Ageing Predators and Asexual Old Queens: Challenging Stereotypes of Cross-Generational Gay Relationships in Beginners and Gerontophilia

Abstract

There are two dominant stereotypes of gay male ageing in Western media. The first is the sexual predator who secures brief relations with much younger men often through monetary exchange or other forms of coercion. The second is the stereotype of the asexual ‘old queen’-a body whose ageing effeminacy removes him from the matrix of sexual eroticism. The two films analysed in this chapter attempt to challenge these stereotypes and revise the received narrative of gay cross-generational relationships. Beginners (Mills 2010) narrates how a man comes out as gay in his late seventies and becomes the genuine love interest of a much younger man. The film is remarkable for the way it deliberately questions the reliability of narration and cinematic focalisation. Beginners’ consistent questioning of accepted narratives of all relationships forces the spectator to reconsider the assumed loneliness and unattractiveness of the older gay man in contemporary society. Gerontophilia (LaBruce 2013) challenges the stereotype of the ‘old queen’ by narrating how a 20-year-old man falls in love with an octogenarian. Like many of LaBruce’s films, Gerontophilia blends the codes of pornography with narrative cinema to make the spectator consider if something deemed ‘erotic’ may merely be a system of media representation. Gerontophilia continues this questioning of desirability by coding the octogenarian man as the object of desire and situating the spectator’s perspective within the point of view of the young gerontophile.