I updated my depressing blog post of yesterday to include something that strikes me as an extra added burden on late fifties gay male dating. It’s a situation that will hopefully be done with, or mostly so, beyond my generation of gay folk. It’s better now for gay people in a lot of ways and especially for gay kids, even accounting for the fact that bullying still takes a frightful toll.   But millennials who reach their fifties and suddenly find themselves tossed back into the dating pool should be in one that is mostly as full as it should be of randomly available older gay singles. That isn’t the case with my generation.   A lot of gay guys in the general vicinity of my age are still deeply closeted because that’s what they felt they needed to be in order to survive when they were young men back in the 70s.

Being a homosexual back when I was a gay teenager was worse then being a murderer, worse then being a rapist, worse even then being a communist. A lot of us took that to heart and never found the inner strength to live openly and honestly because the risks were just too much, the pressure was just too much.   So a lot of us put on a mask of heterosexuality back then. It was a matter of survival. And as they grew older they lived that life even if it wasn’t the life their soul was meant to live.

Now some of them have wives, some have kids, and they just can’t leave that life without doing a lot of damage to a lot of people around them.   And if at this late stage of that one chance for a decent life you get, they find themselves looking in a mirror and knowing it could have been different…harder, more of a struggle initially, but better, more honorable, more decent…they have to ask themselves if getting their self respect back, their honor back, is really worth the toll it is going to take on a lot of people, not just themselves.   And a lot of them are simply going to choose to go to their grave wearing that mask and I can’t find it in my heart to judge them for it.

And what that means for those of us of this generation who took the risk and lived honest open lives is our dating pool is a lot smaller then it should be and if we are still single at this age we’re basically fighting against really horrible odds on top of the fact that gay males are a minority to begin with. And that can’t be helped. It just is what it is.

Millennials…don’t be looking at lonely older gay guys like me in fear that this is your future.   I am not your future.   I am your past.   For gay guys of my generation it will always be a time before Stonewall.