IT'S LATER THAN YOU THINK

When I was young and beautiful, I would mooch drinks off lonely older guys. These days, alas, I'm buying.

- BRIAN BROOME

I WAS A BEAUTIFUL MAN ONCE.

You wouldn't know it to look at me now. But once upon a time, all of this was tight. I woke up, ate two or three PopTarts, and hit the streets giving everyone within viewing distance the thrill of their lives. There are nude photos of me from that time somewhere on the Internet, and I don't care if you see them. Oh, yes. I was a beautiful man once.

It's a good thing, too, because gay men don't care for nonbeautiful men. Our world is built brick by brick on appearances. When I came out, I remember being astounded by how specific and precise the nitpicking could get.

"His eyebrows are too bushy."

"He has hairy toes."

The categories of gay men are endless. Bears, Cubs, Chubs, Gym Rats, Otters, Pups, Spunk Monkeys, Twinks, Wolves, Daddies. Everyone reduced to appearance.

I was technically a Twink: college-age, smooth, fit. But was there such a thing as a Black Twink? Maybe I was a Blink. Or a Twack.

In the late 1990s, there was a bar my friends and I frequented early on Friday evenings, before we went out for real. As soon as we hit the door, the hunt for old men began. Men with desperation in their eyes. They sat in a row looking into their drinks, never at one another. They played old music on the jukebox and wore out-of-date clothes. Some were stumbling drunk by 7:00 P.M., and we made sure to note how pathetic that was, because it was the '90s and we were freer than they could have ever hoped to be when they were our age.