Eric Shaw Quinn

It’s my birthday!

I’m also happy.  I love my birthday.  It’s the day that makes all my other great days possible.

I feel fortunate in this.  I don’t find that my attitude about ageing is shared by my peers or those who, in time, will be potential peers, should they be lucky enough to attain age of any substance.

We live in a ridiculous culture that equates getting older with personal failure.  We eschew wisdom and experience in favor of the unearned physical attributes of youth.  Everyone gets to be young and cute.  It’s no trick to be 12 or 21.  Youth requires almost no effort and rarely offers more than greater elasticity and a bit more hair.

Age is the great democracy.

I am amused by the frequent age bashing of those who are both young and stupid.  I’m not saying those two attributes necessarily go together but they are all too frequently inseparable companions.  Combined, they bring on a kind of intellectual blindness and delusions of immortality that produce a  disdain of people for achieving something that should, if you aren’t a complete moron, be your life’s principle goal.  If a young person has the good fortune and the good sense required to put together a few years, they too will be old.  The only escape is death.

Our misunderstanding of media, further fuels this absurd belief that people who’ve gotten older have screwed up somehow.  Because it’s easier to sell crap to the inexperienced and uninformed, 3D movies about stapling your testicles to alligators and TV shows about high school moms and celebutards dominate the octoplexes and the airwaves.

As a result, the studios can use insubstantial digital fireworks to fill stadium seats with butts and marketers are able to sell a lot of useless crap to people who are still gullible enough to believe that said crap will make them happy, sexy, popular, attractive, etc.  The sad outcome is that we grow up believing that life and good times have passed us by if we succeed in accruing a few years and few gray hairs.

If in the future we are judged only by what is most often at the top of the charts, it will be assumed that the single most important social issues of our time revolved around our physical appearance and our mating habits.  I’m sure this isn’t a unique or even a recent cultural development. Still, as I look back in the science and history books I find almost no examples of how any individual’s sex life or physical appearance changed history or advanced culture.  Troy was a debacle, Cleopatra and Henry VIII were only practicing the statecraft of their day and Marie Currie just married her lab partner.

I say all this not from a point of superiority, but as a former young person and member in good standing of this superficial culture.

Many, many, many years ago, I too was young.

Back then, in the days of better living through chemistry, The Pill was so successful that condoms had become a sort of down market joke; the province of those too young, too poor or too rushed to get a prescription filled.  Among my people, for whom pregnancy was not at all a risk, the only prescription we ever needed for non-recreational use was the occasional penicillin booster.

We were naive and defenseless.  I was still in high school when people started to die.  They called it GRID – for Gay Related Immune Deficiency – at first.  We had no idea what caused it.  We had no idea how to prevent it.

I am alive today by the grace of two twists of fate I cursed at the time.  First, my parents could not afford to send me to the colleges in and around the big cities in the Northeast where I longed to go.  I had to attend a state college in South Carolina where being gay in the 70’s was like being Jewish in Iran.  I got to New York after my graduation in the early 80’s where I was faced with my second piece of unwanted good fortune.  I was the plain one with the good sense of humor.  Everyone wanted to be my friend but my friends all went home with Prince Charming and I went home on the train with everyone’s coats and backpacks.

Thanks to the influence of the media of the day, you had to look like Burt Reynolds or Richard Gere to be sexy.  I was pale and skinny.  I wasn’t nearly hairy or stocky enough to be desirable, so I went home alone.  It broke my heart and it saved my life.  With few exceptions, all my friends from that time in my life are dead.  They were dead before I was 30 – and before they were.

I am today that rarest of endangered species – a 52 year old gay man.

It is not lost on me that I’m lucky to be 52.  It took more grace, good fortune and just dumb luck than skill or intelligence to get here.  I don’t know how much I’ve learned along the way, but I have figured out that getting older is a privilege and an achievement.  I’m not rich or famous – yet!  I’m still single so I still get to discover what first love feels like.  But most of all, I’m alive which means everything is still possible.

I raise a toast each year on this day to my little gang at Uncle Charlie’s who didn’t get to see 30 or 40, let alone 52.  And I celebrate me today for being born and for managing to stick it this long.  Happiness, it turns out, isn’t something that arrived on my birthday, it’s how I got here.

Happy Birthday!!