The Indestructible Male Libido

By Paul Festa, Nerve.com. Posted June 3, 2008.

Scolded as a child for picking a flower in the park, I was told that, because of what I had done, the flower would die. I knew it wasn't true though, because my own experience had shown that as long as I held the flower and watched it closely, it wouldn't even wilt.

Warnings about imminent decay have multiplied since that day, particularly with respect to my sex life. I've been told that the peak was twenty, then twenty-six, that thirty was the end, and now that it will come at forty-two, forty-five, perhaps a little later. Today, thirty-eight years from the day I was born, I wish I could say I greeted all those birthdays with the same defiance I displayed correcting the grown-up at the playground. But once I'd had some years to observe the effects of time on sexual viability, I started responding to these warnings with something closer to nervous collapse.

In the last few years, I've noticed a curious phenomenon: the more I've panicked about growing older, the less I've seemed to age. With the exception of a few gray hairs and some slow-healing injuries, I still look and feel, in my early-middle age, as fresh as that daisy the moment before I dropped it to the hot sand under the swing set, and nowhere is this truer than in bed.

The only plausible explanation for this is that I was actually right all those years ago about the daisy. The secret to preserving your youth is the same as the one for preventing the boiling of pots. For the last three decades, I've kept vigil over myself and stand, unscathed, amid a half-exploded minefield of erotic doom. Unlike peers who will lug thirty extra pounds to our twentieth high school reunion this fall, I'm showing up in the sailor suit I wore to the Junior Boat Dance.

Don't roll your eyes -- this is important. "There is such a little time that your youth will last," Lord Henry warned Dorian Gray. "The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we did not dare to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!"

I ran all this past some guys I've had sex with over the years, ranging in age from twenty-four to fifty-five, to see how others are dealing with the accumulation of birthdays.

"There's a train of thought in the gay community that your life ends at a certain age," says Sean, twenty-seven, "but I think that's less and less true in younger generations."

There's something distinctly prelapsarian about Sean, with his light brown curls nearly to his shoulders, his lazy wide smile, and, on either side of his broad nose, just what John Lennon must have envisioned when he sang of Lucy's "kaleidoscope eyes." I ask my old tricks if the interviews can be done in the nude, so Sean is sprawled on a low canvas chair with his fingers threaded behind his head and his cock hanging casually to the left.

Sean's ease with nudity reflects a degree of poise about the body's journey through time that I didn't share at twenty-seven. I like the idea that this difference is generational, that a new crop of post-Will & Grace, post-Brokeback, post-gay gays might have self-esteem strong enough to withstand the age-hatred that so famously crushes straight women and gay men -- that is, anyone at the mercy of male desire.

When it comes to birthdays, gay men actually have it worse than women. Unless you're one of those really advanced gays with kids, you careen toward your erotic expiration date without the consolation -- or at least the distraction -- of breeding. When Virginia Woolf said there was nothing sadder than an old bugger, she wasn't being unsympathetic. Imagine the elderly patriarch, surrounded on his deathbed by generations of his DNA, while down the street his wife's hairdresser keels over on his bar stool, soiling his chaps with his final cosmopolitan.

It helps to be partnered. Thirty-three was an easier birthday than thirty-two for the simple reason that I'd just signed a lease on an apartment with a boyfriend and imagined (as I still do) that he and I would be together until the day we died in a fiery wreck. A study came out a few years ago showing that married people live longer, healthier lives than single people. This is attributable to the amount of time they don't spend contemplating the prospect of one day having to change their own diapers.

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