Cult of Youth in the Gay Community : Is There Life After 40?

Cass Mann is one of the world's longest-term HIV-positive diagnosed gay men, now in his third decade of living with HIV, and the founder of UK’s only gay men’s HIV/AIDS charity Positively Healthy, which provides HIV services including education, support, and peer counselling. Here he talks about how gay men sometimes feel that life after forty isn't worth living. Studies show that gay men after forty often feel undesirable and completely worthless if their entire raison d’etre for living was based on the short-lived currency of youth and their continued sexual desirability. There's an English song "No One Love a Fairy When She's Fat and Forty." After forty, gay men often can't do the things they used to do. This may explain why so many gay men over forty are getting infected with HIV. There's life after forty for gay men. Get a life. Get several lives. There's life beyond being gay and HIV positive. For more information, visit http://www.posh-uk.org.uk/ and http://www.AIDSvideos.org/.