Introduction to Queer Aging

Document Type

Journal Article

Role

Author

Published In

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

Volume

31

Issue

4

First Page

531

Last Page

533

Publication Date

10-1-2025

Abstract

This installment of Q2 attends to issues around queerness and aging. While the medical and empirical fields of “queer gerontology” have emerged recently in response to an increasingly aging queer population, the subject of aging remains peripheral across the remainder of queer studies. What this subject comprises is itself a matter for exploration. While it certainly includes attending to the different needs of older members of the community—for example, the comparative lack of available, queer-affirming elder care from familial and institutional sources—it also takes up, as our contributing essayists share, broader themes, including sexual cultures and racial aesthetics, intergenerational transfers of queer knowledge, and the continuous recalibrations of queer selfhood. Any definition of queer aging at this stage is of necessity unstable, if only because chronological and affective registrations of age provoke different and sometime visceral responses. Even the question of when one becomes old is, in queer circles, notably complicated. A colleague recently related that they attended a birthday party for a queer friend turning twenty-eight who celebrated their new status as a “queer elder.” This may sound wildly premature until one recalls that, in queer life, the gulf between twenty-three and twenty-eight may feel more vast than that between twenty-eight and forty-eight. Does this mean queers become old in their late twenties and remain fixedly so for the next sixty-plus years? Or might we instead reconceive queer life as accelerating where it is traditionally thought to plateau? Perhaps the abrupt transition from queer youth to queer elder is no longer sufficient to capture the phases of queer life.


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