Old Gays React to Troye Sivan Videos

The video above is the latest in the “Old Gays…” series of videos from Into on their Intomore YouTube Channel. They have a similar “Old Lesbians…” series, and in both cases they show people from earlier times what younger LGBT+ people are into now. It can be interesting and entertaining, and this one is a bit of both.

I wrote about Troye Sivan’s Blue Neighbourhood trilogy back in 2015, so I was interested to see what these older gay men thought of it, and that many of their reactions were similar to my own. I don’t know if that means I’m “old” or that what I saw is typical enough of old-ER gay men, or maybe even more common than that. But I kind of felt vindicated, for lack of a better word.

Later in the video, they talk about Troye’s song “Bloom” (video below). Apparently, he received a lot of flack for it because it is about bottoming for the first time, and because of the gender-bending visuals. He, however, was nonplussed [See “Troye Sivan Refuses To Feel Ashamed For Singing About Gay Sex” in Sydney’s LGBT newspaper, Star Observer].

One of the things that LGBT+ people don’t talk about very often is the divisions between and among us. We have sex-positive folks and deep prudes, we have hyper-masculine types and ultra-feminine, and we have people within our LGBT+ communities who hate those people. I don’t understand that, and it exasperates me when LGBT+ people start excluding other LGBT+ people because of who they are or how they present. It seems to me that people from a still marginalised community have no business oppressing anyone. Besides, they miss so many awesome people by being so bloody narrow-minded.

In any case, I still like Troye, and recognise his voice whenever I hear it. In fact, just this evening TVNZ’s “Seven Sharp” programme played a snippet of “Bloom” as their closing music. Quite a coincidence considering I was planning on this post.

There’s one thing more. There are so many young gay people on YouTube, young guys in particular, and even though many of them are really good at what they do and are interesting, it’s still really nice to hear from some older LGBT+ people, at least sometimes. I think we older gays deserve to have our lives and realities reflected, too.