After I lost my virginity I went on what could be described as a sex rampage. There weren’t many gay people in my small hometown, and so, with the help of Grindr and the local gym parking lot, I found a way to meet with other gay people that were evidently on a similar kind of journey. And so, I had sex with men—lots of different gay men. So many, I could write a Lana Del Rey album about them all. And during this period of high output, of connection to a certain part of my culture, it surprised me that I found I much preferred the sex I was having with older men.
I was 16 and working myself out. This was 2008, before the current boom in visibility, and I wasn’t at all in touch with gay or queer culture. I didn’t even know it existed. But I was searching for something in these hot, risky interactions. And the sex I had with these older men seemed to make me feel better.
Yet as time went on, the return these encounters offered started to wane. I initially imagined that love might be found in the back of trucks with people old enough to be my (youngish) grandfather, but as the search for validation and community continued, the distance between myself and these older lovers grew. The sex was good, sure, but the emotional link remained impossible; I felt lonelier than ever in my gayness.
Instead of connection, I found a lot of dodged calls, a lot of ducking behind cars at the local supermarket as I saw a man I’d slept with and his wife and two children pushing carts full of groceries to their car. After two years, I’d had numerous life-changing sexual encounters with older men: some in the good way, some in the bad way. It wasn’t until the summer before I was leaving for university, when I’d all but called off the search, that I met Stan. Stanley. I was 18, and he was more than triple my age.
He picked me up down the street from where I lived, in a cul-de-sac that couldn’t be seen from any window in my parents’ house. Of course, I was hiding huge parts of my sexuality from my family still—my sex being one of them. So I snuck out on the pretense that I was going to the cinema with my girlfriends. The irony was lost on me then, but Stan drove an articulated freezer truck, one of those which transported frozen goods up and down the country, and it was absolutely enormous. When it reversed, a speaker would shout “Attention: Vehicle reversing!” in an automated voice. Two nights a week for the following three months, this giant lorry that dwarfed the houses in my neighborhood would pick me up and shout its announcements—and I thought I was being totally subtle.
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