Jockstraps, Harnesses and Union Suits: The CEO of Nasty Pig Talks About How They Went from Pariahs to Popular Girls
"We had a note taped to our store door accusing us of spreading AIDS," recalls David Lauterstein, who created a gay slutwear empire with husband Fred Kearney.
Caftaners, it’s 2024! Are you scared? I am! What will this most consequential year bring?
Well, thankfully you can escape all things globally consequential right here at the Caftan Chronicles, where I deal mostly with gay things that a. happened years ago or b. don’t relate very much to broader world with all its perils and uncertainties. However, I do want to briefly follow up on my last brief post in which I said I’d joined a coalition of Substack writers urging the platform to moderate their content and demonetize/deplatform authors that traffic in overt Nazism, white supremacy and racism. What I learned last night from the coalition leader is that Substack, after originally outright refusing to do so, reversed its position and said that they would remove certain Nazi-esque authors from the platform because they violated Substack’s preexisting “no incitement to violence” rule. And that they would monitor content going forward. This news was reported by Casey Newton, who edits the very popular Substack account “Platformer,” whose threat to leave Substack seems to have played a key role in making Substack reverse.
I’m very happy we banded together to force some concessions from Substack because I actually like Substack and didn’t want to move this whole Caftan affair to another platform (although I still will if Substack does not follow through on its no-Nazis promise). So we’ll see how this goes! I want to reiterate that the only content I have a problem with personally is overtly hateful content that maliciously singles out people from certain identity groups. I am not a fan of censorship of positions I don’t hold myself, such as being against medical care for transgender people, affirmative action or drag shows. I think once you start calling for censorship of content beyond outright violence-inciting hate, you’re on a slippery slope—voices on both the left and the right start yelling “Censor that!” about every conceivable thing. Just because you disagree with something or are even personally offended by it does not mean it should be censored.
One more thing on this point: If you want to drop Substack a note saying that, as a reader, you were happy to hear that they will remove Nazis from the platform and monitor hate speech going, you can email their “Terms of Use” contact, which is tos@substackinc.com, with the simple subject line “Thank you for agreeing to remove Nazis from your site.” That should help keep the pressure on them to live up to their promise.
So that’s that and now we can get back to the fun silly gay stuff, which this month takes the form of an interview with New Yorker David Lauterstein, 53, who, about 30 years ago, started a little club/fetish/sexwear line called Nasty Pig with his then-boyfriend, now-husband Fred Kearney.
They started the business in 1994 out of a little storefront in Chelsea called Re:Vision (I interviewed them way back then for HX magazine when I was briefly the editor)…
…but then they moved a few blocks and changed the store name to Nasty Pig, which I remember thinking was a little spicy in the late nineties/early aughts even for NYC’s then-reigning gay ghetto.
I wanted to interview David (the outward-facing partner in the duo) because I’m interested in how the brand has evolved through time. It was started at a time when everyone, pre-U=U and pre-PrEP, was fearful and cautious about sex, so the idea of being a sex “pig,” of really letting go and having fun with body fluids rather than holding them back, was almost a kind of wistful fantasy that the brand was trading on. But now, more than a decade into PrEP and the reemergence of good old seventies-style bareback sex, it seems that the brand, rather than losing its taboo power, has only exploded in popularity—especially with a younger (let’s call them “fetish lite”) generation of gay men for whom wearing a harness to the club is a cheeky and somewhat basic fashion accessory rather than a sign of some commitment to the hardcore leather underground. What once had a whiff of danger about it is now mostly just—fun.
So here’s my attempt to get as semiotic as possible about gay slutwear. Enjoy! Already for February I’ve lined up an interview with one of my longtime favorite gay authors, who has a new book coming out. I’m so excited to read it and then talk to him about it, and about his life. (Speaking of novels, mine, Speech Team, has sold nearly 5,000 copies…please help me get to 10K in the coming months so I get a second chance with my publisher!)
From jockstraps to literature…I’m high-low! Isn’t that the best way to be? :) xTim
Tim: David, thank you so much for talking with me today. First of all, you and Fred live together?
David: We've lived together for 29 years, in Chelsea. We moved there in 2014. It's a one-bedroom in a prewar building with lots of original features like archways between the rooms and a sunken living room. We brought some modern design sensibility to it, stripping the floors and painting them gray and adding a lot of charcoals. In the living room, there's a large holographic image by Alexander McQueen's nephew and in the bedroom there's a painting of the moon that Fred did. He does everything. He built the light fixtures and night stands. He paints, sculpts, gardens—he's just a pure artist.
Tim: Do you have pets?
David: No. We had two dogs that we got within a year of meeting each other but they both passed away a few years ago.
Tim: What is a typical day like?
David: I usually wake up around 6:30pm and he wakes up around 10. I wake up, take a piss and make some Café Bustelo coffee. I quick scan The Economist and hop on Instagram. Then I masturbate to amateur porn on Xtube or Twitter. I'm not much for highly produced stuff. I also don't use OnlyFans. Then I head to the gym, Crunch in Chelsea.
Tim: Do you wear Nasty Pig to the gym?
David: Yes, I wear Nasty Pig shorts, tank top, underwear and socks with Nike sneakers. I do "push" exercises one day, "pull" the next, legs the next—and I try to squeeze in some cardio. About an hour and 15 minutes total. Right now I'm listening at the gym to 100 Gecs.
They're this really hot duo. I also listen to Rosalía sometimes, classic house, techno, Beyonce.
Then after the gym I come home. If Fred is up I'll make us breakfast—scrambled eggs, chicken-apple sausage, English muffins, avocado, oatmeal—some combination of that. After that, it's hard for me to say what my routine is, because I'm a she-E-O. I work remotely Mondays and Fridays. Every Monday morning I meet with my board of advisers for 45 minutes to go over stuff, talk about leadership and the events of the world and how they pertain to my organization and my customers and how I can be the best leader for my team at Nasty Pig. There's a total of ten of us with offices next to the Eagle [longtime NYC leather bar] between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. We've done shoots there and sometimes the owner and me have private happy hours after work.
Tim: Can you give an example of an event of the world and how that might pertain to Nasty Pig?
David: I think the single most important thing for me to do as CEO is to make sure my staff feels safe and supported, understanding that everyone who works for me is a human being and that I'll never be as important to them as their health and families.
Such as, when the monkeypox outbreak happened [among gay men the summer of 2022], I was giving them as many updates as I could regarding what was going on behind the scenes with vaccinations. Or, one of my employees is a woman with a child, so if there's a school shooting I want to make sure she feels seen despite the fact that we're a majority-queer workplace.
Tim: Then what does the workday look like?
David: I come in and see what meetings I have on my calendar and work closely with my COO on things like design fittings. We're working on four seasons at once. Today I have a meeting to review Spring 2025, then a fit meeting for samples on Fall 2024, then a marketing meeting looking at Spring/Summer 2024.
Tim: What is the evening like?
David: Me and my man making and eating dinner and then lying on the couch and watching some Netflix or Hulu, being super chill and talking about creativity and the world.
He's a better cook than me. We make pasta with meat sauce, stir-fry chicken, chili—he likes to experiment. We're watching Shameless, which we never caught before. We like to dive into horror and sci-fi movies too. Then I go to bed between 9:30 and 11 and my husband usually stays up until midnight to 1:30.
Tim: Okay, great, thanks for that. So you were born—
David: In Brooklyn but I grew up in Westerleigh on Staten Island.
Tim: What were you like as a kid?
David: Pretty quiet and to myself but in high school I found a group of friends and marched to my own beat. Like many gay kids at the time, I was closeted and fearful but I expressed my queer identity through fashion. I definitely was influenced by goth and hip-hop street fashion.
I listened to a lot of hip-hop, alternative rock, punk and a little pop. I worshipped everyone from the Smiths and the Cure to Run DMC. Then I went to SUNY Binghamton upstate for college.
Tim: Did you think to yourself, as did many queer outer-borough kids back then, "As soon as I can, I'm going to live in Manhattan"?
David: Yeah, I started coming to Manhattan without my parents when I was 13 or 14 to shop for music and clothes, then every weekend sneaking into clubs like Palladium, the Tunnel, Limelight. Then in college I'd go to Mars, the Red Zone, [Larry Tee's night] Love Machine—and a lot of hip-hop clubs. I majored in poetry in college.
Tim: Really? Wow. What drew you to that?
David: I started writing poetry in first grade. I really related to it—I don't know why. I started listening to hip-hop when I was ten years old. In college, at SUNY Binghamton upstate, first I was premed, then prelaw, but then I switched to poetry even though it was an insane choice of majors. I really love poetry.
Tim: Yes, I saw some of your poetry on your Instagram.
What poets do you love?
David: [Rappers] Chuck D. [from Public Enemy] and KRS-One, and Sylvia Plath, e.e. cummings and Oscar Wilde.
Tim: Do you have a favorite poem?
David: That would be tough. My favorite book of poetry is Ariel by Sylvia Plath. I love the poem "Lady Lazarus."
Tim: What do you love about Plath?
David: There's a rhythm to how she wrote. It's relatable and not particularly lofty. Poetry can be very esoteric, but hers cuts through and gets to the heart of who she is as a human being. She's using it to work out her own demons.
Tim: Okay. So after college you move to Manhattan in 1992. What was that like?
David: My aunt and uncle, who are these wonderful insane very successful New York artists, had a studio apartment on Park and 34th in this very beautiful Deco doorman building that they rented to me. I was very fortunate to be able to live alone in my first apartment. They charged me $750 a month. I painted one of the walls with a silhouette of a woman's head with tree branches coming out of it. My bathroom wasn't particularly clean, which my then-boyfriend and current husband pointed out to me.
Tim: And when did you come out?
David: On Park and 32nd St., in the car of my straight best friend. We were very stoned and I remember being really scared to tell him, but he said, "It's okay, dude, I love you anyway." He's still my best friend.
Tim: And when and how did you and Fred meet?
David: On May 6, 1993, at a gay bar in Chelsea called The Break—
Tim: I used to live across the street from it. I was there all the time.
David: —at Dollar Margarita night on Thursday. I was supposed to meet a guy there who didn't show up, so I ended up talking to Fred. We left together and walked a couple blocks to his apartment and I asked if I could come up to use the bathroom but really I wanted to suck his dick. And I did. But later that night, I wrote in my journal that I needed to find someone meaningful in my life but that it would never be Fred.
Tim: Why?