Once we do, we can fully embrace the cliché that “age ain’t nothing but a number.” And if all else fails, there’s a certain reassurance in the knowledge that Blanche from The Golden Girls was getting laid- a lot-well into her sixties. That inner knowledge of myself, both bad and good, means I have a quiet confidence in who I am rather than what I have or do."Īs a gay man, getting older means unpicking two intertwined strands of prevailing thinking: those imposed by heteronormative society, and those imposed by our own community.
“I feel more self-assured and I’ll happily go to a club and dance on my own. “ I feel like my sex life has gotten better in my late forties than it was in my late thirties,” he says. Over time, Martin believes he “made peace” with being single and began to “enjoy my life as it came." He realized that with experience comes benefits.
“I definitely felt some intense emotions about my own mortality and wondered if I would find love again," he says. Martin, a gay man from Lausanne, jokes that at 46 he's "probably ancient in gay years." Six months ago, he experienced something akin to a “mid-life crisis” when he and his partner separated. Looking to our queer elders can provide some comfort in aging. People were calling me 'daddy' and rejecting me based on my age right after telling me I looked 23." "Now my age was going to be another factor reducing the pool of guys interested in me. “As a person of color, I’m already marginalized for something I can’t control-my race and ethnicity," he says. "It's all about how much sex you're having, how many people are in your DMs, how many likes you can get on a selfie, how many followers you have.”įor Bu, heteronormative expectations combined with youth-centric attitudes within the LGBTQ community combined to create a toxic double whammy of panic. "I think we put so much currency on certain facets of ourselves and other gay men when we're that age," he says. Roo, a gay man from London who turns 30 next February, admits that he felt sucked into a collective "marketplace mentality" for much of his twenties. Twinks and other young queer men don’t necessarily have it easier than the rest of us-far from it. It’s difficult to pinpoint when someone might lose their twink credentials-is it turning 26? Gaining weight? Growing a beard? And if he continues to date younger men as he gets older, he might become defined by another, less flattering label: “chickenhawk”-essentially the gay male version of a “cougar.” Open any gay hookup app and you’ll find guys looking for, or calling themselves, a “twink,” decades-old queer shorthand for a young cis man who’s probably white, probably slim, and probably has little or no body hair. It would be unfair to suggest that gay male culture is completely focused on recapturing youth, but there’s definitely a subset of the LGBTQ community that equates being young with being sexually desirable. When you’ve spent a portion of your formative years in the closet, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that you need to make up for lost time.ĭoing that’s not easy. We’ve all seen the viral tweet: “Gay culture is being a teenager when you're 30 because your teenage years were not yours to live.” It’s a heartbreakingly relatable sentiment, and a wryly funny one, because it’s rooted in truth.