Gay Men's Relationships Across the Life Course

P. Robinson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230244122
• eBook ISBN: 9781137314680
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the life stories of a diverse sample of gay men from nine major international cities. Through their relationship stories, old established patterns of gay life are compared with new, emerging patterns of fatherhood, friendship and parenting.

1

Collecting 97 Gay Men’s Life Stories

Heterosexual people are persecuted on Valentine’s Day for showing their emotions in public, let alone homosexuality. … 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 population 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 represent their numerical distribution. For example, in Auckland, I interviewed 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 disappears. For this reason, while a qualitative sample of gay men cannot 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 minorities, even though there will be similarities. Finally, they cannot cover every variety of views held by gay men. They are a reliable representation, 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 hazardous. 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 railway 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 themselves 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 interviews 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 legitimate to blend material collected where there is a significant time difference, 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 serious 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 methodological 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, country 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 interviewees in India and Hong Kong. The first was a promise I made my editor to address a failing her reviewer observed in the original publication 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 interviewees, 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 countries easier and more immediate. But unlike when a researcher arranges face-to-face interviews, making on-line connections can be more difficult, 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 experiencing 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 experiences 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 familiarity 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 ‘autobiographical 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 interviews 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 computers 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 interviewees 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 interview 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 t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Collecting 97 Gay Men’s Life Stories
• 2 Single Men
• 3 Long-Lasting Relationships
• 4 Fatherhood
• 5 Marriage
• 6 Cohabitation
• 7 Living in the Midst of HIV-AIDS
• Conclusion
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Index