Generation XXX: The Patriarchal Pleasures of Gay Elder Porn

It’s a weakness: I love older men.

I can’t help it. I just know the grizzled dude in that “Most Interesting Man Alive” beer commercial is an incredible fuck. Those ads for male hormone treatment in which men in their twilight years are transformed into bulging muscle monsters with younger gold-digger girlfriends should have me thinking “Bullshit!,” but all I can do is grab my groin and think “Lucky whores!”

I deeply want to be sexually harassed by a boss who looks exactly like silver fox John Slattery, a total hog who paternalistically slaps my ass with a gritted sneer before telling me to get him a Pellegrino. “I have a Kaplan Business Degree!,” I counter as he unzips with a smirk. “I’ll scream!,” I virtuously protest as he pulls me to his sinewy body, only to have him laugh as he forces his lips onto mine. “Ha! Go ahead! I’m drunk on my power, and who’d believe you anyway!? Look how you’re dressed!”

Yes, I’m an Uncle, Daddy, and Grandpa slut.

You could put five Corbin Fisher-style guys stripped naked in front of me in a line-up, but if there’s one man there with a salt-and-pepper crew cut and a silver handlebar ‘stache, they might as well be invisible as I stutter “Sonny like! Sonny like!”

Basically, I feel like Linnea Quigley in Return of The Living Dead, the only difference being that while she strips and waxes erotically about being eaten by a pack of old men, I envision me in a retirement community gang bang comprised of nasty former drill sergeants, high school coaches, and steel workers.

It’s a sickness.

I can’t be the only afflicted one though, seeing as Gay Elder Porn — featuring men in their ’50s, ’60s, and even their ’70s — seems to be gaining mainstream gay acceptance. The hetero variety is big in Japan already, and straight porn has been employing horny geezers to full effect for years now. Gay porn has seemed comparatively slow on the uptake, though. For too long it was very Logan’s Run, with players retired out when the chips in their hands started blinking at the ripe old age of 25. I mean, there was a time not that long ago when 40 was considered ancient in a business now chock full of performers in that age range, and I roll my eyes whenever studios market a guy who’s all of 35 as a daddy.

Maybe viewers just got bored with the callowness of the medium, because now sites like Older4Me, HotOlderMale, and DaddyBFFs exist to cater for those with a taste for seasoned studs over 40, the men featured running the physical spectrum from jacked-up and ‘roided-out to Old Country Buffet.

What’s your pleasure, son?

Gay Elder Porn has two fairly distinct manifestations with a modicum of overlap. First there’s what I call “Generation Porn,” in which you get a nifty age range among the stars. The eldest member of the cast is usually the big selling point or title character in entries like Dad Goes To College or Daddy’s Teenage Turn-On. The whole idea is to take classic patronage stock characters — cops, coaches, your best friend’s hot-ass dad — and smut ‘em up for the delight of you inner child. Incest, coercion, and discipline are common themes. What’s really hot about it is that you get scenes wherein you have a guy in his mid-’20s getting mounted by a guy in his late ’30s, only to have a hot piece in his mid-’50s on the sidelines elbow his way in, saying “That’s not how we fucked ass in my day! Get the hell over and lemme show you how it’s done, boy!”

It’s all about learning!

Then there’s “Golden Years Porn.” It ditches the youngin’s all together and let’s its randy seniors go at with each other. It’s basically everything The Golden Girls hinted at but couldn’t deliver. You’ll still get a nice mix here, with some men giving their younger counterparts a run for their money in the bod department, while others are pure Boca Raton golf course, viewers apparently lusting after both with equal measure. When I watch these entries, I can’t help but comically picture producers giving the porn pitch to their prospective starlets, the novelty being that instead of broke college boys, they’re exploiting retirees who’ve lost their pensions. “No one from the rotary club will ever see this, Harvey…”

How can I account for not just the influx of mature men into gay porn, but the audience for it? There are a lot of factors. Despite all the “Ewww, no oldies!” shade thrown on Grindr, I think gay male culture has finally woken up to the fact that attractiveness doesn’t have an expiration date on it. We’d all spread for Sean Connery if he asked, and I don’t even want to say all the things I’d do to that hot older cop on The Closer with the great haircut and ace wardrobe.

I also think the prissy party boy thing is wearing seriously thin. Maybe I want to date a guy who’s done things and knows things — a man who doesn’t weigh his food or speak with the syntax of a teenage girl. How many dispensable guys name Skylar or Cord can the gay porn industry employ before the whole medium just eats itself?

With the biz having taken a serious economic hit, it’s in some ways been forced to narrowcast its product in more innovative ways in order to entice viewers. Some years back Nip/Tuck featured a storyline in which a producer admitted that granny-themed porn actually pulled in as much profit as the more mainstream titles headlined by younger name female stars, the only difference being that he could shoot three movies with his stable of MILF actresses for what he had to shell out for a lone pin-up superstar’s going rate.

Straight porn produces “Geezer Porn,” a kind of teen girl subgenre wherein dirty old men score with insipid babysitters and cheerleaders in pigtails and midriffs. It’s all supposed to be gross and usually is — through some of the more attractive men have developed gay followings — and I guess the idea is to create this grotesque old-on-young contrast that won’t threaten the male viewer. Gay porn happily gets the dichotomy right by neither turning older men into lechers or younger men into simps. The odds are that we were all attracted to some elder male figure of power as gay kids, so that jolt of sexual tension remains potent onscreen.

There’s also a deeply divisive generational social and economic battle playing out before our very eyes that may be contributing to the trend. If Occupy Wall Street skews young and displaced, then The Tea Party comes off as wizened and selfish. I wonder if that schism isn’t generating a certain erotic hostility in the public consciousness, the “elderly” Haves we might’ve once merely viewed as categorically un-sexual now turning up in fuck flicks and getting bukkaked like total cum-sluts. Doesn’t every gay man desire to turn the tables on stern-faced, disapproving authority figures who chide and scold? And don’t we all secretly get off on the thought of surrendering to them?

Some elders just deserve a certain respect.