’.
Finally, three men understood the stigma they experienced as arising
from a conflation of HIV-AIDS and homosexuality. Their views are rep-
resented here by Kevin, a man in his early 50s:
I have had … that feeling of belonging to a minority group since

HIV-AIDS first was talked about 15 years ago … and the publicity …
reminded you that you are in that group … that little box over there
of how all people regard gay people as being involved in that activity,
and therefore you must be part of that.
In summary, what can be said about the effect of HIV-AIDS on the

men from the pre-HIV generation? Unlike the young cohort, who were
only children or teenagers in the 1980s, the men from the older cohort
could draw on their lived experience to explain how the disease affected
them when they were in their 20s. Feelings of fear or vulnerability that
they recalled were the result of (a) medical and scientific communities
then being unsure of the disease’s mode of transmission, (b) reports that
gay men were particularly at risk of infection, and (c) not knowing if
their prior sexual history put them at risk.
Young generation
Fifteen men, or 54 per cent of those from the young generation, spoke
of feeling frightened, vulnerable, or being aware of increased stigma
because of HIV-AIDS. Those who reported such feelings were mostly in
their 30s and, as in the case of the men from the middle-aged genera-
tion, fear or vulnerability struck a stronger chord with them than did
stigma. Of these 15 men, 12 described feeling frightened or vulnerable,
and six spoke of the stigmatising effect HIV-AIDS had on them, three
of whom did not refer to feeling afraid or vulnerable.21 In the follow-
ing section, the discussion concerns first, the men who spoke of feeling
frightened or vulnerable in face of the disease, and then those who
referred to its stigmatising effect.
The 11 men who said that HIV-AIDS affected their sense of self because
it frightened them or made them feel vulnerable fell into two categories.
The first group, which is relatively small, comprised three interviewees
who described the fear they associated with HIV-AIDS in general terms –
as frightening simply because the idea of such a disease was terrifying.
For two of the men, both in their 20s, their fear was linked to the image
of the Grim Reaper, which, as mentioned in an earlier footnote, was
shown on Australian television in 1987 as part of a campaign to alert
people to the disease’s presence.22 As Ian (28) recalled:
When I was in high school, the big advertising campaigns scared me

to death. I was so scared that I tried not to be gay because I did not
want to die.23
The second group, which comprised eight men, described feeling

frightened or vulnerable because of how the disease affected them
personally. For example, one man in his early 20s was too afraid to be
tested for the HIV antibodies; another, in his 30s, had been too fright-
ened to visit a friend in hospital as he died from AIDS; and a third, also
in his 30s, delayed coming out because of his fear of HIV-AIDS. For oth-
ers from this group, it was the immediate proximity of the disease that
frightened them, especially those men who were HIV positive.
Jason was in his mid-30s, and is one of the three men in the sample
who was HIV positive. When he spoke of the effect the disease has had
on him, he recalled the late 1980s when he was in his early 20s: ‘It was
just routine testing. I did not suspect that I was positive and the results
ripped me apart.’ With the help of his parents, he regained his emo-
tional footing, enrolled in a university course, and began to feel more
in charge of his life. While the threat of death is more distant now, and
his viral load is under control, Jason said that HIV-AIDS continued to
have ‘a dramatic effect on my life to this day’.
HIV-AIDS has a pronounced capacity to mark with stigma people it
infects or who are at risk of infection. Most of the men from the young
generation who experienced HIV-AIDS as stigmatising, spoke of its con-
flation with the gay identity, that is, as one man in his mid-20s said,
‘the stereotype is that all gay people must have AIDS or carry the virus’.
All the men who held this view were in their 20s. Angus, who was 23,
said that when he came out, which was in 1997,
there was already a perception in the community that gay equals

HIV. It would have been worse if I had come out five years earlier,
because then not only was there a perception in the community but
people were talking about it. I remember in Year 10 Science we had
sex education, and the one time HIV was brought up was in respect
to gay sex, otherwise it wasn’t talked about at all. The one time I get
to be talked about as a gay man at school, it’s to do with HIV. The
only picture I ever got in the country of the gay man was to do with
the virus.
Angus’s recollection is instructive for what it says about the homophobic

nature of sex education provided in Australian schools and the negative
effect this can have on non-heterosexual students.24 It was also mirrored
in the experience of another man in his 20s who, until he did his own
research, said that the message he drew from advertising and educational
campaigns was that all gay people would get HIV-AIDS and die.
An unintended consequence of these campaigns, therefore, might have
been to stigmatise gay men, and possibly lesbians too, at least in the early
days. Importantly, however, for managers and workers in GLBTI25 com-

munity organisations and sexual health centres, all those men in their
20s who noted the stigmatising effect of HIV-AIDS also said that it was
through contact with local gay communities or sexual health services
that they learned the truth of the virus and how to minimise or elimi-
nate risk of infection through ‘safe sex’ practices.
Changed/changing sexual practices
As a response to the fear, vulnerability, and stigma they felt in the face
of the virus, many of the men interviewed for this chapter then spoke
about how they changed or adapted their sexual practices as a precau-
tion against contracting it. Twenty-nine of the 58 men (or 50 per cent
of the sample) referred to these changes.26 As many commentators
have shown, not only did AIDS cause gay men to reassess their sexual
relations, it also made many of them review the nature of their affec-
tive relations and engage in a broader range of relationships. For some,
monogamy became more attractive, as historian Angus McLaren has
observed, while for others, as activist Simon Watney noted, ‘safe sex’
was only one adaptation that enabled gay men to continue sexually
adventurous lives27:
[S]afer sex … [was] a way of sustaining their commitment to erotic

pleasure and freedom of choice. The widespread formal and infor-
mal institution of ‘jack-off’ groups and parties … evidently sustains
a cultural identity that confidently refuses the crude anti-sex mes-
sages that make up so much official government-sponsored AIDS
‘education’.28
The second narrative that the men drew on concerned their sexual
practices and how, in response to learning about HIV transmission, they
tried to minimise their chances of contracting the virus by a number
of means including monogamy, celibacy, risk avoidance, and selective
participation in casual sex encounters. In the discussion that follows,
consideration is given first, to the accounts of the men from the middle
generation and second, to those from the young generation.
Middle generation
Fifteen interviewees, or half those from the pre-HIV generation, referred
to their sexual practices when explaining how HIV-AIDS had affected
their sense of self. All who did so, explained that the threat of HIV had
the effect of convincing them to change their previous sexual behaviour
in order to minimise any risk of infection. These men’s preferred strat-
egy of choice was to practise safe sex with strangers or safe sex in the
context of monogamous relationships.29 In the following section, these
two sets of accounts are considered in turn.
In the accounts of the men from the middle cohort, there is evidence
of gay men’s ability to change their sexual behaviour in face of the
threat that HIV-AIDS posed in the 1980s. For example, Lionel, aged 59,
said that before AIDS, his overseas holidays, especially to the USA, had
been ‘big sexual adventures’. By the 1980s all that changed, and instead
he found himself ‘taking more interest in museums and going to bed
early’. Another man in his 50s said AIDS brought to an end the ‘sexual
play’ that had been such a part of the 1970s. Among 40-year-olds who
described the effect of HIV-AIDS on their sexual practices, Trevor, aged
49, said it was no longer ‘worth going out and getting a one-night stand
and fucking your brains out’. Glen, aged 49, said he always had safe sex
and Ivan, aged 40, reflected, ‘it probably prevented me from dipping
my toe too deeply.’
Four men from this generation said they, or friends they observed,
had retreated from their previous sexual adventurism and now relied
on their monogamous relationships to protect themselves from risk of
the virus. Their views are represented here by the accounts of Richard
(aged 58) and Bill (aged 52).
Richard explained that a chance decision to embark on a ‘fairly
monogamous’ relationship saved him from the high-risk life that
he had led in the 1970s involving adventurous sex and intravenous
drug use:
It has not had much effect on me because I am not HIV and there
was little likelihood that I would ever be HIV especially since I met
[my partner] because it has been a fairly monogamous relationship.
But had he not come along, I could easily be HIV … and I think that
I am very lucky that I don’t have it. … I [had been] quite promiscu-
ous [in the 1970s] and was shooting up drugs too, which is another
thing. I was very fortunate that it did not happen later. Because … [I]
could easily have … carried on as usual.
Bill was coy about its effect on his own sexual practices, but had
observed the effect that the presence of HIV had had on men in his
friendship circle. Like others in the pre-HIV generation, they had
enjoyed relatively unrestrained sex lives in the 1970s, all of which

changed with the arrival of the disease:
One thing that became fairly evident was that many of the people
that I had known who had been fairly free spirits tended to couple
up very quickly and they became pairs of people as a security blanket
as much as anything.
Young generation
Fourteen men, or half the interviewees from the post-HIV generation,
raised the matter of sexual practices when explaining how HIV-AIDS
had affected their sense of self. According to the testimonies of those
interviewees who referred to sexual practices, they understood the effect
of HIV-AIDS as underlining the importance of (a) safe sex, (b) monoga-
mous relationships, or (c) sexual relations with men who were not HIV
positive. In other words, the interviewees either withdrew from sexu-
ally adventurous encounters altogether or continued to have them. If
they continued to have them, they did so either according to safe-sex
principles or by participating selectively. Interestingly, none mentioned
celibacy.30 In the following section, these three sets of accounts are
examined in order.
Of the 10 men who spoke of practising safe sex, only one man,
Drew, aged 39, had been sexually active in the time before HIV-AIDS
was detected in Australia (early 1980s). ‘I remember pre-AIDS,’ he said,
‘and things were so much easier. You did not have to take precau-
tions. It did not matter what you did.’ Drew’s reminiscences contrast
an imaginary, halcyon time of seemingly ‘easy sex’ with the serious-
minded approach now required in order to avoid contracting the
disease;
In those days, nothing like … [safe sex] mattered. There was a group
of maybe 30 that used to hang out in the gardens at night. Everyone
was sleeping with everyone and it was not a huge issue then, but
now you just cannot do that anymore. It is not worth the risk. It has
impacted a lot but it is easy to take precautions to make sure that it
is not going to affect you.
Drew’s account is notable for two other reasons. It demonstrated first,

his ability to adapt to changing sexual mores and practices, and second,
his responsiveness to state-funded sexual health campaigns.
One of the three Aboriginal interviewees in this sample, Vincent,

aged 30, spoke of practising safe sex so as to take control of his sexual
identity and sex life:
[W]hen I started having sex in 1994–5, you were told, ‘condoms,

condoms, condoms’. There was a bit of fear about it, but I made a
conscious choice that I was not going to let that fear control my
sexuality but that I would always have safe sex.
The remaining eight men variously referred, like Vincent, to having no

sense of things being different, that is, that safe sex was de rigueur from
the moment they became sexually mature, and being, in the words of
one of them, ‘bombarded when I first came out with information about
safe sex’ (Harry, aged 28).
Two men said that they withdrew from sexually adventurous encoun-
ters because of the threat of HIV-AIDS.31 Mick (aged 33) was one of the
men who said he found the disease frightening. He was in a stable rela-
tionship now, which he said was preferable to his previous relationship,
where his partner did not want to ‘settle down’:
He wanted to play up outside but then come home to a relationship.32

To me that was very frightening because I … [did] not know who he
was mucking around with and what they could have passed on to me.
Travis (aged 38) was the other person whom it could be said had with-
drawn from sexual adventurism in the face of the threat HIV-AIDS
posed. In his view, HIV-AIDS had not affected his sense of self because
his partner was the only man with whom he had had a relationship
and, in his words, ‘because we have a monogamous relationship, it has
not affected us in any way’. In Travis’s mind, HIV could only affect a
person’s identity if s/he were infected by it.
As mentioned, when describing how HIV-AIDS affected their iden-
tify, two groups of younger men said that they continued to engage in
sexually adventurous encounters. The first group, comprising 10 men,
did so by following safe-sex principles. The second group, consisting
of two men, spoke of avoiding sex with men who were HIV positive, a
strategy that many health officials understand but none recommends.
This is also known as ‘negotiated safety’, and is an arrangement that
allows gay men to have sex without what some regard as the limita-
tions of safe sex. When two men have what is called ‘negotiated safe
sex’, they arrange or decide to have unprotected anal intercourse on the
understanding that each is HIV negative. Such an arrangement is not as

foolproof as protected anal intercourse because its ‘safety’ rests on two
important assumptions: that each man knows that he is HIV negative
and is telling the truth about what he knows. As well, such arrange-
ments are not always made in advance after an exchange of views but
in the heat of the sexual moment or on the basis of the other’s features,
‘how he looked’ across a crowded bar or in a sex club. Negotiated
safety and other strategies more common in groups or communities of
HIV-positive men, such as ‘sero-sorting’ and ‘strategic positioning’, are
regularly discussed in publications of the Australian Federation of AIDS
Organisations (AFAO) and the National Association of People Living
with HIV-AIDS (NAPWA).33
The two men who said that their response to HIV-AIDS was to avoid
sex with men who were HIV positive were aged 36 and 24 respectively
at the time of interview. The account of the first man, Jeremy, was fairly
straightforward, and concerned only one, albeit significant, experience
where he terminated a budding relationship when a man in whom he
was interested disclosed that he was HIV positive. ‘It was a real head
spin,’ said Jeremy. ‘I was scared for him. I was scared for me. “What have
I done? Have I contracted it?” I asked myself.’ Very quickly, Jeremy’s
fears overwhelmed him, prevented him from considering safe sex as a
means of continuing sexual (and/or affective) relations with his puta-
tive partner, and they parted as friends.
The account of the second man, Troy, was less straightforward because
it revealed a more confused understanding of the virus and its threat to
an individual’s health. In the first part of his narrative, Troy admitted to
having had unprotected (anal) sex, which he said occurred in ‘the heat
of passion’. Nowhere in his interview did he indicate whether he was
penetrated, penetrating, or a combination of both in his sexual prac-
tice. The second part of his narrative concerned his friends’ response
on learning that he had unprotected (also known as ‘unsafe’) sex: ‘my
friends smack[ed] me in the head for doing that’. Troy did not seem seri-
ously concerned, however, for in the third part of his narrative he said
that ‘scare campaigns’ [that is, sexual health campaigns] caused ‘the fear
factor about AIDS’. In the final, increasingly contradictory, part of his
narrative, he said that he would avoid having sex with someone who
was HIV positive, admitted that this was ‘a bad prejudice on my part’,
and then acknowledged that ‘you can still enjoy someone [who is HIV
positive] and not be exposed to it’ – presumably by practising safe sex.
The final part of his narrative was contradictory because elsewhere in
his interview Troy explained that a former partner was HIV positive.
Troy was 24 when interviewed. He appeared to be a confident, self-

assured man. During his interview, he said that his sex life began as a
young teenager. His narrative on safe sex was inconsistent because it
contained elements that jostled with one another: sex in the heat of the
moment, which he later regretted and for which friends reprimanded
him. Possibly too frightened to accept personal responsibility for his
actions, he blamed the education campaigns for spreading fear. The
least consistent aspect of his narrative concerned his sexual relations
with an HIV-positive man, a former partner. Here Troy advised against
so doing, then almost immediately contradicted himself, insisting it was
possible to enjoy oneself and not be exposed to the virus.
There are a number of possible reasons for Troy’s inconsistent narra-
tive. For instance, it was heavily influenced by the views of his friends,
sexual and affective partners, and perhaps also by his desire to please in
the interview. I had the distinct impression also that as well as wishing
to please in his interview, Troy wanted to show me that he was aware of
the practices and principles of safe sex, which he might have assumed
were expected of him as a young, sexually adventurous, gay man.
From among the young generation who said that the virus’s effect
was to cause them to practise safe sex, only one (of 14 men) reported
any experience of loss.34 This suggests that their willingness to adopt
safe-sex practices was more a consequence of the public education cam-
paign that began when they were children or teenagers, and continues
to be disseminated now that they are adults. In other words, unlike the
men from the middle generation, who witnessed the death of friends at
time when being HIV positive frequently meant contracting AIDS and
then dying, the young men in this sample were not practising safe sex
in reaction to the seen, visceral consequences of becoming HIV positive
but as learned experience.
Loss and solidarity
The third narrative concerned the men’s witnessing friends or lovers’ ill-
nesses or death, and/or caring for them while ill or dying. Twenty-four
interviewees (about 40 per cent of the sample) said they gained a greater
sense of connection with other gay men as a result of these experiences
and, in so doing, could see that this might have contributed to the
growth of a stronger ‘gay community’.35
Scholars are generally agreed that one of the more remarkable effects
of AIDS was to invigorate gay communities in western countries in the
mid to late 1990s. In the first place, groups of gay men used their own
resources in the form of their labour, time, and community leadership

to organise, lobby, and care for people living with the virus. Then, in the
case of some countries – for example, Australia and New Zealand – they
were able to work co-operatively with governments in shaping health
policy.36 Networks of gay men, whose engagement with gay culture
before the advent of AIDS had mainly focused on hedonistic pursuits,
such as dancing and having sex, showed themselves able to respond
altruistically and communally:
AIDS provided a powerful and renewed source of strength to gay

identity and gay institutions because, at least temporarily, it made
any divisions in the community relatively less important, since the
common life-and-death struggle took precedence over almost all
differences; it formed a set of issues around which all parts of the
community, including those excluded by male sexual practice, could
work together; and it created a sense of crisis that moved even the
most nonpolitical homosexuals and those whose participation in
the community had hitherto been marginal to provide their money,
labor [sic], and talent for the struggle.37
Gay community networks in Australia and similar western countries

became stronger as a result and began to transform into more diverse,
inclusive social structures. Ken Plummer has argued that by the final
decade of the twentieth century, the growing acceptance of gay men
could be measured by the expanding volume of stories they were tell-
ing about their lives.38 Despite the growth in homophobia that some
western countries experienced in the 1990s and 2000s, stories such as
those that Plummer identifies continue to be told and add to a greater,
more positive gay presence.39 One of the important social effects of the
epidemic was that it showed gay men that their relationships were not
secure and provided them with a very strong reason to demand state
recognition for their relationships. During the epidemic, men discov-
ered that their de facto relationships had no standing when families
forbade lovers and friends from attending their son’s funerals because
they did not want to acknowledge the cause of death, or when hospitals
allowed siblings and parents access to dying men but not lovers because
they were not kith or kin. As discussed in Chapter 5, experiences such
as these underpinned gay men’s energetic involvement in the gay mar-
riage campaign in, for example, Europe and the USA.
The third narrative might appear paradoxical, combining, as it does,
the loss many men experienced, especially those from the middle
generation, when friends diagnosed with AIDS died in the 1980s and
1990s, and the solidarity they experienced as they and others worked
together to care for ill and dying friends and strangers, to raise money,
to lobby governments, to organise themselves, and raise the conscious-
ness of other gay men and heterosexual citizens. This is best expressed
in an extract from the transcript of interview from a 50-year-old man,
Des, who worked in health:
It really has not had a lot of effect on me personally except the … loss
of close friends who … died … of HIV, and the violent reaction that
the community had against gay men [in the early years]. But then
politically … it was [possibly] the best thing to happen. Sometimes
when something drastic happens, it is like opening a wound. …
[T]he … gay community united … stood up and said, ‘We are not the
devil. We are not what you perceive us to be. We are a loving, caring,
and giving community like everyone else; and we demand respect.’
Middle generation
When recounting the sense of loss they experienced as a result of
HIV-AIDS in Australia, almost all this group of 16 men from the mid-
dle generation recalled deaths of friends, partners, or acquaintances.
Interestingly, given what many scholars have observed about their
generation’s involvement in building a stronger gay community both
during and after the worst of the epidemic, only four men referred to it
in their interviews.
It is clear from the accounts of the men who recalled the deaths of
friends and partners that the experiences profoundly affected them at the
time. Samuel (aged 57) recalled many funerals he attended; the one man
in this generation who was living with HIV-AIDS, Stuart (aged 49), said
that his friends were dying all around him as he ‘became sick’; Jerome
(aged 49), remembered visiting hospital ‘three of four times a week every
week for long periods’; and Scott (aged 45), who was travelling in Europe
and the USA when the epidemic began, recalled, ‘when I came back from
overseas … so many people I had known … were no longer there’.
As mentioned, four men from this group referred to gay solidarity
along with loss. Two of these men did so when describing the effect of
the disease on gay men in general. The first, Noel, aged 58, observed
that the disease ‘had a positive impact on the gay rights movement’;
and the second, Des, aged 50, noted ‘the gay community united in
solidarity’. The other two men demonstrated their involvement in gay
politics and community-building in the accounts they gave of care work
they did, and in the case of one still do for PLWHA. Trevor, aged 49, said
that he and his partner
looked after people who have been dying with AIDS. … We’ve gone
to fundraisers. … The last few years, we’ve been making up hampers
to help people with AIDS. We buy socks and tee shirts and food for
them at Christmas time. It’s usually 20 people that we contribute
towards making up hampers [for]. We spend … close to a thousand
dollars on these hampers. … It’s the only way we can really help in
the gay community.
Finally, Samuel, aged 57, who still works with PLWHA, said that when
the epidemic was at its fiercest, he ‘worked with people with HIV-AIDS
and have quite a lot of clients who have died of AIDS’.
Young generation
Three men interviewed for this chapter were HIV positive at the time
of interview, two of whom were from the young generation. Included
in these two men’s interviews were frank, poignant stories of how, on
learning that they were HIV positive, they adjusted to the loss of who
they might have been and become. Julius, aged 34, said ‘I found myself
somewhere I never thought I would be.’ Unwilling to expand on this
statement, he limited himself to saying that he had learned to love
himself more, to enjoy life more, and, in his words, ‘to set myself goals,
which I never did before. I have begun to live day by day.’
The other HIV-positive man from the young generation was Jason,
who was aged 35 at the time of interview. He provided a fuller account
of how he learned to adjust to the loss of who he might have been. It
took him five years, he said, ‘to pull [him]self back together mentally’.
When he was diagnosed, he was 22, when many of the HIV treatments
were still in an experimental phase, and Jason was terrified.
The remaining six men from the young generation who drew on the
third narrative to explain the effect of HIV-AIDS on their sense of self
spoke of loss in isolation did not refer to any experience of gay commu-
nity solidarity. All of them had stories of losing friends, partners or, in
the case of one interviewee who was a health worker, clients as well:
When friends have died or been really ill and I have been dealing
with that in my personal life, and with HIV prevention as work, I
have almost felt that my life was defined by the virus, that it was
part of who I was, even though I am not [an HIV-] positive person.
( Joseph, aged 35)
Another man in his 30s was so affected by the thought of the disease
that he was unable to visit a friend in hospital who was dying from it:
‘he was demented and I did not have the courage to do it’. Despite this,
and despite being exposed to the disease in the 12 months before his
interview and undertaking the post-exposure prophylaxis treatment
and speaking to counsellors at the time Robert, aged 38, still began his
narrative account of the effect of HIV-AIDS on his sense of self with
the sentence ‘In some ways, I have not really confronted the question
of HIV-AIDS.’ Paradoxical as this might seem, what Robert might have
been saying is that he had not yet found a way to deal with the terror it
aroused in him, that, in a sense, he was still in its thrall – so much so,
that at the conclusion of his answer, he rationalised his fear thus: ‘it is
a fact of life, like a lot of other risks we take. People drive cars and a lot
of people die from car accidents.’
Intuitively, and on the basis of what is known about the period from
other research, it makes sense that more men from the middle genera-
tion than from the young generation (twice as many) spoke of loss and
solidarity, for theirs was the generation most immediately affected by
the epidemic and from whom the largest number of volunteers and
workers came who devoted themselves to the work of recovery.40
Conclusion
On comparing the two generations of men interviewed for this chapter,

only minor variations would appear to exist between how they drew on
the three principal narratives to explain the effect of HIV-AIDS on their
sense of self.
In regard to the first narrative – fear, vulnerability, and stigma – while
the men from the pre-HIV generation recalled the rise in stigma that
occurred in the early years of the epidemic, their chief fear centred on
the disease’s mode of transmission, that is, specifically which sexual
practices involved risk and which did not, and whether in the years
before modes of transmission were known or the test was available
their sexual history meant that they had contracted the virus. Any fear
or sense of vulnerability the men from the post-HIV generation expe-
rienced mostly concerned their present-day sexual practices, and in
general terms whether there was any possibility they had ‘slipped up’
or would ‘slip up’, in other words would engage in unsafe (unprotected
anal) sex, in the words of an interviewee in his 20s, ‘in the heat of the
moment’. What experience the young men had of stigma seemed to be
a carryover from the initial outburst of homophobia that accompanied
the onset of HIV-AIDS in Australia in the mid to late 1980s. These men
grew up in a time when knowledge of HIV-AIDS was widely known,

and yet as Angus (aged 23) explained (above), sex education classes in
secondary school could be occasions for public outburst of homophobia
that conflated homosexuality and HIV-AIDS.41
The second principal narrative – changed sexual practice – was used
similarly by both age cohorts. The men generally spoke of the impor-
tance that they placed on their knowledge of safe-sex practices, while
a small number from both age cohorts explained how they understood
and practised monogamy as the best defence against the threat of the
disease. The exception to these two trends was a minor narrative that
two men from the post-HIV cohort used to explain how they employed
a strategy of selectively engaging in sexual encounters with men whom
they judged not to be HIV positive.
The third principal narrative – loss and gay solidarity – showed only
one difference between the two cohorts. This was that almost all the
men from the pre-HIV cohort who made use of the narrative had experi-
enced deaths of friends or partners, whereas only a handful of men from
the post-HIV cohort had similar experiences. Their relatively limited
experience of death from AIDS might help to explain why the disease
held more terror for the men from the post-HIV generation than for
those from the older generation. Expression of gay community solidar-
ity was fairly evenly represented by generation, with the men from the
middle generation showing a slightly more practical engagement.
A clear, although not especially significant, generation difference
existed in relation to the third principal narrative, loss and solidarity.
The men from the pre-HIV generation reported experiencing both loss
and solidarity, often describing a causal connection between the two,
while those from the post-HIV generation experienced only loss in
response to witnessing the deaths of friends or lovers. This makes sense
historically because, as discussed, most published research identified
the community-building that took place in the midst of the epidemic
as a marked, positive response to the disease. This community-building
occurred in the 1990s, when the older men were able to take part in the
rebuilding or witnessed it or its benefits, but when the men from the
post-HIV generation were still children or teenagers and only begin-
ning to become aware of the disease. What differences in attitude that
exist between the two generations of men were results of the men’s
birth years and the social/medical context prevailing as they grew to
adulthood.
Conclusion
The important thing is that we need to have a much

deeper understanding of these … gay … communities.
They are not one single community. We tend to gen-
eralise hugely, and so the more research that is carried
on, the more oral histories, the more intelligence-
seeking information about patterns of life, the better
the future will be for people like us.
(Amery, aged 82, Sydney)
Two underlying ideas connect the stories that my interviewees told me

and the larger stories that I have told in the foregoing chapters. They
are first, a propensity for gay men to conform to existing, mostly het-
erosexual patterns of relationships, and second, to create relationships
that more closely suit their circumstances and needs. These impulses
to conform to heterosexual norms or to create new patterns of rela-
tions and behaviour mean that the relational lives of gay men are both
similar to and different from those of the heterosexual majority. Gay
relationships that are similar makes them easy for outsiders to identify
and understand; those that are different require outsiders to take more
time to understand them. I hope this book goes some way to help gay
men understand the variety of relationship types available to them and
where those came from that are different from the relationships their
straight friends enjoy and why they were fashioned the way they are.
I hope also it goes some way to help straight readers understand the
reasons for gay relationships being as they are and why they were cre-
ated both in the shape of heterosexual relationships and differently in
order to suit gay men’s social and sexual needs.
165
In the paragraphs that follow, I summarise some of the more impor-

tant findings from the preceding chapters, beginning with Chapter 1,
where I explained when and how I recruited the 97 men for the interna-
tional sample and the 80 men for the all-Australian sample. The stories
the single men told were considered in the context of increasing num-
bers of people in their 20s and 30s living single lives (Chapter 2), and
two myths about friendship and loneliness. My analysis of the stories
the single men told showed that almost half them (n = 41) led full and
active social lives. I found also that age was not a crucial factor in men’s
experience of being single, and also strong evidence of their capacity
to practise friendship well. This last finding was significant because it
helps explain why, contrary to negatives myths, a single life is not a
lonely life and that, again, contrary to negative myths, gay men can
maintain strong, mutually beneficial friendships.
Examination of the stories the men told about their intimate lives
(Chapter 3) showed that gay men’s long-lasting relationships most
strongly resembled the companionate marriage in quality and nature and
were not overly sexualised, except in the first, early blush of romance, or
if the men conducted open relationships. In support of this argument, I
found evidence in the men’s relationship stories of three companionate
traits, which I identified as a cosy togetherness, companionship, and
partnership. Evidence for cosy togetherness came in men’s accounts
of the physical intimacy of sharing a bed to ‘snuggle up’ and caring
for one another’s wellbeing. Companionship is more complex, and
evidence for it was found in men’s accounts of the emotional support
their partner provided. The relative insignificance of sexual relations
in the stories the men told of their relationships was notable because
first, it is often assumed that sex plays the most prominent role in gay
men’s relationships, and that gay men are highly sexed and sexualised;
and second, because of how similar these long-lasting relationships are
to the image of long-term heterosexual couple relations. Two groups of
men spoke of the sex in their relationships. The first group did so when
referring to an early period in their relationship when they had a lot of
sex, or to the fact that their relationship was now less sexualised or had
transformed so that sex was only one means of expressing their affective
bond. The second group of men referred to sex in the context of their
relationship as an open relationship. Finally, I found a minor narrative
as well in the men’s stories about love, how they understood it, and
how they expressed it. Generally speaking, I inferred love’s presence in
the men’s relationships when they used companionship or partnership
narratives, which was the case for a small handful of men from cities
Conclusion 167
including Manchester, Melbourne, Sydney, and New York. Like many

of their straight male counterparts, the men interviewed for this book
showed a strong reluctance to use the word ‘love’ when speaking about
the qualities of their couple relationships.
Fourteen Australian men and eight men from the international sample
had stories to tell of fatherhood (Chapter 4). These men came to be fathers
as the result of former relationships with women or ‘everyday experi-
ments’ (for example, with a lesbian couple or surrogacy). Heterosexual
fatherhood represented the experience of the large majority of gay men
interviewed for this chapter. Non-heterosexual fatherhood represented
the experience of five men from this sample, three of whom were in
their 30s. The fatherhood stories the men interviewed for this chapter
related ranged from accounts of intense, involved fathering – including
those from four of the five non-heterosexual fathers, as well as men in
their 50s and one in his 60s – to relationships that were regular and
close, to more distant relationships, and no relationship at all. The
accounts of intense, involved fathering reflected an explicit dedication
and willingness to commit to fathering, which is in contrast to prevail-
ing stereotypes of (a) men’s general unwillingness to devote time to car-
ing for their children unless asked to so by their wife or female partner,
and (b) gay men’s self-centredness.
The focus of Chapters 5 and 6 was on why a majority of younger men
favoured gay marriage and why a majority of the men aged 51 and older did
not. My analysis showed that more than 40 per cent of the international
sample favoured gay marriage, and that another 20 per cent favoured
civil union, but not gay marriage. Therefore, more than 60 per cent
of the men interviewed for this book were in favour of legalising same-
sex relationships. I found a number of themes when I looked at the men’s
arguments about legalising same-sex relationships. The younger men
(aged 51 and under) mainly argued in favour of legal/property equal-
ity, relational equality, and recognition of relationship success through
marriage. In doing so, they were using arguments similar to those
that have been in circulation in the West since the push for marriage
equality began in the 1990s. The close correlation between the men’s
arguments favouring gay marriage and arguments in the literature on
same-sex marriage suggested strong cross-germination of ideas between
scholars in gay and lesbian studies and GLBT activists in the West.
While the older men (51 and over) drew on similar narratives about
legal/property equality and relational equality, some of them saw sup-
port for gay marriage as a continuation of their earlier involvement in
social activism, beginning in the days of gay liberation. Others among
them drew on practical arguments about the suitability of tried and true
cohabitation arrangements. These men said that if their relationships
were serial, stable, and monogamous, they were married in all but name
and that therefore gay marriage was unnecessary. More than 20 per cent
of the sample opposed gay marriage. Here, the men’s principal argu-
ments were that many gay men had no wish to marry, that marriage
was a patriarchal institution, and that gay marriage would represent a
return to heteronormativity for gays and lesbians.
Different generations of gay men – men who were sexually active
when HIV-AIDS was first diagnosed in the West (the early 1980s) and
men in their 20s and 30s and sexually active in the early 2000s – mostly
regarded the threat of the disease similarly. My analysis of the men’s
stories in Chapter 7 showed strong evidence for the effectiveness of the
safe-sex message. I found also evidence of greater willingness among
men in their 20s to take ‘strategic risks’, which is in line with other
published research. By contrast, I found no evidence of willingness
to take such risks from the men who belonged to the pre-HIV genera-
tion, who were sexually active when the disease was first diagnosed in
Australia and other western countries, who had first-hand experiences
of the havoc it caused gay men’s friendship networks and communities
in the 1980s and 1990s. What I did find from these men, however, were
recollections of risky sexual behaviour in the years before the onset of
HIV-AIDS and memories of the fear these caused them when news of
the mode of transmission became public. Unlike a small group of men
from the post-HIV generation who were willing to engage in risky sex,
the older men showed strong signs of having absorbed public health
messages about safe sex and duly adjusted their sexual practices.
Unlike positivist scholars, I did not include a control group of het-
erosexuals, against whose relationship stories I could compare those of
the gay men interviewed for the book. Instead, I relied on the work of
other scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Elizabeth Beck-
Gernsheim, Lynn Jamieson, Martha Nussbaum, and Nancy Polikoff,
among others, to provide insight into the state and status of hetero-
sexual relationships in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century
in the West. I used their accounts of changing or persisting patterns of
behaviour as a basis for comparing the stories my interviewees told me
about their lives as single men, their experiences of long-lasting rela-
tionships and fatherhood, their views on gay marriage, for and against,
and their experiences of living in the midst of HIV-AIDS.
The book continues to challenge myths about gay men and their rela-
tionships, namely, that they are sex-obsessed, incapable of sustained,
Conclusion 169
long-lasting relationships, and live lonely lives if single. Like Dennis

Altman writing in the 1970s,1 I hope to live long enough to see the
end of the sexual apartheid that has beset the West since the late
nineteenth century when doctors and lawyers began distinguishing
between and moralising about human sexual behaviour on the basis of
individuals’ erotic desire. And, like many other researchers in this field,
I see a close connection between sexual freedom and human rights. To
me, it seems very strange, as John Boswell pointed out in the 1990s
before his death from HIV, that it is easier for some people to speak
about individuals who commit murder or genocide than to mention
men who sleep with men.2
At the very least, what I think this book has shown is how alike gay
men are to the rest of the population – how alike we are in how we
manage our friendships and relationships, and yet how distinctive and
unique the experimental relationships and families we create can be.
When greater numbers of straight people come to realise and accept
this, I suspect they will have less need to fear gay men and more rea-
son to accept the same extraordinary variety in humans that Alfred
Kinsey found and celebrated in his gall wasps. I believe this book’s most
important contribution to a better understanding of gay men’s lives
and relationships is in emphasising how their lives have been and are
socially constructed in response to varying degrees of social tolerance,
and how gay men have shaped their relationships either by conforming
to dominant, heterosexual patterns or by shaping them through experi-
mentation to suit their own needs.
Appendixes
Table A.1 International sample, 2009–2011
Code name Age City* Occupation field
Randall 87 Mel Human services

Herbert 82 Mel Clerical
Amery 82 Syd Education
Clancy 81 Mel Retail
Godfrey 81 Syd Education
Hector 81 Mel Small business
Drake 77 Mel Media
Ambrose 77 Mel Education
Basil 75 Auc Retail
Lucas 75 Auc Transport
Colin 72 NY Education
Christian 72 Syd Law
Jeffery 72 Auc Transport
Arran 70 Mel Human services
Ashton 70 Syd Small business
Sean 67 Auc Small business
Baden 65 Mel Small business
Alfie 63 Man Clerical
Fergus 63 Man Education
Parry 63 NY Business
Bryce 63 Man Entertainment
Arthur 62 Lon Health
Hugh 62 Mel Education
Alec 62 Syd Research
Anselm 61 Mel Education
Ward 59 NY Education
Marvin 59 LA Clerical
Bernard 59 HK Small business
Raymond 58 HK Business
Austin 57 Auc Education
Cam 56 LA Welfare
Logan 56 Auc Business
Isaac 56 Mel Health
Ryan 53 Lon Media
Hilton 53 NY Human services
Zachary 52 HK Construction & bldg
Ben 52 Man Education
Mike 52 Mel Bureaucracy
(continued)
170
Appendixes 171
Table A.1 Continued
Tate 51 Lon Business

Earl 51 NY Business
Buck 51 HK Business
Calvin 51 Mel Business
Nathan 50 Auc Small business
Carl 49 Auc Education
Everett 49 NY Human services
Ethan 49 Lon Clerical
Danny 48 HK Media
Fred 47 Lon Construction & bldg
Alvin 47 NY Education
Teddy 47 Mum Health
Duncan 47 HK Business
Timothy 46 NY Human services
Jude 46 LA Education
Eddie 45 Man Education
Kendall 44 NY Finance
Edmund 44 Mum Agriculture
Jonathon 44 Lon Business
Callum 43 Mel Education
Gabriel 43 Auc Health
Joe 42 HK Entertainment
Jacob 42 Mel Research
Noah 42 Auc Education
Felix 41 HK Clerical
Connor 41 Lon Retail
Charlie 40 HK Entertainment
Kyle 40 Auc Business
Guy 38 Lon Business
Liam 37 Syd Education
Anton 35 Lon Law
Evan 35 LA IT
Alexander 34 HK IT
Findlay 33 NY Clerical
Aiden 33 Lon Law
Dylan 32 Syd Clerical
Jackson 32 NY Welfare
Leo 31 Syd Human services
Gavin 31 Auc Retail
Jem 29 HK Human services
Curtis 29 HK Health
Eamon 28 Lon Construction & bldg
Howard 28 Mum Health
Denis 27 Mel Entertainment
(continued)
172 Appendixes
Table A.1 Continued
William 27 Mum Business

Bailey 26 Man Education
Kenny 24 HK Business
Giiles 23 Mum Education
Kim 23 Mum Education
Garth 23 Mel Education
Jarrad 23 Mel Education
Zane 22 Mel Education
Hayden 21 Mel Education
Jamie 21 Mel Education
Todd 21 Mel Education
Dominic 20 HK Education
Toby 19 Mum Health
Brody 19 Mel Education
Dougal 18 Mel Retail
* City codes: Auc = Auckland, New Zealand; HK = Hong Kong, China; Lon = London, UK; LA =
Los Angeles, USA; Man = Manchester, UK; Mel = Melbourne, Australia; Mum = Mumbai,
India; NY = New York City, USA; Syd = Sydney, Australia.
Table A.2 Australian sample, 2001–2003
Reginald 79 Mel Clerical

Gerald 75 Mel Construction & bldg
Vernon 75 Ade Entertainment
Leslie 74 Hbt Education
Chester 71 Mel Small business
Harold 71 NSWa Education
Geoffrey 69 NSWb Media
Ronald 68 Mel Education
Charles 67 NSWb Businessman
Kelvin 66 Mel Education
Maurice 65 NSWb Small business
Kenneth 65 Mel Business
Oscar 65 Mel Food
John 65 Hbt Bureaucracy
Brendan 64 Hbt Bureaucracy
Clive 64 Cbr Bureaucracy
Terrence 64 Ade Education
Douglas 63 Mel Health
Leonard 63 Ade Retail
Lindsay 62 Ade Education
(continued)
Appendixes 173
Table A.2 Continued
Barry 62 NSWb Agriculture

Edward 60 Cbr Media
Lionel 59 Mel Education
Noel 58 Hbt Education
Roy 58 Hbt Construction & bldg
Richard 58 Syd Education
Samuel 56 NSWb Welfare
Ross 54 Hbt Bureaucracy
Patrick 53 Hbt Media
Thomas 52 NSWa Education
Kevin 52 Mel Business
Bill 52 Mel Education
Donald 52 Ade Health
Michael 52 Mel Education
Graham 52 Mel Bureaucracy
Henry 50 NSWa Human services
Des 50 Syd Health
Trevor 49 Mel Food
Stuart 49 Mel IT
Jerome 49 NSWb Business
Nigel 49 Cbr Bureaucracy
Glen 49 NSWa Transport
Bob 48 NSWb Media
Alan 47 NSWa Education
Simon 46 Cbr Construction & bldg
Neil 46 Mel Bureaucracy
James 45 Hbt Education
Scott 45 Mel Education
Roger 44 Cbr Education
Mathew 42 NSWa Law
Ivan 40 NSWa Health
Ken 40 NSWa Agriculture
Drew 39 NSWa Small business
Robert 38 Mel IT
Travis 38 NSWa Transport
Neville 37 Mel Education
Andy 37 Mel Food
Alex 37 Hbt Bureaucracy
Jeremy 36 Syd Finance
Joseph 35 Mel Human services
Daniel 35 Mel Human services
Jason 35 Mel Education
Julius 34 Mel Education
Paul 33 Mel Entertainment
(continued)
174 Appendixes
Table A.2 Continued
Tony 33 Mel Law

Mick 33 NSWa Transport
Luke 32 NSWa Education
Adrian 30 Syd Finance
Brian 30 NSWa Transport
Vincent 30 Mel Education
Harry 28 NSWa Human services
Ian 28 Hbt Bureaucracy
David 28 NSWa Human services
Mark 25 Mel Education
Myles 24 Syd Clerical
Lachlan 24 Syd Clerical
Adam 24 NSWa Education
Troy 24 Syd Education
Angus 23 Mel Education
Jack 22 Syd Bureaucracy
* City codes: Ade = Adelaide; Cbr = Canberra; Hbt = Hobart; Mel = Melbourne; NSWa =
country town in southern New South Wales; NSWb = country town in central New South
Wales; Syd = Sydney. Because the two country towns in NSW were relatively small, their
names have been disguised so as to protect the interviewees’ identity.
Table A.3 Relationship status
Age cohorts Single Relationship Total
70+ 8 7 15
50–70 11 17 28
30–50 17 17 34
≤30 6 14 20
Note: Single n = 42 or 43 per cent of the 97 men from

the international sample. Of these 42 men, 30 had
previously been in relationships, which on average
were 6.5 years in length. Relationships n = 55 or 57
per cent of the sample.
Table A.4 Single men
Name Age City
Amery 82 Syd
Clancy 81 Mel
Godfrey 81 Syd
Ambrose 77 Mel
Basil 75 Auc
(continued)
Appendixes 175
Table A.4 Continued
Name Age City
Lucas 75 Auc
Jeffery 72 Auc
Colin 72 NY
Fergus 63 Man
Alec 62 Syd
Anselm 61 Mel
Marvin 59 LA
Austin 57 Auc
Cam 56 LA
Ryan 53 Lon
Hilton 53 NY
Mike 52 Mel
Calvin 51 Mel
Earl 51 NY
Carl 49 Auc
Ethan 49 Lon
Everett 49 NY
Teddy 47 Mu
Jude 46 LA
Timothy 46 NY
Kendall 44 NY
Felix 41 HK
Connor 41 Lon
Kyle 40 Auc
Charlie 40 HK
Guy 38 Lon
Evan 35 LA
Anton 35 Lon
Alexander 34 HK
Dylan 32 Syd
Leo 31 Syd
Curtis 29 HK
Eamon 28 Lon
Garth 23 Mel
Jarrad 23 Mel
Giles 23 Mu
Dougal 18 Mel
176 Appendixes
Table A.5 Fatherhood settings
Code Age Married/union &/or children
Bernard 59 Adopted s
Gabriel 43 Civil U + 1s
Neville 37 No + 2d (cousins)
Joseph 35 No + 2s (foster)
Tony 33 1d
Hector 81 55Married* + 1d
John 65 40Married + 2d
Douglas 63 39Married + 4d, 1s
Leslie 74 36Married + 3d, 1s
Randall 87 35Married* + 4ch
Gerald 75 31Married + 2d, 1s
Anselm 61 26Married* + 1d
Drake 77 24Married* + 2d
Henry 50 20Married + 2s, 2d
Terrence 64 20Married + 1s, 1d
Hilton 53 18Married + 2d
Austin 57 15Married* + 3 s
Ross 54 13Married + 1d, 2g/d
Clive 64 11Married + 2s, 1d
Trevor 49 08Married + 1s
Roy 58 08Married + 2s
Scott 45 07Married + 1d
* Length of marriage inferred from material provided in

transcripts; years not specified in interview. ch = children;
d = daughter; s = son; g/d = granddaughter; g/s = grandson.
55Married = married for 55 years.
Notes
Introduction
1. Royal College of Nursing and UNISON (2004) ‘Not just a friend: best practice
guidance on health care for lesbian, gay and bisexual service users and their fam-
ilies’: http://www.asaging.org/lgbtch-search?title=nursing&body=nursing,
accessed 4 December 2012.
2. GLBT is the acronym for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender.
3. D. Altman (1989) ‘Aids and the Reconceptualization of Homosexuality’
in D. Altman et al. Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? Essays from the
International Conference on Gay and Lesbian Studies (London: GMP), p. 35.
4. P. Robinson (2008) The Changing World of Gay Men (Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
5. Having been born in the early 1950s, I belong to the baby-boomer genera-
tion. I was in my 50s when I first sent my editor a proposal to write this
book, and in my late 50s when I sent her the final manuscript. I was edu-
cated at Melbourne University and Oxford University, and was awarded my
PhD as a mature-age student in 2007.
6. F. Bongiorno [Review of] Robinson Changing World in Journal of Australian
Studies, 33(3), September 2009. On the myth of the gay male world as
a middle-class creation, see, for example, George Chauncey (1994) Gay
New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World,
1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books), p. 10.
7. P. Shahani (2008) Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India
(New Delhi: Sage), p. 50.
8. C. Jenkins (2006) ‘Male Sexuality and HIV: The Case of Male-to-Male Sex’
(Lucknow and London: Naz Foundation International); copies available at
http://www.nfi.net/risks.htm, accessed 8 December 2012.
9. The information sheet I sent potential interviewees said that my research
purpose was to interview gay men on the topic of gay age and ageing, and
explained that gay men’s life stories were one of my chief research interests.
10. D. Altman (2001) Global Sex (Sydney: Allen & Unwin), pp. 86–7.
11. S. Seidman (1992) Embattled Eros: Sexual Politics and Ethics in Contemporary
America (London: Routledge), p. 191.
12. J. Boswell (1980) Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People
in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 26–7.
13. N. Elias (2000 [1939]) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic
Investigations, trans. E. Jephcott with some notes and corrections by the
author. E. Dunning, J. Goudsblom, and S. Mennell (eds), rev. edn (Oxford:
Blackwell), pp. 414–21.
14. Robinson Changing World, pp. 8–13.
15. D. Altman (1982) The Homosexualization of America, the Americanization of the
Homosexual (New York: St Martin’s Press), p. 22.
177
178 Notes
16. For more discussion of the idea of gay community, see P. Robinson (2009)
‘Gay Men’s Experience of Community in Australia’, Journal of Australian
Studies, 33(1), 67–78.
17. On assimilationism, see, for example, P. Moore (2004) Beyond Shame:
Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality (Boston, MA: Beacon
Press), and R.C. Savin-Williams (2005) The New Gay Teenager (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press).
18. P. Simpson (2011) ‘Differentiating the Self: How Gay Men in Manchester
Respond to Ageing and Gay Ageism’, Unpublished PhD Thesis: University of
Manchester, p. 76.
19. Shahani Globalization, Love and (Be)longing.
20. S. Khan (1996) ‘Culture, Sexualities, and Identities: Men Who Have
Sex with Men in South Asia’ (Lucknow and London: Naz Foundation
International): http://www.nfi.net/articles_essays.htm, accessed 6 December
2012; J. Seabrook (1995) Notes from Another India (London: Pluto Press), and
J. Seabrook (1999) Love in a Different Climate: Men Who Have Sex with Men in
India (London: New Left Books).
21. A. Holleran (1990) Dancer from the Dance (London: Penguin Books).
22. For a more thorough discussion of the use of the term ‘gay’ to describe same-
sex-attracted men, see Robinson Changing World, pp. xii–xiii.
23. Khan ‘Culture, Sexualities, and Identities’.
24. K. Mannheim (1997 [1952]) ‘The Problem of Generations’ in M.A. Hardy
(ed.) Studying Aging and Social Change: Conceptual and Methodological Issues
(Thousand Oaks: Sage), pp. 22–65.
25. Mannheim ‘The Problem’, p. 24.
26. Robinson Changing World, p. 53.
27. C. Phillipson (2003) ‘Intergenerational Conflict and the Welfare State:
American and British Perspectives’ in A. Walker (ed.) The New Generational
Contract: Intergenerational Relations, Old Age and Welfare (London: Routledge),
p. 212.
28. C. Attias-Donfut and S. Arber ‘Equity and Solidarity Across the Generations’
in S. Arber and C. Attias-Donfut (eds) The Myth of Generational Conflict: The
Family and State in Aging Societies (Oxford: Routledge), pp. 7–8.
29. M. Bernard, J. Phillips, C. Phillipson, and J. Ogg (2000) ‘Continuity and
Change: The Family and Community Life of Older People in the 1990s’ in
Arber and Attias-Donfut The Myth of Generational Conflict, p. 216.
30. Attias-Donfut and Arber ‘Equity and Solidarity’, p. 3
31. K. Plummer (1995) Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds
(London: Routledge).
32. D. Carr (2001) ‘Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity’
in L.P. Hinchman and S.K. Hinchman (eds) Memory, Identity, Community:
The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences (New York: State University of
New York Press), pp. 16–17.
33. For more discussion of the self as narratively constituted, see Robinson
Changing World, pp. 6–8.
34. S. de Beauvoir (1977) Old Age, trans. P. O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books); N. Elias (1987) The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell); P. Laslett (2000) The World We Have Lost: Further Explored,
3rd edn (London: Routledge).
Notes 179
35. U. Beck and E. Beck-Gernsheim (2002) Individualization: Institutionalized

Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage), p. 133.
36. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2011, the median age of
death for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in South Australia was 50.3
years for both males and females; http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/
Latestproducts/3302.0Main%20Features72011?opendocument&tabname=
Summary&prodno=3302.0&issue=2011&num=&view=, accessed 6 December
2012.
37. M. Mohanty (ed.) (2004) Class, Caste, Gender (New Delhi: Sage), p. 20.
38. G. Pritchard Pink News, January 2008: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2008/
01/21/gay-nursing-home-opens-in-germany, accessed 3 December 2012.
See also following piece by staff reporter Pink News, July 2009: http://www.
pinknews.co.uk/2009/07/10/swedish-nursing-home-may-cater-specifically-
for-gays, accessed 3 December 2012, and K. Connolly ‘LGBT housing
project unites generations out in Berlin’, The Guardian, 28 October 2012. For
Australia, see, for example, A. Simmons ‘Aged care forcing gays “back into the
closet”’, ABC News, 12 July 2010: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-07-12/
aged-care-forcing-gays-back-into-the-closet/901768, accessed 20 December
2012; T. Nightingale ‘Advocates hail first aged care facilities for gays’, ABC
News, 25 May 2012: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-25/first-aged-care-
facilities-for-gay-seniors/4034230, accessed 20 December 2012.
39. E. White (1986) States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (London: Pan Books),
p. 62.
1 Collecting 97 Gay Men’s Life Stories

1. See Tables A.1 and A.2 of Appendixes.
2. Chapter 4.
3. For details, see Table A.2.
4. For details, see Table A.1.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 3–4; R. Sennett and J. Cobb (1973) The
Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Alfred Knopf).
6. Robinson Changing World, ch. 4.
7. G. Robb (2004) Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (London:
Pan Macmillan), pp. 61–3.
8. A web-cam is a small camera that can be attached to or is built into a com-
puter to allow visual as well as audio communications.
9. Interviews continued via Skype until December 2011.
10. E. White (1986) States of Desire (London: Pan Books).
11. I received a positive response to my advertisement posted on the university’s
G&L website. Four men contacted me from San Francisco, three from Los
Angeles, as well as those already mentioned who lived in New York. Because
my travel plans were fixed and my budget constrained, I was not able to
travel to San Francisco for interviews, which was a pity given the city’s long
history of gay social and political activism.
12. Interviews held indoors were with Colin (aged 72), Parry (aged 63), Ward
(aged 59), Hilton (aged 53), Finlay (aged 33).
180 Notes
13. Colin (aged 72), Parry (aged 63), Ward (aged 59), Hilton (aged 53), Earl (aged
51), Everett (aged 49), Alvin (aged 47), Timothy (aged 46), Kendall (aged 46),
Finlay (aged 33), Jackson (aged 32).
14. M. Davis (1992) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York:
Random House), pp. 12, 244–50; see pp. 232–6 for discussion of munici-
pal regulations designed to harass homeless people in chic areas of Los
Angeles.
15. The four LA men were Marvin (aged 59), Cam (aged 56), Jude (aged 46), Evan
(aged 35).
16. The Crown Prince of Gujarat, Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, is a long-
standing advocate of aged-care accommodation for elderly gay men in India
generally and specifically in Gujarat.
17. I was in Mumbai 23–28 December 2009.
18. Arthur (aged 62), Teddy (aged 47), Edmund (aged 44), Howard (aged 28),
William (aged 27), Giles (aged 23), Kim (aged 23), Toby (aged 19).
19. G. Herhsatter (1999) Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in
Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press).
20. Bernard (aged 59), Zachary (aged 52), Buck (aged 51).
21. T.S.K. Kong (2004) ‘Queer at Your Own Risk: Marginality, Community and
Hong Kong Gay Male Bodies’, Sexualities, 7(5), 5–30.
22. Kong ‘Queer at Your Own Risk’, p. 13.
23. http://tcjm.org, accessed 9 December 2012.
24. Randall (aged 87), Herbert (aged 82), Clancy (aged 81), Hector (aged 81),
Ambrose (aged 77), Drake (aged 77), Charlie (aged 70), Baden (aged 65),
Hugh (aged 62), Anselm (aged 61), Isaac (aged 56), Mike (aged 52), Howard
(aged 51), Callum (aged 43), Jacob (aged 42), Denis (aged 27), Garth (aged
23), Jarrad (aged 23), Zane (aged 22), Hayden (aged 21), Jamie (aged 21),
Todd (aged 21), Brody (aged 19), Dougal (aged 18).
25. I included the sole Welsh interviewee in the English part of the sample and
did so because his anonymity would have been compromised had I cited
only one Welsh interviewee. In doing so, my intention was not to assume
British cultural or ethnic homogeneity.
26. For international appeal of the Sydney gay and lesbian Mardi Gras festival,
see G. Carbery (1995) A History of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras
(Melbourne: Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives), pp. 79, 89, 159, 177,
191–7, 218; for growth and development of Sydney gay scene, see Robinson
Changing World, chs 5 and 6.
27. Australian Bureau of Statistics Quick Stats, October 2007.
28. According to its web page, Pride history group is a ‘not for profit commu-
nity history group which collects information about Sydney’s gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender and queer past’.
29. Associate Professor Donna Baines of McMasters University put me in touch
with Michael Stevens when she was on sabbatical at Auckland University.
30. Auckland (1,303,068), source: 2006 Census of Population and Dwellings: Report
on Initial Results for Auckland Region, Auckland Regional Council, 2007;
Melbourne (3,592,591), Sydney (4,119,190), source: Australian Bureau Quick
Stats, October 2007; London (7,172,036), Manchester City (439,500), source:
2001 Census, Office of National Statistics, United Kingdom; Greater Mumbai
(16.4 million), source: UN-Habitat Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, The
Notes 181
Challenge of Slums (London: Earthscan), Part IV: ‘Summary of City Case Studies’
pp.195–228; Los Angeles (9,862,049, 2008 estimate), New York (19,280,753,
2005–7 estimates), source: US Census Bureau Quick Facts; Hong Kong
(7,067,800, 2010 estimate) website of the Census and Statistics Department,
The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
31. For the nature and composition of clandestine gay worlds before gay lib-
eration, see, for example, G. Chauncey (1994) Gay New York: Gender, Urban
Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic
Books); C. Heap (2009) Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American
Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); C. Upchurch
(2009) Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (Berkeley:
University of California Press); G. Wotherspoon (1991) City of the Plain:
History of a Gay Sub-culture (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger).
32. See R.W. Connell (2010) ‘Two Cans of Paint: A Transsexual Story, with
Reflections on Gender Change and History’, Sexualities, 13, 3–19.
33. Chauncey Gay New York; J. Seabrook (1995) Notes from Another India (London:
Pluto Press); J. Seabrook (1999) Love in a Different Climate: Men Who Have Sex
with Men in India (London: New Left Books).
34. For provenance of ‘everyday experiments’, see J. Weeks (2000) Making Sexual
History (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 212ff.
2 Single Men
1. U. Beck and E. Beck-Gernsheim (1995) The Normal Chaos of Love, trans.
M. Ritter and J. Wiebel (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 145.
2. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim The Normal Chaos of Love, p. 145.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 160–1, 174.
5. J. D’Emilio and E.B. Freedman (1997) Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality
in America, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 302–4.
6. D. Altman (1982) The Homosexualization of America, the Americanization of the
Homosexual (New York: St Martin’s Press), p. 88.
8. For Australian data on one-person households, see, for example, http://
www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/1301.0Main+Features562012#,
accessed 7 September 2012. For United Kingdom data on families and house-
holds, see http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/family-demography/families-and-
households/2011/stb-families-households.html, accessed 7 September 2012.
For data on Germany, see Beck and Beck-Gernsheim The Normal Chaos of
Love, pp. 14–15, which shows, for example, that, in the late 1980s, 15 per cent
of Germans lived alone.
9. Special thanks to Dr Helen Marshall for her observation that increasing
numbers of single people might indicate a return to longstanding patterns
of delayed marriage.
10. M. Pollak (1986) ‘Male Homosexuality – or Happiness in the Ghetto’ in
P. Ariès and A. Béjin (eds) Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and
Present Times, trans. A. Forster (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), p. 57.
182 Notes
11. E. White (1980) States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (New York: Dutton),
p. 287.
12. A. Giddens (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism
in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 58.
14. H. Bech (1997) When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity, trans. T. Mequit
and T. Davies (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 97.
15. Bech When Men Meet, pp. 98–9.
17. In all, 41 men (or 42 per cent) from the international sample (n = 97) were
single at the time of interview.
18. See Table A.4.
19. Of the 34 men in the 50–70 age cohort, 17 were single.
20. In Australia, the life expectancy for a male aged 50 in 2008–10 was 81.7
years: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Products/54EE2DFDF75948
B3CA257943000CF07D?opendocument, accessed 9 September 2012. In Hong
Kong, the life expectancy for a male child born in 2010 was 80 years: http://
www.censtatd.gov.hk/statistical_literacy/educational_materials/statistics_
and_you/index.jsp, accessed 9 September 2012. In India, the life expectancy
for males in 2011 was 65.8 years: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.
com/2011-05-16/india/29548151_1_life-expectancy-indian-woman-indian-
man, accessed 9 September 2012. In New Zealand, the life expectancy of a
male child born in 2012 was 78.8 years: http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_
for_stats/snapshots-of-nz/nz-in-profile-2012/international-comparisons-
with-our-top-five-visitor-source-countries.aspx, accessed 9 September 2012.
In the United Kingdom, a male child born in 2009 was expected to live
until 78.4 years: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12771594, accessed 9
September 2012. In the USA, the life expectancy for a male aged 50 in 2008
was 79 years: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/births_deaths_
marriages_divorces/life_expectancy.html, accessed 9 September 2012.
22. All the men were asked in the interview if growing older had affected their
social life.
23. Mass gay events include circuit parties and leather parties. Cities such as
Berlin, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney are known
for their mass gay parties. In Melbourne and Sydney in the 1980s, these were
often known as ‘warehouse’ parties because they were held in derelict build-
ings, often warehouses located at shipping docks when freight transport was
undergoing the transformation from cargo to container. Mass leather parties
in Berlin are still held in derelict power stations, for example. The term ‘cir-
cuit’ party is a North American expression. See, for example, C. Carrington
(2007) ‘Circuit Culture: Ethnographic Reflections on Inequality, Sexuality,
and Life on the Gay Party Circuit’ in N. Teunis and Gilbert Herdt (eds)
Sexual Inequalities and Social Justice, with a foreword by R. Parker (Berkeley:
University of California Press), pp. 123–47. For more on circuit parties today,
see this US-based website, which provides monthly information on mass
parties in the Americas and Europe: http://www.justcircuit.com/Home.aspx,
accessed 9 October 2012.
24. For more on the gay scene, see Robinson Changing World, pp. 72–94.
Notes 183
25. Colin (72), New York; Ryan (53), London; Hilton (53), New York; Mike (52),
Melbourne; Calvin (51), Melbourne; Carl (49), Auckland; Jude (46), Los
Angeles.
26. For more on Greenwich Village as a meeting place for gays and lesbians
between the wars, see G. Chauncey (1994) Gay New York: Gender, Urban
Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic
Books), pp. 237–44; on Stonewall Inn and its place in history of gay libera-
tion in US, see D’Emilio and Freedman Intimate Matters, pp. 318–25.
27. More information about Body Electric, which was established in 1984, can
be found on its webpage: http://www.thebodyelectricschool.com, accessed
10 October 2012.
28. See Robinson Changing World, pp. 161–74.
29. P. Robinson (2011) ‘The Influence of Ageism on Relations between Old and
Young Gay Men’ in Y. Smaal and G. Willett (eds) Out Here: Gay and Lesbian
Perspectives VI (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing), pp. 188–200.
30. Bech When Men Meet, p. 12.
31. S.O. Murray (2000) Homosexualities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press),
p. 440.
32. Regarding specialisation of the commercial gay scene in, for example, Los
Angeles and New York in the 1970s and 1980s, see White States of Desire,
passim.
33. G. Robb (2004) Strangers: Homosexual Love in the C19th Century (London: Pan
Macmillan).
34. A. Stein (1997) Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation (Berkeley:
University of California Press), pp. 152–3.
35. Stein Sex and Sensibility, p. 152.
36. Earl (51), New York; Teddy (47), Mumbai; Charlie (40), Hong Kong; Anton
(35), London; Leo (31), Sydney; Eamon (28), London.
37. Earl (51), New York; and Charlie (40), Hong Kong.
38. Anton (35), London; Leo (31), Sydney; and Eamon (28), London.
39. Teddy (47), Mumbai.
41. In this quotation, Anton was not referring to bars or clubs for under-age
boys. Referring to ‘12-year-olds’ was ironical and meant to underline the
youthfulness of gay venues.
43. See Chapter 3 for more detailed discussion of works of U. Beck, E. Beck-
Gernsheim, A. Giddens, and the individualisation thesis.
44. S. Khan (1996) ‘Culture, Sexualities, and Identities’, London: Naz Foundation
International; http://www.nfi.net/articles_essays.htm, accessed 17 October
2012.
45. S. Nanda (1999) Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India, 2nd edn
(London: International Thomson), pp. 38, 40.
46. Khan ‘Culture, Sexualities, and Identities’.
47. J. Weeks (2000) Making Sexual History (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 216–20;
see also Robinson Changing World, pp. 149–50.
48. The men over 60 were Clancy (81), Melbourne; Godfrey (81), Sydney;
Ambrose (77), Melbourne; Basil (75), Auckland; Lucas (75), Auckland; Jeffrey
(72), Auckland; Alec (62), Sydney; and Anselm (61), Melbourne. The men
184 Notes
under 60 were Cam (56), Los Angeles; Everett (49), New York; Timothy (46),
New York; Kendall (44), New York; Kyle (40), Auckland; Guy (38), London.
49. Robinson Changing World, p. 140.
50. N. Elias (1987) The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell), p. 74.
51. Cam (56), Los Angeles; Everett (49), New York; Timothy (46), New York;
Kendall (44), New York; Kyle (40), Auckland; Guy (38), London.
52. For more on extended youthfulness of gay life course, see Robinson Changing
World, pp. 72–6, 153–4.
53. Godfrey (81), Sydney; Basil (75), Auckland; Jeffrey (72), Auckland; Alec
(62), Melbourne; Anselm (61), Melbourne; Connor (41), London; Guy (38),
London.
55. Jake is a social networking group for gay men in London. Its activities
include providing information sessions, lobbying, and social events: ‘Over
the years we have hosted hustings where Jake members grilled politicians on
their manifestos and the most glamorous parties in the hottest locations’;
see: http://www.jaketm.com, accessed 28 October 2012. Fridae is an equiva-
lent organisation for non-heterosexuals, operating in Bangkok, Hong Kong,
Singapore, and other capital cities in SE Asia. Its slogan is ‘empowering LGBT
Asia’. In May 2012, for example, it hosted a seminar in Bangkok on ‘LGBT
diversity in the workplace’, which focused on improving career prospects for
non-heterosexual employees of multinational corporations. Fridae’s website
is at http://www.fridae.asia/about, accessed 28 October 2012. One of the
non-heterosexual networking groups in Melbourne is Globe, which pro-
vides ‘GLBTI business, professional and like-minded people opportunities to
further develop their business interests and network with other profession-
als and business persons’; one of its better-known groups is Fruits in Suits,
which organises social events for gay and lesbian white-collar workers; see:
http://www.globemelbourne.com.au, accessed 28 October 2012.
56. For the shadowing quality of homophobia, see Altman The Homosexualization
of America, p. 22. For the homonormative push of white, gay elites, see, for
example, M. Warner (2000) The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the
Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 61–80,
and M.B. Sycamore (ed.) (2004) That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting
Assimilation (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint LLC), p. 2.
57. On increased workplace insecurity, see, for example, H. McQueen (1998)
Temper Democratic: How Exceptional Is Australia? (Adelaide: Wakefield Press);
R. Sennett (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of
Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton).
3 Long-Lasting Relationships
1. See P. Robinson (2008) The Changing World of Gay Men (Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 125–8.
2. For discussion of changing shape of heterosexual couple relationships,
see, for example, Z. Bauman (2003) Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human
Bonds (Cambridge: Polity Press); U. Beck and E. Beck-Gernsheim (1995) The
Notes 185
Normal Chaos of Love, trans. M. Ritter & J. Wiebel (Cambridge: Polity Press),
pp. 5–9; and E. Beck-Gernsheim (2002) Reinventing the Family: In Search of
New Lifestyles, trans. P. Camiller (Cambridge: Polity Press), passim. A useful
critique of Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s arguments about the shape and nature
of contemporary relationships can be found in C. Smart (2007) Personal Life:
New Directions in Sociological Thinking (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 18–20.
For the effects of individualisation on the couple relationship in the 1960s
and 1970s, see E. Shorter (1976) The Making of the Modern Family (Glasgow:
William Collins). For preliminary discussion of companionate marriage as a
basis for couple relationships in Australian gay men, see Robinson Changing
World, pp. 126–8.
3. A.J. Cherlin (2004) ‘The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage’,
Journal of Marriage and Family, 66, 851.
4. L. Stone (1979) The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, abridged
& rev. edn (London: Penguin Books), pp. 217–24.
5. Smart Personal Life, p. 59. For an account of the four types of love, see, for
example, Shorter The Making of the Modern Family.
6. J. D’Emilio and E.B. Freedman (1997) Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality
in America, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 265–66.
7. Cherlin ‘The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage’, pp. 851–2;
J. Murphy (2000) Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in
Menzies’ Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press), p. 56.
8. D’Emilio and Freedman Intimate Matters, p. 266.
9. Cherlin ‘The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage’, p. 852. For the
greater acceptance of cohabitation in the USA and other western countries,
see for, example, Cherlin ‘The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage’,
pp. 849–50; B. Hewitt and J. Baxter (2012) ‘Who Gets Married in Australia?
The Characteristics Associated with Transition to Marriage 2001–6’, Journal of
Sociology, 48(1), 44–6; and L. Jamieson (1998) Intimacy: Personal Relationships
in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 32–3.
Investigations, trans. E. Jephcott with some notes and corrections by the
Blackwell); Beck and Beck-Gernsheim The Normal Chaos of Love; Beck-
Gernsheim Reinventing the Family; Bauman Liquid Love.
11. E. Illouz (1999) ‘The Lost Innocence of Love: Romance As a Postmodern
Condition’ in M. Featherstone (ed.) Love and Eroticism (London: Sage),
p. 176; Z. Bauman (2001) The Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity Press),
p. 156.
12. A. Giddens (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism
in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 2, 58, passim.
13. Giddens The Transformation of Intimacy, p. 58.
15. The following is a small selection from early works on gay and lesbian
personal life where the short-term nature of gay men’s relationships is
discussed: D. Altman (1972) Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (Sydney:
Angus & Robertson), pp. 17–18; M. Foucault (2000) ‘Sexual Choice, Sexual
Act’ (1982–3) in Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, trans.
R. Hurley and others, ed. P. Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books),
186 Notes
p. 150; W.H. Masters and V.E. Johnson (1979) Homosexuality in Perspective

(Boston: Little, Brown), pp. 229–30; K. Plummer (1981) ‘Going Gay:
Identities, Lifecycles and Lifestyles in the Male Gay World’ in J. Hart
and D. Richardson (eds) The Theory and Practice of Homosexuality (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 105; M. Pollak (1986) ‘Male Homosexuality –
or Happiness in the Ghetto’ in P. Ariès and A. Béjin (eds) Western Sexuality:
Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times, trans. A. Forster (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell), pp. 43, 51; R. Robertson (1981) ‘Young Gays’ in J. Hart and
D. Richardson (eds) The Theory and Practice of Homosexuality (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 173; D.J. West (1968) Homosexuality
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books), p. 56.
16. See Chapter 5, and Robinson Changing World, pp. 115–33.
17. J. Boswell (1980) Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People
in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 26–7.
18. For the effect of social hostility on gay men’s intimate lives, see Robinson
Changing World, pp. 21–5, 122–4.
19. The seven men whose relationships were of 30 years’ duration and longer
included three couples as well as two men who had been formerly married.
The age range was 56–87, and comprised a man in his 80s, two men in their
70s, three men in their 60s, and one man in his 50s. Two of the men were
from Manchester, four were from Melbourne, and one was from Sydney.
20. The eight men in relationships of between 20 and 30 years included two
couples and a man who was formerly married. The age range was 47–81,
comprising one man in his 80s, two men in their 70s, one man in his 60s,
three men in their 50s, and one man in his 40s. Three men were from Hong
Kong, one was from Manchester, two were from Melbourne, one was from
New York, and one was from Sydney.
21. The nine men in relationships of between 10 and 20 years’ length included
a couple, a man who was formerly married, and a man who had a son. The
age range was 42–67, and comprised a man in his 60s, four men in their 50s,
and four men in their 40s. Two of the men were from Auckland, three were
from Hong Kong, one was from Manchester, one was from Melbourne, and
one was from New York.
22. Of the 31 men in relationships not classified as ‘long-lasting’, 10 were in
relationships of between eight and five years inclusive, 11 were in relation-
ships of between one and four years inclusive, and 10 were in relationships
of less than a year.
23. Christian (72), Sydney; Alfie (63), Manchester; Bryce (63), Manchester.
24. Ashton (70), Sydney; Zachary (52), Hong Kong; Buck (51), Hong Kong;
Duncan (47), Hong Kong.
25. Eddie (45), Manchester.
26. Other scholars use a related concept, ‘cosiness’, as a criterion for compan-
ionate marriage. See, for example, J. Finch and P. Summerfield (1999) ‘Social
Reconstruction and the Emergence of Companionate Marriage, 1945–59’
in G. Allan (ed.) The Sociology of the Family: A Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers Ltd.), pp. 23–5.
27. For a more detailed discussion of gay marriage, civil unions and civil partner-
ships, see Chapters 4 and 5.
Notes 187
28. For more discussion of men’s expectation of independence in relation-

ships, see B.D. Adam (2007) ‘Relationship Innovation in Male Couples’ in
M. Kimmel (ed.) The Sexual Self: The Construction of Sexual Scripts (Nashville,
TN: Vanderbilt University Press), pp. 122–40.
29. R.W. Connell (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
30. P. Bourdieu (2001) Masculine Domination, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity
Press), pp. 50–2.
31. The concept living apart together (LAT) was developed by sociologists to
describe living arrangements of couples (often gay or lesbian) who continue
to live independently in their own flat or house long after the start of the
relationship. This is not a recent development. British painter Francis Bacon
preferred his boyfriends to live in a flat near him; see J. Hawley ‘Dark Night
of the Soul’, Saturday Age 3 November 2012, Good Weekend supplement,
p. 24. For more on LAT, see S. Roseneil (2006) ‘On Not Living with a Partner:
Unpicking Coupledom and Cohabitation’, Sociological Research On-Line:
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/11/3/roseneil.html, accessed 9 December
2012.
32. D’Emilio and Freedman Intimate Matters, p. 266; Stone Family, Sex and
Marriage, pp. 217–24.
33. Stone Family, Sex and Marriage, pp. 217–53.
35. Drake (77), Melbourne; Sean (67), Auckland; Fred (47), London; Jonathon
(44), London.
36. The six men comprised a man from the 30-plus group: Drake (77),
Melbourne; two men from the 20–30 group: Parry (63), New York, and Ben
(52), Manchester; and three men from the 10–20 group: Fred (47), London,
Eddie (45), Manchester, and Jonathon (44), London.
37. Fred (47, London); Eddie (45, Manchester); Jonathon (45, London).
38. For distinctions between sexual and companionate relations, see, for exam-
ple, Smart Personal Life, pp. 59ff.
39. Foucault ‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act’, p. 150.
40. The equivalent heterosexual term is ‘friends with benefits’. The Age, 24
March 2011.
41. Adam ‘Relationship Innovation in Male Couples’, pp. 128, 125. For use of
the term ‘outlaw sex’ and practices it covers, see J. Rechy (1977) The Sexual
Outlaw: A Documentary (New York: Grove Press Inc.), and for pictoral rep-
resentations of the same, see D. Hanson (ed.) (2011) Tom of Finland: The
Comics, vol. 1 (Köln: Taschen GmbH).
42. Adam ‘Relationship Innovation in Male Couples’, pp. 139, 133.
43. On inequalities in straight relationships, see Smart Personal Life, pp. 173–7;
Giddens The Transformation of Intimacy, p. 2. On equality in gay relation-
ships, see G. Herdt (1997) Same Sex, Different Cultures: Exploring Gay and
Lesbian Lives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), p. 154; A. McLaren (1999)
Twentieth Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 191; J. Weeks
(2007) The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life
(Oxford: Routledge), p. 218. Not all historians agree that equality is a dis-
tinguishing characteristic of gay relationships, preferring a more nuanced
analysis.
188 Notes
4 Fatherhood
1. A shorter, less detailed version of this discussion of gay fatherhood settings
and stories appeared in February 2012 in Australian Policy Online: http://
apo.org.au/research/fatherhood-settings-and-stories-gay-men, accessed 31
January 2013.
2. G. Chauncey (1994) Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of
the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books), pp. 6–7; A. McLaren
(1999) Twentieth Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 187ff.;
J. Weeks, B. Heaphy, and C. Donovan (2001) Same Sex Intimacies: Families of
Choice and Other Life Experiments (London: Routledge), pp. 159–60.
3. Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan Same Sex Intimacies, pp. 160–3; J. D’Emilio
(2002) The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press), pp. 185–90.
4. Randall (87), Melbourne; Hector (81), Melbourne; Drake (77), Melbourne;
Clive (64), Canberra; Anslem (61), Melbourne; Bernard (59), Hong Kong;
Austin (57), Auckland; Ross (54), Hobart; Henry (50), country Victoria;
Gabriel (43), Auckland; Neville (37), Melbourne; Joseph (35), Melbourne;
and Tony (33), Melbourne.
5. J. Lindsay and D. Dempsey (2009) Families, Relationships and Intimate Life
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press), p. 155.
6. Leslie (74), Hobart; John (65), Hobart; Terrence (64), Adelaide; and Scott (45),
Melbourne.
7. Gerald (75), Melbourne; Douglas (63), Melbourne; and Hilton (53),
New York.
8. Roy (58), Hobart; and Trevor (49), Melbourne.
9. Chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6 are based on the international sample, and Chapter
7 on the all-Australian data set exclusively.
10. Randall (87) was married for 35 years and had a male partner of 37 years;
Hector (81) had a male partner of 25 years, and was still married and had
been for more than 50 years; Gerald (75) was married for 31 years and had
a male partner of nine years; Leslie (74) was married for 36 years and had a
male partner of 20 years; John (65) was married for 40 years and had a male
partner of 20 years; Douglas (63) had been married for 39 years, had a male
lover, and kept a household with his second wife.. While Douglas described
himself as gay, his sexual and intimate life more strongly resembled that of
a bisexual person.
11. Drake (77) was married for 24 years and had a male partner of 31 years;
Terrence (64) was married for 20 years and had a male partner of 24 years;
Anselm (61) was married for 26 years and single at the time of interview;
Henry (50) was married for 20 years and had a male partner of 10 years.
12. Clive (64) was married for 11 years and had been single for 17 years; Roy
(58) was married for eight years and had been single for nine months; Austin
(57) was married for 18 years and single at the time of interview; Hilton (53)
was married for 18 years and single at the time of interview; Ross (54) was
married for 13 years and had a male partner of more than six years; Trevor
(49) was married for eight years and had a male partner of 19 years; Scott
(45) was married for seven years and had a male partner of eight years.
13. These were a man in his early 80s and one in his early 60s.
Notes 189
14. McLaren Twentieth Century Sexuality.

investigations, trans. E. Jephcott with some notes and corrections by the
Blackwell).
16. D. Altman (1972) Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (Sydney: Angus &
Robertson).
17. Mark (25), Melbourne.
18. D. Dempsey (2012) ‘More Like a Donor or More Like a Father? Gay Men’s
Concepts of Relatedness to Children’, Sexualities, 15, 156–74.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan),pp, 145–48. For discussion of gay men’s sur-
rogacy experiences, see, for example, Dempsey ‘More Like a Donor or More
Like a Father?’, pp. 156–74.
21. G. Chauncey (2004) Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate
Over Gay Equality (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books), pp. 110–11; the case,
Bottoms v. Bottoms was held before the Virginia Supreme Court in 1995, see
M.C. Nussbaum (1999) Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University
Press), pp. 204–5; Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan Same Sex Intimacies,
pp. 158–9.
22. Randall (87), Melbourne; Hector (81), Melbourne; Drake (77), Melbourne;
Clive (64), Canberra; Anselm (61), Melbourne; Bernard (59), Hong Kong;
Austin (57), Auckland; Ross (54), Hobart; Henry (50), country Victoria;
Neville (37), Melbourne; Joseph (35), Melbourne; Tony (33), Melbourne.
23. Leslie (74), Hobart; John (65), Hobart; Terrence (64), Adelaide; Scott (45),
Melbourne; Gabriel (43), Auckland.
24. Gerald (75), Melbourne; Douglas (63), Melbourne.
25. Roy (58), Hobart; Hilton (53), New York; Trevor (49), Melbourne.
26. Anthony McMahon uses the term ‘joys of fatherhood’; see A. McMahon
(1999) Taking Care of Men: Sexual Politics in the Public Mind (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), p. 125.
27. J. Weeks (2000) Making Sexual History (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 216–20.
28. The term belongs to Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan Same Sex Intimacies,
pp. 161–3.
29. See, for example, B. Featherstone (2009) Contemporary Fathering: Theory,
Policy and Practice (Bristol: Policy Press), pp. 24–5.
5 Marriage
1. Same-sex marriage has been an area of research interest since the 1980s,
with increased activity in the late 1990s and even more so in the last decade.
See, for example, J. Boswell (1995) The Marriage of Likeness: Same Sex Unions
in Pre-modern Europe (London: Harper Collins); K. Plummer (1981) ‘Going
Gay: Identities, Lifecycles and Lifestyles in the Male Gay World’ in J. Hart
and D. Richardson (eds) The Theory and Practice of Homosexuality (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul), pp. 93–110; A. Rolfe and E. Peel (2011) ‘“It’s a
Double-Edged Thing”: The Paradox of Civil Partnership and Why Some
190 Notes
Couples are Choosing Not to Have One’, Feminism and Psychology 21(3)
317–35; B. Shipman and C. Smart (2007) ‘“It’s Made a Huge Difference”:
Recognition, Rights and the Personal Significance of Civil Partnerships’,
Sociological Research Online (1). Some scholars have focused on the experi-
ences of lesbians and gay men. While questions of sexual identity and
relational equality have seen coalitions form between gay men and lesbians,
each has a unique, gendered view on marriage. My perspective in this chap-
ter and more broadly in this book is on the experience of non-representative
samples of gay men and gay men only.
2. A. McLaren (1999) Twentieth Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford: Blackwell),
p. 199; G. Chauncey (2004) Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate
over Gay Equality (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books), p. 3.
3. Isaac (56), Melbourne.
4. G. Hekma (1999) ‘Same-Sex Relations among Men in Europe, 1700–1990’ in
F.X Elder, L.A. Hall, and G. Hekma (eds) Sexual Cultures in Europe: Themes in
Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 99–100.
5. Information on state-by-state legislation in favour same-sex marriage is
drawn from N.D. Polikoff (2008) Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing
All Families under the Law (Boston, MA: Beacon Press), pp. 110–20.
6. As reported in The Age, 5 July 2012; see also J.P. McCormick (2012) ‘Same-
Sex Marriage Bill to be introduced in France this October’, Pink News 26
August: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2012/08/26/same-sex-marriage-bill-to-
be-introduced-in-france-this-october, accessed 29 August 2012.
7. McLaren Twentieth Century Sexuality, pp. 199–200.
8. G. Herdt (2009) Moral Panics, Sex Panics: Fear and Fight over Sexual Rights
(New York: New York University Press), pp. 157, 182.
9. Polikoff Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, p. 111.
10. Polikoff Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, p. 111.
11. C. Frew (2010) ‘The Social Construction of Same-Sex Marriage in Australia:
Implications for Same-Sex Unions’, Law in Context, 28(1), 86.
12. M. Kirby (2011) A Private Life: Fragments, Memories, Friends (Sydney: Allen &
Unwin), p. 91.
13. S. Roberts (2012) ‘Australia votes against legalizing equal marriage’, Pink
News 9 September: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2012/09/19/australia-votes-
against-legalising-equal-marriage, accessed 20 September 2012.
14. G. Williams (2012) ‘States Leave Canberra Behind in Rush to Same-Sex
Marriage’, The Age 19 September: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/
politics/states-leave-canberra-behind-in-rush-to-samesex-marriage-
20120919-266wa.html, accessed 20 September 2012.
15. J. Green (2011) ‘French Parliament rejects Gay Marriage Bill’, Pink News14
June: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/06/14/french-parliament-rejects-
gay-marriage-bill, accessed 15 June 2011.
16. S. Gray (2012) ‘The Times backs gay marriage’, Pink News 25 July: http://
www.pinknews.co.uk/2012/03/05/the-times-backs-gay-marriage, accessed 7
March 2012.
17. S. Gray (2012) ‘Scottish Government will bring forward equal marriage legis-
lation’, Pink News 25 July: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2012/07/25/scottish-
government-will-bring-forward-equal-marriage-legislation, accessed 26 July
2012.
Notes 191
18. S. Gray (2012) ‘Catholic Church in Scotland: Society “should not facilitate gay
relationships”’, Pink News 26 July: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2012/07/26/
catholic-church-in-scotland-society-should-not-facilitate-gay-relationships,
accessed 27 July 2012.
19. Alexandra Topping, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/05/gay-
marriage-result-mps-vote?INTCMP=SRCH, accessed 20 February 2013.
20. T.S.K. Kong (2012) Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden
Boy (London: Routledge), pp. 118–19.
21. M.C. Nussbaum (1999) Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University
Press), pp. 201–3.
22. G. Simmel (1999 [1895]) ‘On the Sociology of the Family’, trans. M. Ritter and
D. Frisby in M. Featherstone (ed.) Love and Eroticism (London: Sage), p. 291.
23. Nussbaum Sex and Social Justice, pp. 201–3.
24. M. Warner (2000) The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of
Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 61–80. On assimi-
lationism, see, for example, P. Moore (2004) Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the
Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality (Boston, MA: Beacon Press), and
M.B. Sycamore (ed.) (2004) That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting
Assimilation (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint LLC).
25. A.J. Cherlin (2004) ‘The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage’,
Journal of Marriage and Family, 66, 855–6.
26. A condensed, earlier version of this chapter appeared in a refereed paper
entitled ‘Generational Differences to Gay Marriage’ that I presented at
The Australian Sociological Association conference at the University of
Queensland, November 2012.
27. In the United States, different state jurisdictions use different terminol-
ogy for formally recognising same-sex civil unions. See D.R. Pinello (2006)
America’s Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (New York: Cambridge University
Press), pp. 160–6.
28. Twenty-three men, or slightly less than a quarter of interviewees, said they
opposed gay marriage. And 12 men (or 12 per cent of the sample) said they
were unsure.
29. When I first examined the men’s answers, I noticed that the proportion of
those opposing gay marriage began to increase at the age of 51. My incli-
nation was to divide the group into two subsets but after a seminar with
fourth-year students, in which we discussed the week’s readings on gay
marriage and my analysis in particular, it became clear that a three-way
division would be more useful so as to take account of the majority of men
aged 31 and under who supported gay marriage. I would like to thank the
eight students enrolled in HAF 445 Social Issues at Swinburne University of
Technology in semester one 2012 for their help in seeing divisions in my
data more clearly.
30. Two of the men from this group were in their 30s; 17 men were in their 20s;
and the remaining three men were aged 19, 19, and 18. Ten of the men were
from Australia; two were from Britain; four were from Hong Kong; five were
from India; and one was from New Zealand.
31. The views of the five men who said that they would support only a civil
union or civil partnership but not gay marriage are examined in the next
chapter.
192 Notes
32. The longest relationship was six years, and the average length of relationship
for men in this group was 14 months.
33. Garth (23), Zane (22), Hayden (21), and Todd (21).
35. Curtis (29), Hong Kong; Denis (27), Melbourne; Jarrad (23), Melbourne;
Todd (21), Melbourne.
36. L. Jamieson (1998) Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies
(Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 32–3; and C. Smart (2007) Personal Life: New
Directions in Sociological Thinking (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 13–16.
37. Giles (23), Mumbai; Zane (22), Melbourne.
38. At the time of writing, the Hon. Penny Wong was Minister for Finance in
the Gillard Government and Senator Bob Brown was leader of the Greens, a
minority party in the 43rd Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia.
Senator Brown resigned as leader of the Greens on 13 April 2012 after 16
years in the Australian Parliament.
39. Reported in The Age, 7 July 2012.
40. Jamieson Intimacy, p. 157.
41. Two of the men from this group were in their 50s; 23 were in their 40s;
and nine were in their 30s. Five of the men were from Australia; eight were
from Britain; six were from Hong Kong; two were from India; five were from
New Zealand; and eight were from the USA.
42. The views of the eight men who said that they would support only a civil union
or civil partnership but not gay marriage are examined in the next chapter.
43. The longest relationship was 21 years, and the average length of relation-
ships for men in this group of men was seven and a half years.
44. The three men who were in civil unions or civil partnerships were Duncan
(47), Hong Kong; Eddie (45), Manchester; and Gabriel (43), Auckland. The
three men who were in a gay marriage were Danny (48), Hong Kong; Joe
(42), Hong Kong; and Everett (49), New York.
45. Ethan (49), London; Felix (41), Hong Kong; Alexander (34), Hong Kong.
46. Danny (48), Hong Kong.
47. Ethan (49), London.
48. Jonathon (44), London; and Dylan (32), Sydney.
49. C. Smart (2008) ‘“Can I Be Bridesmaid?” Combining the Personal and
Political in Same-Sex Weddings’, Sexualities, 11(6), 770–71.
50. Smart Personal Life, pp. 66–79.
51. Cherlin ‘The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage’, p. 856.
52. Smart ‘“Can I Be Bridesmaid?”’, p. 767.
53. Six of the men from this group were in their 80s; nine were in their 70s; 10
were in their 60s; and 16 were in their 50s. Seventeen of the men were from
Australia; seven were from Britain; four were from Hong Kong; six were from
New Zealand; and seven were from the USA. None of the men in this age
cohort was from India.
54. The views of the seven men who said that they would support only civil
union but not gay marriage are examined in the next chapter.
55. In this age cohort 23 men were in relationships, and 18 were single. The
longest relationship was 42 years and the average length of a relationship
was 22 years. Of the men in relationships, six men were in civil unions and
Notes 193
one was in a gay marriage. Three of the men in civil unions were in their
60s and three were in their 50s, and came from Hong Kong, Manchester,
and New York: Alfie (63), Manchester; Bryce (63), Manchester; Parry (63),
New York; Ben (52), Manchester; Buck (51), Hong Kong; Earl (51), New York.
The man in a gay marriage was Ward (aged 59) from New York. The men
who had previously been in heterosexual relationships comprised six men
who were still married or formerly married to a woman and three men who
were divorced, a total of nine men in all. From this age cohort there were
also seven men who had children, all but one of whom were children from
a former marriage or relationship with a woman.
56. Hector (81), Melbourne; Godfrey (81), Sydney; Basil (75), Auckland; Colin
(72), New York; Fergus (63), Manchester; Alfie (63), Manchester; Ward (59),
New York; Raymond (58), Hong Kong; Austin (57), Auckland; Logan (56),
Auckland; Cam (56), Los Angeles; Ben (52), Manchester.
57. Chauncey Why Marriage?, p. 96. Others writing on gay marriage or marriage
equality have made similar connection. See, for example, Polikoff Beyond
(Straight and Gay) Marriage, pp. 51–2.
58. Chauncey Why Marriage?, pp. 96–104.
6 Cohabitation
1. For the status of the push for gay marriage in Australia in early 2000s, see
P. Robinson (2008) The Changing World of Gay Men (Basingstoke and
2. M.R. Fowlkes (1999) ‘Single Worlds and Homosexual Lifestyles: Patterns
of Sexuality and Intimacy’ in A.S. Rossi (ed.) Sexuality Across the Lifecourse
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 175. For useful discussion of
same-sex marriage and the public debates it has inspired, especially in the
United States, see G. Chauncey (2004) Why Marriage? The History Shaping
Today’s Debate over Gay Equality (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books); K.E. Hull
(2006) Same-Sex Marriage: The Cultural Politics of Love and Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press); M.C. Nussbaum (2004) Hiding from Humanity:
Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press),
pp. 256–65; and A. Stein (2006) Shameless: Sexual Dissidence in American
Culture (New York: New York University Press), ch. 8.
3. J. D’Emilio and E.B. Freedman (1997) Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in
America, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 369.
4. C. Charlotte (2010) ‘The Social Construction of Same-Sex Marriage in
Australia: Implications for Same-Sex Unions’, Law in Context, 28(1), 78.
5. Simon Cullen, ABC News19 September 2012: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-
09-19/controversy-over-cory-bernardi-bestiality-comments/4269604, accessed
20 November 2012. Stephanie Peatling, The Age 23 September 2012:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/bernardi-keeps-on-losing-
20120922-26dof.html, accessed 20 November 2012.
6. J.P. McCormick, Pink News, 22 November 2012: http://www.pinknews.
co.uk/2012/11/22/new-zealand-committee-told-that-equal-marriage-is-an-
abomination-and-could-lead-to-incest, accessed 23 November 2012.
194 Notes
7. Link to ‘Freedom to Marry’ on Log Cabin Republicans’ website: http://www.

logcabin.org/site/c.nsKSL7PMLpF/b.8104529/k.9A48/Freedom_to_Marry.
htm, accessed 19 November 2012.
8. G. Simmel (1999 [1895]) ‘On the Sociology of the Family’, trans. M. Ritter
and D. Frisby in M. Featherstone (ed.) Love and Eroticism (London: Sage),
pp. 283–93; C. Donovan (2004) ‘Why Reach for the Moon? Because the Stars
Aren’t Enough’, Feminism and Psychology, 14(24), 27.
9. Donovan ‘Why Reach for the Moon?’, pp. 25–8; M.C. Nussbaum (1999)
Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 202;
J. Stacey (2004) ‘Marital Suitors Court Social Science Spin-sters: The
Unwittingly Conservative Effects of Public Sociology’, Social Problems,
51(1), 135.
10. G. Herdt (2009) ‘Gay Marriage: The Panic and the Right’ in G. Herdt (ed.)
Moral Panics, Sex Panics: Fear and the Fight over Sexual Rights (New York:
New York University Press), pp. 191–2.
11. Two of the men from this group were in their 30s; 17 men were in their 20s;
and the remaining three men were aged 19, 19, and 18. Ten of the men were
from Australia; two were from Britain; four were from Hong Kong; five were
from India; and one was from New Zealand.
12. The longest relationship was six years, and the average length of relationship
for men in this group was 14months.
13. Curtis (29), Hong Kong; Eamon (28), London; Jarrad (23), Melbourne;
Hayden (21), Melbourne; Brody (19), Melbourne.
14. Eamon (28), London; Jarrad (23), Melbourne; Hayden (21), Melbourne.
15. Eamon (28), London; and Hayden (21), Melbourne.
16. Curtis (29), Hong Kong; and Brody (19), Melbourne.
17. For discussion of immigration restrictions, see N.D. Polikoff (2008)
Beyond(Straight and Gay)Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law (Boston,
MA: Beacon Press), pp. 121–2.
18. Two of the men from this group were in their 50s; 23 were in their 40s;
and nine were in their 30s. Five of the men were from Australia; eight were
from Britain; six were from Hong Kong; two were from India; five were from
New Zealand; and eight were from the USA.
19. Three of the men were in a civil union or civil partnership and three men
were in a gay marriage. The men who were in civil unions or civil partner-
ships were Duncan (47), Hong Kong; Eddie (45), Manchester; and Gabriel
(43), Auckland. The men who were in a gay marriage were Danny (48),
Hong Kong; Joe (42), Hong Kong; and Everett (49), New York. The longest
relationship was 21 years, and the average length of relationships for men in
this group of men was seven and a half years. Two of the men were formerly
married and one man had an adopted child.
20. Teddy (47), Mumbai; Edmund (44), Mumbai; Callum (43), Melbourne; Liam
(37), Sydney; Finlay (33), New York.
21. For more on ‘good’ gays and homonormativity, see M. Warner (2000) The
Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press), pp. 61–80.
22. Decca Aitkenhead, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/sep/28/rupert-
everett-memoir-vanished-years, accessed 3 October 2012.
23. Calvin (51), Melbourne; Charlie (40), Hong Kong; Anton (35), London;
Aiden (33), London; Jackson (32), New York.
Notes 195
24. Warner Trouble with Normal, p. 85.

25. Nathan (50), Auckland; Alvin (47), New York; Duncan (47), Hong Kong; Fred
(47), London; Jude (46), Los Angeles; Eddie (45), Manchester; Jacob (42),
Melbourne; Connor (41), London.
26. Six of the men from this group were in their 80s; nine were in their 70s; 10
were in their 60s; and 16 were in their 50s. Seventeen of the men were from
Australia; seven were from Britain; four were from Hong Kong; six were from
New Zealand; and seven were from the USA. In other words, none of the
men in this age cohort was from India.
27. Twenty-three men were in relationships at the time of interview and 18 were
single. The longest relationship was 42 years, and the average length of a
relationship was 22 years.
28. For more on comparative longevity in gay couple relationships, see Robinson
Changing World, pp. 122–33.
29. Six of the men were in civil unions or civil partnerships and one was in a
gay marriage. Three of the men in civil unions/partnerships were in their 60s
and three were in their 50s: Alfie (63), Manchester; Bryce (63), Manchester;
Parry (63), New York; Ben (52), Manchester; Buck (51), Hong Kong; Earl (51),
New York. The man who was in a gay marriage was in his late 50s and was
from New York: Ward (59). The men who had had heterosexual relationships
comprised six men who were still married or formerly married to a woman
and three men who were divorced. Seven men from this age cohort had
children, all but one of whom had children as a result of a former marriage
or relationship with a woman. Five of the men were from Melbourne, one
was from New York, and two were from Sydney.
30. Randall (87), Melbourne; Ambrose (77), Melbourne; Drake (77), Melbourne;
Christian (72), Sydney; Ashton (70), Sydney; Baden (65), Melbourne; Hugh
(62), Melbourne; Hilton (53), New York.
31. Sean (67), Auckland; Arthur (62), London; Marvin (59), Los Angeles; Zachary
(52), Hong Kong; Mike (52), Melbourne.
32. As mentioned above, I asked the men the following questions in relation to
gay marriage: ‘Are you married; do you intend to marry? If the circumstances
were right, would you marry a man?’
33. See, for example, J.N. Katz (2001) Love Stories: Sex between Men before
Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) for accounts of inti-
mate and sexual relationships between men from the late 1820s. See also,
B.R.S. Fone (1992) Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic
Text (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press).
34. ACT UP is the acronym for ‘AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’, which was
created in New York in 1987. For more information, see P. Moore (2004)
Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press), pp. 83, 93.
35. Amery (82), Sydney; Alec (62), Sydney.
36. Herbert (82), Melbourne.
37. Lucas (75), Auckland.
38. Arran (70), Melbourne; Parry (63), New York; Isaac (56), Melbourne; Tate
(51), London; Earl (51), New York.
39. Clancy (81), Melbourne; Jeffrey (72), Auckland; Bryce (63), Manchester;
Anselm (61), Melbourne; Bernard (59), Hong Kong; Ryan (53), London; Buck
(51), Hong Kong.
196 Notes
7 Living in the Midst of HIV-AIDS

1. In 2011, the UK recorded its highest rate of HIV diagnoses since 1999; see
S. Roberts ‘UK: HIV infection rate for gay men at record high’, Pink News 11
November 2012, http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2012/11/29/uk-hiv-infection-
rate-for-gay-men-at-record-high, accessed 19 December 2012.
2. See G.W. Dowsett (1996) Practicing Desire: Homosexual Sex in the Era of AIDS
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), ch. 3.
3. Safe sex and ‘safer sex’ were terms for sexual practices that some scientists
and many gay lobbyists recommended people having casual sex adopt in
the early days of the HIV-AIDS epidemic because they were thought likely to
prevent transfer of the HIV. Once this was shown to be the case, government
medical authorities in many western countries adopted these guidelines and
funded safe-sex campaigns among the different groups of men who have
sex with men – that is, gay men as well as men who do not identify as gay.
The purpose of safe-sex campaigns was to encourage gay men to engage in
protected anal sex only, that is, to use a condom whenever they had such
sex if they did not know the HIV status of their partner. In its early days, safe
sex was recommended for anyone who intended to have casual sex, anal or
vaginal. For discussion of changes in sexual practices among gay men as a
response to HIV-AIDS, see Dowsett Practicing Desire, pp. 77–87.
4. D. Altman (1989) ‘Aids and the Reconceptualization of Homosexuality’ in
D. Altman et al. Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? Essays from the Inter-
national Conference on Gay and Lesbian Studies (London: GMP), pp. 35, 37.
5. See Dowsett Practicing Desire, ch. 3.
6. In the Annual Surveillance Report 2009, the National Centre in HIV
Epidemiology and Clinical Research observed the annual number of new
HIV diagnoses in Australia has remained steady over the past three years at
around 1,000 cases, which represents a return to rates of infection not seen
since 1994.
7. The three men are Stuart (49), Jason (35), and Julius (34).
8. See Table A.2 for details of the all-Australian sample, and Chapter 1 for dis-
cussion of it and my use of two separate non-representative samples of men
for this book.
9. The average age of men in this cohort was 49 and, on average, they came
out at 27. Interviewed in 2002, a 49-year-old man would have been born in
1953, would have turned 21 in 1974 and, if he came out at 27, 1980 would
have been the year that he did so. Of the 30 men in this cohort, two-thirds
were aged 29 or older in November 1982, the year when the first case of AIDS
was diagnosed in Australia.
10. Twenty men from the middle cohort (n = 30) had been born between 1942
and 1953, and were therefore between 40 and 29 in 1982. For the outbreak
of HIV-AIDS in Australia, see Dowsett Practicing Desire, p. 61.
11. The average age of these men was 33, and on average they came out at 21.
Interviewed in 2002, a 33-year-old man would have been born in 1969 and,
if he came out at 21, he would have done so in 1990.
12. Twenty-two men from the young cohort (n = 28) were born between 1980
and 1966, and were therefore between 2 and 16 in 1982. Fourteen men, or
half the young cohort, were aged 12 or less in 1982.
Notes 197
13. In 1987, an advertising campaign to alert the public to the risks of HIV-
AIDS began on Australian television. The television advertisements showed
the hooded figure of Death, scythe in hand, stalking people of all ages and
types. The highlight of the advertisement showed Death (thereafter in public
discourse referred to as the Grim Reaper) bowling a ball in the lane of a bowl-
ing alley where the skittles were random human figures, thereby reinforcing
the unpredictable nature of the disease’s spread. For more information, see
P. Sendzuik (2003) Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS (Sydney:
University of NSW Press).
14. I would like to thank members of the audience who heard an earlier ver-
sion of this chapter at the Oral History Conference, Talk About Town in
Melbourne, August 2009 for suggesting two of these possible explanations:
(a) gay men’s desire to refuse any conflation of HIV-AIDS and the gay iden-
tity and (b) negative interviewees’ desire to distance themselves from the
virus.
15. Twenty-one were from the middle cohort and 15 from the young cohort.
16. T.E. Cook and D.C. Colby (1992) ‘The mass-mediated epidemic: the politics
of AIDS on the nightly network news’ in E. Fee and D.M. Fox (eds) 1992 AIDS:
The Making of a Chronic Disease (Berkely, CA: University of California Press),
pp. 84–122; J. Gordon and C. Crossman (1992) ‘“aids kills fags dead …”:
cultural activism in Grand Bend’ in J. Miller (ed.) Fluid Exchanges: Artists and
Critics in the AIDS Crisis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), pp. 241–54;
A. Meredith (1992) ‘That last breath: women with AIDS’ in Fee and Fox
AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease, pp. 229–44; S. Sontag (1991) Illness as
Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).
17. Twenty-one is 70 per cent of the middle cohort (n = 30).
18. The 12 men were: Lionel (59), Roy (58), Noel (58), Kevin (52), Michael
(52), Des (50), Jerome (49), Stuart (49), Bob (48), Alan (47), Simon (46), and
Matthew (42).
19. For an account of this period of unknowing, see Sendziuk Learning to Trust,
pp. 11–17.
20. Today, a ‘window period’ of three months is understood to exist between
infection and when the body produces HIV antibodies that can be measured
by a blood test. For more details, see H.M. Sapolsky and S.L. Boswell (1992)
‘The History of Transfusion AIDS: Practice and Policy Alternatives’ in Fee and
Fox AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease, pp. 183–5.
21. The 12 men who spoke of feeling frightened or vulnerable, including three
who also spoke of stigma, were: Robert (38), Jeremy (36), Daniel (35), Joseph
(35), Jason (35), Julius (34), Mick (33), Ian (28), Mark (25), Adam (24), Troy
(24), and Jack (22). The six men who mentioned stigma were: Tony (33), Ian
(28), Mark (25), Adam (24), Myles (24), and Angus (23). In other words, the
15 men who referred to fear, vulnerability, and stigma comprised nine who
spoke of fear and vulnerability only, three who spoke of fear, vulnerability,
and stigma, and three who spoke of only stigma.
22. For more information, see Sendziuk Learning to Trust, p. 137.
23. Born in 1974, Ian would have been 13 when the Grim Reaper campaign was
shown on television.
24. For the link between homophobia and conservative opposition to discussion
of homosexuality in sex education curricula in Australia, see S. Angelides
198 Notes
(2008) ‘“The Continuing Homosexual Offensive”: Sex Education, Gay

Rights and Homosexual Recruitment’ in S. Robinson (ed.) Homophobia: An
Australian History (Sydney: Federation Press), pp. 172–92.
25. ‘GLBTI’ is the acronym for non-heterosexual people, standing for ‘gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex’.
26. Fifteen were from the middle cohort and 14 from the young cohort.
27. A. McLaren (1999) Twentieth Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford: Blackwell),
p. 199.
28. S. Watney (1992) ‘The Possibilities of Permutation: Pleasure, Proliferation,
and the Politics of Gay Identity in the Age of AIDS’ in Miller Fluid Exchanges,
pp. 329–67.
29. Eleven men (73 per cent) discussed safe sex and four men (27 per cent)
monogamy.
30. For more extensive discussion of varying strategies gay men adopted in the
face of the disease, see P. Robinson (2008) The Changing World of Gay Men
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), ch. 4; and Watney ‘The Possibilities of
Permutation’, p. 352.
31. The two men who said they withdrew from sexual adventurism were Travis
(38) and Mick (33).
32. In the gay world, a relationship such as the one Mick is describing here is
known as an ‘open’ relationship. See Chapter 3 and Robinson Changing
World, pp. 128–32.
33. For a fuller discussion of ‘sero-sorting’ and ‘strategic positioning’, see
G. Prestage et al. (2008) Three or More Study (Sydney: National Centre in
HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, University of New South Wales),
pp. 2, 42–3, 50–2, 54. My thanks to Mr Daniel Reeders, former campaign
co-ordinator for PLWHA Victoria, South Yarra, for his advice about safe-sex
policy and health campaigns in Australia.
34. His was the death of a friend.
35. Sixteen were from the middle cohort and eight from the young cohort.
36. For discussion of gay communities’ response to HIV-AIDS and their rela-
tionship with government health and research strategies in Australia, see
Dowsett Practicing Desire, ch. 3; for discussion of similar work in the United
States, see R.A. Padgug and G.M. Oppenheimer (1992) ‘Riding the Tiger:
AIDS and The Gay Community’ in Fee and Fox AIDS: The Making of a Chronic
Disease, pp. 245–78.
37. Padgug and Oppenheimer ‘Riding the Tiger’, p. 258.
38. K. Plummer (1995) Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds
(London: Routledge), p. 96.
39. On growth in homophobia, see A. Stein (2006) Shameless: Sexual Dissidence
in American Culture (New York: New York University Press), pp. 103–10 and
passim; D. Eribon (2004) Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. M. Lucey
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp. xv–xxi.
40. For a summary of the period and published research on the HIV-AIDS
epidemic in the West, see Robinson Changing World, pp. 54–62.
41. For more on homophobia in secondary schools, see, for example,
M. McCormark (2012) The Declining Significance of Homophobia: How Teenage
Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality (Oxford: Oxford University
Press), and McCormack’s interview of 8 April 2012 on the Melbourne gay
Notes 199
and lesbian radio station, JoyFM, as well as some discussion of changes

in homophobia in schools over last 15 years: http://badblood.wordpress.
com/2012/04/08/mark-mccormack-interviewed-by-dean-beck-lauren-
rosewarne, accessed 20 December 2012.
Conclusion
1. D. Altman (1972) Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (Sydney: Angus &
Robertson).
2. J. Boswell (1995) The Marriage of Likeness: Same Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe
(London: HarperCollins).
Index
Aboriginal, 3, 10, 17, 31, 84, 90, 157, Carr, David, 9–10
179 Catholic Church, The, 104, 106, 129,
ACT-UP, 138 130, 131, 133, 139
Adam, Barry, 78–9 Changing World of Gay Men, The,
age cohorts, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 23, (2008), 21
30–31, 42, 57, 66, 99, 113, 117, Chauncey, George, 90, 101, 118, 119,
119, 123, 124, 127, 133, 134, 144
145–6, 164 Cherlin, Andrew, 64, 105–6, 110, 116
see also age groups, generations Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
age groups, 53, 130, 147 Homosexuality, (1980), 5
see also age cohorts, generations civil solidarity pact (pacte civil de
ageism, 47, 57 solidarité), 131
AIDS, see HIV-AIDS civil union, civil partnership, 68, 81,
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 44, 47, 101–4, 106–7, 112–17, 120–1,
93 124–7, 130–7, 140–3, 167
Altman, Dennis, 2, 4, 5, 39, 87, 146, Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and
169 Psychogenetic Investigations, The,
Anand, Vivek, 25 (1939), 5
see also Humsafar Trust Cobb, Jonathan, 19
Are You Being Served?, 94 cohabitation, 13, 64, 109, 125, 127,
‘assimilation’, 6, 105 128, 133–4, 137, 143, 144, 168
Auckland, 14, 33, 34, 35, 56, 57–8, coming out, act or process of, 8, 9, 19,
59, 88, 94, 124, 126, 137, 142 41–2, 85, 86, 91, 95, 97, 98, 99,
Australian Christian Lobby, The, 122 108, 147, 153
Australian Federation of AIDS companionate marriage, see marriage,
Organisations (AFAO), 158 companionate
companionship, 63, 67–74, 81, 82,
Bauman, Zygmunt, 41, 63, 65, 101, 166
168 contraction, social, 43, 53–61
Bech, Henning, 41–2, 45, 60 Craigslist, 21, 22, 26, 27, 32, 34
Beck, Ulrich, 37–8, 41, 47, 60, 63, 66,
101, 168 D’Emilio, John, 39, 72, 122
Beck-Gernsheim, Elizabeth, 37–8, 41, drugs, recreational, 36, 47, 48, 97, 98
47, 60, 63, 66, 101, 168
Bernardi, Australian Senator Cory, Elias, Norbert (1897–1990), 5, 54, 86
122–3 ‘everyday experiments’, 36, 85, 87,
Body Electric, 44, 47 88, 99, 167
body image, 44, 49
Boswell, John (1947–1994), 5, 144, Facebook, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26
169 fatherhood, 2, 11, 12, 13, 80, 83–99
Brown, Australian Senator Bob, heterosexual, 85–7
111–12 non-heterosexual, 87–91
Bush, US President George, 102 see also surrogacy
200
Index 201
families, 6, 7, 9, 15, 19, 22, 24, 28, and gay marriage debates, 101–2,
31, 37, 51–4, 56, 85, 89–96, 99, 106, 118–20, 127–8, 140
101–5, 110, 114, 116–19, 121–3, stigmatizing effect, 12, 16–17, 32,
127, 131–2, 137, 142, 160, 169 97, 101, 106, 118, 149–54, 163
blended, 89 see also Humsafar Trust, people
‘families of choice’, 52–3, 61, 85, 92 living with HIV-AIDS
merged, 93–3 Holleran, Andrew, 7
‘pseudo family’, 51–3, 61 homonormativity, 60, 128
see also, friendships Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation,
Foucault, Michel (1926–1984), 76 (1972), 87
Fowlkes, Martha, 121 Hong Kong, 2–7, 17–18, 21, 26–30,
Freedman, Estelle, 39, 72, 122 34, 35, 48, 69, 70, 71, 88, 90,
Frew, Catherine, 122, 123 100, 104, 106, 109, 114, 118,
friendships, 1, 30, 32, 36, 41–5, 48, 121, 124, 126, 130, 137, 142
50–4, 61, 71, 77, 80, 95, 108, Humsafar Trust, Mumbai, 2, 24, 25
141, 155, 166, 168, 169
understood as family (Mumbai), individualisation, 37, 40, 42, 50, 60,
51–3, 61 63, 65, 81, 101, 119
feature of ‘family of choice’, 52 intergeneration relations, 45–6
reduced number, see contraction,
social Jake (gay network, London), 58–9
‘fuck-buddies’ (aka ‘friends with Jamieson, Lynn, 116, 168
benefits’), 76, 77, 80
Khan, Shivanandra, 7, 25
gay ‘scene’ (bars & clubs), see ‘scene’, Kinsey, Alfred (1894–1956), 15, 169
gay Kirby AC CMG, the Hon. Michael, 103
Gay liberation (gay lib), 5, 6, 8, 35, Kong, Travis, 27–8
57, 107, 111, 117, 118, 119,
120, 122, 128, 133, 134, 138, Lakshaya Trust, Gujarat and Mumbai,
146, 167 2, 24, 25
generations, 4, 8–9, 12, 13, 24, 25, 31, Log Cabin Republicans, 123
33, 34, 45, 49, 83, 95, 96, 99, London, 3, 5, 7, 25, 29, 31–2, 33, 35,
106, 109, 112, 118, 119, 122, 44, 49, 50, 57, 58, 59, 88, 113,
137, 138, 145, 146, 147, 148, 115, 125, 130, 133, 140
149, 150–9, 161–4, 168 Los Angeles, 6, 18, 23–4, 35, 56, 118,
see also age cohorts, age groups 137
Giddens, Anthony, 41, 65, 66, 81 love, 7, 44, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72–4, 79,
Gohil, Prince Manvendra Singh, 24, 25 82, 93, 109, 110, 162, 166–7
Heffner, Hugh, 39 mainstream(ing), 1, 121,122, 123,

Hekma, Gert, 102, 105 138, 144
Herdt, Gilbert, 102, 123 Manchester, 6, 7, 20, 32–3, 35
heteronormativity, 12, 38, 85, 98, 115, Mannheim, Karl (1893–1947), 8–9
123, 130, 135, 136, 143, 168 Maori, 3, 14, 17, 34
Hidden Injuries of Class, The, (1973), 19 marriage, 40, 41, 51, 56, 60, 80, 82,
hijras, 24, 51–3 85, 86, 87, 90, 96, 98
HIV-AIDS, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 14, 24, 25, companionate, 11, 62–8, 72–5, 77,
36, 39, 40, 138, 145–64 80–1, 100, 119, 166
as cohort marker, 107, 145–7 gay, 2, 11–13, 100–44, 167, 168
202 Index
McLaren, Angus, 101, 102, 154 hierarchy of, 105, 123

Melbourne, 3, 17, 27, 30–1, 32, 46, open, 74–7, 79–80, 82, 166
54, 55, 74, 88, 108–10, 135 ‘pure’, 41, 65, 81
men who have sex with men (msm),
3, 7, 15, 24 S&M (sado-masochism), 44, 46
Mumbai, 2, 3, 6, 7, 14, 18, 19, 24–6, ‘scene’, gay (bars & clubs), 4–7, 22,
35, 50–3, 61, 110, 123 26, 29, 33, 35, 39, 42–4, 46–9,
Murray, Stephen, 45 52–61, 108, 109
and social obsolescence, 49, 53
Nanda, Serena, 51 Scottish Parliament, 104
National Association of People Living Seabrook, Jeremy, 7, 35
with HIV-AIDS (NAPWA), 158 Sennett, Richard, 19
Naz Foundation, Lucknow and Shanahi, Parmesh, 7
London, 25 Simmel, Georg (1858–1918), 105, 123
New York, 3, 7, 14, 15, 18, 21–3, 27, single lives, 2, 36, 37, 38, 39, 61, 166
34, 35, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, Skype, 3, 20, 24, 26, 30, 32
56, 96–7, 98, 139 Smart, Carol, 64, 115–17
Nussbaum, Martha, 90, 105, 168 social lives
contracted, 53–60
obsolescence, social, see ‘scene’, gay full and active, 43–53
OutlineNZ, Auckland, 34 social obsolescence, see ‘scene’, gay
solidarity, 149, 159–63, 164
partnerships, 41, 63, 67, 71–2, 73, 74, Sontag, Susan (1933–2004), 149
81–2, 166 States of Desire: Travels in Gay America
people living with HIV-AIDS (1986), 22
(PLWHA), 23, 24, 25, 31, 32, 36, Stein, Arlene, 47–8, 61
39, 40, 97, 130, 147, 148, 161 Stevens, Michael, 34
Pink Alliance, Hong Kong, 29 Stone, Lawrence, 72
Playboy, 39 surrogacy, 87, 88, 99, 167
Plummer, Ken, 9, 160 see also fatherhood
Polikoff, Nancy, 103, 168 Sydney, 7, 33–4, 35, 49, 54, 57, 69, 136
Pollak, Michael (1948–1992), 40, 41
‘pseudo family’, see familes togetherness, 42, 67–72, 74, 166
Tongzhi Community Joint Meeting
relationships, 2, 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 21, (TCJM), Hong Kong, 29
22, 36, 40, 41, 43, 45, 50, 51, transgender, 2, 9, 24, 51
52, 56, 60–1, 62–82, 83–86, 89, Trebilco OAM, Peter, 33
91, 92, 113, 117, 118, 127, 130, Turnbull, the Hon. Malcolm, 112
131, 132, 134, 135–40, 154–6,
160, 165, 166, 168–9 Weeks, Jeffrey, 52, 88, 91, 96
with children, 12, 51, 83, 84–6, 90, White, Edmund, 11, 22, 40–1, 47
91–9, 105, 112, 122, 167 ‘white wedding’, 109, 110, 113, 116,
couple, 31, 39, 42, 60, 62–6, 69, 70, 117, 119, 143
72, 74, 75, 79–82, 89–91, 99, Why Marriage? The History Shaping
101–10, 112, 114–19, 123–4, Today’s Debate Over Gay Equality
126, 129, 131–2, 134, 136, (2004), 118
141–4, 166–7 Wong, the Hon. Penny, 111, 112

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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

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Gay Men’s Relationships Across the Life Course

Gay Men’s Relationships

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

List of Tables viii

A.1 International sample, 2009–2011 170

in the cohort, there was some evidence of willingness to take ‘strate-

As with Kinsey and his statistical taxonomies, this book challenges a

I would like to acknowledge here the help and assistance I received

whom sent me ‘written interviews’, the meaning of which I explain

What identified me as a gay person when I was younger

Younger gay men in Mumbai have a different kind of

My interest in the life course is twofold. First, I am interested in how

The non-representative sample on which this book is based comprises

somewhat predictable because as an Australian male of my class and

The research that underpins this book rests on four assumptions,

Sexual identity and gay world(s)

Unless we are prepared to exclude all those sexual constructions that

themselves and how they understood their identity as based on their

though six were advertised as ‘mixed,’ one is mainly ‘lesbian’ and

From Paul’s description and my observations of Canal Street, the gay

reasons. First, as others since Mannheim have noted, it is an inexact

Social construction of age and ageing

Sexuality as well can affect how an individual experiences old age.

than 40 men gave for supporting gay marriage – legal/property equal-

Connecting the chapters that comprise this book is a narrative about

Heterosexual people are persecuted on Valentine’s Day

Two non-representative samples

Drawing on data from two separate sets of interviews can be hazard-

80 gay men that I interviewed in Australia in the period 2001–3 for

need to conduct fieldwork in non-western countries where English was

Recent advances in interpersonal communications such as e-mail and

In the next section, I explain how I conducted face-to-face inter-

I made contact with many of the interviewees through personal intro-

by the number of men with whom I arranged to have an interview who

therefore to increase the number of interviewees in the New York sample

Initial attempts to make contact with any of the social organisations in

Skype. The first Skype interview took place in mid-December 2009,

I posted on the Hong Kong page of Craigslist, I tried posting advertise-

rather than expressing pride in their homosexuality … [gay men

A European expatriate I interviewed in Hong Kong, a man in his late

My [boy] friend has a lot of Chinese gay friends. … None of them

When I asked Bernard whether he thought things would be different for

I know there is a gay life developing very quickly in China but it is

status as a British crown colony and the longstanding business, educa-

relatively mobile, I was able to meet most of them in a relatively public

Queer As Folk. Before I left Australia, I posted an advertisement on

Sydney interviewee was from the very-young generation. Two of the

Pre-planning is crucial if the researcher intends fieldwork of this nature.

countries or in large, international cities. Also, I hope that my accounts

My mother and father had a friend … when I was

At least two different narratives have circulated at different times in the

Everything is planned round avoiding feeling lonely: all kinds of

well-filled calendar and carefully planned moments to recover from

The image their description conjures is of an individual too aware of