The Role of Reevaluation in the Gay Man's Quest for Authenticity

The following is an excerpt from Uncharted Lives: Understanding the Life Passages of Gay Men by Stanley Siegel and Ed Lowe, Jr. (Plume, 1995).

Generally, when a man arrives at roughly the midpoint in his life, he begins to reconsider the choices and the commitments he has made within the context of a changing realization about his mortality and the different perspective he is developing about the passage of time.

Specific choices he has made have absorbed a certain amount of time, and even his relationship with time is new. He feels that he can be more patient – looking five years ahead at a new goal no longer seems so difficult because time seems now to move faster than it did when he was younger – but by the same token, he no longer feels as confident in the amount of time he has ahead of him to accomplish new goals.

. . . This period of high self-examination often leads to a man's deconstructing some elements of his life and realigning them in a rearranged order of importance: what he now thinks he really wants and what he wants to avoid. At some period, and usually this one, every man reinaugurates a quest for authenticity, perhaps one that he feels he abandoned or departed from in a once distracting reach for material satisfaction, praise, or career fulfillment. But the focus and the approach may be vastly different between a gay and straight man during this time of life.

From the outset, the gay man frequently is more prepared for this kind of reevaluation process, because he has been living with it on and off both since childhood and since his earliest acknowledgement of his different sexuality.

Because the gay man was not given the opportunities for participation in institutions like marriage and was forced out of the option to embrace such responsibilities as come with starting a family, he likely developed in his youth an advanced expertise in managing individual freedom and in exploring all the other aspects of life that are not traditionally associated with institutions – nightlife, personal entertainment, socializing, and. frankly, having fun and letting loose. When he reaches a so-called crisis stage, wherein he takes inventory and checks his priorities to see if they still fit, the gay man usually is looking at the possibility of embracing some serious responsibilities. The classic heterosexual man at the same crossroads in life generally is depicted as doing exactly the opposite, as throwing off his too burdensome responsibilities and his career ambitions in order that he may stop to smell the roses, buy a red sports car, and fall in love with a sexually enthusiastic woman fifteen years his junior.

Reevaluation and reexamination seem to be a period characterized by a fair recognition of the value of love and a strong desire to welcome love as a greater, more dominant ingredient in an individual's life than perhaps it previously had been.

Along with the renewed interest in authenticity, the individual becomes more aware of the number and relative proximity of people who love him and with whom he can be loving.


See also the previous posts:
• "Don't Fence Me In"
• Affirming Our Essential Goodness
• Wrestling with the Angel
• Mindful Lovemaking
• The Gay Male Quest for Democratic, Mutual, Reciprocal Sex

Photography: The Leveret.