The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Jeremy Piven's been doin' too much sushi to show up to work. Plus: Muppet burlesque and Top Chef both make us feel dirty!
Dating Confessions by You "I think we both sort of think we're doing the other one a favor. Sad or funny, either way this does not bode well..."
It helps to be partnered. Thirty-three was an easier birthday than thirty-two for the simple reason that I'd just signed a lease on an apartment with a boyfriend and imagined (as I still do) that he and I would be together until the day we died in a fiery wreck. A study came out a few years ago showing that married people live longer, healthier lives than single people. This is attributable to the amount of time they don't spend contemplating the prospect of one day having to change their own diapers.
From the time we're born until age twenty-six, we mature. The rest is decay. That's what a college professor of mine told the class when we read As I Lay Dying. Meanwhile, Sean shows no sign of having spent the last year decaying, or worrying about it. He describes having sex with men in their forties and finding them "undiminished in any way." But that generation gap he mentioned before comes up again: "I think we view older generations as having struggled and as being a little beat up by life."
I don't feel beat up by life, despite what my essaysin this publication might lead you to believe. More importantly to my sexual longevity, I don't look beat up by life. Yes, the grey hairs, but I still have full coverage, and hair has not yet migrated to the far reaches of my body, unless you count the little sprouts coming out of my ears, and those I can tweeze while I'm writing. Not only do I still fit into the sailor suit, but if you put your index finger between my butt cheeks, I could squeeze so hard you couldn't pull it out — and when you did, there might be a diamond in your hand. I admit to thirty-two on Craigslist and get away with it.
I admit to thirty-two on Craigslist and get away with it.
"Being gay is a young man's game," movie idol Rupert Everett told the UK's Daily Telegraph a few years ago. "Being gay and being a woman have one big thing in common, which is that we both become invisible after the age of forty-two. Who wants a gay fifty-year-old? No one, let me tell you."
When I was thirty, a celebrity-photographer friend of mine told me the cut-off was forty-five. "You should spend the next fifteen years," he advised, "fucking as many guys as you possibly can."
At forty-six, my friend Scott was the oldest guy I'd had sex with when we hooked up nine years ago. He hadn't exactly been preserved in amber — most of his hair was gone, and his face bore witness to a California childhood decades before sunscreen was fashionable. But Scott was handsome and energetic. He wasn't young, but he was youthful.
Scott was surprised to find in his forties that he still had it going on. "I had coins in my pocket. I think everyone has some currency in his pocket — or no currency, but there's a measure. If you're twenty-four and you're unbelievably hot, and you're totally engaged sexually, your pockets are bulging with currency, with coins. As you get older, the currency leaks from your pockets!"
I first heard Scott use the coin metaphor describing a visit to the old "Tuesday Sucks" party thrown by the Radical Faeries, a countercultural gay group whose communal houses and rural sanctuaries provide refuge not just from the straight world, but from the mainstream gay mindset whose only message to a fifty-year-old gay man is game over. With the Faeries, Scott found not only that he had currency, but so did older men, some much older. Faerie gatherings attract beautiful young guys like Sean, and also Patty, a wizened old hippie with whom I shared a lingering kiss the last time I flew to Appalachia to dance around the maypole.
I love these older men and I honor them, but I know that on some level kissing Patty and going to bed with Scott were different ways of keeping tabs on the cut flower, of looking into the distance of my years at the possibility of erotic longevity. While mainstream gay culture promises us sexual penury in our old age, the Radical Faerie utopia offers the voluntary redistribution of every kind of wealth.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
