In the early, innocent years of the new Millenium, when I nosed into my late thirties – a time that now seems like a second adolescence – and was still living in London, I was contacted on Gaydar (a steam-powered Grindr) by a nervous, early 20s US student with little experience of the world of MANSEX.
He was a bit younger than I would have usually gone for, but he was super keen. He was also quite hot, in a corn-fed Mid-Western way.
So, I decided to do my quasi-intergenerational, trans-Atlanticist duty.
Sat on my bed, just before kick-off, he suddenly and earnestly posed the question: “Do you think it right that someone your age should be having sex with someone my age? You’re a decade and a half older!”
“When I was your age”, I replied slowly, “I would never have slept with someone my age. And now I am my age I can tell you that I was absolutely right.”
I then asked him if he would like me to drop him back at the tube station.
“Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “You can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“Because you haven’t fucked me yet!”
This was my first encounter with the American custom of sincerely discussing morality and then, ethical foreplay over, just going ahead and doing what you wanted to do anyway. Especially if it was “wrong”.
It was also my first journey into the world of daddydom – even though he never actually used the ‘D’ word, which wasn’t really a thing back then. And nor was, for that matter, ‘a thing’ a thing. That’s how long ago it was. Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, I’m nosing into the realm of grandaddydom.