Sexual invisibility after 70

Abstract In China, it has long been difficult for the elderly generation to talk openly about sex. In the context of late‐life HIV diagnosis and treatment, this difficulty is compounded by clinical and familial practices that seek to manage the stigma of sex through avoidance. In our multisited ethnographic fieldwork in the southern region of Guangxi, we found that clinicians followed scripts in which they asked older patients about their sexual history just once and then allowed the subject to drop. Within families, HIV was translated into illness and respectability, and in community talk, condoms were conceptualized only as contraception for the young, not as a measure to prevent infection. We term this pattern sexual invisibility : for those 70 and older, sex is not absent, but it is difficult to sustain as a topic of care, negotiation, and prevention. Late‐life intimacy persists through ordinary arrangements, yet prevention talk is delayed, softened, or displaced.