They call me Mr. Shorts because of my red boxers, shorts, that is. That's about all you'll catch me in these days out here in California living the life style I have come to know and love when it's not raining of course or parching in the desert sun or earthquaking on our dancing faults. They call that the hula in Hawaii. Out here we just get the Malibu shakes, do the Mendocino twist, or jolt to the after-shocks that sometimes sweep through the snow-capped Sierras apres-ski. But it's our California, and out here we swing, well, if not one way, then another. So let us come to the point. I swing to the tune of the Silver Fox. That may require some explanation, so allow me to begin.    

Not long ago I responded to a sex survey. Oops! It's out in the open. Yes, I have been known to do "the thing." As in "swing." Mr. Shorts, a.k.a. Ben Boxer and Colonel Brock, is coming out! Been in the closet most of my life, but no more, baby. Out is out. Never told the whole truth in a survey before. I was interviewed in youth by the Kinsey Report on human sexuality. I lied about my experience of homosexuality. "None," I said. That was then. This is now.    

Is that the real you? Hey, baby, this is the real me! Let's hang it all out. At last!    

The survey asked for my self-identification. For the first time in my life of 63 years, I told them the truth:    

In prepubescence, I was intensely attracted to males in a non-sexual way, and then experimented with homosexuality and heterosexuality during and after puberty. Although I did not know the word at the time, I now would define myself as then bisexual, but inclined toward a taste for the male. I enjoyed homosexual contacts in ways different from the heterosexual ones. I loved boys, but felt the need for girls due to peer pressure and as a means of disguising my homosexual inclinations from family and friends. Exposure would have been disastrous. I fell in love with an older male when I was 15. He was married and a father. He taught me the intricacies of homosexual love and some advanced techniques of hiding it from the world. I continued the pattern of overt heterosexual and covert homosexual behavior through college and the military.    

In the military, the official and peer pressures to be heterosexual were enormous, almost crushing. In self-defense, I went so far as to marry, and the heterosexual side of me came to love my wife dearly, but when she died shortly after childbirth, followed soon by our darling daughter, I found solace only in homosexual encounters with fellow soldiers, an abundance of whom were willing and ready to enjoy them. We were linked in a great deception, swaggering manfully together in public, but seizing private opportunities for sensual tenderness man-to-man. "Dropping the soap" in the shower was for us infinitely more than a joke. Those clandestine moments marked by sexual ecstasy and further exhilarated by the thrill of imminent discovery comprised an unparalleled bonding with my kind.    

As my life continued, women found me appealing perhaps less for my looks than for my understanding heart. Their pursuit of me was often relentless, and I succumbed to their advances, if rarely with deep emotion. That was reserved for my intense and often obsessive secret relationships with men although I did, while still young, marry again. She was an older, wealthy woman who found me dashing and presentable to her international set of friends. I abstained from homosexual behavior during this marriage, quite frankly, in hopes that the great bugbear of my life would simply go away with maturity. What maturity ended was the marriage. I could no longer bear the pressure of my true nature suppressed. We divorced.    

I embarked on a career in journalism which took me around the world. I continued to enjoy superficial relationships with women, sometimes resulting in sex which often proved more pleasurable for them than for me. I came to look upon these moments as the death throes of my heterosexuality because rising out of the ashes of each was always a new guy wherever I found myself in the world. Quick contacts were the name of that game in most instances, but a few were of some duration.    

Then, at 26, at a gentlemen's club in Boston, I saw a man's reflection in a mirror. He turned to me, and the deed was done. We fell instantly in love. No doubt about it, I was gay. That relationship lasted for several years and confirmed me as utterly homosexual in the physical sense.    

Because of the generally youth-oriented attitudes of the gay male, my sex life petered out, you might say, during my late forties and through my fifties until I finally attained the status of "60 Plus," a magic line of demarcation, and entered the world of the Silver Fox, where the mature male is idolized most often by younger men, but sometimes by men of his own or greater age. He is frequently sought after for his presumed wisdom, substantial physique and other elements not popularly associated with gay culture per se. It comprises, in essence, a subculture of its own, a crossover between the gay and the straight communities because many of its adherents are or were heterosexually married and are, in a great many cases, fathers as well. Here the mature man, bisexual or exclusively gay, or, I understand in a few cases, actually straight but spurned by women in his old age, may find love and intimate sexual associations beyond his wildest imaginings, but with other males.    

Exit a lonely, unhappy, sexually unfulfilled, end-of-the-line kind of guy and enter Mr. Shorts! "Life begins at 40?" For me, after 60 is where life has newly begun, and, baby, the line forms to my rear.