Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, and the right to take your shirt off after 60

I turned 62 in June, and for the last several summers I’ve had the same ritual anxiety. As the days get shorter and my beloved sun starts to sink, and I gain another year, I ask myself: Is this the last summer I can run without my shirt?

I’ve spent most of my life taking rigorous care of my body. These days that means 45 minutes of super-set lifting, and nine mile runs, at least five days a week. My shirt comes off as soon as the temperature hits 70. And, every year I brace for the moment someone looks at me and thinks, "Look at the old man running without a shirt."

This summer, something surprising happened. Guys half my age, all under 40, started stopping me on my runs. Some of them I pass frequently, and in one case a 21-year-old started running next to me. They were guys who are genuinely serious about their fitness, the kind who look like they live at the gym.

They all wanted to know my age. When I told them, I got everything from "you’re insane" to "I would’ve guessed 50" to "wow” to “you are super fit." One 28 year-old “kid” gives me a high five every time he passes now and calls me his hero. And each time, I laugh.

I am no one’s hero, I respond to no one in particular.

Related: What it’s like to be a gay man at 60

I say this with humility, and for a reason. All my life, when talking about my looks, I’ve joked that I’m no Tom Cruise. Lately, I’ve started to question that. Granted, he’ll always be better looking than me, but in a lot of ways he’s having the same moment I am, just with a way bigger audience, and in some cases, a more visceral reaction.

At 64, Cruise appeared on the cover of GQ last week with his shirt open, belly button and all, and the internet lost its mind. “Gross,” one commenter wrote. “Ewwwww,” posted another. One woman said her 65-year-old husband — beer belly, six-pack a night, and doesn’t exercise — looks better than Cruise. True or not, that guy has a really loving wife.

Let me be honest: I’m not a Tom Cruise fan. I like his movies fine, but I’ve always found him a little phony, and I rolled my eyes hard when I saw him in a box at that recent Chiefs game, parked next to Taylor Swift like it was nothing. The internet questioned that pairing too.

But as a guy who spent 30 years in PR, I knew their chumminess wasn’t a coincidence. That’s a man with a movie coming out and a publicist who knows exactly what a photo like that does for ticket sales. I’d bet a lot of money the GQ cover was calculated too. Cruise had to know exactly what conversation it would start, and how many eyeballs would land on his name because of it. Cruise, if nothing else, is calculating.

None of that changes whether he’s earned the right to be on that cover. And he has, at least in my humble, borderline vain opinion.

No guy I know looks as good as Cruise’s at 64. I assume there’s been some help. There has to be, but good for him. What isn’t up for debate is the discipline that peeks out underneath his shirt. That kind of physique at that age doesn’t happen by accident. It takes decades of consistency.

Frankly, I think a lot of the people sneering at that photo are less disgusted than uncomfortable, because it’s easier to mock a shirtless 64-year-old than admit you haven’t done the work yourself.

All that said, it took Cruise’s cover shot for me to finally figure out why those guys have been stopping me on my runs. None of them were gay, and I’m not that lucky. The secret lies behind the comments under his cover shot.

Out of curiosity, I checked some of the profiles of guys who remarked favorably about Cruise: Each was way younger than him, athletic, clearly putting in real work. They admired someone at 64 who was still doing it.

I think those guys see Cruise the way I used to see men older than me in my 30s and 40s: as proof that it doesn’t have to end. That’s not vanity. That’s what a role model looks like.

It’s the same reason nobody said a bad word last month when Harrison Ford was photographed shirtless, biking around Los Angeles at 84. I checked the comments, and honestly, I hardly saw any nasty posts. Everyone from twentysomethings to that six-pack-a-night guy looked at those photos and thought, good for him.

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There’s a 20-year gap between Ford and Cruise, and somehow Ford gets a pass and Cruise doesn’t. That gap says more about us than about either of them. In other words, at 60 there’s still no excuse not to exercise. At 80, it seems out of reach.

Cruise doesn’t need my defense, and he’s not getting it because I suddenly like him more. He’s getting it because men my age — and frankly, especially gay men — know something about the pressure to look a certain way as the years go by. We deserve better than being called "gross" for taking care of ourselves and refusing to be embarrassed about it.

I live in New York City, and with the weather finally heading south- highs only in the 60s - I’m back to that nagging question of whether my shirtless runs are behind me. But Cruise has given me my answer: I’ve got at least two more summers of running shirtless ahead of me, and for that, I’m grateful to him for showing me that it’s possible.

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