What’s there to worry about?
There come times when you take stock, checking on what your past portends for your future. I don’t mean like the time you visited New Orleans and felt you’d love to go back. Or if you thought about going into the military after high school? Or you spent years training for the Olympics, so what’s next?
These are all changes of path and direction. Not what I’m talking about, because presumably the person you were that had an impulse to make a change is the same person who acted on that impulse, at least in the short run.
More to the point are the times, and I think they are few, when you did the stock taking, and knew if you acted on it, it would cause you to be a different person entirely. And when you did act, that is precisely what happened. You changed fundamentally.
And in that changing you necessarily had to give up on other possibilities. Maybe you had to strand yourself in an ecosystem more appropriate to the new you. Kind of like the evolutionary fish that walked on land. Even if that required you to hoist up the anchors that tethered you to the things and people of the former you. Learn to deal with the beach instead of the waves.
Marriage may be like that for some, parenting for sure is. I’d also guess that switching political parties in the U.S. might count, especially given our obscenely polarized politics. They say that Democratic women won’t date Republican men for example, one of the reasons we might have inadvertently created the incel class of sexually frustrated men.
These kinds of changes aren’t simply changes in direction; they’re changes in worlds. Michael Cunningham’s novel Day sets up a stock-taking scenario for two of his male characters:
Dan lives on the straight planet, where a thirty-seven-year-old guy who’s single, presentable, and capable of sustained interest in another person is considered a prize. On Planet Gay [where Robbie lives], the conditions are less forgiving.
From Day by Michael Cunningham
These different projections for two men, who are age mates, brothers-in-law to one another, longtime friends, and who can openly express their bro love for one another, face different realities. Dan can get divorced and still find another mate, assuming he doesn’t do crazy midlife stuff to muff his changes. Robbie supposedly faces the dismal prospect of losing his looks along with his mating opportunities. Granted these fall in the realm of statistical possibilities. Dan could be the kind of jerk who no woman will see potential in, while Robbie could score a rewarding lifetime with some man in meets on Grindr. Or both could find themselves in their 40’s living out their respective optimistic or pessimistic stereotypes.
Cunningham himself is gay and has been with his partner and now husband for almost 40 years, so he’s seemingly beaten the stereotype of Planet Gay. So from his perspective what credibility is there in the projection? Living gay certainly was a hard journey 40 years ago, though it’s somewhat easier now. We’re on TV and movies and we don’t always have to die in the end.
The marriage possibility for gay people gave some reason for hope, though a lot of the straight world still has an issue with gays in general and gay marriage in particular. Maybe always will. If so, gay people can’t be complacent. Self-preservation requires some be-on-your-guard anxiety.
That being the case, the kind of stock-taking I’d like to use as an example for a life changing outcome is the process of coming out. Pun intended.
Taking on the mantle of homosexuality is never done for the accolades you’ll get from the world at large. You may get a ho-hum reaction from friends and family saying they “knew all along.” But those ho-hums are often camouflaging regrets and misgivings: you’ll be lonely and unhappy, you’ll embarrass your family, you won’t have children, you’ll die of AIDS you’ll go to hell. When those misgivings pile up, you may find that your friends and family can’t take it anymore and will badger you to come back to the fold or at least don’t act gay. At worst, they’ll ostracize you.
In anticipation of all the concerns you may cause others, you might decide to self-ostracize. Leave it all behind and start over with a new bunch. Or you might oscillate instead of ostracize. Plant one foot in each world. I suspect this is the most common solution for gay men and lesbians, and certainly the preferred solution for those who are bisexual. For trans people, who will be exiting not only their old ecosystem, but physically presenting and behaving differently in their new one, it’s both feet in.
Given the likelihood that you won’t or can’t start from scratch, how pervasive are the supposedly “less forgiving conditions” on Planet Gay that Cunningham’s narrator was alluding to? The stereotype would have it that a gay man’s desirability declines as he ages, as his hair thins and his waistline expands. Unless of course he manages to break into the millionaire ranks, in which case his desirability positively correlates with his wealth, just as it does for straight men.
For lesbians, desirability doesn’t appear to have the same correlates. They seem to look deeper than the surface for the traits that can make for a happy partnership.
But what does the stereotype miss about happiness? Is it all about difficulties in finding suitable partners? Is that what Cunningham’s narrator is alleging? Or is that stereotype missing some term in its equation?
Time to get personal. I’m nobody’s idea of the gay ideal. I’m old, short, bald and damaged. But it’s now been 40 years since I was supposed to start feeling dread at my impending downfall into gay irrelevance. And so far, no dread.
I was just entering my 40’s when the AIDS epidemic erupted, and I found that my partner, a gay bright light who liked how I looked anyway, had contracted it. He lasted only another 5 years and then died of it.
At that point being 45 and widowed, still older, still short and still bald, I ignored my supposed gay liabilities and headed out. The old environment made up of my partner’s haunts, family, and friends, didn’t survive too long after his passing. I left it all without regret because new directions became available. It turns out people who have always thought of you as part of a couple can have some difficulty in seeing you as an individual.
It makes me wonder now whether I need to add a partner’s death as another one of these world changing events. The circumstance of his dying wasn’t under my control. It was imposed and nothing that I could wish away. Nevertheless, I did take the occasion of it to fundamentally retool myself. It was a time of experimentation of the kind more appropriate to 20 somethings.
But that’s one of the things that’s good about life on Planet Gay. You’re allowed to experiment at any age. Gay society leaves the door to change open; it might even require periodic change to keep your membership active. I won’t pontificate on this point, but I suspect that the straight world has more strictures about mid life (and later) changes than does gay life. I don’t know gay people who feel trapped and threatened by mid life. Too many gay men of my generation didn’t make it that far for those of us who did to worry about what would happen when we got there. Those of us who did make it were relieved to be there at all.
This is all speculative, of course. I can’t convince myself that my own experience in getting to 80 is any more a stereotypical trajectory than the “unforgiving” one ever had been for me. Old age can be rough for anyone, gay or not — on Planet Gay no more so than on any other planet.
But as an outcome of my still experimental tendencies, at 74 I found a new man who I’ve settled in with. He’s 7 years younger and also still testing the waters himself. Gay life for both of us is good life.