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Are there elderly lesbians and gay men?1 If we look at contemporary imagery of gay men and lesbians, we are most likely to see images of younger adults (see, e.g., the recent Showtime television series, Queer as Folk); this view parallels the general marginalization of older adults in U.S. culture. Older adult gay men and lesbians may be said to constitute the most invisible of an already invisible minority.
Of course there are elderly lesbians and gay men. Some estimates put the number of gay and lesbian older Americans from i million to 2.8 million (Cahill, South, and Spade, 2000). However, little is known about this group relative to what is known about other groups of older adults. In large part, this lack of knowledge is due to some of the inherent difficulties faced in studying lesbians and gay men in general, including problems of definition, differences in selfidentification as gay or lesbian among this cohort of elders in particular, and, historically, a lack of institutional support for research on this population.
Making research and understanding even more difficult has been the social devaluation of lesbian and gay citizens and especially lesbian and gay relationships by government and religious institutions (see, e.g., the Defense of Marriage Act and similar state legislation as well as many churches' punctilious stances on gay marriage that favor heterosexual intimacy over gay and lesbian intimacy). Additionally, the research that has been conducted has been biased in favor of gay urban centers like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York, with gay men and lesbians who are "out," middle class, and predominantly European American (Quam, 1993).
Expressions of intimacy among older gay men and lesbians counter the negative image of these older adults as alone and lonely. In the few such studies available, there is evidence that a sizable proportion of lesbians and gay men are in long-term relationships (see, e.g., Bell and Weinberg, 1978; McWhirter and Mattison, 1984) or live alone but are not lonely.
Cahill, South, and Spade (2000), for example, indicate that although gay men and lesbians may be more likely to live alone and without a life partner than their heterosexual counterparts, they may have stronger nonfamilial social networks than do heterosexuals. According to these authors,...