What about our 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s? Many of the myths about both gay life and old age are negative. AIDS has given us a crash course in mortality few straights could even imagine. As a result many of us have had our midlife crisis early.

Yet organizations for the 40+ like SAGE show that many of the myths about being old & gay are just as misleading as myths about gay life in general. As in our earlier decades, straight models and road-maps may fail us in planning the years ahead.

Let's look at seven areas typically important to a personally satisfying old age: security, health, friendships, spirit, skills, work, and investments. How do we go about it?

Security implies insurance: too-often ignored disability insurance, the triple support of medical, catastrophic, and long-term care insurance - and life insurance if we're at risk for HIV. Security concerns mean having a succession or resale plan; otherwise if the owner is sick or dying, the business is sick or dying as well.

Health for us means going beyond body culture to prevention and nutrition, confronting our all too prevalent drug and alcohol issues, and repairing the damage that discrimination, closets, and internalized homophobia have wrought.

Friendships require no less than coming out. In no other way can we establish true ties that bind with family - or find out where we truly stand. This means rebuilding our AIDS-decimated friendships, pursuing depth as well as breadth, choosing support and loyalty over flash and fancy, selecting for the long-haul, building an extended family and long-term companionships that seem to be the key to health and long life.

Spirit entails nurturing a value system that works, that gives meaning to our lives - especially important if we choose not to live on through children. It means finding a cause that links to something within us, creating community and companionship through contribution. It may mean endowing our values financially so that our work continues after we ourselves are gone.

Skills can require recycling ourselves, shedding selves as we shed decades, moving ahead and leaving behind, learning from others and risking amateur status - coming to know what we do best.

Work means continuing to be useful and rewarded. Without children it's important to reinvent our careers as a lifework - to pour our time, energy, money, knowledge and skill into something we value, whether this be an issue, a collection or an organization. And when some of us graduate to emeritus status, we may find we can mentor much better as uncloseted whole people.

Our challenge in investment is going beyond AIDS paralysis. The big IF is doing it - now - early enough so our investment can gain momentum and a life of its own. The key change is moving from spending to investing, from income to equity, from present preoccupations to future visions.

Taken together these seven areas are the wealth that can make us glow in our golden years - or, if absent, make us dead before we die. We gay men and lesbians have an incredible opportunity to write our own definition to these seven words - and the meaning we give them will tell the difference as to whether we can look forward to our later years, or dread them.