Wednesday, May 7, 2008

The Age of Adolescence

Everyone has a category of friends - the ones who say they are waiting for only `Mr Right'!

Their pet gripe is that all guys they meet are just looking for one thing - sex. Over coffee as you throw side glances at the new waiter at Barista, on IM, on a beach as you try to get past the one page that you have been stranded at since the beginning of the trip, Waiting-for-Mr-Right will go on about how single guys, even in their 30s are not interested in commitment. And, they themselves are oh-so-ready to say ``I do''.


Recently read an article in New York Times on gay men in their 20s in the US getting hitched.
What I found really interesting was the theory of why gay men of a particular generation in the west were not willing to settle down in their 20s and living a ``protracted adolescence''. It says, many gay men of the previous generation were doing in their 20s what their straight peers had done in their teens - courtship, one night stands.

``Everywhere I looked, gay men in their 20s — or, if they hadn’t come out until later, their 30s, 40s and 50s — seemed to be eschewing commitment in favor of the excitement promised by unabashedly sexualized urban gay communities. There was a reason, of course, why so many gay men my age and older seemed intent on living a protracted adolescence: We had been cheated of our actual adolescence. While most of our heterosexual peers had experienced, in their teens, socialization around courtship, dating and sexuality, many of us had grown up closeted and fearful, “our most precious and tender feelings rarely validated or reflected back to us by our families and communities,” as Alan Downs, the author of “The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World,” puts it. When we managed to express our sexuality, the experience often came booby-trapped with secrecy, manipulation or debilitating shame.''
The article is a bit longish
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27young-t.html?pagewanted=1

Makes for an argument!