Welcome to my blog! I’m here to help you embrace your aging with increased joy and confidence whether you’re in your twenties, your seventies or somewhere in between.
As a forty-nine year-old gay man, creator of mental-health services for gay men at AIDS Project Los Angeles, Gay Men’s Heath Crisis and as a clinician I have had the honor for over two decades to hear gay men’s stories and life experiences. I am always impacted by the narratives and find something in their encounters that matches parts of my own story as a gay man. Something very powerful happens when we are able to relate to the similarities in our story and other gay men’s experiences.
While I have had over twenty-five years with an openly gay lifestyle, I am still figuring out the journey of my gay identity and how to relate to other men. I had very few male friends in childhood. I did not fit in. In 1985 in my early twenties when I became openly gay, I was not quick to gain comfort with my gay identity and the gay subculture of bars, gyms and socialization in the terrifying early years of AIDS. By my thirties, with close to a decade of experience as an openly gay man, I now had more confidence and comfort in navigating my gay world. Then I turned forty, and with getting older all the rules changed again. By cruel irony, I now again began feeling less secure around men – younger gay men and even many gay men my age or older.
When I learned new ways to relate with gay men, I returned to the confidence of my thirties but with less cockiness and more civility. As a result while quickly approaching the right side of fifty, I can say with deep sincerity: this is the best time of my life!
