The Quality of Being Gay
I’m about to turn 30. In the normal world, this isn’t necessarily cause for alarm. However in my world–the gay world–I may as well start looking into assisted living homes, buying stock in adult diapers and developing a love for old Matlock reruns and eating dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon. In our culture, the ages of 30-45 are a wasteland, a time span that may as well just be a black hole of desperation and cats. In Jennifer Garner’s movie 13 Going on 30, the age of 30 is described as “thirty, flirty and thriving.” With all due respect to Jennifer Garner (for whom, I’ll be honest, I’d switch in a New York minute…bitch is hot), that’s not how it works in the gay world, where 20 is the new 30, 30 is the new 60 and 60 is the new dead.
Is 30 the end of being fabulous?
This was recently made clear to me when I went to a Big Gay Dance Club for the first time in [unintelligble] years. As you may remember from one of my previous entries “How to Succeed in Gayness Without Really Trying”, I used to rule a BGDC with a purple velvet fist. Silly me forgot that getting back into the swing of things is not like riding a bike. You can’t just integrate yourself into a place where you’ve never been. You have to ease into it, like first-time anal. Not to mention, there’s a new generation of gay out there. And they’re really fucking stuck up.
Or maybe we were always really fucking stuck up, and I just used to be young and stuck up.
So there I was, out on the dance floor, shaking my ass to Gaga’s “Born This Way” and Britney’s “Hold It Against Me” and generally just having a good time. I was on the dance floor by myself; none of my friends were with me and I wasn’t necessarily looking to dance with somebody. I just wanted to move my body. As I was dancing, this hottie who was 2 inches taller and 7 years younger than I am starting dancing at me. On the streets, this is potentially the beginnings of a dance battle. On the gay dance floor, this is potentially the beginnings of a hot one-night stand. I started dancing back a thim and within a couple of minutes we were “dancing” with each other. I put “dancing” in quotation marks because while we were right up on each other, he was facing away from me. I gave my signals that I wanted to dance with him: the occasional hands on his hip, a little bump and grind–Christ, I’m old–and anything else I could think of to make it obvious that I wanted to dance with him. Apparently those signals weren’t enough and he lost interest, so he walked away and started dancing with someone else.
That. Little. Bitch.
What was I supposed to do? Whip him around and stick my tongue down his throat? Frantically grind my junk against his like we were two homos trying to start a fire? Grab him by the waist, bend him over and have my torrid way with him while Ke$ha appropriately sang “Blow”?
Suddenly, I felt so old. Twinkie Dum found another hottie to dance with, and I stayed where I was and tried to shake and shimmy it off. The crowd, perhaps sensing my defeat, seemed to converge itself onto me until the dance floor was stifling, suffocating the very gayness out of my body and I half-heartedly shimmied myeslf off the dance floor.
Fuck, I’m about to turn 30. My gay life as I know it is about to end. All those twinks–who I normally hate, but the attention is nice–will want nothing to do with me. I’m about to enter the Dead Zone, that time span of 30-45 where if you’re not already couple, the chances of finding a partner drastically decrease and you’ll have to make do with cats, plants and gardening until the ripe old age of 45. And even then, there’s no guarantee that you’ll turn into the hot daddy-type that some homos go for, because how you spend that 15-year gap will determine what you’ll be like at 45. If you spend it working out and keeping yourself fit, you’re golden. If you spend it sinking into a black hole of gay depression, you might as well give up the ghost.
And to that I say, “Fuck you.”
Why should we, the men of the 30-45 age bracket, be spurned by the gay rules? Why should we allow ourselves to be condemned by the agist morays that the gay society imposes on us? I say no more. It’s time we make take that black hole of an age bracket and make it sparkly, beautiful and fanastic. Let’s show those twinks that just because they’re 20 years old, bitches don’t mean shit. Aaliyah said it best, age ain’t nothin’ but a number. And come my 30th birthday, I will stand up, pump my fist in the air and shout “As God as my witness, I’m thirty, flirty and thriving!”
And to that twink who walked away on the dance floor into the grinding hips of the other 20-something homo? Enjoy your herpes, because that guy gets around. Bitch, I’m fabulous.
-Stephen
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