When the Fab Four first sang "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?" that age was still a long, long way from me. Not anymore. It happens this week: March 31, 1998. Happy birthday to me. Thank you, Beatles. Now I realize you had me in mind, and I can answer those questions as if I were posing them myself to the world at large.

Do you still need me, world? I would have answered "No!" on my last birthday, number 63, but not today. What happened? I found you, and you found me. Where? On the Internet, right here. This is the New World, folks. Dreams are spun on the Worldwide Web, and some of them even come true. Mine did.

A year ago, I was a lonely guy past middle age who thought my life was done. No one had made a sexual pass at me in seventeen years. Sure, I had friends and people who "loved" me, but nobody LOVED me! Understand? There were people who cared about me as a person, but none who cared to get into my now famous (or infamous) boxer shorts. There is a helluva difference, you know. The first is good, but the second is essential, for self-esteem.

Then I paid a visit to Chardees, a bar, club and restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, U.S.A., which might be considered the American mecca for Silverfoxes and their Admirers, a purpose served in England by The City of Quebec pub in London. In so doing, I strode into a foxes' lair and found myself for the first time among my own kind. Every gay bar I had ever entered anywhere in the world evidenced the usual in gay-male culture: young, younger, youngest men in search of their peers in age and most looking for the standard Di Caprio twink.

This was not so at Chardees. On every side I found men whose preferences defied all gay convention: older for older, older for younger, younger for older. When I say older, I mean 60 plus, but including in many cases the transitional group in their 50s.

Ben Boxer was welcome there as he had not been welcome in any gay bar since he was a youthful 40. And then the Internet. And the rest is like Christopher Columbus setting foot in the New World.

Yes, world of the Web, you prove every day that you need me as one of the Silverfoxes who come to this Clubhouse in need of you. What could be better than a symbiotic relationship like that, being needful of each other?

Do you still feed me? Yes! You feed my soul with the knowledge that getting older can be a blessing in disguise. You can find love here as you may not have known it on the younger side. Here you will be cherished for what you are now, not for what someone hopes to make of you. There are no make-overs here. Your character is an accomplished fact, and there is a man, old or young, waiting for you on this cozy turf of the aging gay, hoping that you will be exactly what you are: a fount of wisdom and a lover of love.

Gee, but it's nice to be 64!