Why gay men.in 80s had short haircutsand mustaches
ESSAY ‘Hey bro, kind beard’
We meet in the narrow doorway of a bar: I’m going inside, he – somewhere in his thirties, covered in tattoos, bushy beard – is leaving. We pass somewhat clumsily. But when we look at each other, his eyes begin to twinkle. Have we met before? No, right? He stands in the doorway, nodding appreciatively. His grin makes way for a smile, imbued with affinity. ‘Hey bro’, he says with a warm chuckle, ‘nice beard…’, and he continues on his way.
Zeitgeist
Until 17 September ’23, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris presented Des cheveux et des poils (Hair & Hairs), a major exhibition exploring hairstyles in Western art history. Hairstyles in the broadest instinct of the word: from haircuts to moustaches, beards and body hair – shaven and unshaven. By placing the exhibited artworks in the context of their time, the museum showed how a particular hairstyle and its popularity – as with all forms of fashion – are expressions of the obsessions and fantasies of the period from which they arise.
Christopher Oldstone-Moore, composer of the book Of Beards and Men – The Exposing History of Facial Hair, carries this through to beard fashion. ‘Every
The Caftan Chronicles
Hi Caftaners. Ugh, it’s a frozen and rainy day in NYC! (I wrote this on Saturday…it’s actually MLK Day now.) And I have to go out in this mess later to see Pam Anderson in The Last Showgirl (postscript: I wasn’t irrational about it…didn’t think it was a great script although Pam and Jamie Lee Curtis were great) and then to own a little twirl with friends at the move party Harder. I’m pleased I slept in this morning! As for the inauguration, I am taking my cue from Michelle Obama and squinching my eyes tightly closed, sticking my fingers in my ears and going “La la la la la!” (postscript: I spent exactly 10 minutes reading The New York Times coverage of the inauguration…and moved on.)
Recently, having wanted to do a Caftan fashion post for a while, I started wondering if there were any experts or historians of queer men’s fashion, and a little Googling brought me to Shaun Cole, 58, an associate professor of fashion at the Winchester School of Art in the UK. He actually published in 2000 a book called (and how could it not be called this?) Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress in the 20th Century .
He also more recently published a book about
Fashion and Homosexuality
Throughout the twentieth century, clothing has been used by lesbians and gay men as a means of expressing self-identity and of signaling to one another.
Male Cross-Dressing
Even before the twentieth century, transvestism and cross-dressing among men were related with the do of sodomy. By the eighteenth century, many cities in Europe had developed small but classified homosexual subcultures. London's homosexual subculture was based around inns and public houses where "mollies" congregated. Many of the mollies wore women's clothing as both a form of self-identification and as a means of attracting sexual partners. They wore "gowns, petticoats, head-cloths, nice laced shoes, furbelowed scarves, and masks; [and] some had riding hoods; some were dressed favor milk maids, others like shepherdesses with green hats, waistcoats, and petticoats; and others had their faces patched and painted" (Trumbach, p. 138).
Male homosexuals continued to cross-dress in both public and private spaces throughout the nineteenth century. In the 1920s, the Harlem kingly balls offered a safe space for gay men (and lesbians) to cross-dress. Similarly the Arts Balls of the 1950s in
The Caftan Chronicles
Hi Caftaners! Well, I said I was serious about balancing all the serious shit we’re going through right now with fun stuff, and I meant it. And this is definitely a FUN WEEK for Caftan. So I possess for you Boswell Scot, owner of the very cool Best Barber NYC shop on Tenth Route in Hell’s Kitchen. I actually met Boswell a bit more than 10 years ago, right before he opened his shop. I found him to be the sweetest fresh man and I remembered that he once told me the tale of his incredibly painful coming out to his Jehovah’s Witness family and society in Florida, and how he managed to produce a life and locate a chosen family for himself despite a level of rejection that might’ve broken a lesser person.
And how did we reconnect? Well, I got an email one day recently saying that Boswell had become a paid subscriber to my Caftan thing, which prompted a thank-you reply from me and got us chatting over email. As we did, I started thinking about hair and how hair says EVERYTHING about a moment in time (a favorite game of mine is looking at former photos and trying to guess the exact year the photo was taken based on the hair and the clothes…and I usually hit the bu
The Return of Hairy Men
The striped pole signifies an age-old trade, but the second coming of the barber shop — and the attention to male hair it signifies — is far more likely to involve hipsters, sports stars and ultra-trendy beards.
This story was first published in the January 2015 issue of Metro. Photos of Flash City, Ponsonby, by Josh Griggs.
At the railway crossing at Glen Eden, a local history board lists a barber shop as one of the first businesses in the fledgling 1886 settlement. Today, directly across the road is Eight One Eight Barbers, a plain white space with one large hip-hop graffiti piece on the wall and Sanctify Tattoo Studio out the back.
Across the metropolis there’s a network of barbershops, each with a different culture — hip-hop to hipster, ethnic to traditional — but cutting remarkably similar variations of the tight military fade at similar prices ($20–$30). Top haircut is the Sonny Bill (after rugby star Sonny Bill Williams), a modern comb-over with graduated shaved back and sides and shaved-in parting, sometimes boxed at the temple.
“Gents, short back & sides so in vogue” is chalked on one side of the sandwich board outside Green Bay’s