How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [29]
Jeans and Pants: Hippies brought denim pants into mainstream America’s closets, but gay guys have defined how they’re worn, from the designer jeans of the eighties to the manly Levi’s 501s of the nineties and beyond. The fairly new “ripped look” started in gay circles—five years ago, young gay men in Hollywood (admittedly wasted young men) wandered around with holes in their knees and even in the seats of their pants. Now straight dudes also go for the street person/ holes look in jeans. Gay men also borrowed the new, longer shorts from the black community, and now even little boys are sporting gay-influenced shorts.
Khakis and Polos: Nicely dressed gay men have influenced straight America’s tastes. You know the ones I mean, in the nice flat-front dress khakis and exquisitely expensive shirts. As one straight guy I know puts it: “What does the average gay guy look like? Sort of like a soccer dad, only maybe with a tighter shirt. It’s hard to tell them apart.” Richie Rich, one half of the gay design team Heatherette, agrees: “Right now a lot of gay men are dressing like straight men did last year, and a lot of straight men dress like gay men of a couple years back,” he told The Advocate in April 2003. Seeing a straight man in a pink or purple shirt is no longer a rarity, even outside metrosexual circles. (A metrosexual, a term created by writer Mark Simpson, is a man who is straight but has gay habits and tastes.) Ah, the circle of fashion!
Body Hair: Consider the full, well-trimmed mustache of the late 1970s. It was born in the super-macho gay circles of New York and California, but it was made famous by Tom Selleck as Magnum. Take a look at old episodes of Magnum, P.I. Selleck, in his white short-shorts, tight T-shirts, and with big lip hair, appears “gay.” But Magnum was the epitome of the straight, “sensitive-man” look in 1980, when the first episodes were shot.
In hip gay circles, mustaches were mostly out by the mid-eighties, replaced by goatees. Young gay men everywhere began sporting tiny, scraggly things in the crooks of their chins. By the early 1990s, straight boys everywhere were having fun growing tiny bits of facial pubic hair—the minimalist goatee, also called a “soul patch,” was de rigeur on the slacker coffee-house scene. The goatee came in with a vengeance and is still around in straight circles, along with the scruffy, unshaved look pioneered by gay male models and taken up with a vengeance by young, straight movie stars.
Hair dye is also in for straight guys—no one automatically thinks a guy is straight if he gets blond highlights. Perhaps it’s the influence of Hollywood’s new leading men, who now have their hair dyed all the time, both for roles and for fun. Brad Pitt was identified as “the ultimate metrosexual” by Salon e-zine. Before Stonewall, it would have been unthinkable to know that straight actors dyed their hair. Would Gary Cooper have gone blond for a role?
Gay men have also influenced the absence of hair on heterosexual men. The very definition of a metrosexual requires waxed eyebrows and body hair removal. No more hairy backs! The Fab Five on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy have let all of straight America watch as they wrangle the body hair of their clients. (Yes, there are many hairy gay guys—known as “bears” or “otters”—but it seems that the smooth-bodied gay men have captured the hairless look that