What Older Gay Men Know About Reinvention
On starting over at an age when everyone else is winding down, and what that looks like.
Carlos was 67 when he started taking the salsa classes. Not for exercise or socialization, the way the community center brochure framed it. He went because he’d seen a man there the week before. Salt and pepper beard, laugh lines deep enough to hide secrets in.
At home that night, his husband teased him about it.
“You’re taking dance lessons at 67?”
“Yep.”
“And you’re going back?”
“Yep.”
The conversation died there.
But here’s what Carlos told me sometime later: he wasn’t embarrassed. Not about the desire, not about pursuing it, not about being seen doing something new at an age when most people were accepting decline as inevitable.
The pursuing felt familiar. Hunger felt familiar.
What was new was the absence of that old clench in his chest, the one that used to show up whenever he wanted something.
I keep seeing this pattern.
Gay men in their 50s, 60s, even 70s who suddenly seem to unlock something while everyone else is winding down.
Muscles You Didn’t Know You’d Built
Michael was 58 when his husband of 22 years left him. Not for someone younger. Just left. Wanted something different, couldn’t articulate what, moved to Berlin and started making pottery. (Berlin. Of course it was Berlin.)
Michael’s friends expected collapse. They watched him the way you watch someone standing at the edge of a cliff.
Instead, he joined a gay men’s book club. Started going to the gym again, but this time without the punishing self-hatred that had fueled his 30s. Traveled to Barcelona alone, had a two-week affair with a hotel concierge, came home, and signed up for Spanish lessons.
Within eight months, he’d started seeing someone new, another man in his 60s who’d been through his own losses.
When I asked what that period felt like, he said:
“Like I’d been here before.”
Not that he wasn’t sad. He was gutted. But the foundational terror that accompanies a life falling apart?
Absent.
Because at 16, he’d already lost everything once when his parents kicked him out. At 29, he’d rebuilt his life after moving cities to escape an abusive partner. At 41, he’d watched his best friend die of complications from HIV.
The muscles you develop from repeated survival don’t atrophy. They just wait.
There’s research on this.
Gerontologists studying resilience in aging populations keep finding this odd pattern:
Older gay men who’ve held themselves together psychologically often navigate aging better than expected.
Better than the models predict. Not because being gay is inherently easier, but because of what researchers call “crisis competence.”
Translation: we’ve already done the hard thing. Multiple times.
We survived coming out in a world that wanted us dead.
Many of us survived the AIDS crisis, watched friends die, and kept living anyway.
We’ve navigated hostile families, discriminatory workplaces, and bathrooms where we didn’t know if we’d make it out unharmed.
We learned early that reinvention isn’t optional. It’s survival.
So when aging arrives with its inevitable losses and changes and the reality that nothing stays the same? We’ve been practicing for this our entire lives.
You can’t teach crisis competence in a workshop. You can’t get it from a book. You either develop it by surviving things that shouldn’t be survivable, or you don’t.
We didn’t ask for it. We built it because we had to.
But it’s ours now.
What Reinvention Leaves Behind
Here’s the thing about surviving impossible situations repeatedly: the body remembers how. Not as trauma (though that’s there too), but as capacity.
The psychological flexibility you needed at 17 to hold “I’m loved” and “I’m in danger” in the same breath? That same ability at 60 lets you hold “I’m aging” and “I’m still becoming” without shattering.
The instinct you developed at 22 for reading rooms, knowing who’s safe before they’ve said a word? At 65, that translates to knowing which friendships feed you and which are just familiar.
The practice you got at 30 rebuilding your entire identity after coming out, after moving cities, after losing the version of yourself you thought you’d be? At 70, you already know how to let go of who you were and become someone new.
I’ve watched older gay men discover kink for the first time at 60. Fall in love with someone completely wrong for them by every logical metric and not care. Move across countries on a whim. Start painting. Learn instruments.
Not because they’re having a crisis, but because the question “what do I actually want?” finally has space to breathe.
David was 71 when he told me he’d started having the best sex of his life. Not because bodies worked better at 71 (they don’t), but because he’d stopped performing.
No more mental checklist of what he was supposed to want, how he was supposed to act, which role he was meant to play.
At some point, the fear of being seen as too old, too fat, too whatever evaporated like water on hot pavement.
“Nobody’s looking anyway,” he said. “And I mean that in the best possible way.”
When you’ve spent decades being reduced to a category or forced into hiding, invisibility can feel like relief.
You’re free to want what you want. Be what you are.
The performance nobody fully bought anyway no longer matters.
There’s this man I see, 68, who started writing poetry for the first time last year. Not because he retired and needed a hobby. Because he finally had words for things he’d been carrying since childhood.
He brought some to session once. I won’t share them here, but they were raw and specific and sometimes clumsy in that way first attempts at honesty always are.
“I spent so long just trying to survive,” he said. “Now I want to see what else I can do.”
That sentence lands different when you understand what survival cost him.
But here’s what I keep noticing: the older gay men who are thriving aren’t doing it despite their history. They’re doing it because of what that history built.
Not the trauma itself (screw redemptive suffering narratives), but the specific ways impossible situations rewired how they move through the world.
The ability to sit with uncertainty without needing resolution. To hold contradictions that would break other people. To rebuild identity after it’s been shattered and recognize yourself in the mirror anyway. To start over because staying still meant dying. To want things and pursue them even when the world says you shouldn’t.
This is what shows up in later life.
Not as theory. As lived capacity that doesn’t need permission.
Someone in a session called them the Golden Men. Older gay men who survived everything the world threw at them and came out the other side not broken, tempered.
Like gold that’s been through fire.
Not because suffering is noble.
But because when you’re forced to burn away everything that isn’t essential, what remains is distilled. Concentrated. Unshakeable in ways that don’t need to announce themselves.
I see it in the way older gay men I work with hold space for younger ones.
No lectures. No resentment that things are easier now.
Just a quiet, bone-deep knowledge that surviving is its own form of wisdom. That starting over at any age is possible because they’ve done it before. That desire doesn’t have an expiration date unless you decide it does.
Still Becoming
Carlos is still taking those salsa lessons. The man with the salt and pepper beard? They’ve been dating for four months now.
His husband is happy for him (open relationship, negotiated, working).
He sends me updates sometimes. Little snippets of a life that refuses to wind down just because it’s supposed to.
Last week, he told me they’re planning a trip to Buenos Aires. To see where the dance comes from. To learn more. To keep becoming.
He’s 68 now.
The crisis competence he built at 16, at 23, at 34, at 47 (every impossible reinvention he survived) didn’t disappear when the immediate crisis passed. It settled into his bones. Became part of how he moves through the world.
And now, when aging arrives with its inevitable question of “who are you becoming next?”, he already knows the answer isn’t “smaller.”
Most people spend their lives avoiding reinvention. Building walls around a single version of themselves and defending it until death.
We never got that option.
So when 60, 70, 80 shows up asking “are you done yet?”, we already know how to answer.
Not with resignation. Not with clinging.
With curiosity about what we might still discover.
Aging isn’t decline when you’ve spent your entire life practicing reinvention.
It’s just the latest version of a question you’ve been answering since adolescence: who do you want to be now?
Thank you for reading,
Gino
P.S. Where in your body do you feel the difference between “winding down” and “still becoming”?
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All examples in this piece are composites drawn from patterns observed across therapeutic work with gay men. Details have been altered to protect confidentiality. No single story represents an individual person.
This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.
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I found this comment especially interesting: "David was 71 when he told me he’d started having the best sex of his life. Not because bodies worked better at 71 (they don’t), but because he’d stopped performing." People are often surprised that those of us in late life still enjoy sex. And perhaps somewhat by necessity -- our bodies change -- we engage in slow sex, intimate sex. Not slam-bam sex, not didn't-catch-your-name sex. Sexual satisfaction remains high if and when we begin to understand, accept, and adapt that some things have changed. But that isn't all bad.
This piece resonated. I’m 66. I am enjoying finding my voice, every single day. I’m getting good at it too. Lol. I really like the framing here of our life experiences, especially learning how to not simply survive but thrive can make all the difference.