Psychology of The Gay Baby Boomer and Gen X “Fool”

[00:00:00]He topped his class. He honored his parents. He deferred to elders. He excelled in sports. And in the back of a drawer or in the back of his head, he kept the list of 17 urgent projects. A wall of achievement he could hide behind so no one, especially himself, had to look at who he actually was.

[00:00:23]That was Andrew Tobias in 1973, writing under a fake name because his real one wasn't safe yet. It's also a blueprint that a whole lot of gay men your age followed without ever reading the book.

[00:00:37]I'm Frank and today you and I are going to look at the gay baby boomer and Gen X man as the fool. Not the stupid one, the ter one. the guy who followed every rule perfectly and still ended up standing on top of a pyramid of achievement alone.

[00:00:56]Let me start with what you actually see now. Not the wound, the behavior.

[00:01:02]You know this man. Maybe you are this man. He's 58 or 66 or 71.

[00:01:10]His resume is stunning. His apartment is beautiful. His calendar is full. He has opinions about wine, about opera, about the correct thread count. He's the one who remembers everyone's birthday, who overtips, who shows up to the dinner party with a hostess gift wrapped better than the actual present inside.

[00:01:33]He has three group chats, two board seats, one personal trainer, and no one to call at 3:00 in the morning. Watch him at a dinner. He is charming. He is the show. He performs the version of himself he built in seventh grade to survive a locker room and he still can't turn it off in his own kitchen.

[00:01:55]Ask him a real question and the answer arrives already polished, already funny, already deflected.

[00:02:03]He is very good at being loved for what he does. He has almost no experience being loved for existing.

[00:02:11]That's the behavior. Now walk it backward.

[00:02:15]In 2013, two researchers named John Pachankis and Mark Hatenbeller decided to test something Tobias had described 40 years earlier.

[00:02:25]They pulled together a sample of male college students, gay and straight, and asked them what they built their self-worth on. The gay men more than the straight men, based their sense of self on academics, on appearance, on competition.

[00:02:42]They needed to be the best in the room to feel like they belonged in the room.

[00:02:48]The study is called the best little boy in the world hypothesis. And the reason it has that name is because Tobias's memoir had already named the pattern.

[00:02:58]The researchers just tested it in a lab.

[00:03:02]Think about what that means. Somewhere around age seven or 8, a kid figures out that the thing inside him is not okay with the people around him.

[00:03:12]He doesn't have the language for it yet.

[00:03:14]He just knows the temperature drops when he does anything too soft and rises when he brings home an A.

[00:03:22]So, he brings home more A's. He wins the spelling B. He makes varsity anyway even though he doesn't care about the sport because varsity is armor.

[00:03:33]He becomes indispensable to his mother.

[00:03:36]He becomes impressive to his father. He becomes useful to his teachers and every gold star he collects buys him one more day of not being found out.

[00:03:49]What he's building is a decoy with a life wrapped around it. Alan DS, a clinical psychologist, wrote a whole book about what happens when that decoy becomes the whole person. It's called The Velvet Rage. And if you're gay and over 50, someone has probably shoved a copy at you in the last 20 years.

[00:04:11]Downs traces it like this. Childhood otherness creates shame. Shame is unbearable. So you mask it. You mask it with beauty, with creativity, or with material success. Pick your weapon.

[00:04:26]Sometimes all three.

[00:04:29]The mask works. It gets you approval, applause, promotions, invitations, but the mask can never be taken off because underneath it is the same 8-year-old who was pretty sure he was disgusting.

[00:04:45]So, you double down, you work harder, you get thinner, you buy nicer, you drink more, you have more sex or less, but never the amount that actually feels good.

[00:05:00]DS calls it the self-defeating coping cycle. And he documents the recedes, the elevated rates of depression, of substance use, of sexually transmitted infections, of suicide.

[00:05:13]All of it downstream of a mask that stopped being optional a long time ago.

[00:05:20]Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud. The mask worked.

[00:05:25]That's the whole tragedy. The strategy didn't fail. It succeeded exactly on its own terms and delivered a man to age 60 in perfect fighting shape for a war that ended in 1995.

[00:05:41]Tobias himself said it in an interview he did on a podcast called But we loved.

[00:05:48]Achievement he said never soothes the innate need to be loved. You end up on top of a pyramid of achievement alone.

[00:05:57]He was describing his own life. He was also describing a demographic.

[00:06:02]Let's talk about that demographic because this is where the fool card gets expensive.

[00:06:07]Sage, the advocacy group for LGBTQ plus elders, has been tracking the money side of this for years. Their numbers are rough. LGBTQ plus adults are twice as likely to be single [music] and live alone compared to the general population.

[00:06:26]They're four times less likely to have children. Roughly onethird of LGBTQ plus elders live at or below 200% of the federal poverty line.

[00:06:38]The population of LGBTQ plus adults over 50 is around 3 million right now and it's on its way to 7 million. Read that again. Twice as likely to be alone.

[00:06:53]four times less likely to have kids and a third of them hovering at the edge of poverty and a country where the safety net has a lot of holes shaped exactly like a gay man in his 60s.

[00:07:07]Now put that next to the earnings picture. Research summarized in the American Society on Aging's Generations Journal by Mark Brennan Ing and colleagues put it plainly.

[00:07:19]Gay and bisexual men earn somewhere between seven and 15% less than heterosexual men across most income studies. That's the wage gap most people don't talk about because everybody assumes gay men are all rich interior designers with beach houses. Some are, most aren't.

[00:07:40]And here's the mechanical part. Social Security is calculated off lifetime earnings. [music] So, a 7 to 15% gap during your working years becomes a smaller check every single month for the rest of your life. The closet had a payroll deduction. Nobody itemized it.

[00:08:01]Data from the LGBTQ aging center cited on the Queer Money podcast sharpens the picture.

[00:08:09]About 50% of single LGBTQ plus older Americans expect to work past normal retirement age. [music] Among their straight peers, that number is closer to 27%.

[00:08:24]Older same-sex partnered couples have about 38% less income from retirement savings than heterosexual couples.

[00:08:33]38% [music] less.

[00:08:36]over a 30-year retirement, that gap is somebody else's whole house.

[00:08:42]So, the fool at 65 opens the statement.

[00:08:47]He looks at the number and he does the math nobody warned him about because the little boy who built the pyramid assumed the pyramid would still be [music] paying dividends when he needed it to.

[00:09:00]It isn't.

[00:09:02]Real estate went one way, his industry went another. His partner [music] left in 2009, his second partner died in 2017. [music] And the 401k he started late because he spent his 30s trying to look 30 is doing what late 401's do, which is not enough.

[00:09:23]He followed the rules exactly.

[00:09:26]The rules were a trap.

[00:09:29]And here's where the loneliness compounds the money because those two problems are actually one problem wearing two outfits.

[00:09:38]The AARP put out a report in 2024 called dignity.

[00:09:44]Four out of five older LGBTQ plus adults said they were worried about having enough social support as they age.

[00:09:53][music] Four out of five.

[00:09:56]And the health researchers have been very clear that chronic loneliness is a physical risk factor. It raises your odds of heart disease, dementia, stroke, anxiety, depression at a level researchers now put in the same category as daily smoking.

[00:10:15]The fool built a career instead of a family on the reasonable belief that the career would love him back.

[00:10:22]It didn't.

[00:10:24]Careers don't visit you in the hospital.

[00:10:27]There's a study out of the Netherlands by researchers named Kyper and Fakima published [music] back in 2009 that laid out the mechanism.

[00:10:36]They looked at aging lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults and asked why loneliness rates were higher than in the straight population.

[00:10:45]The answer came down to what they call minority stress.

[00:10:50]Three [music] specific things.

[00:10:52]Internalized homgativity.

[00:10:55]The shame you swallowed as a kid that never fully left.

[00:11:00]Concealment, the habit of hiding, which by 60 is so automatic you don't notice you're still doing it.

[00:11:09]And expectations of stigma.

[00:11:11]The assumption walking into any new room that you'll have to explain yourself.

[00:11:17]Those three things working together shrink your social world. Not because people rejected you, because you rehearsed the rejection so many times in advance that you stopped extending yourself.

[00:11:33]You stopped asking. You stopped calling.

[00:11:37]You told yourself you were fine.

[00:11:41]A Spanish research team confirmed the same pattern in a qualitative study published in 2025.

[00:11:48]Older gay men described what the researchers called intersectional discrimination. Age and orientation stacking on each other. The gay bars stopped being welcoming somewhere around 45. The senior center didn't feel safe.

[00:12:03]The dating apps became a blood sport.

[00:12:06]And the network, the chosen family that a lot of these men built in their 20s and 30s [music] brilliantly out of necessity. That network aged too. Some of it died, some of it moved, some of it drifted, and nobody handed him a replacement.

[00:12:25]All right, deep breath.

[00:12:28]Because if you're gay and you're watching this and you're in this age bracket, I want to be clear about something. This is a map, not a diagnosis.

[00:12:37]Maps are useful, and there is more of this map to walk. Let's talk about the body because you knew we'd get there.

[00:12:45]There's a study published in a peer-reviewed journal tracking 181 older gay men, average age around 65, most of them in the Midwestern United States.

[00:12:55]Researchers were looking at what predicts sexual satisfaction in older gay men. What they found is worth sitting with. Something they called internalized gay agism. The belief absorbed from a culture that worships 28-year-olds with abs that you're now obsolete. That belief predicted lower sexual satisfaction. The path was indirect. It worked through body image.

[00:13:20]In statistical terms, they found what's called a complete mediation effect. The agism doesn't hurt you by itself. It hurts you by convincing you your body is disgusting and then the disgust does [music] the damage. Think about who taught you that. The same culture that reduced you to a body when you were young is the one now telling you your body has expired. It handed you the yard stick at 19 and it's still holding the yard stick at 66 and it's the same yard stick. You just move down it. The same study found something else, and this one is a small piece of good news buried in the data. Men in open relationships reported higher sexual satisfaction than single and widowed men. Not because open relationships are magic, because connection, some form of it in some structure that fits your actual life, is the thing that pushes back against the agism story. The fool spent 40 years being told his desire was wrong, then 20 more being told his body was wrong, and no skin cream is going to walk him out of that. What walks him out is somebody touching him like he's not a problem to be solved.

[00:14:32]Let me hit you with one more piece of data because it explains something specific about Gen X that boomers don't quite share. University College London published a longitudinal analysis in early 2026.

[00:14:46]Researchers followed roughly 14,000 people across decades of adulthood.

[00:14:51]About 6,500 of them were born in 1958, late boomers. About 7,600 were born in 1970, Gen X. They tracked psychological distress across their entire adult lives. The finding was clean. The 1970 cohort reported higher average psychological distress across adulthood than the 1958 cohort. Not a little, consistently across the whole run. Sit with that. The Gen X cohort, your cohort if you're in that middle band, has been carrying more distress quietly for decades than the generation right in front of them. And if you overlay the gay experience on top of that, coming of age in a decade where the president wouldn't say the word, the culture wars of the 80s and '9s, watching an entire cohort of older brothers and mentors get sick in your 20s, you get a specific texture of exhaustion that a lot of straight Gen X men and a lot of gay boomer men don't quite match. Nobody built you a bridge out of that. You are still in many cases walking. Now, let's put it all together because this is the shape of the fool card. The archetype of a man walking off a cliff with a knapsack on his back, whistling because he was told the road went straight. The gay boomer or Gen X man who followed the best little boy script did everything right by the rules he was given. He earned the grades. He built the career.

[00:16:24]He kept the secret long enough to be safe. He curated the taste, the apartment, the friends, the abs, the [music] resume. He performed excellence so relentlessly that most of the people in his life have never met him. They've met the show. And now at retirement age, the show is expensive to maintain. The audience is shrinking. And the pension the show promised him is smaller than the version he thought he was buying.

[00:16:50]Here's the reframe. And this is the part that isn't too late. The fool card in the deck is a beginning zero, the start of the sequence. The fool walks off the cliff and something catches him because the whole game restarts every time he moves. What that means for a real man in a real body at 62 is that the pyramid was never actually the point.

[00:17:16]The pyramid was the scaffolding. You can climb down. Climbing down looks like specific things. It looks like calling the friend you stopped calling in 2014 because you assumed he was mad at you.

[00:17:28]He wasn't. He assumed the same thing about you. It looks like telling one person out loud the thing you have never said out loud, even to a therapist, especially to a therapist. It looks like joining the group. Any group, the gay men's chorus, the volunteer thing at the LGBT center, the hiking club, the grief circle, the specific one you keep saying you'll check out and then don't because showing up as a beginner at your age feels like a violation of the whole best little boy contract.

[00:18:03]Good. Break the contract. The contract is what got you here.

[00:18:10]It looks like money conversations you didn't have with a fee only planner who understands that your household structure is not the one the retirement calculators were built for with a lawyer about a will, a health care proxy, a power of attorney. Because if you don't have kids and you don't have a spouse, the state recognizes the default person making decisions about your body is nobody. And nobody is a bad choice. It looks like being loved for existing, which is a skill, which you were never taught, which starts with letting one person see you without the show for 1 hour and not dying of it. The fool in the tarot walks off the cliff with a small white dog at his heels, barking.

[00:18:58]The dog is trying to warn him. [music] And the whole trick of the card is that the fool has to keep walking anyway because standing still on the edge is where he actually gets hurt.

[00:19:11]You've been standing still for a while now. Beautifully, impressively, in excellent shoes.

[00:19:19]Take [music] the step.

[00:19:22]Actually, before you go, one more thing [music] because I don't want to leave you on a poetic image and call it groceries.

[00:19:30]The behavior trace we walked backward has a forward direction, [music] too.

[00:19:35]You built the best little boy in about 15 years from roughly age 7 to 22.

[00:19:40][music] That's how long it took to install.

[00:19:45]It does not take 15 years to loosen.

[00:19:46][music] It takes about 18 months of small, embarrassing, unimpressive moves, the kind that would horrify the seventh grade version of you who was busy being flawless in a locker room.

[00:20:00]Ask for help with something you could technically do yourself.

[00:20:04]Say you're tired when you're tired.

[00:20:07]Cancel the dinner you were going to charm your way through and stay home and be unimpressive at nobody.

[00:20:14]Text the guy first.

[00:20:16]Overpay for the therapist who specializes in gay men over 50, not the one your insurance likes.

[00:20:24]Get the physical you've been putting off.

[00:20:27]Look at the retirement number. Actually, look at it with somebody in the room so you don't have to look alone.

[00:20:35]None of that is glamorous. None of it will get you a standing ovation at a dinner party. That's the point. The applause got you here. Something quieter has to get you the rest of the way.

[00:20:49]All right, go watch the one on the screen. I think it's the right one for