Introduction to Queer Aging

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.Arguably, we are now witnessing the first communally queer generation, roughly marked, to reach old age. By “communally queer,” I refer to the twentieth century shift from subcultures bound through shared private sexual practices to public identities marking a phenomenological “way of life.” But how does queerness signify across a life span? Queer life has been, and remains for many, precarious. Yet it is only because that public identity confers a plausible expectation of generational continuity that we now confront questions of extended life alongside those of premature death.1 That a debate about queer futurity could occasion so much theoretical energy for two decades is the ironic consequence of this newly tenable calculation. If the closet remains a threshold by which one enters queer life, it is no longer the obvious denouement of that existence. Over time, that first coming-out story can lose its emblematic privilege, replaced by subsequent enactments of sexuality that feel just as threatening and exhilarating and that similarly overhaul one's sympathies and self-conceptions. Yet queer academic and cultural production seem hardly able to envision these revaluations as anything more than an extended epilogue to a moment that feels less and less determinative of queer life.The study of queer aging, then, asks that we contemplate the episodic and inheritable features of queer life as the context for the biopolitical and demographic consequences of aging. The embodied demands of the latter constitute, to be sure, a pressing agenda. In September 2024, Advocate magazine declared that “queer aging is the next frontier in LGBTQ+ human rights” as advanced by SAGE, the oldest advocacy group for LGBTQ+ elderly people. SAGE reports that as the population of the queer elderly explodes, such elders are “experiencing isolation, instability, and discrimination at rates disproportionate to the general population” (Yore and Adams 2024). The indignities of the queer elderly that rehearse those of youth—isolation and instability—seem nonetheless produced by a contrary dynamic. If these symptoms in queer youth result from the inflated attention and displacements that overinvest younger bodies, those same symptoms in elderly queers manifest, SAGE implies, as effects of social and institutional disinvestment. The contributions to this Q2 urge an attentiveness to those on the other end of the aging spectrum, not only politically and economically but also psychically and culturally.Through a discussion of bear culture (a deeply influential community rarely acknowledged in US queer studies), Javier Sáez del Álamo's (2025) essay reflects on the relation between the physiological and experiential features of queer aging. Theorizing the “aging of queer practices,” the piece critically catalogs substantive post-AIDS shifts in gay aesthetics, sexuality, and bodies and how queer activists have responded to these changes. Taking inspiration from Audre Lorde's insight that the “generation gap” is largely fabricated dogma, Scott Herring's (2025) piece provides a case study of intergenerational transfers of queer knowledge. Herring's own course on queer lifespans is offered as a template for reshaping classroom pedagogy to facilitate a conception of queerness that foregrounds the desirability of aging. The concluding essay and images by Del LaGrace Volcano (2025) illustrate how queer aging gives us a means “to tell our stories in way that acknowledges the messiness of the queer lives we have lived.” For Volcano, queer aging names an active and actively disruptive endeavor that defies oppositional pairings like young and old. The piece closes with Volcano's brief interviews on queer aging with longstanding figures of the queer community Cherry Smyth, Robert Taylor, Annie Sprinkle, Sandy Stone, and Ajamu Ikwe-Tyehimba.