Why do gay men get gray hair earlier, if they're Peter Pans?

There's one big apparent counter-example to my theory that the gay syndrome is infantilization, caused by some kind of brain pathogen that slows / halts maturation in childhood (building on Greg Cochran's "gay germ" idea). And that is that gay men's health degrades much faster than normal men's. They die earlier, and they have worse prognoses for a given disease compared to normal men.

This is only a problem for the theory if we ignore the obvious -- their earlier onset of degradation is due to their wicked sexual behavior. It is physically corrupting, and their outcomes are proof of that. The root causes are number of partners and filthiness of the act.

Where else do we see evidence of their earlier aging, aside from the natural places to look like lifespan, prognosis for heart disease or diabetes, and so on? Their skin goes to hell a lot sooner than it does for normal men -- they start to look like mummies early on. That can be hard to quantify and find confirmation of in "the literature" or in journalism, though.

The other main sign of aging is de-pigmentation of the hair. For normal men, graying hair will become noticeable during their 40s and become fairly visible during their 50s. Ditto for women -- it is the normal timing for both sexes. During your 30s, you shouldn't have more than the occasional gray hair here or there.

I've noticed a common weird look among queers, where the guy will be in his 30s and already be noticeably gray, or fully gray-to-white by his 40s. Their bodies haven't totally broken down yet, so it creates a very incongruous look that is hard to ignore -- 50-something hair on a 30-something, 60-something hair on a 40-something.

Think of Anderson Cooper, whose hair began graying around age 20, and had further de-pigmented to silvery white before age 40. Dan Savage, another prominent queer, had dark gray hair by about age 40. Closeted actor George Clooney showed clear graying by age 35. Another closeted actor who played one of TV's first mainstream gay characters, Kerr Smith, was fully silver before age 40.

There aren't that many famous gays out there, and the above are only a small sampling of the gray-haired ones. That suggests a huge gap between normal and gay men right there.

To investigate further away from celebrities, I looked for academic articles, which I could not find right away. However, the most prominent gay magazine The Advocate ran a cover story on "Silver Foxes" in 2008. Skip past the first page of the drama queen story of how the author dealt with the discovery of his first gray hairs, and read what the people interviewed have to say. A sampling:

[T]he silver fox also encompasses guys in their 30s, even 20s, who are sexy, in shape, and have some to a lot of gray hair... As one 26-year-old told me, "It adds to their sexiness when guys in their 30s have gray hair..."

Gray hair is "cool now," says Andrew Weir, one of the fashion world's go-to guys for casting advertising campaigns and editorial features. In his work scanning the streets for "real" men and women to model for his client' projects, he says he's noticed a definite rise in the number of silver foxes. Forty-one years old and graying, Weir is one himself...

It's a trend that New York psychotherapist Brian Lathrop has noticed among his predominantly gay male clientele too. In the last few years, he says, his clients in their 30s and 40s have shown a greater acceptance of turning gray in a way that's markedly different from just a decade ago. "They're not treating it like a symptom of aging," Lathrop says. Instead, they're making it work for them. "It's not hypermasculine, but truly masculine."...

A sales executive who cut his teeth at L'Oréal, Pestorius says his colleagues there encouraged him to dye his hair when the gray came in strong at 28. He colored it every four to six weeks but eventually grew tired of the high-maintenance routine...

So I'm unprepared when Travis Parman, a 35-year-old media relations representative for General Motors in New York, sounds as blasé about his silvery 41-year-old partner, John Davis, a health-care consultant...

But it's Justin Conner -- unabashedly gray since his college days at Vassar -- who really surprises me. As he's only 25, I suspect he’s on the leading edge of a full-scale generational upheaval when it comes to men, gray hair, and age...

Jeez, unabashedly gray since college -- getting stuffed up the butt sure takes a toll on the body.

I'll take this article as confirmation of my hunch. They certainly aren't like-minded researchers whose work I'm citing because it supports my worldview. The whole piece is about how nowadays queers are starting to embrace the signs of their advanced aging and degradation -- own that mummy skin, girlfriend! Gray hair before 30? Hey, if you got it, flaunt it! But buried in this puff piece is some good on-the-ground data that you otherwise would not be able to find.

If this view is right, then the tiny number of normal men whose sex behavior resembles that of a queer should also show early graying of the hair. Porno actors are the only place to look, since no normal guy will ever have as many partners, nor dirty himself so much during sex, as a porno dude. Aside from anal sex (where, however, they are never the recipient), they also eat pussy and/or ass in just about every one of their scenes.

A year or so ago I saw something weird -- a porno actor who looked to be a normal 20-something guy, only his hair was entirely gray. "Huh," I thought. "Usually they make these guys take steroids, wax their nuts, take Viagra, etc. All signs of body dysmorphia -- you'd think they'd make a 20-something dye his silver hair a natural color." Keiran Lee, gray-haired before turning 30 (fully clothed picture). Let that be a lesson to any of you perverts who think there's nothing wrong with burying your mouth in a gash or an ass.

We already know that the main predictor of whether a man will get cancer of the oral cavity (after smoking) is how many chicks he's gone down on. Add head and neck cancers, too. They've even narrowed the pathogen down to HPV, the same one that causes cervical and genital cancers in women. Guys who hoover up a woman's fluids that contain HPV are in for a rude awakening.

That piece in Nature also notes that researchers are unclear if it's only oral sex that increases the risk of cancer, or if enough French kissing will do the trick too. Recall this earlier post that shows how recent a lot of our weird sexual behavior is, compared to what we did as hunter-gatherers. It wouldn't surprise me if many diseases turn out to be cryptic STDs, including from spit-swapping.

As for gray hair, I can't tell if it's due to a specific pathogen that attacks the cells that give hair its pigmentation, or some part of the brain that talks to those cells, or whether it's just one part of the broader breakdown in the face of so many stressors of the immune system. Or perhaps if the body senses that it is living an incredibly "fast" lifestyle, it withdraws resources from bodily maintenance and puts them into mating effort instead.

Whatever the mechanism turns out to be, it's clear that gray hair can now be added to the wider syndrome of advanced aging in the gay population. Condoning and even encouraging their warped behavior will only worsen their syndrome. But your typical fag-ophile is concerned less with preventing disease among gays, and more with broadcasting their own ideological purity. Being "on the right side of history" means more to them than whether or not they cluelessly egg on another AIDS epidemic.