Gay Taboos

Intergenerational relationships
Relationships between older and younger individuals take place with some regularity. To mainstream society, for whatever reason, intergenerational relationships, whether gay or straight, remain taboo. For gay men especially, relationships between older and younger men take on a more controversial issue: pedophilia. For ages, gay men have been accused of being pedophiles. Even in our modern political discourse, radical right-wingers use the pedophilia scare tactic to sway voters and fuel the flames of discrimination and prejudice.

A person sees a 50-year-old man dating a 20-year-old woman and they are aghast. They say, “How inappropriate.” They assume she is a “gold digger.” The same group of folks might see a 50-year-old man with a 20-year-old man and say the older one is bordering on pedophilia. It is this double standard, fed by the history of anti-gay discrimination, that makes intergenerational gay dating taboo.

In 2000, Showtime’s “Queer as Folk” blew away gay and straight audiences alike with its graphic sex scene between the 29-year-old Brian Kinney and 17-year-old Justin Taylor. But what U.S. audiences witnessed was nothing compared to the even more graphic 1999 premiere of the U.K.’s “Queer as Folk.” Made prior to the change of Britain’s anti-gay age of consent laws (18 at the time of the show’s airing), the sex between 29-year-old Stuart Allen Jones and 15-year-old Nathan Maloney sent shockwaves through traditionally conservative British culture. Even after the age of consent for gay men was changed to the 16-years-old already set for straight folks, the relationship between Nathan and Stuart would have still been illegal.

[Q Notes, Matt Comer, 'Forbidden Fruit']

I don't know what it says about trans-Atlantic cultural differences, but in Britain the boy (and he was a boy) in the original version of QAF was 15, not 17.