Good afternoon, beloved —
It's down to the last burnt embers of the year, here — in fact, my dad and his partner have already FaceTimed in from Auckland to wish us a happy New Year, and soon it will be Seoul's turn. So 2022 has already broken over at least part of Earth, and in those places (as for all the rest of us, in just a few more hours), I hope its advent brings all the peace and restoration we've been starved of.
We all know, intellectually, that nothing in the underlying set of facts changes simply because we turn a calendar leaf, that human reckoning is merely an arbitrary and not even particularly consistent framework superimposed over whatever it is that actually constitutes time-in-itself. But that doesn't change the elemental truth that there is a considerable deal of power in the ritual of passing between an end and a new beginning. When all of us wake up tomorrow morning, the weight of the year will have lifted, and in every way that's psychologically salient we'll set out together on something that is as yet unmarked and undefined.
At least, that's what I'm counting on. This second full year of COVID left us all in an odd place; if 2021 was not, for most of us, quite as unremittingly brutal as the year before, it has nevertheless afforded us precious little time for consolidation, healing and repair. We're depleted, running on fumes. Or — I'll speak for myself, how's that? — I certainly am, anyway.
It's all left me thinking about the passage of time (which is to say, in human terms, the process and the art of aging) quite a bit more than I used to. It is, of course, quite possible that this is simply midlife speaking, and that this is precisely what I'd be obsessing over right now had there never been any such thing as a global coronavirus pandemic. Nevertheless, here we are. And what I've been mulling lately is founded on something I started noticing years ago — at first out of the corner of my eye, and then more focally as it's become ever more relevant to me. It's this: very broadly speaking, anyway, gay men know how to age better than straight ones.
I was reminded of this most recently over a leisurely lunch of croquetas and beer I enjoyed a few weeks ago with my friend J, when I was in Madrid. We were in the heart of Chueca, the city's gayborhood, and in this time without much in the way of transborder travel, the vaguely tourist-trappy but entirely serviceable bar we were in was recognizably full of locals. The couple at the next table were just about my age, or maybe two years on either side of it, and in some ways they looked every minute of it; the man facing me had the same amount of grey in his hair and beard as I do, was maybe a little bit softer around the waist than I am after my solid year of daily Pelotonizing, sported a nifty new-gen hearing aid identifiable as such only because I know what they look like.
I see this guy's (presumptively or declaratively) straight counterpart all the time in London, in the guise of every class and background from City private-equity wanker to driver on the 73 bus, and I'm generally at least liminally impressed with what a mess he is and we are. (And Britain, mind you, is a place where standards of comportment and crispness in self-presentation are generally higher, across all classes, than they are where I'm from. New York's not all that bad, but fully three-quarters of the grown-ass adults you'll see on Michigan Avenue in Chicago will be wearing sweatpants, generally grey, stained and Bears-branded.) This slovenliness suggests to me that those of us who suffer from it have in some way failed to observe the critical distinction between letting go and giving up entirely. By contrast, the man in the Chueca bar held himself in a way that suggested he'd managed to retain his sense of physicality, even the more-or-less overt sexuality implied by his surgical-steel piercings and horsehide jacket, without losing some essential quality of dignity.
This inchoate sense of energies held in careful balance reminds me of a man in his mid-fifties I knew at the Berkeley Free Clinic in the early 1990s (when I was literally half as old as he was then, and I am now). I remember him as being indefinably adult, in some way most of the people around me at the Clinic were not: more serious in comportment and demeanor, more organized and reliable, more detailed and careful in the way he'd write up patient interactions.
Perhaps this was a legacy of his having been knee-deep in AIDS activism all through that charnelhouse era; that air of seriousness was certainly something he had in common with people I knew on the Treatment & Data Committee of ACT/UP Philadelphia, as opposed to those of us who just wanted to do die-ins or chuck condoms at the hideous antichoice zealot Randall Terry. But at the same time and without contradiction, he was also profoundly in touch with another, far more hedonic side of his being. We knew that most weekends he'd be off at one or another gathering of Radical Faeries, surrendering, whether or not he'd actually dropped acid on that occasion, to the dissolution of ego in the ecstatic throes of communal bliss. We knew, because he told us, what he did at these gatherings. And we saw with our own eyes what set of potentials it activated in him.
None of this ever felt performative, or tryhard. It didn't seem forced or desperate in the way midlife crisis so often does in men. He simply knew who he was, and what that meant in detail. And if part of who he was involved activities that our culture generally preserves for the immediately post-adolescent, he evidently felt not the slightest increment of shame in that, nor did it make him seem like he was clinging to fading youth. When straight men do this, or anything like it, we generally come off like we're reënacting my hero Roger Sterling's lunge for transcendence (and firm young hippie flesh) in his crashpad period, and oh, it's just never pretty. But the gay men I have known seem to manage this reconciliation of forces in tension with something approaching naturalness and grace.
What's more, those gay men for whom it is a part of their life seem to me to have a better handle on the shifting balance of dynamics in longterm relationships. It may simply be that the grass always looks greener and so on, but what I've observed with many of my gay friends, across many years and different places, is that they — you! — seem to have figured out how to protect a core of something lasting and true with a cherished life partner without letting go of some sense of themselves as inherently desirable. It's a neat trick, and I wish I knew how it's done.
And perhaps therein lies my resolution for dawning 2022: I will look to the people in my life who seem to know what they're doing, and particularly gay men, for further lessons in the reconciliation of forces and aging as the pursuit of fully realized being.
With that said, I'd like to wish you the full realization of your being, whatever that may mean to you, and the time and space in which to explore it to the fullest. Such explorations, of course, necessarily imply freedom from fear and want and anxiety, and so please know that you have all my wishes for that freedom as well, for you and yours and every last one of us huddled together on this swiftly tilting planet. May the new year be gentle, and may it be kind.
§ I'm reading Marcia Bjornerud's Timefulness and Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie (thanks Dubravka, thanks Christina); listening to Black Monument Ensemble, old Julee Cruise and the better part of the Roxy Music catalogue; and watching The Expanse. (W/r/t the latter: I do not ship, because I have never been, am not presently and shall never be part of any fandom, but hot damn if I don't love those moments in which Bobbie faces off with Amos.)
In these first moments as in the rest of the year before us, please remember to take care of yourself and those who need you, and to let yourself be taken care of. You have, as ever,
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 115 of Friday, 31 December 2021, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊