Jesse Monteagudo: Jesse Monteagudo is a free-lance writer and reader who lives in South Florida with his accordion-playing husbear. You can reach him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com online. This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VIII Issue 38 ). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.com online.
“Older gay men and younger gay men,” according to author Michael Alvear, “rarely talk to each other. We're like Italian salad dressing in the fridge. You can shake us all you want but eventually we'll lift, separate, and retreat to separate halves of the bottle.” But this was not always so. Relationships between “older” and “younger” men were an important part of Classical Greek culture; sculptors immortalized them in stone and bronze; and poets and philosophers wrote books about them.
Unfortunately, our society's hysteria about sexual predators, and the popular misconception that gay men are child molesters have successfully kept the gay generations apart. AIDS has decimated an entire generation of gay men who, had they still been alive, would have provided younger generations with much-needed mentors and role models.
Making things worse are misconceptions that the gay generations have of each other. To many men of my age group, younger gays have it too good, while younger gays view their elders as “dirty old men” who want to get into their pants, and so on.
It wasn't always that way, of course, and we don't have to back to Classical Greece to find good examples. When I came out thirty years ago, I was working my way through college and could not afford some of the amenities of gay life.
Fortunately for me, I met a lot of interesting, successful, “older” men who wanted to take me places. Of course, most of the time the “places” those men wanted to take me were their bedrooms, but that did not keep me from learning from my elders all that was good about being gay.
All in all, there were more opportunities for contact between the gay generations in 1974 than there are today. To make matters worse, today's gay community is “youth oriented,” which leads many older gays to despair and many younger gays to think that there is no gay life after 30. In “Reeling in the Years: Gay Men's Perspectives on Age and Ageism,” author Tim Bergling examines the “two tribe” mentality that divides the generations of gay men into “us” and “them.” In his first book, “Sissyphobia,” Bergling explored popular prejudices against effeminate men.
Here Bergling “set out to explore this peculiar phenomenon called ageism as it exists within the gay world. Along the way, it occurred to me it might also be time to revisit some of those other age-related topics I once wrote about, to give them more examination and depth than one has room for in a magazine article.”
As research for his book, Bergling created a Web site ( reelingyears.com ) to gather information and comments about ageism in the gay community. During the year that Bergling's Web site was active, 2,000 men of all generations took his poll and 250 men filled out his survey.
When all was done, Bergling was able to gather a fair cross-section of gay men; men with varied opinions about “older” and “younger” men and how ageism affects all of us. “As I surveyed and interviewed folks over the past year and a half, I saw several age-related myths that kept bubbling to the surface, claims and counterclaims that could bear some examination,” he wrote.
In “Reeling in the Years,” Bergling explores some of those myths: “gay kids have it much easier these days;” “every older gay just wants to get into some kid's pants;” “whatever passes for gay culture these days…worships at the altar of youth;” and that perennial complaint that older or younger men had or are having more sex than we are or had. The grass is always greener on the other side of the generation gap.
Bergling is right when he notes that gay adult reluctance to get close to gay kids - because others might think we are “sexual predators” - “are creating a sad and dangerous situation for many of America's gay kids. Certainly there are resources available for gay youth,” Bergling admits, including youth groups and the Internet.
On the other hand, “there's really nothing like the give and take between human beings that occurs in day-to-day, unstructured life, and the wisdom that might be passed down from one generation to the next…not to mention the new “perspectives” an older man might gain from seeing the world through younger eyes. From what I hear from young and old alike in my surveys and interviews - we've already touched on some of it - there's a real disconnect out there between conception and reality.”
Happily, in spite of all this, “more and more gay men of all ages are bridging that gap of years that exists between them and forging relationships that run the gamut from simple friendships or business partnerships to full-on flowering romances worthy of a Harlequin novel.”
The forty-ish Mr. Bergling himself enjoyed for several years a loving relationship with Andy, a youth “with an IQ of 160, the face of an angel, and the body of a young god” who was only 18 when he and Tim first met. Stories like theirs make “Reeling in the Years,” in spite of its tales of woe, a generally-upbeat book. Helping things along is everyone's favorite gay cartoonist, Joe Phillips, who once again does a master's job illustrating Bergling's concepts.
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