![]() ![]() In this article, we illustrate the utility of a life course paradigm in the study of gay men’s health and identity development and propose empirical work that embodies this paradigm. It thus can guide scholars to research questions, practices, and advocacy strategies more clearly aligned with the lived experience of gay men in diverse cultural and historical contexts, with the aim to both understand and enhance gay men’s health. ![]() The life course paradigm recognizes identity and health as historically situated, centering the concept of generation in the study of lives in context (e.g., Hammack, 2005 Hammack & Cohler, 2011). ![]() Sexuality researchers would benefit from a scientific paradigm that recognizes and accommodates the significant social and historical change that has affected gay men’s health and identity development over the past half-century. The heated exchange between these two generations of men at the PrEP forum reveals the way in which social identities and health practices are dynamic and grounded in historical time and place. In all likelihood, they could relate to men of both generations, having developed their sexual lives as gay men with condom use as a strong community norm but having lost few to AIDS. We can’t carry the burden of everyone who died before us.” Men in their thirties and forties (including the first author) were notably silent during the exchange. One of the younger men countered, “We can’t keep being afraid of sex because you were. “Every time you do that, you are asking to die,” one of the older men said. The older men chastised the younger men who admitted that they chose not to use condoms regularly, since they perceived condoms as a barrier to the intimacy they sought in sex. In an early forum on the emergence of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP see Grant et al., 2010) for HIV prevention held at San Francisco’s LGBT Center witnessed by the first author, an argument erupted in the audience between a group of young men in their twenties and a group of men in their fifties. ![]()
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