Older Gay Men Feel Invisible in Atlanta

Older gay men feel invisible in the Atlanta community, even those who have been wit the community for more than 20 years, according to recent research.

Griff Tester, an assistant sociology professor as Georgia State University, presented his most recent project on gay men and their attachment to the gay community in Atlanta during a Brown Bag Seminar on Monday at 1 p.m. in the One Park Place building.

His research centralized around the questions of the extent of attachment gay men feel toward the gay community and does and affect that level of attachment. He found that many of these men saw themselves as invisible with the community at all level of attachment, which Tester categorized into strong, moderate, and weak attachment levels.

Tester interviewed, in-depth, 30 self-identified gay men in the metro Atlanta area all over the age of 60. All men were white except one who identified himself as Asian.

The majority of the 30 men fell into the moderate attachment category, with both positive and negative things to say about the gay community, but those who fell into the strong and weak categories were all men who had lived in the community for over 20 years.

"The positive aspects that these men talked abut was that the Atlanta gay community is a large major community with diverse types of people and social activities," said Tester.

Tester said these men spoke abstractly about the positive aspects with no real concrete details, but when it came to the negative aspects, these men had specific details that they encountered.

"Most of the men talked about feeling invisible in the community with age," Tester said. "even those who had a strong attachment to the community talked about ageism and feeling invisible."

Tester said the dominate theme that arose throughout the interviews with these men centralized around gay bars. Tester said the men felt particularly out of place and invisible at these bars, but the bars still remained the center and focus of the community.

"There is a lot of research that suggests that gay bars were places of retreat especially for this generation of men." Tester said. "This is a place where you find sympathetic others, people who shared your stigmatized identity, and therefore you could do identity work with others in solidarity."

As these men ages, Tester said their desire to go to gay bars decreased, but they were still places of importance.

Tester said interviewees felt excluded from and marginalized in these gay bars, especially from younger gay men. Tester said some of the older men stopped going to gay bars altogether, or only went in a group with other older gay men in fear of discrimination and being ignored.

Tester said that LGBT organizations were also places where these older men felt invisible in as they aged. Tester aid their ideas were overlooked and they generally felt out of place.

Tester said other factors contributed to the older gay men's feelings of being invisible, such as class, gender, race and losing families and friendships during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, but age still dominated the reason for the men's invisibility.