As adults, this cohort witnessed routine harassment by authorities, as well as the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 and the American Psychiatric Association's removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 (see Chapter 2 for a full historical overview).įor all adults, later life is known as a period of both growth and decline ( Baltes et al., 1999), with studies on the latter vastly outnumbering those on the former. Before entering adulthood, the oldest of this cohort would have seen, in 1952, the creation of an official diagnosis that listed homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance ( Bayer, 1987) and watched Senator McCarthy include gay men and lesbians on his blacklist. The cohort of LGBT people currently in later life grew up and moved into adulthood in much less supportive environments than those experienced by younger cohorts.