Here’s to Us!

(my opening gambit to a Facebook group of gay men over 60)
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Since I’m facing my 69th birthday on May 7 it occurred to me it might be nice to clock in with the group while I could still call myself 60-something; sort of one last public gasp from this decade before I trundle on into the next (assuming I do). But reflecting on our ages and the decades we’re conscious of having lived through also makes me curious about what any of the numbers associated with them really mean - and how those meanings change as we get older.
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They don’t mean nothing. Anyone in his 60s born in this country is by definition a baby boomer. And my experience of what this means is that our generation never got the memo that we were supposed to grow up. Think of any of the Micky & Judy movies in the late 30s and early 40s: from high school age on, you dressed up like adults. For the males that meant doublebreasted suits and ties and fedoras. Our generation came of age in the late 60s through early 70s which meant we pretty much received and held onto a view of ourselves as people to whom received categories of style and behavior and allegiances were irrelevant.
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On the whole I count this as a terrific condition of being. I don’t see myself as a product of age as much as influenced by stages of life. Those stages did and do have meaning. They chart our journey from sexual and social selfrealization to finding out what we could do in the world to discovering in what relation to others we felt most comfortable - from solo to coupled, from free-ranging to married with families. Nothing was offlimits - which meant that we arguably had more agency in choosing the contours and substance of our lives than any previous generation had had in recorded history. These conditions are boons to being human.
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I can’t not think as I enter my 70th year that what has most blessed my evolution as a gay male human being is the sheer dumb luck of having been born in 1951 to a middle class American family within hailing distance of New York City - this last fact (for me) as important as any other. New York is as much my savior as the moment of time I’ve been fortunate by chance to inhabit.
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Did this mean there were no ‘bad’ or difficult times? In a way, yes. There certainly were monstrously exacerbating struggles all over my life’s map but what did they or any other ‘better’ or easier experience amount to but life? Life turns out to be an amazing mystical absorbency: it offers an infinity of feeling and engagement and love and terror and confinement and release. Who would want to turn that down? We need dark to know light.
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Our generation as gay men seems to me to have been wonderfully positioned to enjoy the hell out of it and the chance to build a heaven into it. So, raising a glass of whatever you like, and with a nod to Jerry Herman, “here’s to us!”