ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the field of HIV/AIDS risk and prevention, masculinities tend to fade away in favour of ostensibly concrete determinants such as sexual orientation, sexual behaviour, and treatment adherence. Integrating masculinities into sexual health research, requires more than simply linking men's self-ascribed identities with sexual behavior. The chapter addresses gay men's sexual health in Canada outside of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, where HIV and STI transmission for this population typically framed by specific high-risk behaviours and spaces rather than broader social and political ecologies of disease. It shows that masculinities and health are connected not just through the vehicle of 'maleness' or 'masculine' health behaviours, but from the active construction, perpetuation, and negotiation of masculinities as ideas and identities in multiple social and institutional contexts. The future of gay men's health in Nova Scotia is, in many ways, an uncertain one.
