Who Gets to be A Daddy?

 

By Mark Harris

The New York Times

I KNEW THE day would come, but I didn’t expect it to arrive with such savagery. It was a late spring evening. I was strolling down the street in Provincetown, Mass., with my husband when a car pulled up and a young, confident male voice — an unmistakably gay voice, and yes, there is such a thing — targeted both of us with stinging exactitude. “’Sup, daddies?” the voice said, the speaker barely bothering to conceal his sneer as the car sped away.

The indignity! Gay men never run out of vivid new ways to call other gay men old, and I should note here my complete certainty that this (admittedly accurate) assessment is precisely what was happening in that moment. Whoever that guy might have been, and whatever activity of interest to other 24-year-olds he was undoubtedly racing off toward, I’m quite sure that what he meant was, “OMG, I can’t believe you elder gays are out in public on a Saturday night!” rather than, say, “We saw you across the room and we dig your vibe.” He did not mean “daddies” in a good way, which made it all the more injurious because there is currently such a vast array of good ways in which to call someone a daddy, and the word is everywhere. Gay culture is, to put it in cross-generationally comprehensible terms, in its Daddy Era. And like many queer trends, it is both deeply suspect and kind of glorious.

The daddy thing is so widespread in popular entertainment, both gay and, more and more, straight, that its darker implications (which I’ll get to shortly) have become largely overshadowed by its playful ones, which, at their most benign, basically add up to an assertion that there’s nothing more magnetic than a man who ages well. The always-ahead-of-the-curve playwright Jeremy O. Harris was one of the first to the party with a 2019 Off Broadway play, titled “Daddy,” about the imbalanced relationship between a young Black emerging artist and an older white collector (of art and young men) that explored the most troublesome elements of that dynamic, as well as the sexiest aspects of its push and pull. It starred a brazenly confident and sometimes startlingly naked Alan Cumming, whose casting proved to be perfect; Cumming’s public persona has, over the decades, aged — sorry, that’s the wrong word; daddies mature, like wine or T-bills — from the unmenacing straight love interest in “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion” (1997) to the decadent omnisexual adventurer of Broadway’s “Cabaret” (the 1998 and 2014 revivals) to the intimidating kilted daddy of the U.S. version of the ongoing competition series “The Traitors,” in which he presides with casual menace and cool authority over visitors to a castle where, even amid a cast full of reality TV stars, he’s the alpha.

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He’s in an increasingly crowded company. “Daddy” has started to show up everywhere in movies and on television — that is, everywhere that requires a middle-aged tough guy with a sense of irony and at least implicit off-camera heteroflexibility. The 2023 Peacock comedy series “Bupkis” took it unashamedly into the straight-bro realm in a viral moment in which Pete Davidson — gormless, goggle-eyed, at 29 a quintessential nondaddy if ever one existed — encounters the Marvel Cinematic Universe veteran Sebastian Stan, then 40, playing a surprisingly grizzled and hard-ass version of himself. In the scene, Stan marches furiously into a coffee shop and lambastes Davidson for using his Apple TV account and buying “112 individual episodes of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’ … Why didn’t you just bundle it? Why don’t you [expletive] stream it for [expletive] sake?” Davidson, both intimidated and evidently dazzled, gazes at him up and down and says with quiet awe, “You are what we call a daddy. Such a daddy,” then asks for a selfie. (Stan punches him.) Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers’s podcast “Las Culturistas,” the infallible barometer of all things queer and iconic or queer and disposable, held a mobbed prize-giving ceremony in June that included a Daddy Award. It went to “The Last of Us” (2023) star Pedro Pascal, 49, a prestige TV daddy, who, as daddies must, appeared to get both the joke and the flattery.

Even younger guys want in on the action. In a Vanity Fair video promoting last season’s Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” in which all three stars take lie detector tests in front of one another, Lindsay Mendez is asked by Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe, “Which of us do you think is the bigger daddy?” She pauses and says, “Dan,” adding, “No offense.” Radcliffe, who’s just 35, politely says that he probably won that face-off because he’s an actual father, but no — she gives the correct answer: the I’m-past-caring three-day stubble, the quiet confidence, the designated-driver vibe. … She knows a daddy in training when she sees one, and so do we. A younger straight guy snatching the honorific over a gay co-star who is four years his senior is an indication of how murky and inchoate daddy culture has become. And daddy issues can get blurrier when you’re talking to actual gay fathers, a relatively new ilk that the gay playwright Peter Parnell explored in his 2015 play “Dada Woof Papa Hot.” But the gay fathers I know are more than happy to own “daddy,” aspirationally as well as literally.

Before I ask the central question, which is, obviously, “Who’s your daddy?,” I should address the multifarious ways in which the whole phenomenon is … questionable. If we take “daddy” at face value, it’s merely an admiring label for an older man. Nothing wrong with that. But the minute you elaborate, oh, it gets messy in half a dozen ways. To start with, the celebrities most often called daddies by gay men are regularly straight or straightish — they’re guys who feed a fantasy that self-respecting gay men are all supposed to have outgrown at around the turn of the millennium, which is that under the right circumstances, on the right night, after the right number of drinks, maybe that straight guy would … he could … he might. Even at a moment when, officially, we all recognize and embrace the porous nature of sexual identity, this is a daydream we’re not really supposed to have anymore; it seems like a relic of an earlier era, one in which actual out gay celebrities were such a rare commodity that we had no choice but to find our idols elsewhere, either in celebrities who we assumed were in the closet or in those who we knew weren’t gay but wanted to pretend might be. It also feels like a relic in that it lionizes straight guys as somehow more inherently masculine, adult, ideal, correct — the things that gay men, in that antiquated formulation, wish we were. “Daddy,” when gay men drape it like a lei around the necks of hetero celebs, venerates the straight crush object and turns all of us doing the crushing into gawking, self-abasing wishful thinkers — in short, into Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in “Boogie Nights” (1997). At its darkest, it invites straight men to toy with us. 

An artwork showing Colman Domingo in a blue tanktop with earrings, a short beard and a gold necklace.

Sullivan’s “Colman”

(2024).Credit...Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Olivia DiVecchia. Source photo © Erik Carter/August

Are there other problems? Where to start? “Daddy” eroticizes a host of things we’re not supposed to eroticize. One is a father-son relationship — notoriously troubled turf for countless gay men — or a quasi-father, quasi-son relationship. That’s certainly a booming niche in porn (“daddy” was the fifth most popular viewed category on Pornhub’s gay site in 2023) and on hookup apps, where dad-son chatter is a form of texting foreplay that at least requires a little more creative energy than “into?” does but, until recently, has generally been removed from more polite conversation. “Daddy” also, more forgivably, eroticizes inequity — of power, confidence, experience, age and, implicitly, finances, especially if you take it as a shortened derivation of “sugar daddy,” meaning an older man of wealth and polish who supports a younger, attractive person without means. That’s far from the only meaning of “daddy,” and is not in itself gay, but let’s be honest: In any given encounter, daddy is probably paying for the meal and the ride home and calling the shots thereafter. Moreover, “daddy” is a sobriquet that implies a kind of worshipful servility on the part of the speaker, the same way that calling someone “king” does — after all, there’s no such thing as a daddy unless there’s a son who wants to call him that. The word says, “Use me, take care of me, school me, permit me to be your plaything, tell me what to wear and maybe buy it for me, too.” The very desire to be ordered around, bossed or dominated speaks to an appetite for a dynamic that is now frowned upon at universities, workplaces and the like. Where’s our self-respect? 

EH, MAYBE IT doesn’t matter. Because aside from all that, “daddy” is also a fun, impish, provocative, transgressive invitation to role-play — it makes sexual attraction a game and broadens the heretofore narrow and ageist range of who’s allowed at the table: Lots of men can qualify as daddies, depending on the eye of the beholder. In fact, the slipperiness of the definition — to paraphrase the Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 quote about obscenity, you can’t define it, but you know it when you see it — is one of the most alluring things about the word. Even its origins are intriguingly vague; aside from “sugar daddy” (used by gay men at least as far back as a 1977 cover story in Christopher Street magazine), it’s probably got some roots in “silver daddy,” itself a specifically gay appropriation of the old 1920s label “silver fox,” meaning a graying guy who can still get it. And starting around 2016, when it was used (in a heterosexual context) in a track by the singer Ty Dolla Sign, the label took a four- or five-year left turn into “zaddy,” which essentially means “daddy” with an extra zhuzh of appreciation. (It’s not entirely clear where the “Z” comes from, but if you pronounce the first “D” in “daddy” as “dz,” you get a sense of the teasing come-hither sibilance it automatically adds.) By 2019, this magazine was charting the zaddy’s “unstoppable rise” among fashion designers hiring older male runway models. But today, “zaddy” seems to be somewhat on the wane among gay men, partly because it has been so thoroughly pilfered by straight culture that it has lost its cachet; on Father’s Day, the X account of the ongoing television drama “Law & Order” posted four pictures of the actor Christopher Meloni, crossed out the word “Father’s” and wrote, “Happy Zaddy’s Day.”

Can “daddy” still mean anything in gay culture once a straight culture has appropriated it that ruthlessly? Sure. For one thing, the tweet wasn’t wrong. Meloni is an ur-daddy, a Mount Rushmore daddy, at least in an alt-universe in which Mount Rushmore is a major gay tourist destination. At 63, he has been a daddy for more than 25 years. (In pop culture, though not in life, it’s rare to earn the label before you’re 40 unless you’re aging disturbingly hard and fast.) It was his the minute he first appeared as Chris Keller, a serial murderer who becomes part of an exceptionally sadistic and warped love story plotline on the late ’90s HBO prison drama (and, not unrelatedly, gay cult classic) “Oz.” Balding, built like he’s made of a poured blend of fitness supplements and concrete, full of rage, corded with veins that look like they themselves have muscles, Meloni is a particular daddy type: a gym daddy, a rough daddy, a dangerous daddy, a daddy who seems like he’s woken up in strange places and said, “Did we … ?” The Broadway and TV star Morgan Spector is nearly two decades younger than Meloni, but he’s an indisputable daddy. (In fact, his robber baron character on HBO’s “The Gilded Age” was, over the last year, nicknamed Railroad Daddy by some gay fans.) He’s simmering, masculine, with a penetrating glower and a beard as deep and black as your dirtiest secrets. Yes, he’s straight and married to the actress Rebecca Hall, but he’s not above thirst-trap gym selfies on Instagram, which is the most daddy move there is: A daddy knows you’re looking and knows you like it and likes that you’re looking but will never tell you he likes it. Sexual orientation plays an undeniable role in this, but not a decisive one. If a celebrity is straight but you must go to Wikipedia to double-check, he might be a daddy. If you know he’s straight without having to check, he probably isn’t, although those parameters are open to fierce disputation. Oscar Isaac, photographed a couple of years back bestowing upon Jessica Chastain some world-class smolder at a premiere, has daddy vibes but, “Star Wars” shippers notwithstanding, he may be too unambiguously hetero to be a true gay-culture daddy. They can’t help it; they were born that way. So sorry, Jon Hamm, Idris Elba and Jake Gyllenhaal, you’re also eliminated on these grounds. We appreciate your interest, but please take your seats on the bench. (Actually, Jake? Don’t leave just yet. We’ve seen your work in musical theater and are currently re-evaluating your application.)

An artwork showing Morgan Spector in a white T-shirt and jeans with his right hand raised behind his head.

Sullivan’s “Morgan” (2024).Credit...Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Olivia DiVecchia. Source photo © Victoria Stevens/August

Nor are middle-aged gay men automatically daddies. Andrew Scott, of hot-priest renown? Not a daddy. Ben Whishaw? Not even close to dadditude. Nondaddies can still be wildly sexually attractive but if what they give off in their 40s is sensitivity, a haunted quality, a capacity to be hurt or even a hint of residual boyishness, then they’re probably not daddies. (I don’t make the rules; I simply report them.)

Besides, we don’t need new recruits; we’re already in a dadaissance, with the ranks of gay and straight daddies full to bursting. We have Colman Domingo, who has emerged this decade, after roles in “Zola,” “Euphoria” and “Rustin,” as a mad red-carpet daddy. Matt Bomer? With the new beard, yeah, he’s striding into the category as if he owns it. Chris Pine? The new blond-gray Chris Pine? Hell, yes. The fashion bloggers known as Tom and Lorenzo recently asserted that at the Milan men’s shows last summer, he was “serving you, daddy, all week long,” while noting that his look — a double-breasted tan Ralph Lauren suit, slicked-back hair, and a Hollywood golden age mustache, “tend[s] to add a good 15 years to his 43,” because daddy ness is always, on some level, about (over-)embracing maturity. Stanley Tucci is, needless to explain, in the Daddy Hall of Fame. Alexander Skarsgard is a complicated and rare genetic anomaly: the Nordic daddy. Gael García Bernal is the twink turned daddy, a difficult acrobatic transition for which he should be commended. Jason Momoa? He’s big enough to crush you but has a taste for statement jewelry and also looks like he might enjoy role play, so he’s in the club; one interviewer, to the actor’s evident delight, last year labeled his character “the daddy of the Justice League.” Ryan Gosling unexpectedly entered the daddyverse earlier this year during his Oscars performance of “I’m Just Ken,” when he good-humoredly dallied with his chorus boys, then kissed the hand of the male cameraman he was leading up onstage. Welcome, Ryan. We’d been hoping. 

Conversely, there are some things that a daddy can never be: overeager to be identified as a daddy. Needy. Unrelievedly earnest. A try-hard. Humorless. Unskilled at flirting. One rule of thumb: A daddy should be able to host “Saturday Night Live” and be credible as a romantic partner for at least 80 percent of the regular cast members.

LATELY, EXTREMELY ONLINE gay men and their brunch brethren have become exhaustingly fond, as we do because we are unrivaled both at inventing things and at running them into the ground, of referring to actresses of a certain age, authority and status as “mother.” I feel constrained to point out that “mother” is not the equivalent of “daddy.” “Mother” conveys immense esteem, but it’s simply the newest way of claiming a gay man’s century-old right — to create and rigorously curate a female pantheon. “Daddy” is more complicated: It’s about sexual desire and desirability, and also, on a more serious note, about the fraught and challenging relationship that gay men have to getting up in years. Too many gay men still think that we only pass through three stages: twink, 35 and nothingness. If you’re called a daddy in gay culture (or out of a car window), it’s still largely a finger being pointed at your age, at best a way of indexing your sex appeal against your length of time on earth, and almost always, implicitly, a way of saying, “I’m young.” This is even true when young gay men use it as a flirtation device. “You’re very daddyish today” can serve as a synonym for saying that someone looks attractively masculine or dominant, but it’s also a way of saying, “Your self-presentation at this moment is suddenly giving me a sneak preview of what you’re going to look like in five or 10 years.”

For decades in the mid-20th century, the Freudian take on gay men was that we were boys who had somehow had our development arrested on the way to male maturity, and the corollary homophobic insult was that all gay men had a morbid fear of aging. That’s a cliché that too many gay men have themselves been willing to embrace, especially in a culture that has long reinforced the idea that getting older equals losing desirability. It was further complicated by the fact that, for a long stretch of time — the first 15 years of the AIDS crisis — uncountable gay men were robbed of the chance to get older: Just when the first generations of post-Stonewall out gay men would have started to face aging as something other than a horror or an exit from attractiveness, catastrophe struck. But given that our life spans are normal and the population of AARP-eligible gay men is surging, maybe “daddy” is adaptive; maybe the honorific is a way of saying that gay men now have something that we were long deprived of — a robust living history, a collective family tree, elders who aren’t just fading repositories of accrued tragic experience but are enjoying vital lives. Maybe those guys aren’t sad; maybe they’re hot. Viewed thus, “daddy” is a way of rebranding all the stuff that used to connote aging — a beard suddenly streaked with trails of gray, a hairline that isn’t what it used to be, laugh lines that are there whether you’re laughing or not. In that light, there’s a generosity to the label. It sweeps away a longstanding stereotype — the pathetic old queen — that gay men were guilty of promulgating and instead tells us that we’re, at least potentially, an appealing type, a viable part of the gay universe, a commodifiable demographic. There are worse fates.

This means that the final stage of daddyness may soon be upon us; having started as a social media comment and turned into an aesthetic, it’s now on the precipice of becoming a marketing tool, which will be the sign of both its peak and its impending demise. On Amazon, you can buy a black workout T-shirt that says, in white letters, “It’s giving daddy.” Sigh. If history is a guide, we’re probably not more than a year from the one thing too many — the launch of Daddy, the cognac-and-sandalwood men’s fragrance, or “Daddy,” the streaming comedy-drama — that drives the trope into the ground. Until then, we should enjoy every moment of it and welcome every new member. ’Sup, daddies? We are here and, at least until it becomes uncool again, what we say goes.