Vanity is not just a Prince Protege’
December 2, 2009
At 47, I am not quite at the point of selling my soul, as Dorian Gray did, to preserve my looks. But let’s just say the option is on the table.
For gay men, vanity is not a vice; it’s a virtue. As a budding homosexual in the early 1980s I was constantly reminded that the worst thing that could happen to me as I got older was…well…to get older. In the 1960s a gay man past the age of 40 was put away from public view; now he’s considered a “silver daddy.” As in Logan’s Run, once I turned 30 I might as well fling myself into Carrousel and go up in a ball of flames. Don’t let people tell you looks don’t matter. They do. If you don’t believe me, ask Jocelyn Wildenstein, or Wayne Newton, or Joan Rivers. Note that I didn’t say good looks matter.
Around the time I started using moisturizer, I took up boxing. These seemingly unrelated activities are actually connected, at least for me. All I can say is Elmer McCollum, who discovered Vitamin A, should posthumously win a Nobel Prize for paving the way to Retinol. Boxing is a less obvious way of keeping young, especially if your face gets rearranged a lot, but it’s kept me fit and makes me sweat so much I need moisturizer to keep my skin from drying out. Plus, the tenderizing of my face by gloved fists obviates the need for plastic surgery. Hitting things (and sometimes people) is also an excellent way to manage stress. I can whale away on the targets of my frustration without having to serve jail time! (And, as we learned from Lindsay Lohan, spending even 84 minutes in jail visibly ages you.)
My hairline started receding at an early age, somewhere around 12. High foreheads are a “feature” of my paternal genes. My father said it was a sign of high intelligence, but I think he told me that so I’d be more careful about bumping my head into things. I overused the blow dryer and hair gel, which in the 1970s was de rigueur, and by my late 20s my hairline had receded more quickly than the Dead Sea shoreline. I did the Joe Biden comb-over until baldness became socially acceptable and I told my little Italian barber Eddie to go commando on my scalp. That’s how I came into this world, I told myself, and that’s how I’m going out.
But face cream and fisticuffs are not enough to give Ponce de Leon his due. My insides needed care as well. A “friend” encouraged me to try vegetarianism, which helped me stay slim but also turned me an unattractive gray color, which clashed with my wardrobe. Once I switched back to a diet of meat, beer, and Nutella I was fine. My diet wasn’t a problem, but walking on the uneven sidewalks of New York was taking a toll on my joints. I started going to a chiropractor, initially to deal with a hip injury, and after that was fixed I kept going for maintenance. Ten years later, I asked my chiropractor how “old” she thought my spine is, and she said about 10 years younger than the average person my age. Now if only I could display my spine on the outside so people can see how youthful it is.
All of this looks business is irrelevant, however, if you don’t feel good about yourself. To ensure that I do, I somehow find a way to randomly inject the fact that I’m approaching 50 into any conversation. So, for instance, I’ll say, “As someone who was born a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis,” or “I remember touching the Unisphere at the 1965 World’s Fair.” The response I hope to hear is “You don’t look a day over 35!” but more often it’s “What’s the Cuban Missile Crisis?” With the latter response, I usually just segue into a conversation involving Glee or Lady GaGa, which seem to be all the rage nowadays.
In our shallow, Ann Landers-less society, looks are everything, and I plan to hold on to mine as long as I can. Every day I repeat the mantra of Billy Crystal’s Fernando: “It is always better to look good than to feel good.” And if one day I look in the mirror and start shrieking in horror, I know there’s an angel of death with an appetite for immortal souls ready to keep me well stocked with a fresh supply of moisturizer.