Who Gets to Be a Daddy?
I KNEW THE day would come, but I didn’t expect it to arrive with such savagery. It was a late spring evening. I was strolling down the street in Provincetown, Mass., with my husband when a car pulled up and a young, confident male voice — an unmistakably gay voice, and yes, there is such a thing — targeted both of us with stinging exactitude. “’Sup, daddies?” the voice said, the speaker barely bothering to conceal his sneer as the car sped away.
The indignity! Gay men never run out of vivid new ways to call other gay men old, and I should note here my complete certainty that this (admittedly accurate) assessment is precisely what was happening in that moment.
Whoever that guy might have been, and whatever activity of interest to other 24-year-olds he was undoubtedly racing off toward, I’m quite sure that what he meant was, “OMG, I can’t believe you elder gays are out in public on a Saturday night!” rather than, say, “We saw you across the room and we dig your vibe.” He did not mean “daddies” in a good way, which made it all the more injurious because there is currently such a vast array of good ways in which to call someone a daddy, and the word is everywhere.
Gay culture is, to put it in cross-generationally comprehensible terms, in its Daddy Era. And like many queer trends, it is both deeply suspect and kind of glorious.
