Stuff Gay People Like: Having a midlife crisis at 30

A straight boy has his first “girlfriend” when he’s 12, but the closest he’s ever gotten to sex was when he stared for 20 minutes at topless Estonian mud-bathers pictured in National Geographic. If he stays ahead of the curve, he can reasonably hope to reach second base by 9th grade, and fall in love by 10th.

Gay boys take a little more time. They don’t lack interest, but for the first half of high school they’re suffering through painful makeout sessions with girls they’re not attracted to, and listening with mixed eagerness as their cute straight guy friends describe sexual exploits. When gay guys finally get over trying to become straight, they’ll spend the remainder of their teenage years in desperate, angsty isolation, praying that they’ll find a boyfriend – which is easier said than done when you’re in the closet and there’s only one “out” guy in a the student body of 1,500. (Incidentally, that is where gay people learn to hate suburbs.)

It’s a delayed development, and even when they’re transitioning from college to the working world, their romantic lives have just turned 16.
You can stretch your 20s into a period of prolonged “youth,” of an attractive young phase in which binge-drinking and walks-of-shame are at least moderately acceptable, but you can’t make it last past that. Gay men usually look younger than they really are, so the last few years of their 20s are a time to slowly relinquish the remaining semblance of “boyhood” – philosophers will argue for centuries whether or not anything exists beyond. When a gay man reaches 30, everything falls apart. The six-pack he spent an hour a day working on turns out to be more of a liability than an asset; it now requires three hours of attention or it disappears beneath a cushion of fat. He will have a brief panic attack if he is single, and also a brief panic attack if he is in a relationship. His small apartment feels kind of cramped now, and after working happily in restaurant jobs for five years, he now realizes that he is actually poor. All the 21-year-olds now consider him “creepy” if he goes to a bar alone, and all the advertisements catering to his age group just switched from clothing that shows off assets to clothing that covers pudge.

If there’s one group of people on Earth who can have a midlife crisis at the exact same time that their fathers do, gay men are that. It is sometimes said that men experience a midlife crisis at 50 because their childbearing age is through, their wives are going through menopause, and their kids are leaving the nest. Their genes have been successfully passed, which means they are biologically useless, their Darwinian purposes fulfilled. Thus they become disembodied – willing or not, they retire to the life of the mind, as a thinker or hobbyist, falling asleep on the recliner in front of the History Channel, with juicy tomatoes growing in the yard and collections of 100-year-old quarters they “magically” produce from behind their awe-stricken grandson’s ear.

Gay men are not as concerned about biological children, but they, too, are moving on past their earthly years at age 30, the age of transcendence. For a gay man, it is now pretty much decided by his peers that if he has not gotten somehow involved in activism or politics, or at least informed himself, he is a worthless human being. Gay men at 30, like their 50-year-old fathers, are exactly half the age of the oldest person of their sexual orientation they’ve ever met.

They’re now “dad age,” but since they don’t have wives to get pregnant, they don’t know if they’re still young or on the young side of old. A solitary tear falls from the gay man’s eye as he blows out the candles – God, am I dead? Is this the afterlife?

Gay men at 30 have been too busy trying to achieve a real all-American young adulthood to consider actual adulthood, but 40-year-old friends want to smack them upside the head and tell them to give everyone a fucking break.

Stuff Gay People Like (SGPL) is a satirical/cultural column. Visit the Facebook Page.