This is 40

I turn 40 soon. It's an age that I can easily recall my parents being; in fact, my mother would have been not much older than 40 around the time her father died, which I remember all too well, as I was 11 or 12. It felt like she was about the right sort of age to have a parent die. My parents, then, felt like fully settled figures, with a car, reliable jobs, a mortgage, three kids - these markers of grown-upness and stability that I have barely begun to match. I only found out what a clutch pedal is two months ago. My parents' friends were the same age as them, or older, and they smoked, and didn't interact with children much, except in a fairly distanced way; these friends also had mortgages and cars etc etc. There was something unplayful about many of these people - who were usually fun and intelligent and witty in their adult way - that marked them out as being, by this stage of their life, fully formed. Of course, I know that part of this is my childlike projection onto them - that some of these people in their 40s were, necessarily, shot through with misgivings and regrets and uncertainties; but what they gave off, at least so it seems to me, was an air of assurance. 

I know I don't do that - I couldn't possibly, as I try to live honestly, and I consider that I am still learning, still in the business of becoming. I'm fairly sure that my doubts and frailties are there for all to witness; I hope that my curiosity and eagerness are still alive, too, and that they can be seen as well. I'm open with my children about the ways in which I get things wrong - they know (how could they not?) that their dumbfuck dad doesn't know everything, and that I'm merely an adult trying his best, rather than a great settled figure who has arrived at a juncture in life where he is done like a well-cooked steak. I suspect this is a fairly youthful quality - plus, you know, I like to have fun, and I try to be someone who is fun to be around. For these reasons, and for the fact that - to myself - I still feel uncannily like I am a young fellow just starting out in life, I am having a hard time reconciling myself to the whole 'forty in ten days' time' thing. 

I've always looked younger than my age: it used to be that I looked younger than it by eons, but that gulf has been narrowing bit by bit, and I suspect that by now I appear, ooh, 37 and a half. At any rate, from the moment that everybody else my age began to grow and I stayed at the same height, with the same girlish voice - throughout my infancy and into my teens - I retained something childlike. I could pass for a 6-year-old at 10, and for a 10-year-old at 15; at 17, by which time I was about a year and a bit into my puberty, I probably looked about 14. I was ID'd at shops into my thirties - thirty-three being the heartbreaking age when all checks finally stopped. A couple of years ago I was at the self-check-outs buying wine, and a cashier at the tills about four or five metres away called over to me to show some ID, so I went over to tell her that I had none on me, and when I got to within about one metre of her she dismissed me with a hand-wave, saying, "Oh no, you're alright." I will track her down one day and my vengeance will be unparalleled. 

I'm a dinky sort of chap: slim, jumpy. That greater fullness of face and bearing that descends on many men in their late 20s or early 30s - your Leonardo Di Caprios, your Chandler-from-Friendses - never really set in with me. On top of this I have (I think) a strange habit of deferring to others, or perhaps of positioning myself as the novice in a group, somehow. Almost all of my friends are younger than me - not always by much, but some by as many as 15 years; I suppose I must seek out youth in some ways. I would hope that I'm not too tragically holding on to some vanishing Peter-Pan-ish "how do you do fellow kids" quality, but it's probably the case that I have some growing up to do. 

As I've neared this milestone - which my shrink has gently reminded me is an arbitrary one - I have become familiar with, and frustrated by, all the ways in which our culture prizes youth above all. My own attachment to my youth, my clinging on to it, is a part of this desperate world that showers attention and value on... on what? On freshness? What is it? My most recent bugbear is the inane chorus, to be found everywhere online, that it's important to have a skincare routine. Of course there are few things in the world, when you think about it for a fraction of a nanosecond, that could be less important than having a skincare routine - but it's the sort of thing that hangs about in the ether if it isn't beaten down, and eventually infects your mind. Suddenly you catch yourself noticing your skin, your crow's feet; fuck I look old, you think to yourself. When I think about it reasonably, I know that the laughter lines around my eyes, full creases when I smile, are beautiful, because I have laughed a lot in my life, and cried a fair bit too. If I look tired it's because I was scrubbing the milky puke of a child I love off a duvet at three in the morning not all that long ago, and I haven't got the hours back in lieu. And yet I can't tune out that refrain entirely, that chorus of youth-fetish; for one thing, to look too far in the other direction is to stare my death in the face, which I am loath to do. Then I would have to ask myself what I have done, what I have contributed to the world, and battle with my thin reply.  

I'm a gay man, and for a single gay man 40 is the point of no return, the absolute Logan's Run of ages. I joke to friends that I'm turning "gay-40, or 65 in straight years." I've retorted to my therapist that in this respect 40 is not arbitrary at all: it marks the factual cut-off point for so many people on online dating or hook-up sites. A minimum age of 22 and a maximum age of 40 would be, if anything, an exceedingly generous bracket for an eligible gay man about town to have. But everybody has their limits and for many people that is 40. No wonder so many men on the apps are exactly 39 years old. You should see them! Hordes, legions, a veritable swarm of 39-year-old men called Gavin who all look 47. Watch them take a bad selfie for their profile! Marvel as they stand by their car! Ah, here is Richard (39) who is a senior partner somewhere, eating at a restaurant. Here is Gregory (39), who just wants somebody to settle down with, walking his dalmatian. Here is Anton, nice-looking guy, seems about 51, likes to travel and learn new languages - and why shouldn't he at his age, which is 39. 

Gay male culture prizes youth inordinately, particularly online. The demise of gay bars in London has been a tragedy, as it has sent gay men online to pick one another up, and online we are competition rather than community. People there say things that you could not imagine uttering to a person's face. Aging is different IRL and on what Woody Allen's characters call "the computer." In the same way I can see that I am disliked by certain people online who (I would hope) might like me if we ever met, I know I am also considered older online than I would be if seen in person. The way the web presents an ersatz version of you can feel alarming, and it can spill into our perceptions of time. The web is a nightmare for time, as anybody who has looked at Twitter for what felt like ten seconds at 6pm and looked up to find that it's night-time two days later, University Challenge is midway through, and you've somehow missed six meals, will attest. Almost every day it feels like I see young, beautiful, talented people online fretting because they haven't achieved as much as they wanted, or as people they consider their peers, and who are bricking it because they are turning 26 - TWENTY-SIX! - tomorrow. The online world presents a false image of ourselves - not least because, since the advent of the internet, the centre of the world has got considerably younger. In our world it's not at all unusual to become famous at 15, or uncommon to earn a sizeable 'following' at the age of 19: this must have a domino effect on people's vision of themselves, and it must make youth seem all the more enviable. In my day (please insert your own Yorkshire accent here) there were one or two famous people under the age of 20, a lot more celebrities in their mid-20s, and everybody else from Martin Amis to Boutros Boutros-Ghali was a crusty old bastard.  How old is Sally Rooney? Don't tell me. 

The development of my sexuality is indissociable from the online world: I was late to come out, having wrestled privately with my sexuality for many years and endured a fair bit of misery because of it. Being online helped me come out because I was relieved of the need to make a big announcement to dozens of people - it simply became incredibly obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain. And when I was still closeted, and then still uncomfortable with my sexuality as a routinely self-hating gay, in my mid to late twenties, the web provided porn and helped me get laid. For which we are grateful. Amen. No-strings hook-ups felt hot, and there was no need for me to be a part of a community I couldn't get a foothold in on my own, so the idea was appealing, and effective. In time, being online also politicised my sexuality, connected me more to my community, and helped me become a healthier queer. 

The same thing is true of my work: I would have no sort of career if it weren't for the opportunities opened up by writing online, blogging, tweeting, which helped me publicise my work and meet people in the film world. I cannot divorce my current work from the web. The fact that these core aspects of my life are so firmly tied into the online world is a mixed blessing when it comes to growing older though, for the reasons detailed above, whereby time is of a different order there. As a freelancer and a single man, I sometimes - absurdly, I know this is an absurdity - have the feeling that I am competing for opportunities with people decades younger than me. I repeat: this is possibly not the case; it simply feels very powerfully like it, at times. This is extraordinarily disconcerting when it occurs as I need to earn money; I don't want to be sexually lonely. The web sets us against one another and reduces us to figures, even as it helps provide. 

For the boyish man, I don't think there are many ways to age that aren't viewed with a faint distate by civilisation. At least I'm gay, I reflect: a boyish older straight man is even less acceptable to polite society. The main option for the boyish gay man, though - for the sad figure that is the aging twink - seems to be to develop an arched eyebrow and adventure further and further into feyness, becoming eventually a kind of Kenneth Williams-y sort of figure; the type to whom people will remark, in later years, after they have issued a barbed comment, "Ooh, get her." I'm relatively happy with that being my destiny, but what I need to know is if those sorts of fellow can still catch some D. 

What I am afraid of is the feeling of being eccentric, in the sense of being on the periphery of things; this happens to many older people, but principally women I think. I have seen them, these women, in their fifties, start a sentence and then tail off, pretending to busy themselves with something, perhaps helping somebody at the table to more rice, because someone else started talking three seconds after them, and the attention of the group was diverted away from them. I don't think that more masculine men experience this; the patriarch continues to assert himself throughout life, and society listens. He also stands to lose far less of the sexual cachet he has built up, because he perceives himself as the agent rather than the object. For him, I suspect, aging is a different feeling, and less tied in to fears of becoming invisible. 

Covid has had a strange way, from the start, of revealing to people what was already there - like, say, structural racism, or our horrific environmental politics, or the evil of the Tory party. What it showed me, this year, is that I don't want to be on the sidelines; I hunger to be a part of something, to be seen and touched, to be in the swarm. I need the real world to come back, and feel swept along in it, like Giuseppe Ungaretti when he swims in a river and feels cleansed and connected to the universe - and when that world returns to me I will be on the brink of 41, and still young, and so old, and ready to go out and dance.