Gay Men and Prostate Cancer: Learning from the Voices of a Hidden Population

Ten years ago, we published a study on gay men and prostate cancer. The paper gave a voice to gay men with prostate cancer whose voices had been largely unheard or, in some respects, silenced. Fortunately, there has been a groundswell of work in this area since the publication of our study. This chapter begins with a personal vignette of the first author, Murray Drummond, to provide important contextual information for how gay men and prostate cancer are perceived at a primary healthcare level. We then draw on contemporary health promotion scholarship to discuss what is known about men’s health promotion and describe how this promotion intersects with gay men and prostate cancer. We then use some of the concerns voiced by the original group of gay men
with prostate cancer in our study to illuminate the key issues they faced—and in many cases continue to face. We then reflect on some of the legal aspects associated with these concerns in the face of the rapidly changing landscape of LGBTQI rights (and lack thereof) in contemporary Western cultures. We conclude by describing a way forward in light of the sociocultural, legal, and physical health concerns these men face with respect to their illness.