Archive for July, 2010
What Should Medicine Do When It Can’t Save Your Life
What do you want the end of your life to look like?
I have been writing about my mother’s death for my book, Finally Out at Forty: Letting Go of Living Straight when I came across this article, “Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?” by Dr. Atul Gawande.
Here is an excerpt:
The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.
A study showed that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression.
My family was blessed that our mother had included us in discussions about how she wanted to spend her last days once the music died. My brother and sisters all knew that she did not want to spend her last days, surviving in a warehouse for the dying. Knowing her wishes help us to feel comfortable that decisions we made helped her to die with dignity.
To read the rest of this article, and you should read it, click here.
Summertime Blues
This post appeared on Real Jock: Gay Fitness, Health and Life
Gay Men and the Summer Blues: Fighting Seasonal Affective Disorder
By Russ Klettke, Published Jul 26, 2010
Summer isn’t the best time of year for everyone. Shelly Winters wasn’t on that boat with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in “A Place in the Sun,” and various singers (Bananarama, Ace of Base) have reminded us that a break-up in the warmer months brings its own pain. We feel obligated to be happy in summer, but sometimes it just isn’t happening. Likewise, summer sadness isn’t always about love lost; there are biological and other social reasons why the warmer months can cause depression—and gay men have particular vulnerabilities in this regard.
To read the rest of the essay, click here.
Gay Fathers Who Come Out
“Marital history has tremendous impacts on the trajectory of one’s life course and the timing of significant life events,” according to a paper by Herdt, Beeler and Rawls.*
In their paper reporting on a study of older gay men and lesbians in Chicago, men who have been in heterosexual marriages are more like each other than they are similar to gay men who have different life histories. They have clusters of common experiences that make it easier for them to relate to each other, but it may make it more difficult to relate to men who have always known they were gay and were never married.
These experiences are not a trivial factor in their lives.
People who have been married tend to self-identify an average of ten years later than those who did not marry. Marriage delays the age of coming out to both of their parents, although mothers are generally told earlier than fathers.
These authors wrote that those who have been in heterosexual marriages are out of synchrony with developmental tasks appropriate to their age (although I have found this to be true for most men who come out late, whether or not previously married).
With little or no previous experience in the gay community, they find themselves struggling with tasks which are typically associated with late adolescence and young adulthood rather than middle age. These men are rookies in a game they’ve never played before. Previously married men lack certainty about their new world.
Without a clear sense of their new identity, they begin to explore a new world. Many have left a well known world in the suburbs for a new life in an urban environment. They may feel adrift between two ports, their straight social network and the gay community. Their lives have been turned upside down.
They not only feel different from the men in the straight world, they also feel different from the men in their new gay world. Many are not prepared to begin life anew as a single man. Their coming out trajectory is different than it is for men who came out early. Was their marriage the cause or the effect?
One man with whom I spoke was retired military. Although he knew he was gay much earlier in his life, he had married and divorced twice. He was the custodial father of his two daughters. He said that his military deployments enabled him to remove himself from the conflict he felt about his sexual orientation. Not yet out to his daughters, he is struggling to find a new life as a gay father.
The gay rights movement may differentially impact the lives of previously married men, depending upon their age and life-course experiences, but even younger men who have grown up with the values of traditional society may find it difficult to enter the gay community.
Some men find fathers attractive partners, considering them less self-oriented and better at compromise, but dating an older man with kids is complicated because the children will always come first. It takes a particular kind of man who will accept being permanently moved into a subordinate place in his partner’s affection.
Men who are completely unwilling to forsake their hidden, heterosexual life often don’t make good long term partnership prospects. While some men are willing to commit to long term relationships with men who are married, most tire of being on call for the stolen moments a married man can make himself available.
*Herdt G, Beeler J, Rawls TW (1997). Life Course Diversity Among Older Lesbians and Gay Men: A Study in Chicago. Journal of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity 2:3-4, 231-246
New Antibody Discovered, Kills 91% of HIV Strains
From the Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2010
By MARK SCHOOFS
In a significant step toward an AIDS vaccine, U.S. government scientists have discovered three powerful antibodies, the strongest of which neutralizes 91% of HIV strains, more than any AIDS antibody yet discovered.
The antibodies were discovered in the cells of a 60-year-old African-American gay man. Researchers screened his cells to find 12 that produced the antibodies. Now the trick will be for scientists to develop a vaccine or other methods to make anyone’s body produce them.
Gary Nabel, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “We’re going to be at this for a while” before any benefit is seen in the clinic.
More than 33 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2008.
One potential pitfall: There is evidence that Donor 45′s cells took months or possibly even years to create the powerful antibodies. That means scientists might have to give repeated booster shots or devise other ways to speed up this process.
To see the entire article, click here.
Sex with an Old Guy
Men over fifty, sixty, seventy-five, even ninety can be great lovers for three basic reasons:
1.They are not in a hurry.
2. They put their partner’s needs first.
3. They have learned that great sex doesn’t have to include intercourse at all—it’s only one option.
It’s true that as men age in the second half of life, some physical changes happen. That means thatit may take longer for a man to get hard. He may not get as hard as when he was twenty-five. He may not ejaculate each time he has an erection. If we stop here, we have set older men up for performance failure. None of that has to happen.
Instead of embarrassment over lack of rock hard erections, older men can become relaxed, finding imaginative ways of pleasing. Oral sex increases. Sex toys are used. Erotic body exploration happens. In some cases, even “dress up” and gentle kinky sex transpires. A whole new world of possibilities opens up! Here’s the best news: Once the worry and fear of soft erections goes away, many older men are surprised at the firm erections that appear seemingly out of nowhere.
To read more, click here.