Gay men's relationships across the life course [Book Review]

Abstract

Peter Robinson (2013) Gay Men 's Relationships Across the Life Course, Foreword by The Hon. Michael Kirby, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK. 202 + xvi pagesReviewed by Timothy MarjoribanksIn the twenty-first century, and continuing long standing trends, understandings of human experience, behaviour, relationships and action are increasingly framed and shaped by medical and health science discourses, whether that be from medicine itself, or from other disciplines such as psychology, genetics and neuroscience. Similarly, disciplines such as economics also lay claim to providing significant insights into human motivations. While such disciplines provide important insights into human behaviour, and dominate much public debate in these areas, they can also be limited by downplaying or ignoring the significance of social structures and societal contexts, and by also downplaying the ways in which the actions of individuals and of groups are both enabled and constrained by such structures and contexts. In this regard, with its central engagement with the social, sociology has a vital role to play in contributing to our understandings of the intersection of human action and social contexts. One way in which it can do this is through providing theoretically informed and empirically grounded insights into human action, relationships and experience. In his book, Gay Men 's Relationships Across the Life Course, Peter Robinson, Lecturer in Sociology at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, has done just that, providing a valuable sociological contribution to a crucial set of debates around the life experiences and relationships of gay men.The book is organised around nine chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. In addition to a chapter setting out the research approach, six results focused chapters are organised around different aspects of the life course, including by name, single men, long-lasting relationships, fatherhood, marriage, co-habitation, and living in the midst of HIV-AIDS.In setting the foundations for the empirical heart of the book, the author engages critically with four theoretically informed assumptions that provide an overall framework for his analysis (page 4). These are, first, that there is a connection between sexual preference and sexual identity that underpins the existence of a 'gay world'; second, generation is a contested but important sociological concept; third, the self is narratively constituted; and fourth, age and ageing are socially constructed. Bringing these four dimensions together, Robinson is making an argument for the importance of considering experiences and relationships over the life course as being actively negotiated and contested by individuals inhabiting particular worlds, and for a social constructivist approach both to understanding people's relationships and to the creation of knowledge about their lives.Having established an analytic foundation for his research, the empirical data for the book is constituted by 97 life story interviews that the author conducted in 2009-2011 with gay men in nine major cities, namely Auckland, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Manchester, Melbourne, Mumbai, New York, and Sydney. In addition, the author also revisits data that he collected in Australia in 2001-2003 for his PhD, namely interviews with 80 gay men. This data, and Robinson's analysis of it, are a real highlight of the book.Among the many important contributions of Robinson's book, here I focus on three. First, the book makes a significant contribution to the existing literature by giving voice to gay men from a range of different social locations and contexts, and at different stages of the life course. Through his analysis of his data, Robinson is able to provide many important insights into the lives of gay men, often challenging dominant understandings of those lives. For example, his participants reveal that a single life is not a lonely life, and also that, contrary to dominant myths, gay men develop and maintain strong and mutually beneficial friendships (chapter 2; and page 166). …