Excerpts from
Chapter Three

In the first-season finale of Showtime’s Queer as Folk, a character turning 30 is awakened by friends who throw him a surprise birthday party, complete with black confetti, balloons and a casket; at one of my favorite DC restaurants the whole wait staff comes out and serenades you when they find out it’s your birthday…when they get to the part where they’re supposed to insert your name, they sing “Happy birthday you old queen, happy birthday to you,” as they deliver the cake and candles. (It doesn’t seem to matter to them how old you actually are. Any birthday will do.) And a few years back on my then-boyfriend Christopher’s birthday, I came home and went back to the bedroom to give him his card and presents. I found him lying on the bed in a near catatonic state. I seriously thought he might have OD’ed on something; it turned out he had, in a way. He’d had too many birthdays, as far as he was concerned, and was therefore feeling ancient.

Christopher had just turned 25.

Not all gay men have such oddly humorous or downright depressing ways to look at aging, but I’m here to tell you that quite a few do. John is a just-turned-40 ad executive in New York City who says the “clock just seems to tick louder these days,” now that he’s reached the big 4-0. “Almost any man takes stock of his life at 40, and sometimes he’s going to have that middle-aged angst thing happening. But a gay man who’s 40, especially a gay man who’s single, is often going to start worrying about how long he’ll be socially viable. He’s got kind of a double burden to carry.”

“I think a lot of gay men have, for some reason that escapes me, adopted the worst attitudes of straight women when it comes to getting older,” says Charles, a 33-year old executive in Los Angeles. “When a straight guy turns 30 it’s barely a speed bump. For a lot of gay guys, turning 30 or gasp! 40, is like the worst thing they can imagine. For them it’s like a road block.”

Charles tells me that he’s the kind of guy who prefers “mature” men, and hardly even notices his own birthdays. But he says he has “tons of friends that are really obsessed about their age. It’s like all their birthdays are on the calendar, circled in black. I guess, like a lot of women, they fear that as they get older they’ll be less and less attractive to potential mates…and trust me, these guys do a lot of mating. So getting older just freaks them out.”

“Gay men are always concerned with age. Men as a whole become more distinguished than women as they age. But gay society has placed them as obsolete after the age of 40,” notes Pierce Mattie, the men’s grooming editor for Genre Magazine. “Yes, your chicken virgin status is lost at age 25 placing you in your prime at 30, then moving you along as a spectator at 35 and retired by 40. Naturally the gay man who turns 35 will be going through what a heterosexual man would at the age of 55. You could say that gay men are 20 years ahead of the game. This is a lot of pressure to be young forever.”