Fridae

The clock leered at me.

Its every tick a sibilant whisper, its every tock a thunderous bell.

I ignored it. But still it counted to itself smugly, nastily, gleefully.

Fine, I looked up, just as the hands swung past 12. Great. I just had to witness myself turn 32. Joy.

Since I can remember, birthdays have always depressed me. Maybe it's part of the whole morbid gay fear of wrinkles and sagging social lives. After all, we're a group that venerate youth and beauty. What's left for those of us who take yet another ominous step closer to gay spinsterhood?

I mean hell, go to any gay club or bar. Eighty percent of the crowd is probably under 35, and the rest claim to be. For those lucky bitches who look a youthful 25 at 40, well, good for you. Make the most of your waning years before you're ravaged and ravished by the cruel claws of time.

If you think about it, yes, it's silly. Ageing happens to everyone, and you have a choice whether to accept it gracefully or not. But for gay men, what do we have to look forward to? Where do we get our sense of place in the grand beauty contest of life? Straight people have their families and kids and mortgages. But us? Can we really just subsist on mahjong and friendship? Does libido fade away with every decade? The answer would seem no - I have a 60+ Caucasian friend who has a gruelling sex life, but he's lucky. There are a lot of young Asian twinks who like old white guys. Sadly, the converse isn't true. I know of no young white boys who like old Asian men.

So what happens to old gay men? We can't ALL open bars and clubs. Do we just stop and take up gardening? Can we? Especially for those of us who enjoy the scene, with its glitter and cattiness and sex and seduction, what do we turn our energies on?

I was in one of the more popular gay sex clubs a couple of days after that dreadful birthday, when a group of 40 to 50-something gay men walked in. The guy at the counter tried politely to turn them away, but eventually let them in when he couldn't come up with a polite excuse. (The same group had been turned away at a Halloween party a few days earlier, with overcrowding as the excuse.) Once the group had gone to chance their luck in the darkness upstairs, the group at the bar dropped a few comments, myself included. Though a small voice in the back of my head cautioned me to watch it. "You're not that far off, dear", it whispered evilly.

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One of the guys in the group even made a pass at me, and while I remained polite, I wondered if someday I'd invoke the same sort of revulsion in some gay boy as I was feeling then. Scary thought. I quickly ordered another beer.

Maybe that's one of the reasons I decided to come back to Manila. In Singapore, I'd found less and less "marketability" in the gay scene, where beautiful guys looked for beautiful guys, and youth blissfully took pleasure in reflected youth. Of course, I over generalise. I know, I know, maybe I was just meeting the wrong guys. I did have some nice young chaps, who liked being with a more mature man (little did they know). But the truth was, it's rare that some sweet 22-year-old army boy would come home with me, rather than someone equally sweet and young. And there were some really beautifully kept guys who were well into their 30s and who were still much desired. But the gym holds other terrors for me, so no thank you.

In Manila, despite it being a "young guy's scene", I found that the age gap wasn't quite as insurmountable a barrier. Maybe it's because some guys here tend to look for "older brother" figures (Some couples I know have 8 to 15 year age gaps, and they still work). Maybe some guys like conversation with their hotdogs. Or maybe it's because I'm meeting a fair number of guys in the same age range, and same situation. Whatever the reason, it seemed that starting the dangerous drive into the next decade wasn't as irksome. But the incident at the sex club made me realise that I hadn't managed to avoid the inevitable. I'd just staved it off a few more years.

I know that Fridae has done some articles last year about age, and how to survive it. But I guess I'm just looking at it from the darker, more despairing side. Indulge me. I just turned 32 and I feel rotten.