Contents:
GAY HISTORY: WHEN DID WE TURN ON THE MOTACHE?
The Gay Mtache.
Gay men practilly owned the mtache the '70s, and now 's bee a symbol of men's health issu celebrated every year durg Movember. In honor of our hairy history, we prent the big gay mtach of our past. Forster whheld publitn of his groundbreakg gay romance novel Mrice until after his ath.
RENNTRE GRATUE GAY à PARIS, (75)
As gay inty and polics began to perate pop culture, we saw the emergence of the Castro Clone, often wearg a heavy mtache: a reference to the workg Joe. A group of men relax on the street durg the Gay Pri para New York Cy, June 1982. Barbara Alper//Getty ImagSo on one hand the mtache was aligned wh the stat quo (thk firemen and ps), while on the other beme shorthand (and ocsnally handlebar) for the sexual outsir: the swger, the porn star, the gay man.
But he argu that Magnum also reprented a mastream, TV-iendly offshoot of a popular gay look of the era: “The so-lled ‘clone, ’ wh his obligatory mtache, bomber jacket, beefed-up shoulrs and mcular butt unr tight jeans. This Freddie Mercury-que “clone” look had evolved turn, wr Peterk, om the subculture of “leathermen” the gay clubs of the 1970s, whose “sadomasochistic practis and role-playg flourished and beme a new homoerotic norm. ” and “Go Wt” featured both a leatherman and a mtached wboy, helpg to make Middle Ameri aware of the mtache’s proment stat gay culture.
Perhaps equally vastatg for the ’stache’s populary straight society was the nng joke the first four Police Amy movi — om 1984 to 1987 — which hapls male characters fd themselv trapped a fictnal gay club, the neon-l Blue Oyster Bar, where they’re forced to dance wh fuzzy-lipped leathermen. It was an creasgly unfunny gag, which simultaneoly managed to entrench a daft homophobic stereotype and torpedo the mtache as a macho stat symbol for straight men. What really ma mtach utterly unwearable, though, wasn’t so much their associatn wh gay and S&M subcultur but that — as epomized by those Blue Oyster sks — they beme the subject of ridicule.