Subcultural Spaces: LGBTQ Aging in a Swedish Context

Background: The Swedish Context

Life conditions and resistance strategies are always historically and culturally situated. As Rosenfeld (1999) points out, being informed about the historical context is crucial to understanding the diverse and complex experiences of older LGBTQ adults. As in many parts of the western world, LGBTQ peoples’ rights have changed radically in the Nordic context during the last 40 years, in terms of increased civil rights and legal protection from discrimination (Bromseth & Siverskog, 2013; Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2011). Sweden shared with many other countries in the western world the strong anti-homosexual attitudes prevalent in society in the 1950s, changing gradually in the 1960–1970s, along with shifting discourses on sexuality in society and a growing feminist movement. By the 1980s, homosexuality had been removed as a psychiatric diagnosis in most Nordic countries. However, the emergence of HIV/AIDS at the same time affected the society as a whole and the gay community and social life in particular, with dramatic consequences (Svensson, 2007). The 1990s marks the beginning of a period with increased civil rights and legal protection from discrimination that has continued to improve up to the present.

Sweden was the first country in the world to introduce laws creating access to public trans (trans is used in the text as synonymous with transgender) healthcare in the 1970s. However, getting access to care has been conditional on participation in a gender identity assessment, including requirements to adjust to tight frames of gender normativity to live up to the criteria of the diagnosis for transsexualism (Bremer, 2011). It is also required to adjust to the terms for the assessment, like forced sterilization that was required in Sweden up until 2013. Trans identities have been pathologized through medical diagnosis with transvestism being classified as a psychiatric disorder until 2009, while transsexualism (now known as gender dysphoria) continues to be on the books. The World Health Organization’s removal of trans identities from the medical diagnosis system, The International Classification of Disease, 11th Revision in 2018, and the chapter on mental disorders to the chapter for sexual health, recognizing gender identity as fluid and nonbinary, is expected to impact the how trans people can access health care, but as to how and when remains to be seen.

The early trans movement started in the 1960s in the Nordic countries, and trans people’s living conditions and rights have increasingly become part of the gay movement in Sweden (Norrhem, Rydström, & Winkvist, 2008; Siverskog, 2016). In spite of these changes that have implied improved possibilities and terms for creating livable lives for LGBTQ people, heteronormative structures are still dominating society. LGBTQ people still face increased risks of harassment and violence, as well as a higher likelihood to suffer decreased mental and physical health (Public Health Agency of Sweden, 2014, 2015).

Methodology and Theoretical Perspectives

The empirical material comes from two different studies in a Swedish context, consisting of 33 interviews in total. They were carried out between 2009 and 2013, using a similar theoretical framework as points of departure, queer theory, and critical gerontology. The first study is an ethnographic study based on participant observation and interviews with 13 nonheterosexual cis and trans women between the ages of 60 and 94 years at the time of the interviews, born between 1916 and 1952. All participants lived in the Stockholm area and took part in subcultural communities (lesbian feminist or LGBTQ-communities) in different degrees and with various engagement over the years. ¹

The second study is based on interviews with 20 people identifying as LGBTQ. ² They were 64- to 88-year old at the time of the interviews, born between 1922 and 1950. The participants lived all over Sweden, in cities, villages, and in the countryside. It varied among the participants if and to what extent they had been part of subcultural contexts.

Both studies were approved by the Regional Ethics Committee in Sweden. Life story interviews were used (Atkinson, 1998) and thematic analysis conducted (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The interviews were transcribed and coded parallel to the process of conducting fieldwork, to open up for a development of the interview work through interesting discoveries in the coding process (Silverman, 2006, p. 337).

During the analysis, we worked with a theoretical framework to understand concepts of community and belonging throughout the life course. We have used Sara Ahmed’s concept of orientation to explore how bodies are situated in time and space, where different spaces and contexts make it more or less easy to feel comfortable and at home. Ahmed also offers an understanding of how following what she refers to as “the straight line”—as in norms and expectations for what a heteronormative life path should look like—is intertwined with a promise of happiness (Ahmed, 2006, 2010). We have also worked with anthropologist Valentine’s (Valentine, 1995) term lesbian time-spaces that she introduced to makes sense of processes of identification, describing them as material and discursive productions including linguistic, spatial, and bodily dimensions. Here, we expand the term to queer time-spaces, looking at both similarities and differences when it comes to nonheterosexual cis women, cis men, and trans older adults’ experiences of participating in subcultures over time. ³ These will be explored in the following analytical sections of the article: Coming in, coming home; Spaces with friction; and Aging, bodies and community.

Analysis

The analytical themes were developed in relation to the focus of the special edition of the journal, LGBT older people and subcultural spaces as local contexts. They were derived using materials from both studies as a point of departure, where both of the authors shared interview quotes with the other that we interpreted as relevant. Most of the quotes have been used in previous work, a few are published for the first time. We then cooperated on organizing the material thematically, ending up with five to six themes and then narrowed it down to three overarching themes. The themes represent important topics in our individual studies, but combining our materials has implied a broader selection of voices and perspectives, allowing for a more complex critical analysis.

Coming In, Coming Home: Finding Spaces of Belonging

In a time where coming out (to a judgmental heteronormative society) might not be an option, coming in (to a subcultural community) was crucial to be positively confirmed in a counternormative sexuality and gender identity.

During the 1960s, there were a few gay bars and clubs in the bigger cities, and it was also during that same decade that the first trans groups were formed in Sweden. For those coming out during this time, it was not always apparent how to find these spaces or how to enter them. Lars, a gay man who moved to Stockholm in the beginning of the 1960s “experienced a time where there were clubs, but you had to bring your passport and driving license and ID yourself as well as be recommended by someone else.” When he went to the gay club Timmy, there were “closed heavy velvet curtains, so no risk that someone from the outside would be able to see in.” This illustrates how local discourses, time, and place play into conditioning LGBTQ lives and the possibilities to meet and shape community. Lily and Lena, both identifying as trans women, remember the early trans groups and how they were characterized by secrecy. Lily had to apply by mail to enter a group for transvestites where everyone used secret names and addresses. Lena talks about how the early trans group she was in contact with had locked doors and encouraged people to never talk about their trans experiences outside that room. The secrecy around these spaces, aiming to offer anonymity and a sense of security from a heteronormative world, also had the effect of excluding people who were not already in these networks. But once in, doors often opened to new worlds with new friends, communities, and meeting spaces.

To find these spaces is often described as very important and meaningful, sometimes life-changing, in the life narratives. Lena and Lily describe their first experiences of meeting with other trans people as “liberating” and as something which made them feel “super strong, like no problems existed.” Harald, a gay man who went to a men’s camp organized as part of a male liberation movement in the 1970s where he met other gay men, describes it as “totally revolutionizing, I fell in love with four guys during that week ( … ) These camps have meant very very very much to me.” Tora describes her first meeting with the lesbian movement in the mid-70s in similar ways. Her first summer at the lesbian feminist camp on the Danish island Femö was the starting point for the personal and political transformation when joining the lesbian feminist movement. Ingrid, a lesbian participant who also came into the women’s movement in the 1970s, describes that the women’s center in which she was active “became a home for me.” Weston (1991) has pointed out how “coming home” to a community is about finding invisible kinship and how it connects the meaning of coming out and living close to other gay and lesbian people (pp. 127–128).

The participants who had been politically involved talk about the value of doing things together with people who they shared experiences with, finding strength collectively. Saga, who identifies as a lesbian, migrated from Finland to Sweden to be able to live a lesbian life. She got involved with a lesbian-feminist group and says many of the people she met there are still in her life. When asked what this context meant for her, she replied:

It has strengthened me a lot. When I meet my old classmates, even if they understand that I am gay I feel that I have my own life, I belong somewhere and I have my own context and that is so very important, so I am really happy for the struggle that has been fought.

Our empirical material illustrates how it is not only about sharing sorrows and hard experiences but also about formulating one’s own spaces that become meaningful through shared experiences beyond hard ones. As Valentine and Skelton point out from their empirical study, it can mean a lot to be seen and confirmed for who you are, and that being able to take part in spaces where you can feel comfortable can lead to a better sense of self (Valentine & Skelton, 2008, pp. 853–854). The creation of queer spaces can be seen as attempts to create “safe(r) spaces” aiming to create other norms and contexts where one does not need to worry about being harassed, and where one can meet like-minded people to relax, get strength and formulate strategies for change (Ambjörnsson & Bromseth, 2013, 21ff.).

Among the people who were politically involved, it is common that they still in later life have close relationships and strong networks from this time. Harald who was involved in various groups talks about the gay choir in the 1980s.

We had several people who were HIV positive and died. And some of them got so skinny. We sang up at the Rosenlund hospital for those who were hospitalized there, and for some it was so secret that they did not even come out of their rooms but just opened the door so they could hear us. Their parents had no idea they were HIV positive. It was pretty horrible.

Along with Harald’s quote about how people have collectively cared for and taken responsibility for each other, other experiences in our empirical material support this as well. Friendship and chosen families are given great importance in the narratives and resemble other empirical studies where gay and lesbian participants talk about friends and family as those who have been there to support each other socially and materially, who have been through conflicts and faced repression together, and who share a history that can be measured in months or years and that is counted as kinship (de Vries & Megathlin, 2009; Weston, 1991, p. 113). It is, however, important to point out that this does not apply to all people, some of the interviewees did not take part in subcultural contexts, some had very small networks and little support in everyday life. Factors that played a role in this were health status; geography—where rurality and smaller cities often did not offer closeness to LGBTQ contexts; and class—where social, cultural, and economic capital mattered for the possibilities to access LGBTQ contexts.

Spaces With Friction: Uncomfortable Spaces

In creating their own spaces and establishing countercultural narratives of good lives where gender and sexuality are verbalized as liberating and strengthening, there are simultaneous experiences of friction and negotiating narrow norms of acceptable ways of identifying and expressing gender and sexuality. This could sometimes be caused by the surrounding heteronormative society, where renting facilities for a gay or trans club could be met with prejudice and rejection. Klara, who started a correspondence club for transgender people in the 1960s, wanted to also create a space where the members could meet and have dances. They found a place where

it worked out for a year or so. And then, suddenly it came someone working as a caretaker and said that the other people in the house felt uncomfortable with “strangely dressed gentlemen coming here, so we want you to move somewhere else.”

For the ones with strong identification with subcultural spaces, the relation between the individual and collective in creating a sense of belonging is important. Ross (2012), studying older lesbian adult community and relational practices in Italy, claims that the ideological values and visionary grounds for good lives outside of heteronormativity created in subcultural environments are important for the individual personal relations, also contributing to a sense of belonging in periods where group activity is low. This is particularly true for the lesbian feminists in the study, whose ideological grounds in the international second wave feminist movements have remained strong roots for identification, where community with women was central and where joining the women’s movement was also a political choice because of the male dominance they experienced in the lesbian and gay community.

The story of long-term relations with the lesbian “sisters” are often told by our cis-gendered lesbian participants while simultaneously being lined with friction for Klara, a lesbian trans woman. Her access to the lesbian community has always been strongly dependent on whether she was accepted as a woman or not. After years of participating in building the women’s movement, she experienced being questioned and excluded during the 1990s. Beyond Klara’s experience, there are other narratives of being trans in an LGBTQ context. Kjell, who identifies as nonbinary, has been involved in the local LGBTQ group where they live. They thought that people within the LGBTQ group would be knowledgeable about trans issues, but they experienced that there was as much ignorance there as elsewhere in society. This is also due to the early gay movement and the early trans groups being careful about keeping separate from each other (Siverskog, 2016). When the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Rights (RFSL), the largest LGBTQ organization in Sweden, included trans people as their target group 2001, these different groups were expected to share spaces, struggles, and experiences. Sture, a transfeminine person, expressed how it was hard at first to feel included in those spaces and that he felt that when trans people arrived to those spaces, they were often stared at and that there was a lot of prejudice in those contexts. Here, the queer space does not become a place where the body can be comfortable and take up space, rather there are frictions happening. This corresponds to other empirical studies where trans people have experiences of LGBTQ being reduced to “gay” through which trans realities are made invisible and marginalized (Browne & Bakshi, 2013, p. 89). Trans people have also reported less social support and feeling less at home in the LGBTQ community (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2013).

Lesbian feminist spaces could be characterized by restricting norms as well. Several of the lesbian participants talk about how they experienced these narrow norms. Maj talks about how it was important to identify as lesbian, whereas bisexuality was not accepted. Another recurrent narrative surrounds femininity and how there were strict norms for how to present. Maj says

you were expected to have long hair and a Palestinian scarf, jeans but you were not allowed to wear a skirt. You see this was very hard for me to adapt to. I felt terribly choked by all of this.

Aging, Bodies, and Community: Continuity and Change

Some of the participants have been involved in subcultural spaces for many years and have aged with(in) these movements. The queer subcultural map has also been redrawn over time, where there, today, are local RFSL groups in smaller cities, Pride events take place in over 80 different places throughout Sweden, and where the Internet has drastically changed the preconditions. ⁴ As Browne, Bakshi, and Lim (2012) state in their empirical study of LGBTQ communities in Brighton, aging does not mean that subcultural spaces become less important in later life. Identification with subcultures continues in old age. But what does old age mean within these spaces, and what is it like to enter them in later life?

I haven’t been at the Mermaid Pride in many years, I think last time was in Copenhagen. And then I just felt “What am I doing here?” I walked there with two other ladies with grey hair and we looked at each other and then there was a lot of gay guys in spandex around us, I mean I felt I had more in common with the cops who walked there. (Kari)

Taking part in communities in later life may be different due to how society has changed, but people also talk about how they themselves change over time, with aging. Saga describes how when she was younger she was “running out a lot to bars and clubs and thought that was exciting, but now I think it is pretty worthless.” She says it can be nice to go to parties where she can meet up with people she has known for many years, but that in general “one changes with age.” Marianne describes how the context she was in changed over time, along with herself:

I went to this lesbian party every year and met a lot of people I had not seen in a long while. But then after a while, one noticed there were fewer and fewer of us, and in the end there were only a bunch of people in their 20’s there. And there we sat, a few friends and looked with big eyes at these young people dancing to their music. ( … ) After a while one kinda felt like, we are too old for this. I guess that is what happens when you become older, you hang out more at home, eat dinner together and such things. (Marianne)

Discussion

To use Ahmed’s (2006) concept of orientation, the well-trodden heteronormative path is often easy to walk, since many people have walked there before. The tangled paths leading to other lives are harder to find as well as more complicated to walk, but might also guide one to new worlds and possibilities. In this article we have explored the processes of finding, entering, and creating subcultural spaces, how they are situated in and shaped by historical and geographical context, and how meanings of community, belonging, and subcultural spaces among aging LGBTQ people relate to age and aging. Using Valentine’s (1995) term with a twist, how can queer time-spaces contribute to making sense of processes of identification, as both material and discursive productions including linguistic, spatial, and bodily dimensions? A general finding is that LGBTQ communities have been central to many of the participants, in creating a sense of belonging and identifying outside of heteronormativity, something that confirms existing research. The experiences of subcultural spaces in different periods of one’s life are further recalled as meaningful and strong, in particular regarding the recollection of identity confirming practices, representing a powerful element in queer life narratives of coming in (Formby, 2012).

Our study has illustrated how old age can be a disadvantage for entering or participating in queer subcultures, especially when it comes to dating. However, the empirical material has also pointed to how old age can be something that adds to one’s social capital within these subcultures. Critical gerontologists Katz and Marshall (2003) points to how unreasonable demands of not aging and living “outside time” are put on older people, and that a resistance to this could be to emphasize time, tradition, wisdom, memory, change, and generations against this pressure. Instead of distancing oneself from one’s old age, age and experience could be used and emphasized in constructing oneself as well as the history of one’s community. The ability to refer to a collective history and struggle of which one has been a part of can give a sense of belonging in old age (Browne & Bakshi, 2013).

As we have seen, access to material subcultural spaces was strongly affected by trans- and homophobic attitudes and legal frames in Sweden, as when the government decided to close down the saunas because of the HIV and aids-epidemic in the 1980s, or for the transclubs, struggling to find localities to rent. Yet again, not only lesbian feminists, marginalized in the gay and lesbian movement, oriented themselves toward the women’s movement, participating in building meeting spaces and women’s houses for women, but also lesbian separatist spaces to create politics and community on their own terms (cf. Hallgren, 2008). The character of these spaces and places were colored by the historical time they were created—also in terms of who was considered to be a part of the “we”—boundaries that have changed over time. Bringing the T into the lesbian and gay community, in the wave of queer theory, has had a big impact on welcoming trans people, as Klara’s story shows, even if there are still transphobic attitudes within lesbian feminist environments.

Chosen families and importance of community are emphasized in research, but our study illustrates how taking part in community may also be conditioned by ability to access and participate in these contexts. Geography, class, economy, health, and social networks are all factors playing in to this. Analysis of community and relationships among older LGBTQ people needs to take social, cultural, and economic resources into account as factors playing in to the choice and ability to have relationships (Heaphy, 2009). Furthermore, what happens to a sense of community over time? Using a life course perspective in research on LGBTQ-aging needs to be developed more in a Swedish context, since the focus has to a large degree been on LGBTQ-history—or on young or middle-aged informants. We also need to look further into the meanings of subculture and community over time, of how age normativities structure LGBTQ-politics as well as the shaping of social spaces. Whereas safe space for younger queers are enhanced as crucial for strengthening mental health, focus on inclusive and confirming spaces also for an older LGBTQ-adults could be addressed in senior policy as well as within the LGBTQ-community to a larger degree.