The Gay Beards, popular on both Instagram and YouTube, talk to NBC OUT about the bety of iendship and why they've been "practilly separable" for nearly 20 years.
Contents:
- GAY HISTORY: WHEN DID WE TURN ON THE MOTACHE?
- 'THE GAY BEARDS' DEMYSTIFY THEIR ENDURG FRIENDSHIP
- JAM BEARD: THE CLOSETED GAY LIFE OF THE MAN BEHD THE AWARD
GAY HISTORY: WHEN DID WE TURN ON THE MOTACHE?
A woman who dat a closeted gay man to help craft a hetero image is lled a beard. See: evangelil pastor Rick Warren’s goatee; the Duck Dynasty clan’s pairg of wild beards and entrenched homophobia; and Speaker of the Hoe Pl Ryan, who has attributed his growg beard to a pact unrtaken by his bow-huntg club. In the early 20th century, as the beard cled Europe and the rporate shave ascend, a sophomoric svenger hunt swept Bra: Whenever a beard man was spotted, players peted to be the first to yell “beaver!, ” rackg up pots for every scff they claimed.
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.
'THE GAY BEARDS' DEMYSTIFY THEIR ENDURG FRIENDSHIP
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.
JAM BEARD: THE CLOSETED GAY LIFE OF THE MAN BEHD THE AWARD
” 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.