You can usually tell a person’s age by the state of their hands. I stared at the pair across from me, folded on the scratched wood bar beside the lemon wedges and cocktail napkins. They were rough-hewn, liver-spotted, with wrinkles that cross-hatched a sparse thicket of hair. It was another night of yearning at a gay bar and I was contemplating going home with the man beside me because his hands kept a score (“I’m 65!” they screamed) that belied everything he’d done to hide the decades behind him. His face looked middle-aged, no doubt thanks to a skin-care routine that cost more each month than my whole wardrobe; his body was toned from years spent in the gym; and his hair was buzzed on the side and longer on the top, which was fashionable in New York back then. Everyone in cosmopolitan western cities tries to look young. But I only slept with men who looked old.
Back then I was 24, but the guys I wanted were at least in their mid-50s. Now I’m 33, and my lovers are almost always senior citizens. My husband is 77. “You have daddy issues,” a college friend I no longer see told me blithely a year or so after graduation, as though this cliche was newer and wiser when it emerged from his mouth. Now it’s a wonder no one tries to diagnose me with “grandaddy issues”.
I’m open about my sexuality, but I despise being pigeonholed. Still, I believe that those who share my preferences form a discrete sexual subset, encompassed by homosexuality, yet obscured by its mainstream. Men in my situation must come out twice: first, as homosexuals, and then as homos who only sleep with old homos. Our loins are left unstirred by young twinks with six-pack abs or adorable bear cubs whose hairy chests have yet to grey, just the same way that female models from Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues left us limp as adolescents. Generations of male heart-throbs have come and gone, and we’ve appreciated their appeal only as a social consensus, not a carnal urge. Myriad people are indifferent towards popular sex symbols. Yet my apathy towards young beauty is so pronounced that I’ve wondered if I react to older men as a sex of their own. Why have I always nursed a crush on bald character actor Richard Jenkins – b 1947 – but not, say, America’s gilded waif Timothée Chalamet? Am I drawn to changing hormones, a pheromonic balance that alters as testosterone declines and a bit of oestrogen enters the soup? This bizarre idea is no less plausible than damaging presumptions that someone with my predilection is a gold-digger, a stunted character in a Freud case study, or a culprit of elder abuse.
It was impossible to explore my sexuality in adolescence. I had no reason to come out. The straight kids would have ostracised me, and the gay ones – could I have found them, anyway? – would no doubt have alienated me, because queerness has its own conventions, and teenagers try harder than anyone to observe their bounds. The men who I found attractive were legally barred from dating me. The first one I fell for was a humanities teacher who was 37 when I was born. He was straight, married and had grownup children. He was the sort of educator who charmed kids but had no idea that his jocularity and friendliness could be misconstrued by a 16-year-old who essentially followed him around the halls and spent every free moment in his classroom. This entirely unrequited crush (which I never admitted to anyone until I was well into adulthood) planted the germ of who I became.
Meanwhile, I slogged through the motions of adolescence with varying degrees of enthusiasm. I went to parties, drank eager amounts of booze, made out with high-school girls, played beer pong, studied extremely hard, engaged in good-natured academic competition, shot hoops with my friends, hung out in their basements, watched Comedy Central, teared up in my bedroom while I listened to indie rock bands. I laughed intensely at jokes, but still felt as though I was watching myself perform this act from the outside. At night I jerked off to porn videos of older men and hated myself afterwards.
My early years of college were similarly repressed and desperate. I dreamed before puberty of living in a house with my peers. By the start of adulthood, a campus full of horny contemporaries had morphed into a cruel rite of passage. At 20 I told a dear friend that I was attracted to men, neglecting to mention that my wheelhouse was limited to old dudes. A partial truth seemed better than living a lie.
But sex with my contemporaries changed nothing. I mostly pursued people if they, like me, were obsessed with art, music, literature and film. Sometimes this created the opportunity for passion to develop, but desire never sprouted a connection if the other person was within a light year of my age.
My second coming-out – as a lover of older men – was piecemeal. Many of my peers found out when I moved to New York City at 22 to get a master of fine arts in fiction writing and promptly fell in love with a 61-year-old. I bummed a cigarette off him outside the local gay spot at closing time and then we went back to his apartment. He had a similar charm to my high-school teacher, a belly laugh and a lived-in wit. He didn’t quite believe me when I told him that I loved him just a couple of weeks after we first slept together. I introduced him to friends. I spoke about him to a couple of relatives, who, although shocked, at least fostered an appearance of open-mindedness.
Our relationship collapsed for a number of reasons soon after I turned 24. Many of my friends then confessed that they thought it impossible for a young adult to date a man of my ex’s vintage. It was assumed he had been tired after six decades on the planet, and his exhaustion would always outpace his appetite for something new. He encouraged this narrative about himself, too, and I probably should have taken him at his word. He had entrenched obligations, both financial and emotional, traumas and history too tightly wound to ever be unspooled. He had dead parents he grieved, and friends who had become like family, and a recent retirement about which he felt ambivalent and that undermined his self-esteem, and a weekend property out in the country that was equally his pride and his weight to bear. I was too young to have much of a past or many present commitments that weren’t disposable. What I had, for the first time in my life, was the sense that I had a romantic future.
I finished grad school, moved to Crown Heights, and began to ride the slow, erratic train into Manhattan many nights of the week in order to hang out at a gay bar on East 58th Street called the Townhouse, still there today, which served oldsters who wanted to pick up young trade. A lot of sex workers operated out of this club, which maintained a loose dress code that only applied to men with grey hair and wrinkles. I was wary of the social conservatism of anyone who submitted to this in the 21st century, yet I liked how the clientele didn’t try to look like boys. These older men suspected that I, too, was charging for it. They questioned my intentions because I sparked the flirtation, which is necessary with much older guys in gay bars; they won’t approach the young because they don’t want to risk rebuke or coming off as creepy. I had plenty of sex, but most of the men I met were heterosexually married with children and grandchildren, in town from Florida or New Jersey and looking for a bit of action on the side.
One of the sixtysomethings I slept with had another lover, a 39-year-old artist who showed in Lower East Side galleries and wanted a friend who could cruise the aged with him. I was down, and went to his art shows, too. But one day he propositioned me, then asked me on a date. I rejected him: “I thought you only liked daddies.”
He did, but he had given up on pursuing them. The trouble was that he could never introduce an older lover to his friends, he told me, or take him to a dinner party, or allow him into the corner of the art world that he occupied, or hold his hand at a restaurant, or take him home to mom and dad. His cowardice stuck with me and I worried that one day I would turn into him.
Months passed and I figured out ways to put off what I obviously cared about the most, which was falling in love. I decided that I could not fall in love until I finished and published my first novel. I also decided that I could not fall in love until I could afford to live alone. Regardless of my plans, I fell in love when I was 25 with my now-husband, Jeff, then 69. We first spoke on the dating app Scruff, which is mainstream these days but used to cater specifically to hairy men and their admirers.
We did not know how to relate in bed at first, so we smoked some crumbly old cannabis he had in his drawer and talked about experimental poetry. The next week Trump was inaugurated president and my fear about this imminent catastrophe had solidified into a vague if potent determination to “be a political person”, whatever that meant. I knew that I could never go to the Townhouse again, for that entire swathe of the East Side had been tainted by vendors selling red hats and the dystopian police presence outside the Trump Tower. Undoubtedly I was being unfair, sweeping every closeted family man with a suit and a suburban address into a bin marked “Not radical enough for my new life”. But I no longer wanted to risk sleeping with the enemy.
Jeff was certainly not the enemy. He had been out for nearly half a century when we met, had been a tireless gay rights activist and co-chair of the Village Voice union in the 1980s, when he managed to extend the benefits of their shop to same-sex couples, a virtually unheard-of victory for queers in 1982. He enjoyed so many of the same movies that I do, including asinine comedies I revelled in during my adolescence, and had an innate understanding of obscure genres of music. He wasn’t a snob. He had more financial resources than I did but still lived like a bohemian – a lifestyle I could afford. We tried to be friends at first and I insisted that we split every meal and night out for drinks straight down the middle: my attempt to counter society’s assumption that I chased older men because I wanted their money was, I understand now, an admirable if ultimately self-defeating response to homophobia. Intergenerational gay relationships are always scrutinised for being transactional. Acquisitive stereotypes cut both ways: the younger partner worries about seeming conniving, while the older partner fears being fed a line, as if his significant other is the dating equivalent of a phishing email. My commitment to self-sufficiency was not what allowed Jeff and I to transcend these preconceptions. It was the strength of our attachment, the reality that we fell in love.
Pretty soon we were spending every night together and having explosively good sex multiple times a day. I had experienced something similar with my ex, but was nonetheless in uncharted waters. Jeff still mourned his late husband, who was a decade his senior and had died less than a year and a half before we met. I had exercised little caution about inserting myself into his grief because we were too incompatible on a surface level to have more than an extended fling. He is six inches shorter than I am, and my previous crushes were taller than me – I believed that considerable height was necessary. Jeff has a high voice, cries when he feels overwhelmed, and embraces his femininity in dress and spirit, while the men I thought that I found most attractive embraced masculine stereotypes. This relationship was expanding me so quickly that I realised again that I was still in the process of coming out: I knew that intergenerationality was a must, but I had no idea just how much received thinking about gay attraction could be discarded. At the same time, the different parts of myself could flourish in this coupling: I could be boyish, dumb, silly, sad, ardent, obsessive and anxious. I didn’t need to cloak any of these qualities in whatever I believed adulthood to be.
“What will you do if he gets sick?” is a question people still ask me after we’ve been together for nearly eight years. Implicit in their curiosity is a belief in the ableist, first-world fallacy that young people don’t suffer illness or die – I want to reply, “What will he do if I get sick?”
Sometimes, people mistake us for father and son, which is not completely inaccurate – although the question of who is the parent and who is the child is more complicated than they might assume. Our relationship was able to blossom thanks to a mutual understanding that either of us may begin a romance or move in with another person and regard the other as a beloved family member deserving of affection, support, comfort and care. Love is not a contract, insurance policy or a coerced promise, and this freedom ironically absolves us from the urge to depart each other’s lives.
For now, and hopefully for an indefinite hereafter, Jeff and I cohabit and coexist. We both work from home, which means we spend all day in each other’s space, bemoaning disappointing emails and discussing our next meal, concocting excuses to leave the apartment for a stroll in the middle of the afternoon. We demonstrate together for Palestinian, Black, queer and migrant lives. In the evenings, we go to gallery openings, concerts, clubs, movies, readings; we come home, have a drink, get stoned and laugh. We meld existing friend groups and make new ones, a cross-section of lovely people who span generations.
“I guess I was skittish when we met,” Jeff says when I ask him to reflect on that time. “I really couldn’t get how anyone could be attracted to my saggy butt and annoying old-guy forgetfulness. The real surprise, though, is that when I look at you, sitting on the futon in your plaid pyjama pants, big eyes smiling at me, we’re the same age, no difference at all.”
I am not trying to sell a lifestyle, and I suspect that late capitalism is still several years away from being able to market sex and love with a septuagenarian as a smokin’ hot trend. But, I guarantee that there are many of you out there, of every gender identity and sexual orientation, who know now or will find out later that you are happiest romantically and erotically with someone much older. Don’t despair. Though if you do, that’s OK too – I sure did.
Months after we met, Jeff and I woke up, sleep-deprived and sensitive, from a fight about how we could continue. We went on a walk. All of society seemed to be against us. The glares of passersby tracked us while we trudged up the avenue and stopped on every block to argue or to hug. If we broke up, we would be miserable. If we stayed together, we would accompany each other a little further into the uncertainty of existence. “Let’s be close today and see how tomorrow works for each of us,” we resolved – as we had in the past, as we would in the future. And then we wandered the streets hand in hand, plotting a course that was as new as it was old.
