When men meet me, they are forever telling me I look younger than I am, that I do not look in my 40s at all and are not happy that I am not grateful for the compliment. The presumption is that at my age, I ought to pay for sex if I want to expect any at all. Men insult and abuse me openly on these websites now as an older guy but, worse, they immediately tell me they are ‘paid guys’ (that’s the Indian term). To child sexual abuse activists, he was just a predator who had it coming. Hansal Mehta’s unwatchable Aligarh had to airbrush the old, slow-moving and unbecoming Siras into the palatable and hot Manoj Bajpayee and make the sordid sex between two older men (the second being a poor and middle-aged Muslim rikshawala) into hot sex between a hottie and a hipster. The older gay man was, and remains, a central source of exploitation, ridicule and murder (as with the not too distant murder of the 57-year-old banker from Besant Nagar in Chennai by four young boys), but is now the source of open ridicule. This is not to romanticise any earlier moment.
