A Great Conversation with a UK Historian of Gay Men's Fashion (Yes, there is such a person!)
Shaun Cole's "Don We Now Our Gay Apparel" takes us from the New Edwardians to the hippie gays to the clones to the ACT UP skinheads to the skinny-jeans twinks to...what's going on now?
Hi Caftaners. Ugh, it’s a cold 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 crazy about it…didn’t think it was a great script although Pam and Jamie Lee Curtis were great) and then to have a little twirl with friends at the dance party Harder. I’m glad 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 gay 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 gay men’s style in the 21st century, but to be honest, it’s not as period-for-period specific as Don We Now… (which also, despite its interestingness, I wish contained more photos).
Even just coming off a personal loss in his family, Shaun generously agreed to talk to me, and we did, for about two hours, on Wed Jan 15.
This was such a fun conversation that I’ve tried to bring visuals to as much as I can below, for obvious reasons. I want to have another Caftan conversation on this topic at another point, maybe with someone who works in fashion or images. Since I was young, I’ve loved fashion—but to be honest, more popular fashion history—what certain people were wearing at certain points in time and what it said about them and about the culture at that moment. I’m less interested in what’s on runways and the goings-on of high-fashion per se. I’m more interested in what came off the streets that influenced runways, and then how mass retailers took the runway looks and put them all over the streets.
Do you have a favorite fashion decade? Hands-down, mine is the seventies. I love how women, especially working women, dressed in that decade (cue Mary Tyler Moore and Diane Keaton in Manhattan)…
I love how sexily men dressed (whether straight or gay)…
…and I love how the overall proliferation of Tshirts, jeans and sneakers signaled this decade that is often called the cynical post-Watergate “hangover” of the 1960s but that I’ve always seen as a decade of uninterrupted sexual and culture freedom and forward motion until we hit the chilling effect of Reagan and AIDS (which, of course, brought in flash and opulence that was vulgar but, well, let’s face it, fun to look at in retrospect.)
The only thing is that a lot of seventies clothes look heavy, itchy and unbreathable because of all the synthetic fabrics.
Here is a clip of Shaun and I talking about the meaning(s) of the gay clone that emerged in the 1970s:
Okay, here’s my convo with Shaun. I hope you enjoy. If you do, and if you’ve been enjoying these Caftans, and are not yet a paying subscriber (and my millionth thanks to all those of you who are), please consider becoming one. Oh! And did you see my post about the gay men’s literary retreat somewhere near(ish) NYC that I am co-trying to organize for May or June? Here is the link, which includes the “soft commitment” sign-up sheet via an embedded Google doc.
Shaun, thank you so much for talking to Caftan today about the history of gay men's style. How did you become a scholar of this?
In the early nineties, I was working at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the prints and drawings department, where I looked after the fashion-related materials. A woman at the V&A was curating an exhibit there called Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk, which was looking at the style of subcultures and "style tribes." So my job was to look through the archives for images.
At the time, I was dressing in a very skinhead style, which—even though the look has right-wing connotations—many left-wing gay men had adopted as a look associated with [the NYC-founded AIDS activist group ACT UP. Also for the exhibit, I wrote up a report on Kinky Gerlinky, which was a roaming nightclub in the late eighties and early nineties that was all about dressing up outrageously, including a lot of drag.
And that report was basically about gay styles, which I started doing research on—only to realize that while quite a lot had been written on the history of lesbian styles, there was nothing comprehensive about gay men. So I wrote this report, which led to Don We Now... four years later, which prompted a lot of invites to speak at universities and talk on TV and radio.
And that's how you became the gay men's fashion history expert. Do you still follow gay men's fashion?
Not so much. As a man of a certain age (58), I go out much less than I used to. But I'm often invited to universities to talk about this, so I meet young queer people who are still out on the scene. And I'm constantly still looking at what people are wearing and asking myself, "Am I reading this man as gay?"
What is the through-line of the book? That we have always dressed in a kind of code to recognize one another?
That was a big question for my second book, Gay Men's Style: Fashion, Dress and Sexuality in the 21st Century.
What is gay style? Is there such a thing? Is there only one gay style? All the men I asked had slightly different answers. Some said that gay men wear things in a particular way, or they wear particular types of clothing. Others would say it's more about an attention to detail. And a lot of men would say it's harder and harder to tell [gay men's from straight men's style] these days. But I think that there's a certain segment of the gay male and the broader queer community that is interested in pushing the boundary about what is conventional to wear.
Hm, yeah. Where in London do you live?
Wimbledon.
Oh, that's a rather posh suburb, yes?
Yes.
Okay. Well, where I live right on the not-very-posh immigrants-meet-hipsters Queens/Brooklyn border, that's both Ridgewood and Bushwick and I swear sometimes I am the only queer person in this whole area who's 55, because it seems all the queer people in my area are roughly half my age. If I'd stayed on the West Side of Manhattan, I'd have more of a gay age cohort around me, but I don't. But walking around this area, and riding the L train almost every day, which is like the hipster fashion train, I like that it keeps me very attuned to what young people are wearing. And I too notice a lot of overlap right now between—let's just say gay men and straight men, knowing that a lot of these people are also nonbinary and transgender.
And right now, the overlap is a very nineties-redo baggy loose look, those chunky New Balance sneakers and baggy jeans or cargo pants, baggy sweatshirts and sweaters, vintage black leather car coats, which I remember making a big return from the 70s when I was young in the 90s.
But I do see gay and straight distinctions, the main one being that gay men will still wear tight things and show off more skin, like baggy jeans with a crop top or a tank top.
Or they'll show their thong under their baggy jeans. And even though straight men are wearing thigh-baring short shorts again, gay guys are still wearing their shorts tighter and/or shorter.
The other thing is jewelry. All the guys will have an earring but gay men are more likely to have a dangly one, or just more attention-getting jewelry in general. Then there's the whole pearl choker thing—but I've also seen this on straight-appearing Black and Latin guys at my gym. It's interesting. I never could've predicted that someday straight men would be wearing pearls.
Shaun: Also, there's a very particular attention to men's butts now. When we were younger, building up your ass at the gym wasn't a thing.
That is so true. Remember all the muscle Marys who were built up above the waist and looked like chickens from the waist down?
I think there seems to be more focus on building up a particular form of bubble butt, which has a certain effeminacy about it that perhaps at one point gay men were desperate not to be a part of.
Wow, I have so many thoughts about the butt. Gay men have really embraced and centered the butt, the bigger the better, in a way that I absolutely don't remember when we were young.