Negotiating ‘Heterospaces’: Tolerance, Conviviality and Resistance at Rest, Work and Play

Abstract

Gay men do not live in a lavender ghetto (Knopp 1995: 143–4). Their lives are more braided than this stereotypical representation (which has purchase within and outside gay culture) would allow. Like any other individuals, they are also concerned with a range of moral and political issues that go beyond any obsession with age, ageing and ageism (Kristiansen 2004: 258). Any account of gay male ageing would be lacking if it did not address how men negotiate heterosexually defined social spheres. This chapter examines relations occurring within the city, neighbourhoods, the spaces of friendship, workplaces and the gym, which are understood as heterosexual — what I call ‘heterospaces’ — and which emerged as significant in interview accounts. This chapter focuses mainly on middle-aged gay men’s sense of self-identity as they grow older, and what their relations within these varied heterospaces say about how they experience ageing, ageism and the workings of heteronormativity and homophobia (fear of gayness that animates prejudice, discrimination and hostility).