Older Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Adults

Identities, intersections and institutions

Andrew King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317086017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Andrew King is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey, UK and co-editor of Sociological Objects: Reconfigurations of Social Theory.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315598772-1

This book is about the lives of older people who have come to define themselves as lesbian, gay and/or bisexual (LGB), considering questions of identity, inequalities affecting their lives, what histories have shaped their conditions of existence and their relationships with significant others, notably partners, friends, families, as well as the people and institutions that provide services they use or imagine they might use as they age. It explores their social networks, forms of resilience and experiences of ageing. It is written primarily from a sociological viewpoint, although it draws on ideas and studies from a range of other disciplines, including gerontology, feminism, social policy, social work and psychology. At its centre is my desire to use sociology to explore and deconstruct the categorisation of people as ‘older LGB adults’ and the way that individuals are positioned as particular kinds of people because of the intersection of their age and sexuality, amongst other sources of identity and social division, such as gender, social class, ethnicity, geographical location and health status. Overall the book aims to consider differences amongst older lesbian, gay and/or bisexual people, disaggregating monolithic conceptions of lesbian, gay and/or bisexual ageing, as well as comparing their lives with those of older heterosexual people.

In the book I review a considerable body of literature about LGB ageing, but at the centre is a corpus of data that has its origins in a series of empirical studies and publications that I have contributed to over the past decade (Cronin and King 2010a, 2010b, 2014; Cronin et al. 2011; King and Cronin 2010, 2013; King 2014, 2015, forthcoming 2016a, forthcoming 2016b). These studies, which I refer to cumulatively throughout the book as the OLGB studies, explored the lives of 26 LGB people aged over 50 years and also included a project that sought to empower service providers to understand and address the needs of older LGB&T¹ service users. I provide further details about the studies in the Appendix of this book. It should be noted, however, that the discrete projects that made up the OLGB studies emerged from different backgrounds and were conducted for different purposes. They also emerged at different times, starting in the early 2000s and ending in 2012. Hence, the OLGB studies reflect LGB ageing for a group of older LGB people at a particular point in history, a time that, as I discuss in forthcoming chapters, has been one of immense change, in terms of legal, policy, and social and cultural factors affecting LGB ageing in the UK and indeed elsewhere.

¹ Transgender, or trans*, is a broad term that is used to refer to people whose gender identity or performance of gender is different from that associated with their assigned sex at birth. Trans includes people who are transsexual, transgender, transvestite, cross-dressers and those who regard themselves as of no gender or gender queer (Age UK 2011a; Whittle et al. 2007).

Current generations of older LGB people have witnessed profound changes across the entire course of their adult lives and the group that I predominantly focus on in this book is those aged 50 to mid-70s. These LGB Baby Boomers, who are considered to be a ‘young-old’ cohort (Rosenfeld 2002), are said to have been at the forefront of social–sexual change (Giddens 1992) and to have transformed the meaning and experience of ageing sexualities (Knauer 2011; Phillipson et al. 2008). This is a group of adults who will set the agenda for what it means to be an older lesbian, gay and/or bisexual person for the next few decades. Unlike their generational predecessors, who are more likely to have lived hidden or ‘silent’ lives (Knauer 2011; Pugh 2002), older LGB Baby Boomers are said to be more likely to have had access to celebratory, rights-based conceptions of sexual identity that will challenge service providers, policy makers, mainstream heterosexual society and indeed academic debates about ageing sexualities. However, as I noted earlier, and will elaborate upon later in this chapter, it is vitally important to consider issues of diversity and difference amongst older LGB people, and not to view these people as a homogenous, monolithic group. Whilst sometimes it is expedient to refer to ‘older LGB people’, and this is something I do frequently in the book, it is just as important to consider individual lives and biographies, to examine how a range of social divisions and inequalities affects lives, alongside those related to ageing and sexuality.

LGB ageing has been the focus of academic studies across gerontology, social work and public policy, but my own perspective is sociological. I believe that sociology provides important conceptual tools for exploring older LGB lives and that my own use of these tools adds to the work of previous sociological scholars in this field in the UK (such as Cronin 2006; Heaphy 2007, 2009; Heaphy and Yip 2006; Heaphy, Yip and Thompson 2004). In order to do this, the book, rather like sociology itself, draws on a range of approaches used in the social sciences, including diversity theories, theories of intersectionality, Queer Theory, Symbolic Interactionism, Conversation Analysis, theories of reflexive or late modernity and theories of embodiment. I realise that this eclecticism, some might say theoretical vandalism, could be seen as confusing and problematic. I contend, however, that because older LGB people do not fit easily into any theoretical framework and exploring their lives points to problems with theoretical approaches used in sociology, gerontology and social policy, amongst others, such eclecticism is absolutely necessary. This is particularly so with grand theories of identity and social change, such as theories of reflexive and late modernity, as well as theories of ageing and the life course. I argue that older LGB people complicate a range of taken-for-granted assumptions within the social sciences and within existing policy and practitioner discourses, calling into question easy assumptions about ageing and sexuality later in life.

This introductory chapter is intended to set the scene for the book as a whole. In order to do this I begin with a discussion of some key concepts and terms related to age and sexuality that frame discussions in forthcoming chapters. I am aware of the importance for many of situating older lesbian, gay and/or bisexual people demographically, so I provide a snapshot of the UK's ageing population and consider the demographics of the older LGB population; again, this is to contextualise what I am discussing in this book, but, as I point out, such demographics do not give us a detailed understanding of the lives of older LGB people. Consequently, I briefly consider how older LGB people are represented in the existing research literature, noting some key themes that I return to throughout the book: issues of constraint and inequality on the one hand, and agency, celebration and empowerment on the other. Finally, I provide an overview of the structure of this book and discuss some limitations in terms of ‘missing voices’.

Key concepts and terms

I want to begin with a discussion of some of the key concepts and terms related to age, introducing the notion of the life course, in addition to ‘cohort’ and ‘generation’. My aim here is to make clear the sociological approach to ageing that I will be taking throughout the book, distinguishing it from more biological and psychological models that have sometimes been applied to LGB ageing. I then, briefly, refer to the term sexuality and the categories lesbian, gay and/or bisexual, which I will also discuss in greater detail in Chapter 2.

Age, ageing and the life course

Age and ageing are contested terms in the social sciences, referring to chronology, biology, maturation and life stages. However, as many writers have noted, ideas about age and ageing change throughout history and across cultures – they are, in effect, social constructions (Ben-Amos 1995; Featherstone and Hepworth 1989; Green 1993; Hareven 1982b). Consequently, within sociology there has been a focus on the life course, as a means to distinguish processes of ageing and maturation from biological and psychological models, such as the lifecycle or lifespan, which equate these processes with a series of pre-determined, developmental stages (Hockey and James 2003; Pilcher 1995). A life course perspective, conversely, considers wider social processes and also changes at the level of subjectivity and agency (Elder 1978; Hareven 1978, 2000). Hence, the life course is concerned with,

individual and family transitions . . . part of a continuous, interactive process of historical change . . . part of a cluster of concurrent transitions and a sequence of transitions that affect each other . . . shaped, therefore, by different historical forces. (Hareven 1982a, 2)

Thus, in contrast with a model of linear stages, which people move through from birth until death, the notion of a life course suggests that attention should be focused upon a multitude of changes that occur at three levels: individual, collective and historical. From such a perspective, this means exploring how people experience the passing of time in terms of their subjectivity, their relationships with others and the wider contexts in which these take place. In short, from a life course perspective we age in and through social, historical, political and cultural contexts – to ignore this would be to isolate age and ageing, regarding them as individualistic processes, which they are not. For the study of LGB ageing this is especially important, because older LGB people's subjective experiences will have been shaped by the wider social/sexual norms of the society they have lived in, as I will show repeatedly throughout this book. However, one particular problem with this conceptualisation of the life course is that it mostly assumes heterosexuality is the norm, the reference point. Such heteronormativity, the term I will use from now onwards, implicitly renders the lesbian, gay and/or bisexual life course as ‘Other’, as different, as non-normative (Calasanti and Kiecolt 2007) and subject to erasure (Cohler 2005). Indeed, I will illustrate at numerous points throughout the book why this is problematic and why queering the life course, by taking the viewpoint of lesbian, gay and/or bisexual ageing, is necessary.

Cohort and generation

As I noted earlier, the concepts of cohort and generation are seen as central to debates about LGB ageing. Pilcher (1995, 6) suggests that ‘cohort’, a term that originated in demography, denotes ‘a defined population who experience the same significant event at, or within, a given period of calendar time’. Hence, we may talk about a cohort of people who move through the life course and experience the same events at similar points in their lives – for example, when entering the workforce and retiring. In contrast, Pilcher suggests that ‘generation’ refers to kinship relations, the distinction between one generation of a family and another. However, Burnett (2003) argues that cohort and generation are more distinct and within sociology there are several different models of generation that can be used. One of particular significance for what follows throughout this book, is the notion of generation found in the sociology of knowledge proposed by Karl Mannheim (1952).

Mannheim (1952, 290) used the term generation to mean a unity that comes from ‘a similarity of location of a number of individuals within a social whole’. He postulated that given the nature of social change, each generation would develop a particular zeitgeist or worldview, depending upon the events that shaped the era in which they came of age. For instance, commonly used terms such as ‘Baby Boomers’ and ‘Generation X’ (for examples, see the collection edited by Epstein 1998) are used to refer to particular generational groups with specific characteristics. The classic example used by Mannheim himself was the Wartime Generation, who he argued retained a sense of solidarity and collectivism across their lives as a result of coming of age during World War II. However, although Mannheim had sought to illustrate the importance and irreducibility of social processes to biological maturation, he inevitably proposed a linear model of human development that reified events experienced during youth above all others. In part, this reflects the period in which Mannheim was developing his generational model: in the aftermath of two world wars. Certainly, Burnett (2003) contends that Mannheim's reification of youth as the period of zeitgeist development is now called into question by processes of social change; in effect, the possibility of a singular zeitgeist is problematic and it is important to consider the intersection of social change and subjective experience across the life course, not just youth.

Older and later life

The decision to classify lesbian, gay and/or bisexual identifying people aged over 50 as older in the empirical studies used in this book, the OLGB studies (see Appendix), was partly pragmatic. There was a need, for instance, to define an age cohort for the projects. But it was also deemed to be important to align this empirical work with writings in gerontology that have traditionally viewed older as beyond 50 years in chronological terms. It should be pointed out immediately, however, that older in this sense does not mean old. Although chronological age was the key criterion for participating in the OLGB studies, as I noted earlier, age is as much a social and cultural construction as a chronological one (Pilcher 1995; Vincent 2003).

To be older one does not have to feel or indeed be old. One does not have to have reached retirement age, itself very much a social construction (Phillipson 1982, 1993). One may be employed, retired, unemployed; in good health, in poor health; living alone, in a relationship, bereaved. Despite the diversity in experiences of being older, policy makers and practitioners, as well as gerontologists and sociologists of later life, invariably invoke ‘older’ as a subject category, a position for an individual to fill based on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Contextualising
• Part II Situating older lesbian, gay and/or bisexual lives
• Part III Institutionalised and institutional identities
• Appendix: details of the OLGB studies
• References
• Index