First time gay in my 40s stories
March 02, 2017
The Epidemic of
Gay LonelinessBy Michael Hobbes
I
“I used to get so elated when the meth was all gone.”
This is my friend Jeremy.
“When you own it,” he says, “you have to keep using it. When it’s gone, it’s like, ‘Oh nice, I can go assist to my life now.’ I would stay up all weekend and travel to these sex parties and then feel appreciate shit until Wednesday. About two years ago I switched to cocaine because I could work the next day.”
Jeremy is telling me this from a hospital bed, six stories above Seattle. He won’t tell me the strict circumstances of the overdose, only that a stranger called an ambulance and he woke up here.
Jeremy is not the ally I was expecting to have this conversation with. Until a few weeks ago, I had no idea he used anything heavier than martinis. He is trim, intelligent, gluten-free, the kind of guy who wears a operate shirt no matter what day of the week it is. The first time we met, three years ago, he asked me if I knew a good place to do CrossFit. Today, when I ask him how the hospital’s been so far, the first thing he says is that there’s no Wi-F
What No One Tells You About Being A Middle-Aged Gay
Embracing aging as a gay man can be an overwhelming and liberating experience…
By Jumol Royes
Gay tradition is youth obsessed. That’s not breaking news.
Yet not even the gay glitterati have figured out how to stop the living clock and put a halt to the aging process.
I turned 40 recently and was forced to reckon with the superb expectations this birthday is burdened with. After remembering that birthdays are simply temporal markers that we use to remind ourselves, and each other, that we’re still here taking up space, I got to thinking about all the things no one tells you about becoming a middle-aged gay man.
For starters, you don’t accept an email or smartphone notification reminding you to change your Grindr tags and tribes from twink, twunk or cub to bear, daddy or zaddy, for those of you with a little extra swagger in your step.
Planning to meet up for drinks with a guy from the dating app? Be prepared to possibly spend more money than you accounted for when you discover that you’re not only responsible to pay for your control drinks, but to cover the tab of the hottie you’re hoping to hook up wit
by Fred Penzel, PhD
This article was initially published in the Winter 2007 edition of the OCD Newsletter.
OCD, as we know, is largely about experiencing grave and unrelenting suspect. It can bring about you to disbelief even the most basic things about yourself – even your sexual orientation. A 1998 investigation published in the Journal of Sex Research found that among a organization of 171 college students, 84% reported the occurrence of sexual intrusive thoughts (Byers, et al. 1998). In decree to have doubts about one’s sexual identity, a sufferer need not ever have had a homo- or heterosexual experience, or any type of sexual experience at all. I have observed this symptom in young children, adolescents, and adults as adequately. Interestingly Swedo, et al., 1989, set up that approximately 4% of children with OCD experience obsessions concerned with forbidden aggressive or perverse sexual thoughts.
Although doubts about one’s hold sexual identity might seem pretty straightforward as a symptom, there are actually a number of variations. The most obvious form is where a sufferer experiences the reflection that they might be of a different sexual orientation than they formerly believed. If the su
My early experiences of queerness could have been scenes in a cliché coming-of-age story. Open on the interior of a dim bedroom. Two preteen girls — one with a mop of dark curls, the other, me, in a crisp bob with thick bangs — negotiate who will be “the boy” in their kissing practice.
Fade to the interior of a Jeep five years later. Outside, rain is coming down in sheets. No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom” plays on the stereo. A blond girl with glitter in the corner of her eyes sits in the driver’s seat. Beside her is one of the girls from the previous scene, hair longer, but with the same dense bangs. The rain makes beautiful slippery patterns on their bodies. They grip their knees to preserve from reaching toward each other.
Then we look them in a bedroom, sitting on a monumental waterbed. The blond miss reaches toward the other one, kissing and grabbing at her breasts, giggling. The other girl pulls away. Then there’s a montage of the blond girl skinny-dipping with groups of other teens, dancing naked with a organization around a bonfire, her and the girl with bangs making out with different guys on reverse sides of the waterbed, and finally, after a tearful argument, the miss with bang
Likesomany who turned 30 before and after me, I marked the occasion, way back in 1999, with a late hours of boozy, bawdy, boisterous bacchanalia. But all the kir royales in Unused York City could not possibly own blacked out the most memorable thing about my 30th.
During my intimate downstairs bash at Cheetah on 21st Street – the one Jay Z name-dropped in “I Just Wanna Cherish You (Give It 2 Me)” – my then-boyfriend Tommy, who was only 26, presented me with a birthday cake emblazoned with the most brilliant, empowering message in colorful icing: “30 is the unused 20!” (Did that mean I was figuratively dating a teenager?!)
But who were we kidding? Serious down, I secretly thought 30 was the beginning of the end, the year when the death knell started ringing. I figured I was entering my make-it-or-break-it decade. The conventional lgbtq+ wisdom (which, for many, still rings true today) was that like actresses in Hollywood, queer men went out to pasture at 40, as they were replaced by hotter, buffer, and most importantly, younger bucks.
I should contain listened to Cher when I interviewed her three or so years before turning 30. She told me then that her 40s had been the best years of her life