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. “’Supbg- bwenas gaming, 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.
He’s in 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.
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