Colton Ford appeared briefly in "Another Gay Movie". He was, in a former life, a gay porn star and is 47 years old. The fact that he is still able to promote himself using his physique is a rarity in our youth obsessed culture.
I don't buy or watch any porn. Frankly, I can neither afford it nor want it. Most of the guys I see on blogs are under 25 and, truthfully, I can't identify with them as sex partners. They are out of my league physically and I am, no doubt, out of their league in wisdom and experience. That doesn't mean I don't like to look at their beauty. I think it is fairly obvious from my posts that I love beautiful men of any age and what I experience online is that stripped, lean, and fit beautiful men over 40 are rare.
That is why so much of the male pin-ups I present on Mythulinity are under 25. For the most part, young gay men have blogs and they devote them to their pretty peers. The sources for finely put together young men are legion. Where are the few good sources for men of age and character?
I am not a big bear lover. I've seen some hot muscle bears, but big belly's and large asses just don't make me aroused on any level. I am thankful that more normal men have a chance to find happiness and sexual fulfillment now. That certainly wasn't the case before HIV/AIDS showed up.
I remember refusing to go to a club in LA because they did a variation of the Studio 54 thing and I never dealt well with rejection. The club's doorman would literally measure you to see if you "measured up" to their standards. Hot and your in, not--go home!! The very idea of standing in line to face rejection was to much for me to deal with. It brought up every personal ad I ever read that would accept only responses from height-weight proportionate men. Whenever I carried a bit too much weight I was as self-conscious as someone with leprosy. I remember one fellow actually approaching me in a club and saying, "You know you'd be really hot if you took off a little weight." I could think of a thousand comebacks for that now. Like, "You know you'd be really hot if you had the sensitivity never to say anything like that, asshole." At the time I was just stunned and hurt.
Nowadays, If I were young, I might be getting more action, but despite the weight issue I had then, I got plenty enough to positively consider myself a "whore". Being a whore before 1981or so was an envious position (no pun intended). A sort of Gay Purple Badge of Courage in the Bedroom Wars. I slept with a lot of guys, but I was always seriously looking for a partner not a casual sextravaganza or a one night stand.
I believe the reason I came out of the 80's without contracting a deadly disease is because I was afraid of rejection in the bathhouse scene and never frequented backrooms or parks and alleyways. I always went home or to a hotel room with the guys who I met. There was always a bed underneath us unless we were in a shower, bathtub, or pool. Casual glory hole and "tearoom" action was too much for my vanilla sensibilities. I was fairly conservative for a young gay man. A romantic, not a hedonist.
Me in 1977, age 25.
Me in 1977, age 25.
Many of the attractive men I knew from the gym and my WeHo haunts didn't make it to 1990. I am not lying when I say I was handsome when I was younger, but it was news to me. I look back at pictures of myself and wonder why I had such deep- seated lack of self-worth. There was little basis for it in my physical appearance. I just never saw myself as someone in good enough condition to grace the pages of a magazine like Blue Boy let alone become a fashion model. (Regrets I've had a few . . . right, a few too goddamned many!)
The reasons why I am relating this are because it is very interesting to find someone like Colton Ford on the net. Not only is he unusually hot, but he is unusually mature. Most of what I am finding is . . . boys. They look and act and talk like boys because they are so darn young. They may qualify by chronological age as men, but in my book, they still aren't there. The bodies are spectacular, but the formed person inside them is still more of a child than a man. I know that lots of my peers (hovering around 60) find that super hot and attractive, but I think a lot of the youth lust is based on self-loathing, a failure to appreciate getting to a mature age in the age of terminal diseases, and the fact that what is visibly presented by the media as desirable commodities are youngsters. Not under age, but still not real men.
Yep, I admire ripped muscular physiques the way I admire centaurs because the physicality is beyond my reality. It is something I have long desired but never achieved. It is how, probably very mistakenly or perversely, I measure a man and not unlike the shallow standards that were used decades ago by some stylish clubs in America and Europe. You can never live up to standards that are set impossibly high. Even the ones who seem able to can't in the long run.
Most gay men are not super beauties, muscle bunnies, or pretty boys and where does that leave them in the search for love, acceptance, appreciation, approval, and admiration (The 4 Essential 'A's of Life) in a society that is so warped and wrapped up in fantasy figures posing as "real" men? We have role models who are flawed in very human ways. (Geez, Tiger Woods is an embarrassing disappointment and a reckoning for how we are foolish to hold up as heroes sports icons who are fabulously successful in part of their lives and horribly flawed in others.) Perfection is an illusion no matter how the media digitally enhances it. Glamour cripples. Where do gay men learn to value themselves more than popular concepts of what is cool or worthwhile?
Granted, Colton Ford, is not your average gay man. He is in great physical condition and he is handsome. But at least he isn't the average gay pretty boy either. And for me that is something like a breath of fresh air.
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