How gay men age: Dads, polar bears & silver foxes are just the beginning

Is there anything duller than a gay guy moaning about getting older?

Thanks to combination therapy and PREP, most gay men can now expect to journey into old age. But we complain all the way there.

“Faggots are worse than women about their age. They think their lives are over at 30. Physical beauty is not all that goddamn important.”
Michael, The Boys in the Band

Of course gay men aren’t the only people wary of getting older. A recent Royal Society for Public Health survey of 2,000 UK adults found that negative attitudes towards ageing are widespread. It concluded: “We need realistic portrayals of ageing that overall reflect both the challenges and opportunities in later life.”

I tried to do just that. A couple of years ago I set up gays live longer, a tumblr account to collect and share images of older gay men. I also threw in any interesting quotes from gay men about ageing.

You’ll be amazed to hear I wasn’t snowed under. In the western world, the dominant image of the gay man is still the shirtless young guy styled to within an inch of his life and dying to party.

But taken together, the images I found exposed a number of recurring messages around ageing that are being delivered to gay men by…