Midlife crisis is that moment when you realize your children and your clothes are about the same age.
—WILLIAM D. TAMMEUS
The universal description of the midlife crisis includes a time of personal turmoil, sudden changes in personal goals and lifestyle, realization of aging and physical decline, and feelings of entrapment in roles that are seen as unwelcome and too restrictive. When I first came out, I was already a decade past “over the hill at thirty” as gay men said at the time. I am sure some people believed that my coming out was just a midlife crisis. One man I corresponded with online wrote, “I will not say my life was better when I was younger, but [it was] definitely totally different. In ten years it will be totally different again.”
All people have a moment when mortality finally becomes personal. We realize that less time remains of our lives than has already passed, and we begin to check things off our to-do list without ever having done them. Midlife is a time when we review our life experiences and begin to consider the need to develop a legacy, a suitable ending to our life story. Midlife is a time of disengaging from the world of the young to pursue a greater range of social roles and to engage a more cognitively complex, ambiguous, and uncertain world. Midlife is also a time of higher cognitive complexity, when values and institutions are seen with more ambivalence and uncertainty. As we mature, we become more critical of groups and institutions that once had a great influence in our lives.
The exact ages for midlife seem to be quite elastic, extending from the thirties through the sixties. At the time I was born in 1943, life expectancy for a man was about sixty-eight years, so at seventy-three years old, I have already received a gift of five years beyond what was expected when I was born. I used the Social Security life expectancy calculator to determine that today, my life expectancy is 86.3 years, or another twelve or thirteen years.1 When I was a child, a seventy-three-year-old man looked pretty damn old. The image of seventy-three that I carried in my head for a long time was of a person who had lived five years beyond the best-if-used-by date. But life expectancy has increased over my lifetime.
Midlife is a time of disengaging from the world of the young to pursue a greater range of social roles and to engage a more cognitively complex, ambiguous, and uncertain world.
Because I’m not dead yet, I’m considered a survivor, but sometimes I wonder, How many of those years will be good years? When will I change from one who has always been a care provider to being one who is dependent upon the care of others? I prefer to think of midlife as the middle of adult life, which would put it at the beginning of my fifth decade. Whatever age one chooses, all people reach a point where they begin to have some awareness that they are aging, that time is passing by, and that they are “halfway home.”
Midlife can be a tumultuous time where every aspect of a person’s life comes into question. Much of what is revealed is horrifying, including the destructiveness in others and the recognition that we have been responsible for some of the pain experienced by those we care about. What we aspired to be and our current achievements may be significantly different. We are stretched between a strong investment in maintaining the status quo and the urgent desire to modify our life.
The period of midlife transition is characterized by disillusionment as we recognize that long-held assumptions and beliefs about ourselves and the world are not true. This can be experienced as both a loss and liberation. When gay men come out in midlife, they may be daunted by deconstructing the straight-and-narrow, nice-kid-next-door pose they had assumed for decades. In maturity people begin to act in ways that are more in concert with their reconstructed internal values rather than revert to their old patterns of pleasing others. Priorities change, and the external world is no longer the reference point for what is correct.
One interviewee described his late coming out in this way: “A mature person has a highly personal value system that they have constructed from the best parts of different systems to which they have been exposed. Prior to maturity they adopted the value system of their parents and peers, or they rejected those values completely and reactively developed opposing values. In either case, values are still dominated by the values of their parents. Midlife allows us to integrate those values with our own later experiences.”
As men undergo the psychological changes of midlife, they begin to reconsider the qualities of life that make it worthwhile. Men often become more sensitive to the misfortunes of others. They no longer fear intimacy, and they begin to question the validity of doing, making, and having and never admitting weakness. Even more important, such ideas are no longer considered expressions of being queer.
In midlife, we are able to recognize that what we learned about being a man and what is expected of us may not be guidelines we must cling to. These expectations may not represent who we really are. Paul, a man I interviewed, is an excellent example. Paul was an identical twin and was a Lutheran minister until he was outed in 1991. At the age of forty-six, at a church leadership retreat, he disclosed that he experienced sexual attraction to other men.
From the age of thirteen Paul had felt called to the ministry, and the increasing struggle he felt about his sexuality led him to believe that if he were exposed, he would lose everything important to him. For him, coming out risked putting all of his familial, social, communal, and vocational relationships at risk. During the years before he came out, he dealt with suicidal feelings and fear of being exposed.
Although the group at the retreat had taken an oath of confidentiality, two colleagues went to his bishop. The bishop demanded his resignation. Losing his job meant coming out to his teenage children, an experience he anticipated would be devastating. Instead, it turned out to be a positive experience because each of his three children said that they still loved him. Paul began to accept that he was gay and believed that God accepted and affirmed him as a gay man.
Prior to coming out, Paul had only experienced limited, casual sexual encounters with other men. Paul and his twin brother had explored their sexuality with each other from the onset of puberty through high school. Paul’s first date with a woman was for the homecoming dance his senior year in high school. He dated a woman in college, but when she wanted to have sex, he refused, rationalizing that it was because his moral standards were higher than hers. He had never had sex with a woman before his marriage. He felt his wife was a good choice for him, but even as he was getting married, he began to feel he was making a terrible mistake.
Paul describes his late-arriving gay “adolescence” in this way: “In 1984, after finally coming to terms with being gay and accepting my sexuality as a positive thing, as is common for gay men who are accepting their sexuality, I acted like a teenager. For me that mainly manifested itself as looking for a lot of sexual encounters and also shocking people by inappropriate revelations of my sexual adventures.” Paul discovered in his coming out that his identical twin, who also had been married, was also gay and had a parallel sexual development. Paul legally married the man he had been with for nearly twenty years, and after that man passed, Paul began a new life with his second husband.
Eight of the men in my study came out in their eighties, four of them having been outed like Paul. Like Paul and me, they always felt very sexual, but acting on those feelings with women evoked considerable anxiety. We avoided heterosexual dating as much as possible, using justifications like morality, need to work, or Southern gentility to explain our restraint. What other young men were learning by trial and error with women, we never learned.
One older gay man I interviewed said about dating, “You eat, you laugh, and you cry. But mostly you just wait.” The first task for many middle-aged men who have been concealing their sexuality is to spend some time alone, deciding how far to take this newly discovered truth about their sexual orientation. They must ask themselves, “Am I ready to forsake the life of heterosexual privilege to become a part of a stigmatized minority? Am I ready for a relationship? Do I believe that gay men are capable of long-term, monogamous relationships? Am I willing to give up a secret life of nonmonogamous sex?”
Romantic love is based on sex and passion, and it changes over time. Most men who come out in midlife are beginning a gay sexual adolescence, and they will spend much of their remaining life trying to integrate sex, Romance, and love. Traditionally men have met their partners through family and work associates, but this is impossible when sexual orientation is concealed. Our deficiencies, however, began to be remediated when we began dating men. Each of us sought to tame the wild horse of Plato’s allegory.
Men who are fathers can be attractive potential partners. They are often considered less self-oriented and better at compromise, but bringing kids into the mix adds a layer of complexity to a relationship. People underestimate the central role of children in the lives of gay men. For gay men, dating an older man with children is complicated because the children will always come first. The birth of Roberto’s son permanently bumped me into a subordinate place in his affection.
In a nearly twenty-year-old study, researchers reported on a group of previously married gay men and women in Chicago. They found that people who have been heterosexually married tend to self-identify as gay an average of ten years later than those who never married. This is consistent with my experience and my survey results. Marriage also delays the age of coming out to both parents, although mothers were generally told earlier than fathers.2 The difficulty of coming out to my mother far surpassed the difficulty I felt in telling her I wanted to be a psychiatrist.
One man I interviewed had retired from the military. Although he knew he was gay much earlier in his life, he had married and divorced twice. He said that his deployments for military combat enabled him to remove himself from the conflict he experienced about his sexual orientation while at home. He was the custodial father of his two daughters. Not yet out to his daughters, he was struggling to find a new life as a gay father.
Gay fathers have some unique problems. The image of the affluent gay man who hedonistically indulges himself doesn’t fit most gay men I know, but it especially doesn’t fit for most newly divorcing gay men. Many go through several years of legal and financial problems often compounded by a wife who feels deceived and cheated and in retaliation, may seek to contaminate the father’s relationship with his children. Because of child support and alimony, these men may have very little discretionary income. Coparenting also makes significant demands on the time of gay fathers, which can be a big source of conflict for a partner who has never had children of his own.
People who have been heterosexually married tend to self-identify as gay an average of ten years later than those who never married.
Marital history and the timing of important life events significantly impact the coming-out trajectory. Because of their common struggle to balance being gay with the responsibilities of being fathers, men who have been in heterosexual marriages have much more in common with each other than they do with gay men who have different life histories. The development of gay men who have children is shaped in a much different way than the development of those who do not, because children are central in their lives. When I joined the gay fathers’ support group, I felt an immediate sense of brotherhood with the other men in the group. Gay fathers have clusters of common experiences that make it easy to relate to each other, but those experiences may complicate relating to men who came out early in their lives and who have never heterosexually married.
Gay men who come out in later life, whether previously married or not, are rookies in a game they have never played before. Their lives are turned upside down. Some trade a comfortably familiar, heterosexual life in the suburbs for a new life in a gay urban environment. Their previous straight social network has been sidelined. They are out of sync with developmental tasks appropriate to their age. With little or no previous experience in the gay community, they battle with tasks that are typically associated with late adolescence and young adulthood rather than middle age. They lack certainty about their new world. Without a clear sense of their new identity, they compete in the game, but there is no rule book. Many are not prepared to begin life anew as a single man.
For many gay fathers, the biggest barrier to coming out is telling their children. Gay fathers know that they are different; they also know that their being different will define their kids as different. Fathers worry about how their being gay will impact their children’s relationships with other kids. All parents want to buffer their children against the pain of being teased, accused, and rejected. Guilt stabs gay fathers when their kids hear slurs like “Your dad’s a faggot.” I worried that my daughters’ boyfriends would be scared off when they said to them, “There’s something important I need to tell you about my dad.”
When I came out to my kids, they responded, “Oh, Dad, we’ve known that for a long time.” Although coming out to their children occasionally sparks a wildfire, many gay fathers have had similar experiences of coming out to their children. One of the men I interviewed who has three adult sons said his children responded, “Pop, why didn’t you tell us this ages ago?” They told him they loved and respected him even more because he demonstrated to them qualities he had been unable to see in himself. He regretted that he had been too afraid to tell them the truth when he first became confident that he was gay. Losses loom so much larger than gains.
Amity Pierce Buxton, who wrote The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming-Out Crisis for Straight Spouses and Families, offers this advice to fathers considering coming out to their children: “Most kids believe that the sooner a gay parent comes out to them the better for them it is. By the time the spouse has been told, children will already be aware of the tension in the household.” Buxton suggests that children not be told at the time their parents separate; coming out should wait until both parents are somewhat comfortable with the revelation. Then both parents are in a better position to be supportive of the children when they are told. Depending upon their age, they may have already observed telltale signs of their parent’s sexual orientation.3
Children should be told at a time when they can react, reflect, and ask questions. The goal is to lovingly help them understand. Unlike thirty years ago when I came out, with so many cultural changes and attention to same-sex relationships in the media, even very young children will already have some idea of what it means to be gay. Most children say that the divorce is a more difficult issue to accept than sexual orientation. But as my daughter said, “Children who have a gay parent must come out to our friends, too. Telling friends about a divorce is a one-shot thing, but coming out to our friends never ends.” In some cases, estrangement may occur. It takes time, consistency, and work to reestablish damaged relationships.
I have never started an important venture feeling adequately prepared. No perfect way exists to come out to children. An acceptable job may be good enough. Everything that is painful is not necessarily dysfunctional. It may help to know that you’re not in this alone, but it may not help much. Sometimes things are as bad as they seem, but often they are not.
As we age, both men and women experience a gradual decrease in the attributes that are culturally considered attractive. But from my research, women and gay men experience this decrease more dramatically and earlier than heterosexual men. For a while past the age of fifty, men get a free ride—age may even enhance some aspects of men’s attractiveness and work to their advantage in some relationships. That said, the psychological impact of physical changes can be significant.
Central to the fear of middle age are attitudes about changes in the body. Those who are most deeply invested in their physical appearance encounter the greatest difficulty, fearing the loss of their external, youthful sexual attractiveness. As Rebecca Mead wrote in the New Yorker, “The new idea offered by the contemporary culture of cosmetic surgery is that it is the vessel itself that we must value, rather than the soul or spirit that it contains.”4 This physically attractive body is the person we present ourselves to be, and some have lived behind the façade of their bodies with little concern for relating to others in ways beyond the physical. Middle age, and the loss of that youthful body, can be shocking, and some gay men feel they’ve lost their former social self.
Stereotypes describe gay men as either limp-wristed and effeminate or obsessed with attaining the masculine body beautiful. In the article “Ageing Gay Men: Lessons from the Sociology of Embodiment,” Julie Jones and Steve Pugh describe the relationship gay men have with their body image. While the extremes are captured by the exaggerated femininity in the form of drag and the exaggerated masculinity in the musculature of the gym rat, between these extremes an infinite variety of aesthetic preferences exist, but the unifying factor is the presentation of an attractive, attention-grabbing body.5
Some gay men consider their bodies their most significant asset, and they seek affirmation through admiration and envy from others. Rarely alone, but sometimes lonely, their bodies are their ticket to power and success, and the goal is perfection. When I was working out at the Iowa State gym years ago, some men would check their muscle definition several times during one workout. RuPaul, America’s foremost drag queen whose show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, has been nominated for an Emmy, said in her autobiography, “We are born naked and the rest is drag.” What RuPaul is suggesting is that all of us use our bodies and the way we dress to influence others’ opinions of us.6
Showering in a gym is surely as oppressive for a stocky, skinny, or aging gay man as it is for a woman trying on a new swimsuit. Chiseled good looks are achieved by very few and remain only a dream for the majority. Not being able to achieve those good looks is sometimes perceived as a lack of commitment to body maintenance or a lack of self-control. The body becomes a project, perpetually in need of development to prevent it from reverting to its natural, homely state. Continual fixation on body image sometimes means attempting to radically alter the way we look by “having a little work done,” including the use of pectoral implants, steroids, and penile enlargers.
Our body image results from the difference between our ideal body and the way we see our current body. We are satisfied with our body image when we have a realistic expectation about what our body can be and we see it as it actually is. The saddest and angriest gay men are those who have failed to accept that their potential is limited and that perfection is unattainable. They feel as intimidated by beautiful gay men as they are by straight men. The enemy for these men is not their body; the enemy is their unrealistic expectation of what their body can be or must be.
Gay men’s connection to physical attractiveness or preoccupation with fashion can be perceived as superficial or even threatening to heterosexual men. The American code of manhood dictates that real men must not be concerned about matters of style and taste, but all the while they are blasted by images of men reshaped by computers and wearing Calvin Klein briefs. The word metrosexual was created to describe American men who blend an interest in style, fashion, and culture while not letting go of balls-scratching, beer-guzzling masculinity. These men have always been a part of affluent groups, but now frosted hair and manicures have become accessible to the average man. In Europe, men don’t need a special category to justify their emphasis on physical grooming, but this crossover is something we are not yet comfortable with in the United States: being a metrosexual is just too queer.
The word metrosexual was created to describe American men who blend an interest in style, fashion, and culture while not letting go of balls-scratching, beer-guzzling masculinity.
Because of the importance of physical attractiveness in the gay community, middle age comes sooner to gay men than it does to heterosexual men. Pressure is put on gay men to work daily to maintain the appearance of youth, but the labor must also be hidden so no one knows how difficult it is to keep up. Harold Kooden wrote in Golden Men: The Power of Gay Midlife that the concept of a linear aging process is misleading. He suggested that gay men have four ages: chronological (clock age), biological (body age), experiential (heart age), and sexual (gay age). He proposed that we age in each of these four areas at different rates and times; chronological age represents only one portion of our authentic age.7
Another age might be added to Kooden’s list: geographical age. Age functions quite differently in urban and rural communities. Because MSM may undergo conflict about their sexuality, their sexual age may lag behind their clock age, body age, and heart age. Geographical age may add another incongruity—men who grew up in the city may arrive at a gay identity at a much younger age.
A midlife crisis is usually believed to involve a change in one’s basic personality. Men are expected to go through this crisis as they begin to experience the physical and psychological changes of aging. In my research I examined the presence of stressful events in the lives of mature MSM. Although the loss of physical vitality can be stressful, the emotional stresses of midlife are far greater—loneliness; illness or death of parents, siblings, and contemporaries; marital discord, separation, or divorce; extramarital affairs; children leaving home; disappointment in children’s achievements; or feeling caught between the demands of parents and children. However, I found evidence disputing the idea that midlife is a universally stressful time. Traditional beliefs about aging, in particular gay aging, overestimate the occurrence of midlife crises, and serious emotional disturbances are the exception rather than the rule.
Medical literature is not much help when one seeks to understand the midlife transition for gay men. Researchers ignore older people and are ignorant of the fact that they might still be having sex. Having been raised in an era when same-sex behavior was criminalized and pathologized, baby boomers are difficult to research because many gay men and women have never let go of their fear of exposure. Consequently they reject the labels that might sideline them from the general population. Many gay baby boomers have lived a heteronormative life, concealing their sexual orientation either by celibacy or by feigning disinterest in sex.
However, midlife can be liberating. Midlife is a time to stop living other people’s values and start integrating that which is valuable from our roots and our later-life experiences. In midlife we shift away from using the external world as our main reference point and focus on what is correct for ourselves and our developing image of the future. Midlife has allowed me to realize that attractiveness is not measured by only one standard or from only one perspective; it includes a personal value system, a mature adult physical attractiveness, and a richness of personal history.
When I turned forty, a sense of urgency to deal with the parts of myself that I earlier had neglected, ignored, or put on hold swept over me. One of those was my sexual orientation. I had been committed to meeting obligations for family and career; a beautiful body, frequent sex, and dancing the night away were the least of my concerns. But I began to ask myself, “Am I too old to start over as a gay man?” I shuddered when I considered that one possible result from coming out might be a series of meaningless and clandestine sexual encounters with faceless men, the risk of disease, and eventual public humiliation.
The real result of my coming out was not that dire, but around that time I began to experience a series of losses: I lost my marriage, I lost the custody of my children, and I began to lose people I loved—my mother, my brother, my stepfather, and friends my own age were dying. Professionally, I had reached the apex of my career; I had to step aside as younger physicians filled with the energy and passion I once had passed me by. For the first time in my life, I had medical concerns. Erik Erikson wrote that “Despair expresses the feeling that the time is short, too short for the attempt to start another life and to try out alternate roads to integrity.”8 Was it possible for me to find integrity rather than despair in a new life as a gay man?
Coming out in midlife is characterized by deconstructing inherited values and reconstructing a value system of our own choosing. Deconstructing a value system does not mean destroying it. Although I needed to unlearn some things I had never questioned when I grew up in Wakefield, Nebraska, I still cherish a couple of things I learned there. One of those values is that no person is superior to another. We have all been given gifts—different gifts to be sure—and we have all used those gifts in different ways, but I abhor the idea that some people are superior to others because they were born into a different world. Another value I embrace that is rooted in my rural upbringing is that we don’t own this earth; we are stewards of it.
I struggled for years with religion. Then I found a church that says, “We don’t do dogma.” This church has only two rules: love God and love one another. That’s very basic—but not so simple. I wrestled for years with trying to understand God, but I came to the realization that if there is a God, he or she would not be understandable by the human mind. Loving one another isn’t always easy, but I have no tolerance for any religious group—like the Westboro Baptist Church with their “God hates fags” tag line—whose members project their own hate of others onto their interpretation of God.
A mentor who can help a man examine his values around sexuality, someone who is further along in that process, is invaluable. Many MSM have lived for years in a heterosexual world where they passed as straight. Sometimes they have had only a partial or conditional acceptance of being gay, and their commitment to their sexual orientation was surpassed by their commitment to values of a heteronormative society. Because they have lived in a straight world and concealed their sexual orientation for so long, by coming out they risk losing their straight friends while they still only have underdeveloped relationships with gay people. Because their self-esteem is so damaged, people who do not undergo an internal transformation of their homonegativism may isolate themselves to a greater and greater degree. Isolated men who experience sexual attraction to other men don’t need more sex; what they need is an emotional hug from men in a compassionate and understanding community.
One man I corresponded with online, a married father and Muslim from Egypt, said he cries himself to sleep each night, wishing some kind of treatment could make him stop wanting to have sex with a man so that he could go on with loving his wife and two children without those intrusive thoughts. He had no support in his community, and explained, “I am afraid I will be killed if my attraction is exposed.” This is not an unrealistic fear in many parts of the world—and even in the United States. He hungered for a connection with like-minded men, and his only link was via the Internet, but Internet relationships are often with other emotionally starved men. Frequently these connections focus on sex to the exclusion of emotional intimacy. It saddens me to hear the stories from so many desperately lonely men, but their sheer number makes it impossible for me to maintain a connection with all of them.
Isolated men who experience sexual attraction to other men don’t need more sex; what they need is an emotional hug from men in a compassionate and understanding community.
The most common regrets people face in midlife are related to education, career, Romance, family, and negative attitudes and behaviors. We are forced to make all of life’s most important decisions without enough information—information that we receive only as our lives unfold. We should not regret a decision that we made in good faith, with the best information available at the time, even when we later receive information that proves the decision wrong. The decision about coming out can be just like that. Although few regret it, no one can know if the people they love will accept them. But not making a decision is a decision in itself—one that bears its own unpredictable consequences.
One man divorced his wife after he came out to her. Then he came out to his family, his friends, and his coworkers, but as a middle-aged man, a new gay life didn’t immediately embrace him as he had anticipated, and he became quite depressed. He went to see his minister, who said the solution was to remarry his wife, and he did. He was no longer as depressed, but he was miserable living a pretense of a heterosexual life.
Some things we sacrifice with regret, some with relief. I do not regret the decision to leave my wife; I believed then—as I do now—that the consequences would have been worse for everyone if I had stayed. What I do regret is that I caused people I love so much pain.
As we mature, we can begin to perceive that with loss comes an opportunity for personal growth, and failure to adapt to loss may lead to bigger losses. Our losses can strengthen us, and the losses experienced by people we love strengthen our capacity for compassion and empathy for others. We learn to accept that love and risk are inseparable. We finally realize that it is safe to openly express our pain and sorrow. We seek to age well, to be vibrant, well-adjusted, and involved in sexually intimate relationships.
In midlife, issues that once divided families can diminish in importance and be reconciled. A family of choice can be blended to include members of a family of origin. We are even able to reconcile with deceased family members with whom relationships were strained; we can learn to forgive them for some of the mistakes they made during their lives. As we mature in midlife, we can see the issues that our parents faced in midlife from a fresh vantage point. As Philip Larkin wrote in the poem “This Be the Verse,”
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.9
At some point in our lives we must stop blaming our parents for our failures. If we blame our parents for our failures, don’t we also then have to give them the credit for our successes? We must also begin to accept that some of our choices have negatively affected our own children, too. But at some point we must stop blaming ourselves for that. Maturity allows us that freedom.
Each of us must direct our own development through midlife. The first step in helping a mature man in the coming out process is to help him understand his history in a new way, to help him understand decisions and choices he’s made in the past. The process of development for gay men does not end with coming out, and as we age we must incorporate positive attitudes about aging. For a man to deal well with midlife, he must develop good relationships with others. He needs peers with whom he feels equal but from whom he also feels separate. He needs friends who accept and respect his individuality and are not just connected based on common activities or similarities. Maturity is a process of individuation, where a person changes in relationship to himself and to the world.
The formula for self-esteem is having confidence in what we think and feel and responding to our own perceptions in a positive way. We can move out from behind the mask of concealment and speak with our own voices, with confidence that our opinions, thoughts, and feelings are valid and worthwhile. We can stop living according to the expectations of others. To do so, we must observe and trust our own perceptions and develop our own vision for the future.