title: Moving toward a holistic conceptual framework for understanding healthy aging among gay men.
abstract: In the last four decades, we have witnessed vast and important transitions in the social, economic, political, and health contexts of the lived experiences of gay men in the United States. This dynamic period, as evidenced most prominently by the transition of the gay rights movement to a civil rights movement, has shifted the exploration of gay men's health from one focusing primarily on HIV/AIDS into a mainstream consideration of the overall health and wellbeing of gay men. Against this backdrop, aging gay men in the United States constitute a growing population, for whom further investigations of health states and health-related disparities are warranted. In order to advance our understanding of the health and wellbeing of aging gay men, we outline here a multilevel, ecosocial conceptual framework that integrates salient environmental, social, psychosocial, and sociodeomgraphic factors into sets of macro-, meso-, and micro-level constructs that can be applied to comprehensively study health states and health care utilization in older gay men.
authors.affiliation: a Center for Health, Identity, Behavior and Prevention Studies , New York University , New York , New York , USA.
authors.forename: Perry N
authors.initials: PN
authors.lastname: Halkitis
authors.forename: Farzana
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Kapadia
authors.forename: Danielle C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Ompad
authors.forename: Rafael
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Perez-Figueroa
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D005544:Forecasting; D006679:HIV Seropositivity / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy; D006297:Health Services Accessibility / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand / Q000639:trends; D054624:Health Status Disparities; D054625:Healthcare Disparities / Q000639:trends; D006694:Holistic Health / Q000639:trends*; D063509:Homophobia / Q000523:psychology; D018451:Homosexuality, Male / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011788:Quality of Life / Q000523:psychology; D012922:Social Change; D057545:Social Stigma; D014481:United States
keywords: HIV/AIDS; aging; ecosocial; gay men; health