Making Sense of Middle-aged Gay Men’s Stories of Relating

Based on accounts from 27 interviewees (aged 39-61) and 20 observation sessions in Manchester’s ‘gay village,’ I examine stories of relating in the ‘homospace’ of the village and its bars. I draw attention to the value of an analytical framework that combines tools from critical realism and constructionism (based on a critical humanism) to explore how informants differentiated themselves from young (scene-oriented) gay men. Such an analytical move conceptualises social reality as multiform, contingent - arising from the dialectic between constraint and choice. It also opens up exploration of the resources of ageing in the shape of ‘ageing capital’ and (age-inflected) ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1987) but which I locate in fields/spheres of existence (Bourdieu 1984). The resources of ageing are used to differentiate middle-aged gay men from younger men in three ways. In empowering mode, accounts of differentiation indicate how resources of ageing (capital/technologies) enable expression of an ‘authentic,’ ageing subjectivity/relationality. In ambivalent mode, men’s narratives indicated negotiation with gay ageism. Less benignly and more often, stories of differentiation designed to recuperate an ageing, relational self could backfire and were implicated in reverse ageism. Contradictorily here, men drew on discourse that undermined their generational claims to a more ‘authentic’ gay subjectivity/relationality and frustrated their abilities to mobilise resources of age/ageing.