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On Aging as a Gay Man

Writer's picture: Shoga FilmsShoga Films

Updated: Jan 28



On the right! Look at the guy on the right! That’s me at age 69. The physical specimen with his arm around me is Adam, my personal trainer for the six months leading up to the 2019 Folsom Street Fair. I wanted a “Folsom Street body” at least once before I died, and I figured this would be my last shot. I was modeling myself, as we all did, after the mesomorphic hunks who flaunted their gym-built bodies. This was as close as I got. 


I say this not to boast (well, a little of that) but to show how poorly the gay ideal fit into the realities of aging. In the popular gay imagination, success was measured by body image, athleticism, and the hotness of ones’ boyfriends. Never mind wisdom or loyalty or devotion to anything but sex, drugs, and house music. How could one sustain such a high bar when the gym routine became more onerous, the advancing decades less of a punchline and more a presentment of unavoidable loss. “But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near." 


A committed long-term relationship offered a possible soft landing, but heterosexuals had a hard enough time securing that berth, so what hope was there for me who wasn’t monogamously inclined to begin with? Money might buy me the facsimile of companionship, but everybody knew that was a sucker’s game. 


Passing the 30 mark was the occasion of much hilarity and some real, if hidden, angst. Turning 40 required a support group. When I was going to graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, the “Men Over 40” group shared their sadness at monthly potlucks. The specter of old age was terrifying. There seemed to be only two endgames, the sad aging transvestite and the bitter old queen – isolated, lonely, pathetic figures lusting after youthful bodies they could no longer attract. 


My personal solution was to ignore the question altogether (vicious tongues have dubbed me Cleopatra, Queen of Denial). As long as my luck and my body held out, I could lead an active life, continue to bushwhack my way through the thickets of love and sex, and pursue interesting professional challenges. Each succeeding decade was better than the last. I’d finally learned to distinguish my ass from a hole in the ground. The 40s were good; the 50s were better; the 60s were positively wonderful! Obviously, I can’t keep this up. Already I live with a sense of horizon. I won’t dive the Blue Hole of Belize. I’ll never lay eyes on Iguazu Falls. And what did I come upstairs for? 


What waits for me when old age takes me in its clammy embrace? I do not know when or how; I only know that it will. Aging, it seems, holds no consolation except for the dubious one of giving up. 


And yet I have so much to offer! I could be a gay elder, but the term itself strikes as an oxymoron. Young gays have no interest in me or my life experience. Ironically, I survived the onslaught of AIDS in the 80s when 10% of my gay cohort perished. Diminished to begin with and succumbing in ever greater numbers to death, impairment, and disease, there are not many of my generation left. 


It is a pity that no one cares, but generational indifference isn’t confined to the queer community. What could be more American than to devalue the past? It’s not new; it’s not now; it’s not next. I won’t accept marginalization until I have to. Then I’ll be pathetic but not before. And yet the Africans have a proverb. When an elder dies, a library burns. 


--Robert Philipson 


Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Not-So-Golden Years of the Harlem Renaissance Queers


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