No andropause for gay men? The body, aging and sexuality in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This article aims to contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate about the implications of andropause in the Gender Studies literature by decentring and complicating it further using the case of Turkish gay men. Aging gay men in Turkey struggle to remain young, healthy and ‘cool’ as they use their wittiness and emotional maturity towards younger men. All of these happen at the intersection of masculinity politics and homophobia within Turkish society and the profound ageism within the global gay culture. Our questions are shaped around andropause and its absence as gay men reject and disidentify with it: Is andropause a heteronormative concept? Through the active rejection of the external outcomes of aging and andropause, mid-life Turkish gay men present an idiosyncratic vantage point to explicate the relatively understudied intersection of masculinity, homosexuality and aging in the non-western contexts. Through interviews we contend that, unlike their heterosexual equivalents, mid-life gay men do not accept andropause, but instead they develop tactics to consolidate their socially capable, self-assured and well-integrated subjectivity within the fringes of the global gay culture. Looking closer at aging gay men and their multifactorial strategies provides us the chance to grasp the ubiquitous heteronormativity inscribed in the narratives of andropause.

KEYWORDS:

• Gay men
• aging
• the body
• de-masculinization
• andropause
• Turkey

Notes

1. Gay men’s anti-aging ventures look similar to the experiences of middle-class Turkish women of menopausal age, with deep concerns for losing a youthful appearance (and having marital troubles because of it), and were inclined to take hormone treatments as a remedy (Erol, 2014).

2. For some examples of this literature (see, Calasanti & King, 2005; Connell, 2012; Courtenay, 2000; Croghan et al., 2014; Cruz, 2003; Fox, 2007; Gardner et al., 2014; Heaphy, 2007; Hostetler, 2004; Jones & Pugh, 2005; Kong, 2012; Lodge & Umberson, 2013; Marshall, 2007; Marshall & Katz, 2002; Mercer, 2013; Sandberg, 2015; Scott, 2015; Simpson, 2013; Slevin, 2008; Slevin & Linneman, 2010; Woody, 2014).

3. As a contrasting point about the desirability of older men, there is a trope of mature gay male, which has been an important theme of gay porn especially in the 1970s, and made a comeback recently in the subgenre of ‘Daddy porn’. In this context, the ‘dirty old man’ stereotype is eroticized, sometimes in the enactments of predatory and abusive scenarios, and sometimes from the point of view of the younger men who actively seek older men as objects of desire (Mercer, 2013). Similarly, some bear and BDSM communities are places where older gay men are valued as sexual partners).

4. Two respondents mentioned that when they were younger they had bisexual orientations and one said he ‘might still have a sexual interest in women’ although he had never actually been with a woman.

5. For racialized older gay men, see Woody (2014).

6. The only source that investigates the intersection of Islamic lifestyle and homosexual men in Turkey is an article by Bereket and Adam (2008). They contend that, ‘for many of the men interviewed here the tension between their sexuality and religious prescriptions was insoluble: they tended to lose religious convictions as they participated in the “gay scene”,’ (2008, p. 218). This distance from religious way of life in general, and Islam in particular, which is quite common especially among middle-class urban gay men in Turkey, is also confirmed through the interviews we have conducted.