The economy is fisting everyone to its bicep, from blue and white collar workers to our artsy fartsy gay underclass and pink-collared moguls.
But don’t think the Great Recession has become America’s social equalizer. The furor over bailed out insurer AIG handing out executive bonuses with taxpayer money spotlights a nation on the brink of an all out class war, or — looking at the inflating cottage industry of financially lopsided dating services — opportunistic class love. ABC News’ Diane Sawyer covered the “growing sugar daddy phenomenon†a few weeks ago, pooh-poohing the concept as high-class prostitution and a gateway to infidelity, but the drab assessment ignored the arrangement’s history, its roots in love-twisted financial instruments like dowries and brideprices, entrenched for thousands of years. It also overlooked the ubiquity of age disparity in pre-industrial days (Pocahontas, by modern Disney standards, was a sugar baby).
I realized the economic pressure to be a sugar baby when I graduated four months ago with a B.A. in creative writing. I watched as my straight friends struggled to find work with their engineering and business degrees. None of them could land jobs, so I knew things were worse for me. I could have gone into newspapers and print media, where my experience lay, but print is dying. With any other field, who the fuck was going to hire a creative writing major from Texas Tech University? I was even getting rejected from basic secretary jobs. So I did what any self-respecting gay guy with no future would do: I went on the internets to find me a rich man.
Through a website I’d rather not advertise, I befriended a lonely 54-year-old sugar daddy who lived in the hills of Los Angeles. After just a week of chatting and surprisingly comfortable phone conversations, I found myself speeding west from Lubbock, Texas through the New Mexico desert in my shitty car on Route 66 (actually, I-40 to be less romantic).
I’m a pessimist and a panicky person. I leapt into this because I had penned editorials on how fucked the economy is: AIG, Bear Sterns, Lehman, Washington Mutual, and coming up next — my overdue rent and lack of paycheck. So yeah, I had found my bailout on some daddy website. Did I feel selfish? Yeah, but I needed to see it out. Maybe it wouldn’t be selfish if we both liked each other. He had offered to fly me, but I didn’t want to feel obligated to him, and I wanted my car there in case I had to bolt. As I entered Arizona at sunset, iPod dying, staring at the vast black silhouette of desert ahead, I thought to myself, what the fuck am I doing?
It’s okay, I thought, just jitters. I’m sure many medieval brides felt the same way going to meet husbands and dukes and estate holders they had never met either. The sugar daddy was seeking a permanent lifelong companion and had grown attached to me through our conversations, or at least the idea of me. And likewise, I had grown attached to the idea of him. I shun Freudian analysis of gay guys, it’s never consistently apt. It’s too monochrome for the rainbow of men with fulfilled familial relationships, but there is still a weird stratum to the term “sugar daddy.†I hate sugar and my father, yet here I was, speeding for both.
In the middle of a snowy Mojave desert, I thought, meaningful dating doesn’t come easy to us isolated gay guys in small West Texas towns or “small West†anywhere. Just about the only guys I had been with were straight (“straightâ€) or really Christian. Observing people shocked and saddened by the Ted Haggard scandal left me in a state of, “Wow, you’re surprised?†Welcome to rural Christiantopia.
Repression is a kink here that young isolated gay guys seek out like they would seek out “cut or uncut?†And there are enough young Haggards to serve it. It’s almost in the eyes, that pained trapped thousand-yard stare. I’ve seen it while getting fucked. I’ve seen it at the mall when jocks with their girlfriends give me sidelong glances at the Gap. But they’re unstable, and ultimately roads to despair, patterns of post-coital rejection and eventual loneliness. And I was hoping desperately that Interstate 40 was a different road.
Of course, rural repression is just one spoke in the constellation of sexuality, one totally exclusive from the sugar daddy phenomenon. When I finally made it to LA (having overnighted in a Motel 6 in the hellhole of Needles, California) I pulled up to the big Spanish house on a hill and walked up the steep driveway. There, sitting calmly, was a black Mercedes with a handicap license place. I had a Lucille Bluth “this does not bode well†moment. I like older men, but when I say older I always meant late 20s. Now was the time to test the ageism I had always criticized in my peers.
I knocked on the door and Fidel Castro in a turtleneck opened it. This wasn’t a surprise. We had exchanged pictures. I sat in Fidel’s vast living room with a bay window overlooking the Los Angeles basin and had awkward small talk, but he made me laugh and we got along — even if he did look like a graying Cuban dictator. He took me to a great Mexican restaurant on historic Olvera Street where we talked for two hours about writing, politics, the economy, gay history, culture, even porn (he’s a judge for GayVN, so I probably shouldn’t give out too many details about him, but I wish I had the chance to rant to him about how they nominated 19 guys for best actor.)
After dinner, he showed me some touristy sights around town, Rodeo Drive, West Hollywood, Griffith Observatory (“oh, it’s that Charlie’s Angels scene where Demi Moore kicked ass!â€), the Chinese Theatre, and of course the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We explored our generational gap pointing out stars of celebrities the other hadn’t heard of or cared for. I got giddy about Johnny Depp. He blew his load over Gloria Swanson.
Then came bedtime. We sat in his king-sized bed together, watching 20/20 on a giant flat-screen, me on my laptop, him reading a book. At that point, I thought, oh my God I’m old too. I could do this. This is comfortable. He is nice. I am happy.
But I didn’t like him. At least not in the way he wanted to be liked, further cemented when the second night, after another great day of sight-seeing and fulfilling banter, he put his hands on me and I slinked away, whispering sorry through the sheets. This would be an exchange. I would be using him. I realized I’m too independent for that and he’s too cool of a person to be fucked over and used by some gold-digging twink. I slept on his chest and he seemed content with this, but the eventual rejecting was odd and painful, especially for someone like me who has had his fair share of rejection. I drove a thousand miles to tell a lonely older man seeking lifelong companionship, “Sorry. I can’t give you what you want.â€
On day three of my LA adventure, I packed up my things, but before I left I asked if I could use his computer to check my email. The most cliché of possibilities happened: I accidentally logged into his account. Inside, I found e-mails from young guys, 18 to 22, just like me, all from rural places far and wide: Bismarck, North Dakota; Eau Claire, Wisconsin; Shelbyville, Tennessee — places not unlike Lubbock. All of them had desperate pleading tones that amounted to a chorus of “Get me out of here. Save me from my life.†The saddest plainsong I’ve heard, the plainsong of trapped gay boys in “small West†nowhere, tired of fucking Ted Haggard and being poor. I saw my e-mail wedged in there, the simple self-effacing pitch of “I would like to travel the world with you.â€
Maybe my sugar daddy wouldn’t be lonely after all. He had other prospects. But I doubted any of those other guys would like Fidel Castro as the “lifelong companion†he was seeking. They’ll like his money, they’ll like his house, they might even like the sex, but they won’t like him, especially not for the rest of his life. And I’m not going to sit here and ageistly call him a creep for having a harem of boys waiting in line either (he could have easily rejected me after a while), I just found the whole situation depressing and moribund by that point and I wanted to get away from it. Who knows, maybe he just wanted sex, maybe he wouldn’t have minded being used and I’m too naïve, too idealistic, and too green for this shit.
The drive back to Lubbock was even longer, but I had time to realize that the sugar daddy, for straight and gay alike, is about total escape. The desperation surrounding the sugar daddy is magnified for gay men. The older face generational exclusion and isolation (he told me he felt like an unwanted, invisible zombie in LA clubs) and the younger are prone to being trapped. The availability of each type in resonance with the worst economy since The Great Depression is fueling the myriad of “twinks seeking silver daddies†services. If both can get what they want, fine, I’m happy for you, but I can’t live in that fantasy arrangement. I don’t just need love, I need reality. I need to suffer to grow up, and for three days in LA, I did.
Opening illustration, Daddy Boy, by Steve Trask. ©2009
© 2009, Rob Wolfsham. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com
I hate to be cynical Rob, but most sugar daddies just want sexual fulfillment. And actually a lot of young guys are very attracted to older men and don’t mind providing just sex, making it a mutually beneficial “arrangement.” Regardless, this was a surprisingly insightful and melancholy story. Your idealism, especially at your age, is refreshing and inspiring. You sound all wrong for that kind of “arrangement” but you realized that. Thanks for sharing this. And hang in there with the job stuff. Newspapers aren’t exactly dying. They’re evolving, and once they have their footing, the jobs will come.
I live in a relatively straight section of Manhattan. I see that “trapped thousand yard stare” often. Sometimes the guy is with his wife and kids. Sometimes he’s a young man out with his pals, joining in the pussy chase out of peer pressure.
Years ago, when the restrooms of the NYC subway system were an archipelago of surreptitious male sex, he would show up there briefly on the way to or from work.
How he manages in today’s world, I have no idea. Sad.
People may offer you up plenty of well-intentioned aphorisms about staying positive and hoping for the future, kiddo, but I can tell you those are some hollow hopes indeed. I graduated years back, and the kids who got out four years earlier than me were still pounding the pavement. I’ve been trying in vain to get into the exact same line of work.
This collapse has been building for at least a decade and the economy hasn’t been able to accommodate a skilled work force for at least seven years now. The backlog of “discouraged workers” (you’ll know the exact second where you become one) and quarter life crises sufferers is too vast to even estimate. People are being pushed right off the ladder as the previous generation works its way back down. The American Dream is just that for those of us in the Doom Generation.
When I was nineteen and studying German at the University of Missouri I had a come-on from my art history professor (talking about clichés !) but was too naive or scared to react more appropriately than by saying: “Come by for drinks? Oh thanks but I’m not thirsty right now”. What course had life might have taken if I’d gone over for a glass of good French wine, checking out his collection of medieval paintings and doing heaven knows what else? With other words, just go fot it! You never know when or where happiness might strike!
Where do I begin? I’m 34 years old, having been with a 65 year old man. Is he my sugar daddy? Don’t know. Yes, I did meet him on a website. yes, i do have a thing for older men. I have dated guys around my age, but I’ve learned that I am attracted (or not) to a man’s PERSONALITY more than the fact of his age. He is interesting, brilliant, creative, resourceful, industrious, clever, and on and on and the nicest person anyone will ever meet. His wealth is merely a CONSEQUENCE of these factors that make him attractive. If I wasn’t attracted to him – strip away all the exterior, temporary things around and about him – I would have left 4 years ago. However, like Barbara Streisand has sung, “Life is a ball of butter, and I’m still here!
Its not really a relationship in the sense of love. Seems more like a casual business relationship, nothing really seemed to be for love. If there is nothing to over come nothing will bring them together and they will only be as emotional close as the day they met.
“The most cliché of possibilities happened: I accidentally logged into his account.”
How is that even possible? Just admit you were snooping.
Wow what a piece “Sunset Boulevard” meets “Bus Stop” you have a great future as a writer for television…
Nice piece. Suggestion for combatting slow-start-to-life/out-of-meaningful-work blues: Get student loans and go to graduate school (M.F.A., law, teaching, whatever). This buys you more time during which you’ll feel productive, hopeful, stave off discouragement, and it’ll make you more marketable in just a couple years. It’s a way to justify not really doing anything, but look totally respectable in the meantime.
@Anonymous: He had his gmail account info saved! Total accident when I loaded the page, I swear! But yes, I did choose to snoop from that point forward. Can’t blame a boy for being curious in that situation.
@Sheri: I’ve considered going into an MFA program, only if I can get the full ride/stipend.
@Tony: I was hoping to hear this input, to at least show that there can be something real in a situation a lot of people pre-judge. I hope I didn’t come across as doing that.
“He had his gmail account info saved! Total accident when I loaded the page, I swear!”
Lies!
For ‘groon’: Douchebag.
“Douchebag.”
Fib!
I know how it feels having a hard time finding a job when getting out of college. I would advise going to graduate school rather then fishing around for rich older men.
I kind of have to agree with the first comment that a lot of them are out there for just sexual fulfillment (NOT all but for the most part). I have talked to a few older guys before and I hadn’t even known them for 24 hours and they were already giving me their address, cell phone and home phone number, and telling me that they lived alone and liked to stay up extra late. Now, I don’t think they are all like this. Who knows, maybe some of them are just lonely and need someone to talk to.
I can’t fathom why people are encouraging young graduates whose degrees aren’t and won’t pay off to dig ourselves deeper into the financial pit by pursuing grad school, all for the sake of a lot of hazy economic projections and estimations dreamed up by the very universities who ripped us off in the first place.
Tip’s right, degrees are so, uhm, 1978. The new world order dictates that you not do college and that you move right into, say, a reality television show or if schooling is ab necessary just do some online course, one of those kind that are available in Phoenix somewhere. I totally get the sugarbabby/daddy trap, I’d be doing it too if I were the right age.
You did the right thing because you went for the wrong reason. If you had gone for the money and lifestyle you would have stayed, but you went out of desperation to get out of Lubbock. That wasn’t the “right” reason. My only criticism is that you went back to Lubbock. Why? You were in L.A. for God’s sake. If there’s anywhere that would have opportunities for a writer of any kind it would be there or NYC. That was the only mistake you made really. Go Back!!
The only hitch is that those cities are incredibly pricey to live in, and many a young person has had to pull up stakes and leave town because they’ve been priced out of the market. If he’s hurting for money, he can’t afford the change of scenery.
Excuse me, but graduate school is not a waste of time. Depends on what you want to do with your B.A. degree. Cool or not, many people want to be scholars and should be scholars. The usual way to do that is to go to grad school and take those extra courses that will give you a teaching degree, then you can teach the subject you’re interested in at the college level and take sabbaticals every few years or so to do scholarly work.
Graduate school translates most easily into future teaching careers. If teaching is not for you then you have to analyze the industry you want to get into. Does your career path favor professionals with masters degrees? The important thing is to decide what you want to do after college and if a higher degree is preferable to job experience. If there are no jobs available you still have to decide if a masters is worth it. The riskiest thing is to do post-grad work without a clear idea of where you intend to go with it.
Good luck, kids. Many of us were where you’re standing now. Personally, in my own life, the first 25 years were the trickiest. By the time I was 30, life had evened out and become much more fun.
I chose to be a writer and an editor. Masters degrees did not matter almost at all in that field, but work experience did. Published articles did. So a lot of early work was done for free or next to free. I suspect many careers in the arts are like that. However, a masters degree would have allowed me, later in life, to teach writing. And in that case, I could have gone back to school for a few years. But grad school is not necessarily worthless and in many cases may be essential to career progress.
Lovely, yes, but true thirty, twenty, or maybe even ten years ago. Not today. Your standard of success and the means by which you were able to obtain it don’t really exist anymore. The days of a young person living in a one bedroom or studio apartment in New York on a shop keeper’s income are long gone. Teaching jobs are scare to say the least, and publishing has closed its doors on new recruits. Colleges have just become diploma factories that take anybody, making degrees essentially meaningless. Education as a pathway to success has let countless young people down. Most of us are not likely to meet the standards of the previous generation. We’re saddled with debt we’ll never be able to pay off. Grad school is still a big financial risk and anyone’s who’s already been put through the ringer will know it has no guarantee of paying off. There are untold numbers of thirty-somethings out there right now who have terrifyingly uneven lives and aren’t having any fun.
Getting outmoded career advice from someone settled and economically secure is the same as getting relationship counseling from friends who are blissfully attached: it may be well-intentioned, but it still gets more excruciating each time you hear it.
…and sadly enough, in a Italy sinking down both economically and in morals from the second Berlusconian era, fags (and I am one of those) learn by chance that if pink is the new black, fags are the new women (in a sexist world, obviously). Pride has become as a matter of fact more a vacation point that a point of view and a starting land, and of course here associationism never evolved to the social help phase, leaving all to everyone’s single(d) efforts. Guys, every time you get stucked into the highschool/blue collar dilemma, think of Italy, in this sense one of the homosexual third worlds.
We’re charged with lobbyism here, but we don’t even have a chance to have a really working one. About feelings,guess what new hedonism can do if mixed with a new leaping up traditional machismo. Enough for now, get back to sob on my cappuccino (pls appreciate the commonplace image).
It’s not usefully to generalize sugar daddies, like anything else, but here is what I could learn. I met quite a few wealthy men, and overtime it seems like I’m just their type. I am very independent and wasn’t looking to make money off of them, but just being around them, the comfort spills over so to say. I’ve learned that some money is good and make you comfortable, but too much money brings another set of problems and complicates everything. The defenses are higher, being successful usually makes them think they are always right since they usually are, some try to control you, many times it’s all about him, they are often lonely, and lastly they are usually very interesting. Having said all that, there is also the phenomenon that when guys look at them, they see money, authority, somebody you don’t question or piss off, and ultimately opportunity, but not the human being. All this is a special set of circumsances for wealthy people to navigate in their lifetimes and learn from.
umm, if a person is friends with an assortment of older men online, and they umm, send this person gifts without this person asking but this person gives them the shipping address anyway, and has received things like new cell phones or a couple hundred dollars for spring break (via pre-paid VISA gift card)… does that make them a sugar baby? =|
@quick? Yes, I think that makes you an e-sugar baby. Or is it iSugarbaby? I can’t remember at what point everything went from e to i.
“i” is a marketing tag reffering to products marketed by Macantosh, so unless you can you can buy said sugar baby at the Apple Store, it’s E-sugarbaby, not “i.”
Welcome to the other side of the coin. Im older and have hit hard times. My inbox on the ” Personals ” site im on fills with emails from young guy with good jobs and security just outta school or going back to it.[ No,im not asking for only this type of mate on the site. ] Im making my way through the pile and not ashamed at all.Whats wrong with finding love in someone younger and financialy set.Yes,i know that if im lucky to find Mr Right in this pile of guys there’s the chance of being dumped later for someone who is younger and who has aged better. So,i’ll make sure from the start that i land on my feet if the bottom does drop out.Hey-straight people sign prenups!