Dear Kirk,

So, we connected on the internet and decided to meet for drinks. Fifteen minutes after meeting (well, it really only took about 5) I realized this guy was not someone that I was interested in AT ALL! Truthfully, I was flattered when he emailed and I found out he was fifteen years younger than I am. Trying to keep a conversation going with someone whose only interests are going to Renaissance fairs, playing video games, and watching reruns of old TV shows on the Sci-Fi channel was difficult, to say the least. Especially since he never asked me one question about myself. I couldn’t call him to say I wasn’t interested because we didn’t exchange phone numbers. So, the next morning I sent a short email that I had enjoyed meeting him but didn't feel a connection and didn't think we had anything in common. Well, I got a diatribe back stating that you can't judge anyone on one conversation. So, what did I do that was so wrong?

Just Not That Into Him

Dear JNTIH:

I think you did your duty here. There are lots of guys who wouldn’t have contacted him at all, so I appreciate that you were honest with him. More and more, I find, people are using the internet to simply ignore one another. Especially with Valentine’s Day approaching, where people are looking for someone to love, it’s a good time to sharpen your dating game!

Dear Kirk,

While I have enjoyed many wonderful encounters from this and related sites, ones that cater to an older/younger audience, I sometimes feel that I am either misleading or dishonest.  Recently, I met a young man and we began an email conversation.  He always referred to me in his mail as "sexy daddy" and we ultimately met.  Now, I realize he only wanted a "daddy" type for play, nothing more and I can deal with that. Yet, I find I am not comfortable with the daddy label for myself even if it accurately describes who I am, especially in the eyes of the young.

I have many friends in long term relationships who are of the older/younger milieu and who are completely happy together.  When I am around them, I sense how right they are for each other even when separated in age by 30 years or more.  Nevertheless, I so often feel that I am not a real person in their eyes but one they have conjured up that suits their fantasies.   In short, I don't need to be real---just OLD

I understand the attraction, the chemistry aspects of any sexual allure, and my fondness for younger guys never wavers.  I would appreciate your thoughts and any suggestions of how I may alter my profile to be more accurate about my tastes.  I tend to have a way with words---perhaps all the wrong ones!

Dear Uncomfortable Daddy,

Thanks for your astute and honest letter. Intergenerational dynamics are indeed complicated. Roles like daddy/boy, master/sub and man/puppy only scratch the surface. And there are lots of guys attracted to intergenerational mates who have no interest in any of these roles.  There are lots of guys who have no interest in taking on family roles;  there are guys who have no interest in being dominant or submissive. Some of us just like guys who are older or younger.

Dear Kirk,

My husband and I are getting ready for another Christmas. We’ve been together 5 years and we’ve never had a good Christmas. He always gets depressed during the holidays thinking about his first lover, who died  in 1987 when I was in middle school. I feel like he hasn’t let go of  him. I grew up in a house where Christmas was a happy time. I want my husband to wear a Santa suit and get into the spirit of it all.

Dear Santa's Neglected Elf:

I’m sure your hubby would look hot in that Santa suit, but Christmas is a complicated time of year. The sunlight has disappeared and people are chemically depressed. It’s a good time to take an amino acid supplement to help your brain. Drink a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar each day to balance out all the holiday sugar. An 85 year-old friend taught me about vinegar. It works.

You and I are part of a younger generation who barely missed the ravages of the AIDS epidemic. We’ll never know what it was like to have a mysterious plague come in and wipe out loved ones. It was a holocaust. There are times I get overwhelmed by my partner’s nostalgia and memories. But I’d much prefer that he keep these loved ones alive in his heart – he’s a deeper and kinder man because of the epidemic.

It actually makes sense to be reflective during the holidays. There’s a somber quality to most winter traditions, whether it’s the Christian story of a poor pregnant woman being turned away from inns or the Pagans yearning for the return of the sun. As much as you can, allow your husband this time to remember his partner and friends. Is there a way you could build that into some new traditions you make together?

Dear Kirk,

I have never paid much attention to how old people are. If people ask me to guess their age, I am completely stumped. It has just never registered much with me. I notice whether a guy is in good shape, whether he’s cute, and most of all how he treats other people, me included. But I’ve noticed since I hit my early 40s that I get hit on by lots of younger guys -- I mean 10 or 15 or even 20 years younger. I am very flattered -- who doesn’t like attention? -- but I have also realized lately that it is hard to communicate sometimes.

I don’t mean sex -- on the times that it comes to that, I feel that I can really connect with the guy I’m with. I mean the other times, socializing together or going out to dinner or walking and having a conversation. I find that a lot of the references I make -- to music or movies or famous writers or other people -- elicit a blank stare -- younger guys just don’t have any idea who I’m talking about.

I hate trying to explain things. Usually I just end up feeling stupid about wasting five minutes on some boring story about somebody I think is “famous”. What should I do?  Signed -- Billy Pilgrim

Dear Billy,

I never play the game of guessing people’s age, because you’re always going to come up with the wrong answer. If a 50 year-old man asks you to guess his age, he wants you to guess 43 whether that’s warranted or not. If you say 47, he’s mildly disappointed he isn’t pulling off 43. And if you guess 50, he feels like he’s doing something wrong, since this is a culture where it’s not okay to look your age. And if you guess 54, he might throw a beer in your face. So good for you for not playing that stupid game. It’s in that genre of things one should only do in a bar, like folding napkins into bunnies.

You have a different set of cultural references than the younger men you’ve been dating. It’s understandably frustrating to you that these guys give you a blank stare when you mention a movie that maybe changed your life. As a younger man, I’ve received my share of blank stares from older men.

Here’s the tricky thing. The younger men in an intergenerational relationship often get smarter from being in that relationship. We’re expected to keep up with two cultural currents – our own and that of our partner. I have seen a lot of movies and read a lot of books because older men point to them as cultural touchstones. But I can also tell you the third song on Nirvana’s album “In Utero.” I can quote Winona Ryder’s lines from the movie “Heathers.” And I don’t expect older men to be able to do that or even appreciate that. And if I show them one of the movies I loved as an adolescent, I don’t expect them to like it. I show it to them because it helped form the person I’ve become.

Sometimes I find that there is a double standard around this: I’m expected to know all the cultural references from my generation as well as from an older partner’s generation, while the older partner isn’t as invested in learning the cultural references that followed theirs. This isn’t always the case, but I’ve seen it enough that I’m saying it out loud.

I’ll let you in on a younger man’s secret: it’s super annoying when an older man acts shocked that you don’t know who sang the obscure girl group song that comes over the stereo when you’re at Safeway. How can you not know who this is?! No matter how many times it happens, he seems genuinely perplexed that you weren’t at summer camp with him in 1966, hearing that song for the first time. And it can be worse if you’re in a group of older men and someone makes a movie reference: He’s a mere child! You haven’t seen that movie? You don’t even know who Alfred Hitchcock is, do you! Making repeated jokes about a younger guy’s age can make an older guy come off as obsessive, youth-fixated and desperate. By the same token, younger guys who take insensitive potshots at older men for being “out of touch” should get smacked upside the head.

My boyfriend and I approach this issue with a lot of care. We’re both interested in seeing and experiencing the best that the world has to offer. Being in a relationship, especially one that’s intergenerational, is a huge advantage because you have two cultural filters at work. I expose him to things that strike me as interesting and he does the same for me. That way, we’re both smarter and we never get bored.

Dear Kirk,

I have always been attracted to older guys. Even in high school I always hung out with seniors, even when I was a freshman! Now I have graduated from college and started a professional life in a big city, and I have gotten into a relationship with an older man. He is 42, and I am 27.

We’re totally in love, and the sex is wild and great. We’ve been together for eight months now, spending basically every night together.

The problem is that we always stay at his house because I have roommates, and now he wants me to move in with him. I understand completely why he doesn’t want to stay at my place with my roommates hanging around. But I also feel weird about moving in because I don’t want to be someone who takes advantage of the fact that he’s farther along in his career and has more money and even owns his own house. I’ve known some guys who were “kept” by older (or just richer) men, and I don’t want to be one of those.

This guy is really wonderful and I don’t want to lose him or appear ungrateful or push him away, but I just don’t know what to do.

 Dear Real Estate Victim,

Not to minimize your concerns, which is an actionable violation of the laws of Social Work 101. but hey, there are worse problems to have! You’re fresh out of college and you’re in love with a man you’re having great sex with. Rejoice, first of all.

After Christopher's death, Don Bachardy took the experience he learned from their 33 years together and dated a younger man. He says playing the role of the older partner helped him understand Chris even better.

In celebration of the opening of the new movie "MILK", we are excited to share this amazing piece by Steve Beery. Steve was a writer and gay activist who died of AIDS in '93. He met Harvey Milk when he was 25 years old and Harvey was 48. Harvey was a daddy who definitely appreciated younger men. This piece was provided to us by Armistead Maupin (my wonderful husband), who met Steve at Harvey's memorial service and remained his closest friend until his death.

My Month with Harvey

by Steve Beery

I was suffering from a typical San Francisco ailment – costume claustrophobia. My tights were riding up, my fake-satin cape was itchy, and beads of sweat were rolling down behind my eye mask. I was dressed as Robin the Boy Wonder at the 1978 Beaux Arts Ball, and I was being unmistakably cruised by a man I knew but had never met.  The man was Harvey Milk, the first openly gay city supervisor – a man I respected and admired.

We’d smiled and nodded on Castro Street several times that year.  I like Harvey’s wide-open grin, and I’d wondered whether the attraction was mutual.  Now it looked like maybe it was. Nervously I straightened my cape, checked my trunks, adjusted my gloves. The supervisor, at ease in his rumpled grey suit, extended his hand and uttered the corniest pick-up line imaginable. “Hop on my back, Boy Wonder, and I’ll fly you to Gotham City,” he said, almost keeping a straight face.

The line was corny, but effective. Harvey had a gift for persuasion, a way of making you believe he could do anything. We swapped phone numbers and got together the next night.  The thing that impressed me most was his laugh, explosive and uninhibited; that, and the slightly daffy look in his eyes, like an overgrown kid’s. At 48 he was nearly twice my age, but full of boyish mischief.

It didn’t take me long to realize that Harvey was a nut, a screwball, a wild card. He was also a satyr, a gleeful disciple of Eros who’d found a way to marry his essential craziness to a set of well-ordered work habits. He insisted on being on call to his constituents 24 hours a day. No problem – from towed cars and trash pickup to tree pruning – was too small. Despite his hippie, flower-power, Summer of Love experience, there wasn’t an ounce of “California mellow” in Harvey. His native New York aggression, undiluted by the amiability of Castro Street, was always spoiling for a fight.

I was surprised, on our first date, to find out how strong he was.  He didn’t have a gym-toned body; he was built more like a big bull, rangy and muscular.  Within his first two minutes at my apartment he picked me up and dumped me unceremoniously on my bed.  He liked to do things fast, at double speed. He walked fast. He talked fast. He even ate fast.

Just think, if you had been Antinous (pronounced an-tin-oh-us), you could have said, "my gay daddy is the most powerful man in the world"... and it would have been true. Many don't realize that one of the Roman Empire's greatest rulers was an openly gay man. The first time I heard about Hadrian and Antinous I was daydreaming in my Roman and Hellenistic Sculpture course in college. Professor Connelly brought up the bust of a Roman Emperor on the slide projector and I thought to myself, "hmm... he looks like a sexy bearded daddy".

Truth is, that's one of the reasons I took the course. I love all those sexy sculptures of the hot daddies. I used to drool over the Farnese Hercules and the Laocoon, and a host of other sculptures of gods, philosophers and emperors. Unlike our culture, the Greeks and Romans really celebrated an older ideal, not just youth.

The professor brought me out of my daze as she said, "Hadrian was gay and had a young lover named Antinous". Wow, a gay Roman Emperor. I knew that the Greeks and Romans were a little less uptight about gay sex, but I didn't know it was possible to have that much power as an openly gay man.

Hadrian was born on January 24 in 76 AD. After his parents died he was put under the care of Trajan who was a cousin of his father and happened to be Emperor at the time. In 117 AD he was named emperor and he ruled until his death in 138 AD.

Hadrian has been described as the most versatile of all Roman Emperors. Trajan was a warmonger, but Hadrian ushered in a time of peace. Hadrian was also an intellect, a patron of the arts, and quite a great architect himself. Among his accomplishments were building the Pantheon and Hadrian's Villa.

The Pantheon is my favorite piece of architecture anywhere. Hadrian built it as a temple to all the gods. It seems that his intention was to create a symbol of unity to bring different belief systems together. The dome is 43.3 meters in diameter and holds the record for the world's largest un-reinforced concrete dome. Modern architects and engineers are still baffled at how he achieved this feat nearly 2,000 years ago. Michelangelo designed the dome in St. Peter's to be 1 meter smaller than the dome in the Pantheon in deference to Hadrian. He didn't want to overshadow his hero's great architectural triumph.

Dear Kirk,

My boyfriend and I have been together for six months. He is 23 and I am 48. I’m a college professor and he works at Costco as a re-stocker. I make about three times what he makes. I often end up paying for dinners out and recently paid for a weekend vacation. I want him to finish college and get a better job but he hates school and doesn’t want to do it. We are talking about him moving in to my house, so I need to set some boundaries about money and don’t know where to start. 

Dear Sugar Free Daddy,

Money is powerful, powerful stuff. I think of it like an open flame – it can be harnessed to cook your meals and keep you warm, but it can also burn the shit out of you. Anxiety about money has derailed millions of relationships.

It sounds like you guys are just getting to know each other. You’re working with a number of potent differences: age, financial status, educational background and probably a bunch of others. Tread lightly and always keep in mind what brought you together in the first place.

I first met Daddyhunt.com founder Chris Turner at a Billy Club gathering. The Billy Club is a group of gay and bisexual men who go on long weekend retreats in Northern California. Chris and I were both in our late 20s in a social group that was predominantly men aged 35-65. We were both in hog heaven, the youngest guys in the room, soaking up the attention of older men that we were both so hungry for.

We didn’t get to know each other really well at the time, because we were both so busy hunting for daddy energy. Seven years later, we reconnected and discussed the possibility of me writing a column for daddyhunt. An advice column. Miss Manners and Emily Post are some of my heroes, so I was game.

But there’s something deeply presumptuous about an advice column. Who the hell are you and who do you think you are to be telling me what to do? That’s a fair question. The American media is so chock full of whack jobs and self-appointed experts that we really ought to be more skeptical about where we find guidance. I don’t claim to be any sort of mental health professional. The only letters after my name are MFA, which arguably could stand for Mother Fuckin’ Attitude. Actually, it’s a master of fine arts, which doesn’t really qualify you to DO anything other than wait tables or work retail while you make art — it certainly doesn’t prepare you to dole out psychological advice to the masses.