Picket lines, not picket fences
1.
Last year, 2025, I officially (that is, in my own mind) became old.
In fact, I’m so old, in gay terms, I’ve become my own fetish category.
But it’s Pride Month, gay Xmas, when everything you want is splayed out under a tree at Cherry Beach, and although I spent my 60’s resolutely stuck at 58 — luckily, with my good genes, I can get away with the lie — I’ve come up against a hard wall with the number seventy. I feel the seventyness oozing out of my pores even as I peer out through the same eyes I had at five, at fifteen. I peer out and think, where did everyone go? What do I do now?
I’m it. There is no one to turn to for advice, I am the advice. And I don’t want everything to be over, I’m a roaring wood fire, fit for roasting weenies, but I just can’t. Weenies are not on the menu, though one or two gay friends have asked me if I would like a walker, or maybe a cane.
So that’s why I shot them.
I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t be that old guy: you know, the touchy-feely bore, the inappropriate lech, the salivating senior who just won’t take no for an answer. But now I’m gobsmacked by “no”, a whole monolithic world of it, and the louder the no, the more I just fuckin’ wanna be that old guy.
Unfortunately for me, gay youth would stare unprotected at a solar eclipse before they’d glance at anyone’s junk who’s over 25. And if you hadn’t received that press release, they’re pissy-mean about bringing you up to date. I simply close down the whole charade, I self-censor, thinking, I will not make the first move here, I won’t assume anyone’s desire, I’ll let it be a pleasant surprise.
Well, lemme tell ya. There have been very few pleasant surprises, one or two possible pity fucks, and a lot of recoiling.
I’m paralyzed by isolation and fear and self-loathing, easy enough to access when self-loathing has been my go-to pastime ever since I became an abomination, around the age of three. That’s an eternity ago, it feels like just the other day, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that my life is over. That’s how it feels, that’s what the gay community projects. Without sex, without desirability, you’re nothing, a loser, a dirty old man. It is understood that sex is for the young and the beautiful, love is for fools, and intimacy? If intimacy is a pest, frivolity and camp are the can of RAID.
And yet it was only ten to fifteen years ago that I split up with my partner (he kicked me out), sobered up, shaped up, and entered my late fifties at 11 out of 10 on the desirability scale. I was, to my absolute amazement, smack dab in the middle of the sexual adventure of my life; at no other time and in no other city had I been as desired, hooked up, amped and plugged in with as much sex and with as many partners as I wanted to handle. I was the latest thing, the new old meat, the blue plate special, with fries. I was the Barnum and Bailey of sex, the Cirque du Soleil of fuckery. I had entirely forgotten that episode, because in the gay world, and maybe in life generally, you’re only as good as your last performance.
When did the sexual adventure end? I live two blocks away from a gay bathhouse (if you don’t know what that means, a gay bathhouse is basically a sex club kitted up for anonymous encounters), but it’s been years since I darkened the doors. I can’t remember when I slid back into the gay man’s destiny of invisibility.
Maybe that’s appropriate, maybe I’m doing the right thing, maybe you commend me, but it feels like capital punishment. I was careless, what can I say? I grew old. My execution day has been set, but not revealed to me. Being old is not tasteful; it’s not an acre of oatmeal vegan leather with a cashmere throw. Being old is boho. An old skin flute and tapestries hung with bells. Being old is so not queer; being old is gay.
I want to echo the Shirley Maclaine character, Doris, in Postcards from the Edge, when she makes peace with her daughter in a final scene. She admits she’s jealous: of her daughter’s youth, of the fact that her turn is over, and it’s her daughter’s turn, now. “It’s really important to enjoy your turn,” she says.
My turn is over. If I filled up every waking moment with polyamory, anonymous encounters, reeling and writhing and fainting in coils, I could not possibly get over my FOMO. FOMO has been a lifelong threat for me, because I was never cool; sure, I was briefly handsome in the way every 20- or 30-year-old is handsome, but not handsome from intent, sculpted à la mode. I never had interesting hair. My peak moments snuck up on me, some ambushed me twenty years later, rarely did I appreciate them in the moment. I was too busy watching myself in mirrors. I was too busy checking that I was having a good time.
My turn is over, my time is up, and I’m tired of the competition. I give you the award, ok? Best plugging of orifices, in a supporting role. I’m tired of being versatile, just let me untie my stays, scratch my hairy ass and be a lazy bottom. I’m seventy and I shouldn’t have to top if I don’t want to.
No. I would not care for a breath mint, thanks.
2.
Back in my day. That’s how I talk now. Back in my day, being gay
went from unthinkable and unspeakable to shockingly visible, overnight, with bell bottoms. Like today’s vulnerable trans persons, our siblings and avant garde in the fight for justice and equality, we were thrust like hostages into the spotlight. Gay Lib! We flickered on like faulty electric bulbs and suddenly felt very faggy, very limp-wristed, very sibilant s. We were here and queer but we were not absolutely certain we wanted to be.
As I’ve said before: nothing disappoints quite so much as getting exactly what you want.
Still, it was an exciting time, in a way. We embraced the intersection with other oppressed people, we saw that the oppression of Black people, of women, of queers was all part of some strategy of diversion, and we realized that we needed to fight, not just for queer rights (I mean, the recognition that we merited the same rights as all other humans, not “special rights for gays”) but that the oppression of anyone was unacceptable. And that we needed to pitch in, support all oppressed people in their struggle.
We wouldn’t complain that a Black Lives Matter protest at Toronto Pride was “spoiling the party”. Neither would we, protesting the genocide in Gaza, stop the Pride parade entirely, so that queer people’s one day celebrating visibility and our right to exist was annihilated. Toronto queers know what I’m talking about.
No one’s tragedy is greater and no one’s tragedy is lesser. It’s not some baleful competition amongst hungry vampires. We can all find the time to showcase our tragedy, so relax! Surely your turn is next, Murgatroyd McGraw!
Why is there Pride? Straight people, usually white men, ask this all the time, sometimes with curiosity, but mostly in an aggressive tone that reminds us that our liberation is on shaky ground, that it relies on their convenience and approval.
(First, let’s get this over with: To enjoy “Straight Pride”: 1. be heterosexual. 2. Choose any day out of 365. 3. Wake up.)
What’s there to be proud of? What we’re proud of is our courage in being visible. What we’re proud of is our determination to push the boundaries of what’s “normal”, push them in every direction until normal doesn’t know what to do with itself.
What we’re proud of is our insistence on our civil rights, symbolized by marriage equality. I’m proud that we realized we didn’t have to marry, and probably shouldn’t. But I would fight for the right to do so if we felt like, because otherwise we would accept your labeling us as second-class, we would have let you fob us off with civil partnerships. We want the best of times and the worst of times, we want to get married in a church, then fuck on your suburban lawns, just because it riles you up.
By insisting on equal marriage, we forced all of you to recognize our relationships as viable, real, just as good, because now we got to declare our love and commitment publicly, with the world as a witness.
We made society look at us. Look at us, for fuck’s sake! Queers exist. What you get to do, we get to do.
And we discovered that a public declaration of commitment focuses the mind. It is the social glue that holds relationships together. We discovered a new problem: if it’s not working, do you just walk away? Or do you bloody well stick to it, argue behind closed drapes, work it out?
Gay men generally have not known the spirit of sticking with it. Gay men are delightful adolescents, Peter Pans. This is because, generally, gay men have not raised children. Gay men, generally, have had permission to think of nothing but themselves.
Gay men are communicators, the soothers, the self-negators. We’re also the nastiest dipsticks on the planet. We’re racist. We’re misogynist. We ratify the patriarchy. We do not, generally, endorse the view that we’re all in the struggle together, unless the struggle involves a naked tea-dance. We call each other “girlfriend” to throw some shade.
We look at a man of sixty worshipping a muscle queen of twenty and go “yuck” because there is no place for the old men, the old women, the elders of our tribe.
The elders who should have been, have been dead these forty years. The whole generation of gay men who would have mentored today’s young men, taught them Donna Summer and Donizetti, Walt Whitman and James Baldwin, taught them the traditional divas (Garland, Streisand, Shirley Bassey), and set the rules for the sex parties: what to wear (just boots, darling), what to bring (your own bottle of Jungle Juice), what time to arrive (in time to be the only bottom in the room), how to manscape (carefully), clang clang clang went the trolley) — gone to graveyards, every one.
There is no experience of, no sense of the value of, no reverence for, someone of seventy. It’s like some of that pop music white people make, music with no past, no weight, no substrate; alien music by people who’ve never listened to music.
I’m not a cherished accumulation of queer experiences, of triumphs and tragedies, a precious, fragile human time capsule. I’m flotsam and jetsam. I’m just skin tags, liver spots, ill-fitting dentures, bad breath, a scrotum that doubles as a kilt and, not now, but coming soon, I wot, a passing whiff of uriney old guy.
My favorite all-purpose admonition to the youngsters in my depraved care is : one day you’ll learn. And, time being what it is, I’m not wrong.
3.
This thing about gay men and straight women. We don’t hate women; we revere them. We’re acolytes in the temple of the goddess. That’s why some of us dress up as women: it’s called drag, and it’s confusing to many people. First of all, a man dressing up as a woman is seeming to give up his birthright of power and put on the trappings of subservience. That’s why society laughs at men dressed as women (or sometimes throws them in jail).
What you don’t get is that drag is theatrical, performance art, and also political in the way it flouts the norms and creates a female persona that is unbridled, loud-mouthed, obnoxious, hilarious. I kiss the hem of every drag queen who ever walked the earth because they were not centred on hiding.
Please can we sort this out: Drag queens are men creating a female persona for theatrical effect. Cross-dressers, often heterosexual, love to wear female clothing, and they are rarely about glam. Transgender people may present as their assigned birth gender, but also may courageously begin to slip into the skin of their true gender, the gender that expresses who they really are. These are separate categories, though it’s conceivable that some overlap might occur.
If you know no trans persons, if you have not spent time with trans people, please do not pontificate about who they are, really, and do not promulgate your dopey, out of date ideas about two genders and the secret cabal of queers out to destroy the world. Talk to some trans people. They are humans, and there are infinite gradations of human.
Please do not tune into RuPaul’s drag race unless you can give drag the respect it deserves. I detest the way this show has unwittingly created a spectacle in which straight people laugh not with, but at drag queens like they’re animals in the zoo. It’s condescending and it’s exoticism pretending to be tolerance. Please don’t tolerate us.
Gay Pride has been snackified by capitalism. Queers are the crunchy crisps that add interest to your bland sandwich, but we are not nutritious. Not all of us, but some of us, realize that acceptance is doom for queers, that equal marriage is necessary but a temptation that should be resisted, because we cannot be the side dish that makes capitalism more tasty. Don’t chew us up and shit us out. We will resist, we will push, because to be queer is never to completely fill the bill.
To be queer is always, in truth, radical, meaning we are different down to our roots. Our roots insist on families, but of our choosing, families like circuses, communes, sexual or celibate according to our moods. We will shift, resisting your safe pigeonholes.
And we will raise children, despite your calumnies; we will raise children of spirit, humor, intelligence, curiosity.
We will raise children better than an army of hets, because we are open to the possiblity that everyone gets to join in the family of humanity, without exception; and we will tell, no, we will show our children this, from the moment they awaken.
We will cherish children like you never have, we won’t beat them or lie to them or consider them our chattel. Those who lay even a finger on a child will be shunned and re-educated. Queer people are the best parents, and big, inclusive families, with lots of women and lots of men, are the best families, because they are the families with room to breathe.
We will be botanists who are certain that each plant knows exactly what shape to assume, how best to become itself.
Those queers who ache to conform, who reject the drag queens, the leather men, the naked dancers, the so-called effeminate queers; the queers who are angry and resentful at their visibility and try to blend in — we will never reject them because we know that they act from fear and trauma. Justifiably. We will embrace them and keep them safe, because not everyone is cut out to be a front-runner. We will face the world for them, and we will show them how to be brave. In some cases, we may die for them.
I ain’t never gonna put a queer down for being afraid or for wanting to conform. I can’t put someone down for wanting to survive this mud wrestling match. One day, when they realize (as did the Black community) that conformity is a trap, that queerness, like Blackness, is an ultimate othering, and that no amount of “dignity” or “not flaunting it” would be rewarded with acceptance and justice, at that moment conformity and capitalism might just flicker like burnt out candles and a whole new Utopia of queerness will rise up —
But I don’t want to give out too much of our strategy.
4.
My turn is over. And I’m aching from a rejection by a 30-year-old who charmed me, seduced me, used me up, and tossed me on the trash heap of casual, arm’s-length friendship.
The 30-year-old is tall, rangy, hauntingly not beautiful, by turns hard edged and butch, girly and emotional, helpless, terrified, disdainful, judgmental, funny and creative. He turns himself out in a revised hippy esthetic, adorned, not always ironically, with dolls and embroidery and decoupage, so that he reminds me of everything I wish my young self could have been, had it been allowed. If I should speak sternly, he exudes overweening confidence before breaking down in heart-breaking, gasping sobs, like the little match girl standing on her loaf of bread.
I thought I was immune to hurt, but I still blush hot burning red when I recall the night he and another friend took a turn in my bedroom, while I sat, seething, weeping with outrage, in the living room. It was the single most callous act of blithely unaware rejection I had ever experienced, the Oscar and Golden Globe and Tony of uncaring self-actualization. I had not even slept one night on the new mattress they christened.
I was so humiliated, so cucked, I could feel the flesh melting off my body like hot wax.
That was three years ago. I kicked him out for that and other behaviors, but loving him is an addictive hobby that I can never entirely give up, and I sense I am somewhat of the same to him. And now, in the present, with his clothing and his art — did I mention he’s a painter of startling vision and talent? — still lining my hallways, still tripping me up, with him living with me yet not living with me, I know he’s enjoying his turn, during the unannounced absences followed by unexplained reappearances which are like manifestations at 10AM. He doesn’t even kick off his shoes, but unfurls on the sofa like a butterfly still wet from the chrysalis, and, face grey with exhaustion, sleeps a sleep like death.
I am more than twice his age. Realizing this is like taking a fast elevator to the basement. Every time I watch him sleep, unfurled on my sofa, I want to run my fingers through his shoulder-length hair and feel his scent bloom, like the scent from decades past, when I once stepped lightly, youthfully, and in love, in a blaze of summer, through wild chamomile. I would, if I dared, whisper, “No one will ever love you as much as I do. No one.”
But I’m a foolish old man near the end of his life, and, in this life, I think I will never again say it.
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