Upscale, downscale - dressing and homosexuality - Column

BECAUSE MY CLOSET DOOR HAS ALWAYS BEEN AJAR, THE clothes I keep in it, from jockstraps to chiffon scarves, have been subject to the various revolutions that have occurred in gay men's fashion since the 1960s. Even now, as a menopausal frump in the throes of dowdy middle age, I am a living museum. of the average homosexual's complex and contradictory attitudes toward his clothing. One major "paradigm shift" I have participated in is our change of role models from the aesthete to the proletarian.

It all began with the matronly caftans I wore as a child, billowing ball gowns in which I swept about imperiously, flicking the hem of my train for purposes of dramatic emphasis every time I dropped a particularly wicked bon mot. By the time I reached puberty, I began to wear towering platform shoes and even to swish down the street twirling a cane, a prop that grabbed the attention of bewildered rubberneckers who stopped dead in their tracks--stunned, no doubt, by my unerring fashion sense. When coupled with the melodious tones of an affected British accent and the gauzy Isadora Duncan scarves that I casually tossed over my shoulder, my flamboyant outfits must have left an indelible impression on the residents of my hometown of Asheville, N.C., the rustic village where I felt quite unjustly marooned, despised by unappreciative yokels in smelly work boots and tattered overalls.

In the late 1970s, however, my involvement with clothing changed entirely. In 1979 I began furiously lifting weights and therefore stripped off the feminizing froufrou of my former getups to show off my hard-earned gains. I doffed the caftans and dashing cravats for skintight tank tops with plunging necklines, beguilingly short cutoffs that inched up over the cheeks of my ass, and T-shirts that I trimmed like halter tops to reveal a svelte, boyish midriff. In place of platform shoes, I wore army boots; in place of canes I swung gym bags. Gone was the rapier-witted fop, and in his place was the grungy prole, the new urban cowboy who strutted his stuff in flannel shirts and dungarees.

Whereas homosexuals traditionally modeled their bodies on the patrician ideal of the clean-shaven upper-middle-class aesthete, many older gay men have taken an unprecedented step down-scale and rejected this aristocratic appearance for an even more spurious blue-collar look, loosely based on quixotic images of old-fashioned frontiersmen and hearty plebeians like marines and truckers. The psychohistory of my own sartorial blunders thus documents a revolution in the gay aesthetic.

But in our anxious efforts to butch ourselves up, have we really succeeded in making ourselves more masculine? The elaborately costumed impersonations of gunslinging cowpokes and close-cropped leathernecks that we use to rid ourselves of the taint of the chichi are ultimately as self-dramatizing and artificial as my own ludicrous experiments as a child with trailing scarves and cha-cha heels. Plus ca change....

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