WHAT IS "OLD"?

Those of us who have lived at least a few decades see how fluid the terms young and old can be.

 

MUST be. 

 

When I first came out—finally—at twenty-four and started going to gay bars in West Hollywood, an especially brutal place for being judged based on looks, I remember thinking forty was so old. When I dated I guy who was thirty, I wondered if our age gap was too great. 

 

Thirty or even forty as something considered older…it feels embarrassingly stupid now. It also reminds me of needy guys on Twitter, announcing it’s their thirty-fourth birthday and saying they’re old just so those of us who are older will say, “Thirty-four’s nothing. You’re so young.”

 

Yeah, I don’t do that. If a thirty-four-year-old wants to feel old—genuinely or falsely—that’s his shit to live with. I remember thirty-four. It felt like the perfect age.

 

But now I’m sixty. My hands did not shake as I typed that, but I’ll admit to pausing after the period. 

 

Holy #%&!

 

SIXTY! So old.

 

But old in terms of being sixty feels like the word fag. I’m allowed to use it for myself but, hell no, it’s not okay for other people, i.e., younger people, to attach old to my age. That’s when I get defensive, even annoyed. Sixty is nothing. Or, at least, it’s definitely not old.

 

Yes, hair-obsessed...

I got my back up last night as I watched the first episode of Season 9 of Queer Eye, set in Las Vegas. The woman being made over was a sixty-three-year-old former Vegas showgirl. It wasn’t an especially memorable episode aside from the fact I was obsessed with the new guy’s hair—the highlights, the length, the styling. (New guy is Jeremiah Brent, replacing Bobby Berk as the interior designer.) I did, however, become too aware of how much the show set the showgirl up as being old.

 

Not knitting (or collecting)
doilies yet!

A grandma.

Living in the past, living only for her children and grandkids.

No new goals.

Let herself go.

Gray hair is bad.

 

Yes, it’s in the show’s interest to portray the poor woman as dour and dowdy in the beginning. This is a makeover show and a radical transformation is key to an episode’s success. Let her reveal come with a string of exclamation marks. Let the viewer say, “Oh, my god, she looks so good…for sixty-three.” Yeah, I added on that qualifier. As if sixty-three is old. 

 

I don’t know what I think is old anymore. I just know it’s not sixty. I won’t allow myself to think that. I certainly am not going with sixty-three, counting down the days before OLD walks into my home and takes over. Hello, knee-high socks and gaudy golf outfit, polo shirt tucked into plaid pants, Buddha belly as prominently on display as unkempt eyebrows and strands of ear hair.

 

Yeesh. Let that version of old be held at bay for a lifetime.

 

I cringed every time Tan, Jonathan, Karamo, Antoni and The Hair Guy said old or older. They made sixty-three something to dread…unless it came with a team that redesigned your entire home, kinda sorta showed you how to make a red pepper dip (Oh, Antoni) and arranged for a last hurrah on a Vegas stage. It’s worth noting that the QE crew is experiencing its own age creep with all but Jonathan now in their forties. (Still, so young now in my books!) From my perspective, the nineteen years between Karamo and the showgirl weren’t so great.

 

“Age is just a number” may be a cliché but, now that I’m seemingly aging more than when I was twenty-something, it does feel true. Let sixty be the new forty. Heck, honestly I’d say I feel not a day over thirty-seven. And immediately after typing that, I sense that I need to defend it. I still work out six days a week. My runs, as an example, are always eleven kilometers (or occasionally more) and I run them as fast as I did thirty years ago. I seem to spin all day, a flurry of activities. That Tasmanian devil critter’s got nothing on me.  

 

Somewhere (way) down the line, I’ll embrace the word old, but it’s a firm no thank you for now. I’m not going to let that mindset in. Let me continue to ascend and descend stairs, skipping every other step. Let me listen to podcasts or, okay, audiobooks. Let me sing-mumble that “Tipsy” song, even if it’s from my home office desk and not an actual bar. (Oh, the noise!) So maybe I’m not exactly young. I’ll concede that. I have no interest in spending a second of my day on TikTok. But I’m not going shopping for knee-high socks this decade either. 

 

Youngish. That sounds all right. Oldish? Nope. Don’t rush me, thank you very much.