May 21, 2004  |  By: KATHI WOLFE  | COMMENTS     

ONE NIGHT EIGHT years ago, Tim Bergling, a journalist and television producer in Washington, D.C., was in the America Online “m4m” chat room. He says he was just shooting the breeze, not looking for an online hookup.

But when Bergling told a young, good-looking gay guy that he was 36, the man instantly ended their chat, “Too old. Bye,” he said.

That was Bergling’s first encounter with ageism among gay men. It was like someone pointing out your first gray hair, he says. This “rude awakening” stuck in his mind as he wrote magazine articles on topics ranging from gay youths to retirement. Deciding to explore aging issues more in depth, Bergling wrote “Reeling in the Years: Gay Men’s Perspectives on Age and Ageism,” which Haworth Press published earlier this year.

“Apparently this young fellow wasn’t remotely interested in where I lived, what I did for a living … if I did drugs … beat up my boyfriend when I was pissed off … Just ‘How old?’ as if my age defined me in toto,” Bergling says.

This experience, in 1996 on AOL, wasn’t unique, say Bergling and other experts on aging.

To learn about gay male attitudes toward aging, Bergling surveyed about 2,000 gay men and another 250 (more in depth) online. The respondents’ ages ranged from the teens to the 80s. Bergling learned from the surveys that ageism cuts across the spectrum of generations.

MANY YOUNG GAY men don’t like being around older gay men, he says. They think older men, those identified as at least 40, either have nothing to say or just want sex.

“Older guys? Forget it,” Jamey, a 24-year-old movie store manager in Detroit, told Bergling. “I get bored out of my skull if one of them walks up to me and tries to start a conversation, even if he isn’t hitting on me, which he probably is.”

This generational disdain is often mutual, Bergling says. Many older gay men who responded to his surveys said that they had little use for young gay guys.

“All those younger guys … think older guys like me just want to get them all into bed,” Rick, a 45-year-old software consultant in Mansfield, Ohio, told Bergling online. “Please! What an utter waste of time would that be? They could never keep up, and good lord, what the hell would we even talk about?”

The dictionary, Bergling says, defines ageism as “discrimination based on age, especially prejudice against the elderly.” Our culture as a whole, regardless of sexual orientation, remains youth-oriented, he says. This is even more evident among gay men, Bergling says.

“Youth and beauty is the coin of the realm in the gay [male] community,” he says. To be sure, not every gay male subscribes to this aesthetic and there are young gay guys who are comfortable around older gay men, Bergling says.

But, nationally, “the young, beautiful jock with the slim waist and the hairless chest” is the “single largest gay aesthetic,” he says.

But gay men shouldn’t beat themselves up over this, says Raymond M. Berger, author of “Gay and Gray,” a groundbreaking work on gay men and aging first published in 1982.

“The preference for youth is particularly strong in Western culture, with its particular emphasis on achievement, and its promise of the future, rather than reminiscence and resting on one’s laurels,” he said in an e-mail message. Who can deny that young people are physically beautiful, he asks.

Yet, Berger cautions against failing to “look beyond the outer shell.” An octogenarian friend of his served as a volunteer for an elderly nursing home resident.

“When my friend entered the room, the resident exclaimed in surprise, ‘Oh, you are so old!’ My friend replied, ‘I may be old on the outside, but on the inside I am the same person I was when I was 20 years old.’ This is the way many of us feel when we get older,” Berger says.

MICHAEL SHERNOFF, A psycho-therapist in New York, said one reason why there are so many myths about aging — older people aren’t sexy; people over 40 don’t have relationships; elders don’t enjoy life — is the lack of “homosocial” contact between older and younger gay men.

“Gay men who are comfortably entering middle age, [we] move on with our lives,” says Shernoff, who teaches at the Columbia University School of Social Work. “We’re not doing the same thing as we did during our 30s and 40s — like dancing at gay bars and clubs — as much as we ...