For a little while it sort of drove me nuts that a lot of men in my group--most of them are fifty and up, with a few in their forties--assumed that I was under thirty. So they would say things like, "You wouldn't remember this, but..." and "As you get into middle age, you'll find..." A lot of them assumed that I was still in school...you get the picture.
It was weird because I'm not very old in gay life, at least in terms of real experience, and in my head I've always been stuck in adolescence, and now I'm going through a real adolescence (of sorts). So I felt...chronologically challenged, but not in the way that most people mean when they jokingly say that. I'm still struggling with this. I can speak my age out loud, and I know I have the life experience that goes with that age, but I also want to disavow much of that experience and start over...and in a way, I am starting over, yet I'm middle-aged. I like being seen as younger than I am, but I resent it when people think I lack life experience...what a mess.
