Gay Ageing beyond Manchester: International Comparisons and Contrasts

Abstract

Having analysed work performed on the body-self in the ‘private’ gay space of the home, self-presentation in various ‘public’ homospaces, and negotiation of various heterospaces and the spaces of constructed family, this chapter moves the analysis beyond a single British city towards an international focus. In order to do this, I identify further similarities with stories based on research of older gay men’s experience outside the UK. But I also focus more, in this chapter, on the differences between the kind of stories featured in this book and accounts relating to or bearing on gay ageing generated in scholarship — empirical and theoretical — in the USA and, to a lesser extent, Australia.