Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

I've always been interested in the various types of gay men one meets over time. Years ago, in my amateur sociology way, I wrote up a gay taxonomy for The Guide. Gay men have been typed and classified over the years -- in the pre-Stonewall era by shrinks and other medics -- and I thought I would give my own insider spin on the genre.

My taxonomy back then was incomplete. Since then I have met various new types: the Soap-Opera Queen, not to be confused with the standard-issue Opera Queen, the Arlene Francis Queen, the existence of which I speculated about, also in this column, without having yet met one. Years later, I had the opportunity to meet two Arlene Francis queens in one week! How does this happen?

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But the biggest gap in my typology of gay men was my missing the Ex-Lad Syndrome.

What is an Ex-Lad? The Ex-Lads I have known have a certain communality of experience. They were all of them cute as could be when young. They all entered into relationships with adult men when they were 17 or 18 years of age. These were not sex-buddies relationships. They were couples. I have always found something a little romantic in such relationships and think it is useful for young gay men to have social and sexual relationships with men older than they. Don Bachardy was 18 when he became lovers with Christopher Isherwood; that did him quite well.

Not all young men with this behavior pattern will develop the Ex-Lad Syndrome -- perhaps Don Bachardy is a fine example. What happens to each lad is that he will stay with the partner for a number of years -- into his late teens and early 20s -- and the partner and he break up (older partner dumps him for new lad) or partner dies, and the lad is now an Ex-Lad and casts about.

The several Ex-Lads I have known never really get it together. They drift from job to job, in and out of other relationships, don't commit, return to live with their families and so on. One killed himself with a shotgun.

This got me to wondering. Were there behaviors Ex-Lads had in common because they were Ex-Lads?

What I think is useful in being young and gay -- mid to late teens -- is the sense of exploration and adventure. I happened to be aggressively promiscuous in those years, ready to have sex with males my own age and those older -- the older were easier to get. Part of this scene was the competition, the art of seduction, part of it was the bonding -- again this was all pre-Stonewall, so there was still a sort of secret society to the gay world. But the behaviors you learn while grappling with gay life when young are part of the acculturation.

For Ex-Lads, it's a different drama. In their relationships, they are the junior partners; the older man sets the agenda and writes the script. The Lads are the companions. This during a time when their own individual gay-identity formation should be in full-throttle. But it isn't; their identity is subsumed to some degree to the partner.

I thought class might be a factor. One Ex-Lad was working-class, another solidly middle-class. Yet both wound up with similar behaviors. I had to attribute it to their being Lads who had missed out on the crucial years of generational and gay cohort consolidation.

Early on, I had to entertain the idea that the Ex-Lad Syndrome might be a subset of the Princess Syndrome. But I decided the Ex-Lads and the Princesses were, in fact, separate developmental tracks. The Lads had been taken care of, every detail attended to by another, youth teased out for as long as it can, adulthood delayed and then, boom, comes midnight, and the fabulous coach turns into a pumpkin. The queens who morph into the Princess types have separate and distinct characteristics and, I suspect, backgrounds. My assay of this type remains a work in progress, though. As gay men get more mainstream, the Princess type will likely become rarer and rarer, but never go extinct. No gay type ever completely disappears. Judy Garland Queens still flourish, many of them born long after Judy joined the ages.

And one more addition to my original taxonomy. This was my late friend Fred, who held interesting opinions. Fred said that the most disgusting thing any gay man could ever do was suck a cock. I had never heard this before from a gay man. I thought Fred would have a hard go of it in Gay World. It takes all kinds.

Perhaps the Ex-Lads didn't pull the low straw after all.