The Age of the Silver Fox

I first spotted the gray a couple of months before my 30th birthday–three or four strands glistening on my left temple. I leaned into the mirror for a closer look and confirmed my worst nightmare: I was officially old. Sure, there were only a few hairs now, but it was only a matter of time -- months, maybe a year? -- before I’d be totally gray and my youth would be lost forever. Call it hyperbole, but as is the case with so many men, much of my self-esteem is tied up in my appearance and libido. How would this baleful development affect my relationship prospects? More important, would I ever get laid again?

The Day I Went Gray: It could’ve been a Roger Corman horror flick for all the anxiety I felt that morning -- and continued to feel for weeks. Every day I’d check, hoping it was just a trick of the light. I wasn’t entirely certain (or maybe I was just in denial) until I sat in my hairstylist’s chair and told her what I suspected. She didn’t believe me, but then she bent down and homed in on the wayward hairs. She touched them, moved them around a bit, and then declared, in the relaxed way of someone clearly used to dealing with diminishing pigment (and fragile egos), “Yeah, they’re gray.” Then she snipped them off.

Gradually, the shock wore off, and I no longer felt negatively about the gray interlopers. I didn’t feel positively about them either. They were just a physical fact, something to which I grew indifferent, like the birthmark on my right forearm or the little moles elsewhere on my body. I have dozens of those babies, and they don’t make me less attractive, do they?

I was still wrestling with the answer to that question when one afternoon last winter I came face-to-face with a silver fox while at the grocery store -- and my insecurity about gray hair dissipated instantly like a bad dream.

I had seen silver foxes before, of course, and even counted some of them as friends, but this guy was different: He was stunning -- lean, attractive, skin unblemished. With his stylish clothes, Ferragamo shoes, and palpable sense of ease, he was a paragon of desirability -- and his thick gray hair only upped the sexy quotient. I wanted to sleep with him, date him, have his kids. And it was all the more enchanting considering this was in Chelsea in New York City, where the average gay guy still sports cargo pants and a fake tan. This man -- and he was definitely a man -- made the other guys look like mere boys.

Sure enough, I started to see silver foxes like him everywhere, these smoking-hot guys with toned torsos, obvious confidence, and insouciant hair, who weren’t decades older than me but only a few years. Wherever I was -- on Seventh Avenue, in my Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, or on business trips -- they seemed to flaunt their silver hair and masculinity as if they hadn’t a care in the world. I was beguiled. Now I couldn’t wait to go gray. I wanted to be a silver fox -- and to date one.