Excerpts from
Chapter Two

“All young people today are looking for is their next trick, or their next drink, or drug, or whatever it is they do,” says Allen, a 50-year old “home restorer” in Maine. “They’ll wise up when they get older. If they get older.”

“I think all old men want is a boy toy, which I am not,” says Seb, a 21-year old college student in Seattle, who says he gets “disgusted” if anyone in the 50-year old age range tries to approach him. Still, he thinks they might have something useful to offer him. “I see how bitter and jaded older guys are, and I want to know how they got to be like that, so one day I won’t.”

Every young guy is a sex or drugged out twinkie? Ask older guys if they agree, and many say yes. Every older man is a chicken hawk, or a bitter old queen? Lots of younger men will agree with those suppositions, and rather whole-heartedly. But ask the members of one group if they ever really spend a lot of time with the other. Ask them where they got those ideas. Something interesting emerges.

As Seb tells it, “95% of my gay friends are within five years of me. I don’t meet older men, because they’re probably looking for something shallow.” Allen explains that he “doesn’t really know anyone gay who’s under 30, not first hand at any rate. But I hear the stories.”
Ah yes, the stories. We all hear them from time to time. Older men pawing at unwilling kids young enough to be their sons, or sulking at home and hating the world. Promiscuous young men partying down till dawn, not even knowing or caring who they’re sleeping with, or even trying to be safe about it.

Do such things happen? Of course they do. Does that paint an accurate picture of all younger and older gay men? Of course it doesn’t. Yet as we’ve already seen in the previous chapter, the ideas and images persist, most often inside the minds of gay men who’ll readily admit they’re pretty much strangers to each other.

That’s why I call such stories or widespread ideas “myths.” Not myths in the classic sense, like some guy in a toga hurling thunderbolts at some other dude in a chariot, or even in the “urban legend” sense, like that story about the rat that got deep-fried at KFC and served up with a side of cole slaw and barbecued beans. (You mean that didn’t happen?) I’m talking more here about the attitudes and preconceptions based on individual facts and occurrences, that are then applied to a whole group of people, so that everyone within that group is tarred with the same brush. Maybe it’s not surprising, considering human nature, that many of us still think this way; it’s such a timesaver to be able to dismiss an entire group. Taking people as individuals… well, that takes some work, and some thought. Straight folks pre-judge gay people all the time, just as men judge women, and butch gay guys judge the femme boys. Why would older and younger gay men be any different, even if when it comes to the battle of “us” and “them,” none of us has much personal knowledge from which to speak?