Whatever Happened To The Boy Next Door, Suntanned, Crewcut All American Male?

As you may have guessed, I am on a little beach holiday with my friend J, yes, the J in a certain Maryland city with the roving camera and an eye for color.

Long ago, when I first started this blog, I mentioned my criteria for a beach town, and Rehoboth still fits the bill. Walking around today - on a weekend on the line between "in season" and "off season" - I was reminded of the charms of the beachfront houses, the length of sandy beach, and the relaxed feel of a beach town. In my mind, when I am here, I am always thinking about what it would take to make this my eventual home - I believe it takes one trilogy of phenomenal bestsellers, adapted into a hit TV series, followed by a short, but successful career writing feature films. Still totally doable. :)

J says I should stick to political writing. :)

The other thing J and I discussed - aside from all the permutations of double edged follow-ups to "I've Missed You" - is the sense that the gay resort scene has gotten les... "look specific." It's something that could be said more generally of the gay male community, and of gay enclaves all over. The body conscious, perfect specimen notions of male beauty still exist of course... but the whole feel, these days, I find far more "real." Real guys who let it go a bit, who don't live their lives only at the gym, who see more of themselves than their abs, their hairstyles, and their quest for perfect looks in others.

In part I think, as J does, that it's a function of age, actually of an aging community. When I first came here, I was 23, whippet thin, and interested in little more than the next party and a good tan. I'd just come out fully, and the world, I was discovering, was coming along for the ride.

We were a gay generation that had little in the way of older references. I think the general average of ages on the beach, for a good ten years, was something around 26. Today, and for the past few summers, the average feels closer to 35, or 38. More of us are older, settled, established. We own the homes we used to rent (well, not me), we found the partners (well,  not me), and we realized there's more to life than the next party... and maybe even beyond a good tan - me too.

It's easy to say that a lot of this is a function of a world after AIDS. Though I can count the losses in friends and acquaintances on more than two hands, many of us are still here. For the generation ahead of usthat just wasn't the case. It was hard, when I came out in the late eighties, to find a gay man over 35. Twenty years on, it remains hard to find one over 55. But these days, gay men over 40 are not so odd, or so unexpected. And it's a whole new world.

I always say, I don't mind aging. I do miss the whippet thin thing... but it's mostly okay. But what I find is that aging, as a gay man, in this day and age, is an uncharted adventure again. It wasn't necessarily the best thing for us at 25, not to have role models. But the lives we've forged, the world we made as gay people... well, it's way open to possibility, even now. Older, and a bit wiser, guys my age can keep making it up as we go along.

What's harder to get a read on is what's happening to younger gay men. I think it's a world that's less adventurous than ours was, more defined, more "normal." Some of that's all to the good - it's nice to see young gay men not struggle so much with coming out, with negative stereotypes and preconceptions, to be so much freer from the threat of death from AIDS. But some of what we had, wasn't so bad - more sexual freedom, less determined notions of relationships (it's why I will always look a little askance at gay marriage), but most importantly, a chance to get your freak on in the wilds of the urban jungle. So much of that, I find, is just gone.

Or maybe it isn't. Maybe it's just a different kind of rebellion, a different notion of how to be gay. I don't know so much, because even now, we separate generationally, in a way that's so subtle you don't really notice until it's too late. I'd love to talk more, see more, hear more of the experience of younger gay men. It may be that, with gay seeming more "normal" perhaps the notions we had, in my generation, about a "gay experience" just don't translate anymore - maybe it's just life experience, more like the straights than not.

I hope so... and yet I don't. The creativity to write those novels, dream the dreams... see the beauty of men, that's what I got, here at the beach, out in those clubs, out in the world. I wouldn't trade a lot of it for anything. If I had, I wouldn't have the kind of creative friendship that endures to this day at the beach. It just gets more interesting from here.  Beach baby, give your hand... and I'll give you something to remember.

Comments

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This is a great post, and I'm wishing you and J a fabulous time at the beach. I miss you!

This post makes me think of the posts people write about generational differences in diverse friendships, i.e., younger folks live in a more racially/ethnically diverse world, have more friends of color, etc. etc. than their parents' generation. Or so the story goes. With this comes different viewpoints, etc. You get it.

The other thing it makes me think is how I always romanticized the 70s as a period when I would have been able to be way more carefree sexually as a single straight woman. I was born in the 70s, so this is only based on myth and history and disco, ;), but it always sounded to me like that would have been an entirely different, pre-AIDS, women's lib world than being young in the late '90s and worrying about safety, disease, etc. But maybe it's all fantasy, nostalgia for a time I never lived in...