Graying Gay
Photo: J. Blake
Most of the people in my bioanthropology class cried when narrator Glenn Close told us about the death of the olive baboon matriarch. She’d been a bitch for most of the documentary (the alpha female, not Glenn Close), stealing food from subordinate troupe members, recklessly tossing around baboon infants, and generally devastating our naive leftist fantasies of a cuddly, egalitarian primatological ideal. It wasn’t for her sake, then, that eyes were moistened, but for the rest of the baboon society. Olive baboons, by a cruel Darwinian twist of fate, are incapable of cultural continuity across generations—the accumulated knowledge of a group is stored in the brain of the leader, serves the needs of the group for a time, and evaporates when that brain stops buzzing. The fallout was hard to watch. Vultures tore apart unprotected babies, young males tore apart each other, older females forgot how to tear apart pieces of fruit—all because the baboon queen died, her practical wisdom scattered across the savannah like so many hyena-gnawed bones.
On an evening last month that involved at least as much tearing and gnawing and probably even more body hair, it struck me that we queers are not so different. Straight folks have straight parents that teach them how to go on and be (re)productively straight (usually quietly and desperately). As for us, there isn’t one who doesn’t know what it’s like to figure everything out on his own, piecing together in late night chat rooms and unmentionable middle-school sleepovers just what it might mean to be something called “gay.” We are orphans, all of us, when it comes to the most important things: No parent taught us how to love or fuck or break up or fight or organize politically or to live. This thrilling sense of modernity, endlessly new and endlessly particular, is dear to so many of us and the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves. It can also be dangerous— we forget about those who have gone before, who have fought battles and cried and bled and caught nasty bugs and learned lessons that we would be best to take notice of, because we are a people with a history.
We aren’t born to people worth calling parents. This means we can or must seek new ones out for ourselves. There aren’t many old queers at hand for this purpose. AIDS killed some. Hate killed some. Drugs killed some. Old age killed some that were lucky. They’re few and far between, but we can’t afford to miss them and their stories. The alternative is to resign ourselves to square one every generation, vultures and all.
One of my best friends in the world is a 70-year old gay man. I spent this last summer gracing his poolside, trading nude backrubs for martinis, fur coats, and, most valuably, wisdom gleaned over the equivalent of three of my lifetimes. From the mortal fear of a confused teenager coming to terms with criminal sodomy in the post-war American Midwest to sordid encounters in Istanbul saunas to the joy of some four decades spent teaching art to high schoolers, I lived in three months of bright sunshine and brighter alcohol the better part of the 20th century gay American experience.
And I learned that we fags get old too. I massaged lotion into sagging flash that had touched more men and lives than I thought chronologically and mechanically possible. I counted pills to make up for the multiplying failures of a body that had once caught eyes in midnight parks and unspeakable nightclubs. I kissed the lips that had spoken more words of love and hate than I could possibly hold in a 21-year-old heart at once—a few of these words even saved my life. And I realized, through all of it, that this man could have died any day then—will die any day now. On that day I will weep to exhaustion, I will curse the name of a god who isn’t there because there will be no one else to blame, and on that day I will also be able to claim a part of that man’s soul, wisdom to be shared with friends right now and with desperate, confused, indecently young men in another half-century.
One night I saw a man at Town with white hair, a cane, a driving cap, and the kind of wrinkles you get from laughing and crying for many more decades than I or any of my friends have been laughing or crying. He worked his way slowly to the middle of the dance floor, and in that steaming cloud of testosterone he raised his head and smiled. It was all I could do to rush to the bathroom stall and cry.
I should have offered a dance. I should have asked for a story. We youngsters should all offer dances and all ask for stories from these, our matriarchs. Without them, we’re just so many desperate, naked monkeys, screaming in the dark against so much forgetting.
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Sweet. But we don’t need you to get all dewey-eyed over us. Some of us are muscular and toned, or as slender and lithe as any 20 year-old, and can wear out two or three younger guys and put them to bed and still be going strong. Don’t let the gray hair fool you.
Very well said and written. We (the gays) need to recognize how important history is yet we never stop to actually hear about it. Myself included.
The guy with money who offered you “martinis [and] fur coats” you spent time with . . . but not he guy on the dance floor. We all have our priorities apparently.
Poignant and true. I am a lesbian of that generation you write of and I believe that bridging the historical gaps would give a growing gay/lesbian community a sense of significance and history. The cynics commenting here are missing out on an opportunity to learn how to grow old with some grace and dignity and more important a sense of family as you mentioned. Learning compassion for your own would also give the movement gravitas in a hostile society and world. Keeping healthy is great if it isn’t just trying to keep young out of fear of denying your own mortality therefore, reinforcing the vacuousness of society at large. Thanks for the read.
This is a nice essay. Thanks, Andrew. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as I get older, it is that the older gay men cannot make the first step in the rapproachment of the generations. When we attempt to do so, the assumption is that we are only after sex (some are, some aren’t, and some want company—and, frankly, some don’t want to have anything to do with young people). But if you are willing, there are some who would like the company, and may even be worth getting to know. So, young people, it’s your move.
This is bullshit. That’s all I’m dignifying this piece of crap
with.
Is there a reason you call these MEN matriarchs? Why this unquestioned, literal emasculation?
@Wagnerian, I believe Andrew was merely using a literary device to link his argument back to the initial paragraph, concerning the matriarch olive baboon. You might as well be insulted that he compared the lot of LGBT folks to apes. Reading too literally is the province of fundamentalists – come in from the cold.
BTW, nothing says knee-jerk masculinist insecurity like professing a love for Wagner, IMHO. He’s the Monster Truck Rally of opera.
Good catch, Kyle. When originally editing this piece, I noticed that, too, and then checked the first paragraph and found the initial reference.
I thought it was lovely, his houseboy experience taught him something truly invaluable… he gained so much more that the material things he gave all those nude back rubs *shutter* for.
@Drew, you know, at first I wanted to get offended at your “shudder” comment (and NB: “shudder” is an involuntary spasm of disgust; “shutter” is a device for blocking light, such as in windows or a camera). But then I realized this was a learning moment. I, and others, need to learn to embrace our huzz-making factor. After all, it is impossible for anyone to be attractive to everyone, regardless of age or just how winsome they were created. No one is universally attractive. At the same time, as we age, the number of people who find us attractive shrinks considerably. It’s unavoidable, and therefore needs to be embraced I suppose. We can’t all live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.
We are orphans, at least from my prospective and most of my gay friends. I can’t think of a more appropriate time to seek out older and wiser gay men. Sure they don’t have all the answers, but they have a lot more to share about being gay than our parents ever did. Very nice Andrew. Bitte mehr!
Beautiful! I teared up a little, not gonna lie.
I agree with you about biography, history, and self-creation in the gay community. I often wonder whether this lack of a received narrative is part of the reason why the queer movement is the strongest postmodern counterpart to any liberal identity politics. In other words, why there is a strong queer movement as a postmodern counterpart to LGBT identity politics, but no equivalently strong maneuver attached to feminist or racial identity politics (undeniably, they’re there, but they haven’t gained much social momentum like the queer thing has). Perhaps it is because this orphan condition you diagnose is a michrocasm in every homo’s psychic experience of the orphaning of the Western individual at the base of postmodern politics.
Yikes. Please delete the crappy comment I made. I just came across this and omg I apologize wholeheartedly. I shouldn’t have been so ignorant about this story. It’s actually quite beautiful. Sorry again.
Shozzy
My partner and I have recently reestablished contact with our friendly neighborhood OWLs, they have so much to teach us. These women in some cases have been together for 20-30 years, it’s amazing for any relationship let alone a gay one.
They are out and proud and they have made a beautiful home in a private community in the NOVA suburbs.
We have so much to learn from them…even if they sneak in pinch or an on-the-mouth kiss here and there. :)
A beautiful piece of writing.
But just one thing: lest you think that we heterosexuals are blessed with such a wonderful extent of tutoring and empathy from our parents, let me assure you that this is not the case.
My parents, in spite of all of the goodness within them, made my initial exploration into sexual adulthood, if anything, much much more difficult than it needed to be, not easier.
I can’t really think of one lesson about sex or sexual love that I learned from my parents. I learned about the physical processes from a home encyclopedia in 4th grade. From 4th grade to 10th grade, I discovered that my body’s desires for loving, fucking, hunting, battling, and journeying were cruelly and sinisterly dis-synchronized from the demands of modern civilization, which commanded me to put off those things until a point when I would be no longer eager or even capable of doing them. (THAT is the cruel irony of the situation: now that I can theoretically have all the sex that I want, I am for all practical purposes now incapable of doing so). I did not learn these lesson from my parents.
In 10th grade I learned about the electrifying pangs of being on the verge of doing what felt to be the most right and wholesome thing that I had ever felt in the world, only to be thwarted by modern civilization’s indoctrinated agents of sexual deprivation (AKA parents). This lesson, I suppose, I must thank my parents for (as well as the other parents whose soul-crushing oppression I have had to endure).
Therefore, I think that the damage is often already done even before the older generation dies. I know for a fact that my parents endured many of the same hardships of sexual repression in their youth, but somewhere along the line those lessons become transformed into their opposite, possibly thanks to the intrusion of values from the rest of society that say to the new parents, “This is what proper parents do….” This is a process that heterosexuals and homosexuals alike need to combat.
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