'Gerontophilia,' Controversial Bce LaBce Film, Explor Intergeneratnal Gay Love | HuffPost Voic

Contents:

• 'GERONTOPHILIA,' CONTROVERSIAL BCE LABCE FILM, EXPLOR INTERGENERATNAL GAY LOVE
• AGEG PREDATORS AND ASEXUAL OLD QUEENS: CHALLENGG STEREOTYP OF CROSS-GENERATNAL GAY RELATNSHIPS BEGNERS AND GERONTOPHILIA

'GERONTOPHILIA,' CONTROVERSIAL BCE LABCE FILM, EXPLOR INTERGENERATNAL GAY LOVE

I am lookg for advice to whether this is gog to be seen as a bad thg if I do have a relatnship, I know 's generally out of the norm, so people are gog to stantly notice (unual - not ual), I basilly fd people attractive as long as they don't have so much wrkl, the age 60 is ually great bee I fd that once I slept wh this guy that was 82 or somethg and found that was not for me, felt awfully weird also, he took me to a gay bar, was embarrassg as hell. However, gerontophilia would take this phenomenon one step further, leadg young people to feel attracted to the elrly, both heterosexual and homosexual general, two typ of gerontofilia are distguished: "alphamegamy", or attractn to extremely old men; and "matronolagnia", or romantic - sexual tert elrly women. Gerontophilia is an adventure unrstandg the "difference" of gayns as not different at all, jt (Pier-Gabriel Lajoie), a sg young Canadian wh a talent for pencil sketchg, pursu his tert elrly men by workg at Coup Cor, an old age hospal.

This chapter will discs how both the stereotyp n be seen to hold siari wh the prejudic surroundg ageg femy and will then analyse two ntemporary film texts—Begners and Gerontophilia—which have tried to challenge the trop and revise the accepted narrative of the olr gay man who is sperately lonely and pable of matag a Ever Happened to Baby Jane and Her Gay Cod Pianist? Footnote 6 Ined, his landmark study of how the olr gay man was discursively nstcted, Raymond Berger summarised this monplace assumptn of how the ageg gay man was thought to live:The olr homosexual…is alienated om iends and fay alike, and he liv alone, not by choice but by necsy.

AGEG PREDATORS AND ASEXUAL OLD QUEENS: CHALLENGG STEREOTYP OF CROSS-GENERATNAL GAY RELATNSHIPS BEGNERS AND GERONTOPHILIA

Footnote 8 Although the films are more nuanced than earlier reprentatns (I have praised Love and Death on Long Island’s subtle crique of herage nventns (Richardson 2019) and Michael Williams offers a stirrg fence of Gods and Monsters this llectn), the films do ntue the tradn of reprentg ageg homosexualy as an existence of lonels and sexual tratn which the olr gay man preys upon younger send siary media disurs between ageg women and gay men is that both are subject to the tyranny of The Bety Myth.

Footnote 9 Although is te that heterosexual men are now experiencg greater prsur to nform to hegemonic standards of mascule bety, Footnote 10 is still predomantly straight women and gay men who are required to objectify their bodi, ternalisg the gaze which regiments and mands standards of physil excellence. A cursory glance at gay popular culture (magaz, onle social works, bars and clubs) will reveal an unashamed celebratn of youthful bety which parallels, if not even mirrors, the adoratn of girlish femy wh heterosexual society and so olr gay men may well fd themselv exclud om youth oriented gay culture. When the body ag, and is unable to nform to the requise standards of gym-toned bety, Footnote 13 then the olr gay man n experience rejectn and alienatn om gay are several theori as to why the youthful, f body is so revered wh hegemonic gay culture.

Baby Jane and her effemate pianist (played by Victor Buono—an actor whose homosexualy was an open-secret 1950s Hollywood) are the most famo example but more recent partnerships, referencg this motif, have clud Bobbi Adler (Debbie Reynolds) and her pianist Will & Grace and Vlet (Franc la Tour) paired wh the old ‘queens’ the Brish s Vic. Arguably, one of the most famo media reprentatns of this type was the late, great Quent Crisp: the self-intified ‘last stately homo of Bra’ and also a wrer, rantr, ocsnal actor and more often someone who was merely famo for beg famo.

Most importantly, Crisp was one of the first publicly intified homosexuals (he predated the popularizatn of the label gay) and this rpect Crisp helped to dify the inography of (ageg) homosexualy the mds of much of the heteronormative majory.

Peter Tatchell, for example, labelled Crisp as ‘self-hatg’ and ‘homophobic’Footnote 19—given that Crisp, throughout his reer, had monstrated ltle support for the ia of equal of the ma problems that gay activism had wh Crisp, pecially om the 1970s onwards, was the way Crisp argued for an sentialised view of homosexualy as effemacy. Footnote 20 Given that a key agenda 1970s gay liberatn polics was the -sissifitn of homosexualy, which gay men appropriated the signifiers of heterosexual masculy, Footnote 21 Crisp’s intifitn of homosexualy wh the matrix of genr transivy was problematic for many gay activists of the time. Most importantly, Crisp’s view that homosexualy uld never atta any erotic or sexual unn, so that ‘the homosexual world is a world of spsters’, Footnote 23 furthered the belief that gay men evably beme embtered and lonely, old ‘queens’.

It is fair to speculate that, until relatively recently, the only publicly regnisable reprentatn of the olr gay man was Quent Crisp and so even his name is now ed as a shorthand to note a type of effemate, ageg gay two ntemporary films discsed this chapter are attemptg to negotiate the legacy of the two domant trop: the predatory olr gay man and the sexualised, spster-like Crispan ‘queen’. This visual trip-wire is tend to make the spectators qutn why they, like Oliver, would assume that the olr gay man would be drsed lavenr-purple and therefore reflect on the legacy of the Crispan mol that had enshred this inography cultural perceptn. While Andy forc many kiss on Hal, there is a shot of Oliver lookg rather upset that Andy has disturbed the time he was havg wh his father but aware that he is unable to say anythg bee of the received narrative of fai barrg gay lovers om hospals.