How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [30]
Underwear: All straight women should fall down on their knees and thank homosexual men for creating and promoting sexy underwear for guys. Before 1990, most straight men didn’t give a hoot about what they wore down there. Underwear was a drab item.
Then came the Mark Wahlberg underwear advertisements shot by gay photographer Bruce Weber. These Calvin Klein spreads were a milestone in male beefcake. Suddenly, “Marky Mark,” a former boy-band singer and solo artist, was transformed into an erotic fantasy in his tighty-whiteys. I remember walking through Times Square sometime in the 1990s, when the famous half-naked Marky Mark billboard hung on Broadway. “I’m weak in the knees—it’s so beautiful I can barely look,” said my gay companion, Tom.
Weber went on to photograph many more attractive young men in their briefs and boxers, as did Richard Avedon. Designers such as Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Tommy Hil figer promoted lines of sexy men’s underwear. All of America became male underwear-obsessed. When then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton was interviewed on MTV in 1992, a female reporter asked him if he wore boxers or briefs. He weighed in with briefs. Is it just a coincidence that we first learned Clinton’s underwear preference, and then, six years later, found out that his penis was crooked? It’s as if he was doing a gradual presidential striptease.
Peacock Clothing: Wladziu Valentino Liberace switched from standard tuxedoes to white suits in his 1950s Las Vegas act so that his audiences could better see him on stage. In doing so, Liberace opened up the way for fancy duds for men. Of course, Liberace didn’t stop at the plain white suit. He embellished it with rhinestones, velvet capes, feathers, and furs. Reportedly, Elvis admired the pianist and visited him often in his dressing room to talk about Vegas show business. What emerged was the “Fat Elvis” Vegas look of the late sixties and early seventies, a series of white pantsuits so effeminate that they made Elvis look curiously more masculine, like a guy who, even though squeezed into something that looked like his older sister’s prom outfit, still oozed masculinity. Other hyper-masculine Vegas types such as Tom Jones and Engelbert Hum perdinck were also affected by the Liberace style. The tradition of the straight entertainer dressed in sissy spangles continues to this day. Singer Chris Isaak is a great example.
Peacock clothes became popular for ordinary straight guys in the seventies—ruffled or blousy shirts, bright colors, shiny belts. The disco look and the leisure suits so many straight men wore toward the end of that decade had their origins in the gay disco look popularized by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.
The Amazing Nude Story of Abercrombie & Fitch
Every young straight man I know wears Abercrombie & Fitch. The clothing line is hugely popular with preteen and high-school boys. Many of them don’t realize that Abercrombie clothing until very recently was a favorite choice of gay men.
Abercrombie started out with a straight-arrow clientele. Founded in 1892, the company was an outfitter of casual and sports clothing with a rather stuffy reputation. A kind of a cross between Eastern Mountain Sports and L.L.Bean, Abercrombie & Fitch supplied expeditions headed by Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Byrd.
But in 1997 Abercrombie & Fitch sexed up their quarterly catalog, filling the pages with seminude young men, and a few women tossed in for good measure. The catalog was so popular with the gay community that it spawned a pornographic parody website, Abercrombie & Filth.
Naturally, the new catalog attracted many gay customers who quickly made Abercrombie their new Gap. “A&F is the poster child for gay apparel,” wrote Amanda Ryder in a 2000 InQueer Culture Review. A few years later, gay customers protested when the company reduced the number of male models in the catalog, saying that in deleting much of the homoerotic content, the company was turning its back on the homosexual market.
How gay was the content