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Sexuality is an integral part of living and growing older, but societal stereotypes of later life continue to place little value on the importance of sexual activity and fulfilment to older people. Here we draw on data from the nationally representative English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) to highlight how transitions in health and sexuality among older heterosexual men intersect in later life. This chapter considers key data from ELSA, combining both quantitative and qualitative findings, to better describe and understand trajectories of later life sexuality. While the ELSA data reveal complex age-related changes in sexual health and wellbeing among older heterosexual men, many remain sexually active and sexually intimate into their 70s, 80s and 90s. We discuss the implications of these findings for practice and policy, particularly in relation to more proactive discussions around changing sexual expression in later life, and how health care professionals can more holistically support older men’s sexual health and wellbeing.

This chapter analyzes how gay and straight men's sexual life histories are powerfully shaped by the combination of early-life expectations about marriage and social structures that make marriage differentially available. Both access to and exclusion from civil marriage have powerful effects that resonate throughout the life course of heterosexual and homosexual men, respectively. Heterosexual access to and homosexual exclusion from civil marriage have produced the institutional backdrop against which a gay sexual subculture has emerged with a value system concerning intimate life forged in direct opposition to its heterosexual counterpart. Whereas the predominant, heterosexual, romantic meaning-constitutive tradition is anchored to the institution of heterosexual marriage, the queer meaning-constitutive tradition is anchored to the institutions of sexual sociality, including bars, nightclubs, and bathhouses.

This chapter presents the author's account of how he is challenging inequalities from the position of privilege that he occupies as a White, heterosexual male. He argues that that privilege obligates people to consciously struggle to take action against sexism and other forms of oppression because their silence is complicity. His analysis is relevant not only to White heterosexual men, but to all people who occupy any position of privilege. Straight academics should “strive to be queer” by undermining heteronormative ideas and confronting homophobia in their teaching, research, and activism. Whites must combat racism, and men must battle sexism. For the author, “striving to be queer” is about recognizing privilege while simultaneously undermining the categories and assumptions that buttress privilege and oppression. More than an identity, it is taking action against injustice when others turn away from it.