Dr. Olson,
I don’t have a question, only a comment or two.
I just read “The Curse of an Attraction to Older Gay Men” in Psychology Today regarding age and sexuality. To be completely frank, I was trying to find daddy porn and stumbled across it. The common themes you were talking about in the article felt like you were writing about me.
I’m the younger guy who is attracted only to older men. I’ve been like this my whole life. There’s just something about a man with silver hair and a belly that I find very sexy. I despise society calling older gay men “sugar daddies” when they like young guys. It’s the worst! It makes me look like a gold digger, and I am not.
I love pleasing an older guy sexually and emotionally. I feel more comfortable being intimate with older men than I do with anyone else.
I grew up in Indiana in an ultraconservative family. I played football and did anything I could to fit in. I never felt like I’d be accepted until I went to rehab. I got partially honest but never revealed my attraction to older men, only that I was gay.
I’ve had a few relationships with older gentlemen, but the looming shame is still there. Your article hit a chord and gave me the hope I was looking for.
My biggest fear with my attraction to older men is that most do not want kids, and I do.
You are the best thing I could’ve stumbled on at this time in my life. Your article put into words what I could not. Maybe my family will get something out of it.
I can’t wait to read Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight.
Kidney Bean
Dear Kidney Bean,
I’m pleased that my article in Psychology Today gave you some insight. You are not alone. That essay has been accessed nearly two hundred thousand times.
My husband and I have been together for thirty-four years, and I am fifteen years older. We almost never think about our age difference. I often write we have a chronological age, a physical age, a psychological age, and a sexual age, which are not consistent even within the same individual. Many younger men who like older men are more comfortable in groups of older men. They think more like the older men, and they often have a sexual age that is more mature, such as they like slow, intimate sex instead of a slam-bam chase to orgasm.
I have a good friend who met his husband when he was very young. They are now fifty-nine and ninety. (I’d be curious if any research on the relationship of the hormone oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone,” in these relationships has been done.)
These relationships are often quite stable. Sometimes the younger partners tend to be nurturing individuals. Often, they face criticism from within the LGBTQ+ community, as if their relationships were based on some motives other than love, usually money, even though younger partners are often more self-sufficient than the older ones.
Many older men who like younger men previously have been in heterosexual marriages and have children, sometimes grandchildren. My husband does not have children of his own but has become a bonus dad and grandpa to my children and grandchildren.
In my first book, Finally Out, I wrote about “men with rounded corners” because often the younger person—who may be quite physically fit—is attracted to a man who has a bit of a belly and looks like a grandpa.
You’re in a minority within a minority, but so many more people are like you than you probably realize.
And those of us who are fat, old men are happy to know you’re out there.
Loren Olson
Photo by J. Bilhan, used with permission