“When you’ve spent your formative years in the closet, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that you need to make up for lost time.”
By Nick Levine
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. 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.
Doing that’s not easy. 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. 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’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.”
Twinks and other young queer men don’t necessarily have it easier than the rest of us—far from it. 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. “I think we put so much currency on certain facets of ourselves and other gay men when we’re that age,” 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.”
As he approaches his 30th, Roo says he’s happy to leave this “naive and childish” mentality behind. “My value now is in how good my mental health is, and asking myself, ‘Am I taking care of myself properly?’ I mind my own business and try not to compare myself to other people.”
Roo’s ability to think more logically about his self-worth as he gets older is impressive. But is it achievable for everyone on the cusp of 30? I spent the last year of my twenties going out to gay clubs more than ever before—even the ones I’d previously dismissed as “basic” and “just for out-of-towners.” I had plenty of fun, but eventually burned out and began to dread waking up to yet another Uber receipt and nuclear hangover. It was only later that I realized I’d partied harder because, subconsciously at least, I thought it was my last chance to go out dancing without looking out of place—without looking “too old.”
It’s ridiculous to claim that society places greater expectations on aging gay men than other groups—look at the way women are judged if they’re still “single and childless” in their thirties. But the pressures imposed by heteronormative society can definitely affect queer people, too. “I didn’t really think much about turning 30 until maybe three months before it happened,” says Bu, a gay man from Manchester. “Friends and family started making comments like ‘Oh, you’re getting old now—and you’re still not married.'” Bu also felt “expectations” from his family to have achieved certain traditional markers of professional and personal success. “ I had this realization that I hadn’t done anything of the sort, which led to anxiety and regret,” he says.
For Bu, heteronormative expectations combined with youth-centric attitudes within the LGBTQ community combined to create a toxic double whammy of panic. “As a person of color, I’m already marginalized for something I can’t control—my race and ethnicity,” he says. “Now my age was going to be another factor reducing the pool of guys interested in me. People were calling me ‘daddy’ and rejecting me based on my age right after telling me I looked 23.”
Looking to our queer elders can provide some comfort in aging. 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. “I definitely felt some intense emotions about my own mortality and wondered if I would find love again,” 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 feel like my sex life has gotten better in my late forties than it was in my late thirties,” he says. “I feel more self-assured and I’ll happily go to a club and dance on my own. 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.”
As 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. 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. May we all be so blessed.
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