My daddy is gay
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I distinctly recall logging on to my first gay dating site a day after I turned 19. It was a portal that catered exclusively to bigger and older men and their admirers, such as myself. These men could range anywhere between their tardy 30s to late 70s, and anyone who admired them were called chasers or sons. It was on that site that I ended up rendezvous my first partner. He was 40 and a Merchant Navy engineer. I fell for him mainly because I thought he was a world traveller, only to realise that the ships he worked on never really anchored at every shore. Condemn it on naïveté. I had hoped, at the very least, he would be more open to the idea of settling down, despite the age gap. This 20-year-old male lover boy phase wasn’t my wisest. The man was so far deep in that closet that I gave up trying to convince him. He would introduce me as his younger brother if a stranger asked. Needless to say, I had to end things with him, and I
This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands
My father is a Frenchman who moved to the Netherlands 24 years ago to raise a family with my mother. Being a curious person with a love of culture, he was soon talking and acting like a Dutch guy – raising my brother and me in the Dutch language.
Once a week, my dad would call his father and siblings in France. He spoke in French so he could chat freely with them about anything he wanted without us understanding what was going on.
But one night, while he was on the phone to his sister, my little brother had crawled out of bed. He went downstairs and heard my father speaking in that foreign language. However, as the conversation went on, certain words suddenly didn’t sound so foreign. My brother picked up the word for “gay” – a word my dad repeated several times during that conversation.
By that point, my parents had told us they had problems in their marriage, but a few months later, when I was around nine years old, we still went on our annual family summer holiday to France. We always visited the same camping spot, near my father’s family house. One day, he was playing a game with my brother in
The term “daddy” has exploded in popularity in recent years. Star Pedro Pascal was recently crowned the internet’s daddy. There is an app called Dream Daddy where players can date a daddy. Saturday Night Live even ran a skit about daddies.
While there is no shortage of discussions about daddies, there is little research about what the term means to the men who are classified as daddies themselves.
My new book, Daddies of a Different Kind: Sex and Romance Between Older and Younger Adult Gay Men, investigates this topic. I talked to 39 men in their 40s, 50s and 60s who saw themselves as daddies, and 26 men in their 20s and 30s who liked dating older men. I focused on homosexual and bisexual men because they are morelikely to formpartnerships with largeage gaps than any other group in the western world.
What is a daddy?
Many of the men I talked to agreed that daddies were experienced, steady, had leadership abilities and nurtured and mentored younger adult men. This mentorship involved a range of topics, from how to come out to family to how to advance in their careers. The connection between older and younger adult men was not just physical, it was emotional too.
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My father was homosexual. He was born in 1918. In my 20s, he started telling me stories about his early life. He was out in the 1930s at a time when it wasn’t frequent. He had dreams that most would not believe he dared to envision. The problem with my dad telling me all of this was that he was still married to my mother.
In 1939, at a party in the Hollywood Hills with gay filmmakers and musicians, he was arrested. Police officers handcuffed the men, herded them into a van, and took them to jail. The following morning, he appeared before a judge for sentencing. Because the arresting officer couldn’t swear that he saw him touching his dance partner, he was released.
Then he was caught up in an illegal sting operation in Pasadena that targeted gay men. They were extorted by the police for cash payments in return for conditional release. His dreams of being a schoolteacher and living with his boyfriend/girlfriend were destroyed.
As Society War II loomed, he attempted to enlist in the U.S. Navy, but he was rejected when his document revealed that he was gay. The Army eventually acknowledged him, perhaps because war was imminent and able-bodied men, even gay ones, were needed.
Before my father shipped