Author: Mark Bittlestone
Mark Bittlestone is a stand-up comedian. He is also very gay man. Just a very gay man, doing a lot of straight-up gay stuff.
Sooooo you’re an “adult”, according to the law. But you don’t feel like one because our generation either doesn’t wanna get married or at least not until we’re 35 and has no hope of buying a house in any major global urban conurbation until we’re about 98. And on top of that you probably spent time in the closet and that has pushed back your natural entrance into the world of dating and relationships and adulting EVEN further.
But dw I got you: here are my top 5 tips on how to successfully GAY adult.
1) Resist it.
This is my approach. I regularly ignore all my responsibilities and go out and get battered on a weeknight. I prank my housemates all the time: recently I hid our toaster and pretended the plumber had done it.* I also dress like a child (or a straight man, tbf). I’ll also do shit like eat 12 Krispy Kreme donuts in a day, or the kind of thing you would expect people who have only recently been granted leave from parental control to do. Anyway, it works well for me, if you define “well” as lurching from one crisis to another, being permanently single and shitting yourself too often on a night out then yeah.
*Actually backfired massively on me because I’m the main one who eats toast and I was having to grill bread which is highly time consuming.
2) Embrace it.
Ok so to be a successful gay adult I think you need to: have a stable job, a circle of gay friends and have had at least one 3+ year relationship. Dunno about you but I literally fail on all counts, but if you want it: for the stable job you just need to do something fkn boring like accounting. For the circle of gay friends just date someone whose personality you like but you ultimately don’t fancy, break up on really good terms, then just stay friends with them and their group. Finally for the 3+ year relationship I honestly don’t know but I would say just set your standards super low and be really tolerant of incredibly annoying things???
3) Ignore it.
Just do you tbh. If, like me, you don’t care about “being mature” but also (unlike me) aren’t obsessed with doing incredibly immature things, and instead you’re just chill with who you are, I think that’s very positive. One nice aspect of gay culture is that, although obviously on the one hand it’s youth-obsessed, on the other there’s definitely more fluidity about age in friendship groups. I have 83, 45 and 21 year old gay friends and it’s not weird. So borrow good bits from each of their vibe and just do you. For clarity, when I say “do you”, I don’t mean have sex with yourself, though then again you do really only live once so yeah, whatever.
4) Plastic surgery.
Yeah so this is towards the extreme end I guess if you really don’t wanna gay adult you can just alter your appearance so that you look like you’re about 15. I haven’t had plastic surgery but I look like I’m about 15 anyway which is a MAJOR advantage in a culture where if you’re 30 you’re #AsGoodAsDead #amirite. What’s my secret? I wash my face with my own jizz every day.**
5) Kids.
I guess in our society the true descriptor of successfully adulting is having kids, whether or not that actually means anything. So I guess if you wanna gay adult you should have kids. Also if you’re gay parents it also probably means you’re good at admin, which is another adult thing, because between surrogacy and adoption and so on you’ve surely had to fill in so many forms (and probs test tubes with your spunk – although if you’re adopting don’t do this).