brut et instructif's blog

There is a guy I fancy who lives not that faraway. We came in contact via a site connection because of a public match up in Bristol. We chatted a lot, about the predictable things. France because I live there. His job. Family. Wrestling and sexual preferences. And then, after about 50 texts in both directions, he admitted that the age gap of more than 40 years between us put him off. Now, that remark contains a paradox, one that I have been thinking about ever since. It alerted me to the large and growing debate over male loneliness in general and the supposed invisibility of gay men after, say, 50. But the paradox is this. The age barrier is almost organic. In Bordeaux I am probably the oldest active lifter in the gym when I go in the late afternoon. A handful of guys register ever so slightly their unhappiness that I am in their space. These guys, in the forties, do not want to get older, and do not what me to remind them of the inevitable. By the time you get to my age, one senses that one is an anticipation, a harbinger, of death. We ever so feintly smell of it.
And this brings us to my paradox. If old men are so unattractive, why is this 30 year old talking to me about fighting, sex and sharing a bed? That is the central mystery here. Note, we have not met yet. We are just talking. We may never meet. But, I am a real peson to him. Someone of some kind of interest. Someone of some kind of attraction. Then last night i watched a YouTube video about gay guys who go to straight barbeques in their neighborhoods in America. And the stats were very revealing. Even with conservative American men who vote for anti-gay policies, they have often learned to glide around this ideological divide when the gay couple from down the street appears at the neighborhood barbeque, a bottle or two in hand. Politics is not discussed. Sexual practices remain obscure. Civilities are observed. It succeeds. A subtle change is at work. It is easier to hate someone in the abstract, a social category, than to despise the man you have just flipped a hamburger (cooked medium) for. At some level, acceptance is taking shape. No noise, no polemics, no obvious change of any thing except at the point of two men being in the same space at the same time. Peaceful coexistence. It is apparently catching. And comparable effects can be observed on Meetfighters when guys who may never meet end up sending hundred plus texts to each other. This is MF's answer to that medium burger. We are getting there.