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BEWARE: ALL OF THE THGS ARE GAY
Skny jeans: Gay. Also gay:Drkg 'tisMan-purs of any kdLattMacchiatosFrappucosAnythg that isn't a cht hair-ducg regular cup of that end, removg said cht hair, or any other hair. (Alopecia sufferers: Automatilly gay.
Y, those are all fely on the homo list. But when one particular look cropped up the post-Stonewall gay scene of the 1970s, was so popular—and so distct—that the guys who sported were dismissed as “clon.
)And while the nickname was ially pejorative, the clone perd marked perhaps the first time that gay men prented themselv wh a queer-signalg uniform that was a direct rponse to societal stereotyp. “The clone was a reactn to thgs you would see movi of gay men beg flty and nelly, ” says John Calendo, a wrer who lived LA and New York Cy throughout the 70s and 80s, and worked as an edor at the clone-cubatg sk mags Blueboy and In Touch for Men.
GAY PRI: THE HISTORY OF NIM AS A TOOL OF EXPRSN
He pots to the gay mstrel stereotyp the 1967 film The Producers, along wh the timid-lookg guys on the illtrated vers of gay pulp books wh nam like All the Sad Young Men. (Not to mentn the 1964 article Life magaze lled “Homosexualy Ameri, ” which scribed a “sad and often sordid world.
”) “That’s the kd of imagery”—backwards stereotyp that basilly villaized queer people—“that a lot of my generatn who beme the clone people grew up wh the ccible of the 60s, ” Calendo ntu, when the civil rights and gay liberatn movements were expandg ias of equaly and eedom.
Drsg like a clone, he says, was a rejectn of those olr gay ’s not so easy to ppot precisely who origated the clone ial, guys who were alive at the time ually brg up Al Parker, an adult film star turned producer and director who worked om the 70s to the early 90s.