Between Bear and Bare

If anecdotal evidence and unscientific observation is to be believed, facial hair is back, especially among the young gay men that populate the hipper gay bars and clubs in New York. (And in the subsequent hot orange and black clusters those clubs create on Grindr.)

Head out for a drink at the Boiler Room, a twirl on the dance floor at a Spank party or a Saturday evening at Sugarland, and you’re sure to see boys wearing all sorts of permutations of beards, mustaches, sideburns, five o’clock shadows and scruff. (Heck, there’s even a separate cruising app, Scruff, named after the two days of growth around the jawline.)

And just like that hair-appropriate iPhone time-waster, there are even parties like Stache Bash at Julius—for men with hair on their upper lip and their admirers—and plenty of things to do for those who love the gay hirsute lifestyle now known as “bear culture.” So why does someone like me, who is currently sporting a rather healthy mustache, still sometimes get derided or heckled by other gays when walking down Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen? “You trying to be in a porn?!” the boys yell and giggle amongst themselves. Even now, when facial hair in the general population, and among gay men in particular, is more popular than ever, why do some people seem to be cowed by so many Gillette commercials?

There seem to be two distinct camps of gay men that have existed since guys began putting their penises in other guys’ mouths. As Allan Peterkin points out in his 2001 book One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair, which has a chapter dedicated to facial hair in the gay culture, in the first recorded cases of homosexuality, back in ancient Greece, it was the bearded who were attracted to the beardless.

It was commonly acceptable for older men, those who grew beards, to have sexual interactions with younger men who were fresh faced and more boyish looking. However, these affairs would draw to a close as the younger man started to develop facial hair (back then they say it didn’t start until about his 20th birthday) and they would graduate from being the passive partners in homosexual relationships to being the active partners. Yes, it took a beard to be on top.

Even then, the beard was a symbol of masculinity because you had to be of a certain maturity to grow one and it is one of the secondary sex characteristics that the ladies can’t grow (outside of circus tents and freak shows, at least).

Homosexuality then went underground for a couple thousand years, and what emerged was the modern dichotomy we still have in regards to gay men, their sexual relationships and facial hair. This can be summed up handily in two noted gay figures: Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, who were basically contemporaries slightly before the dawn of the 20th century (though Whitman was about 35 years older). Whitman was the tough American working-class man who loved nature and men in the natural state, therefore as bearded as could be. Wilde, the Irish writer and dandy, ran with a set of effete upper-class intellectuals who sported freshly shorn cheeks.

Both camps set themselves apart from the mainstream, Whitman by embracing hypermasculinity and a long beard, and Wilde by adopting a more manicured look and conspicuously bald face. In both cases these distinguishing marks made them easily recognizable to other gay people, something very handy in the days before Manhunt.

The clean-shaven and the mustachio and bearded looks have always been like a yin and yang, existing simultaneously but going in cycles so one is more prevalent than the other. In the ’20s clean-shaven was ideal and in the ’30s Clark Gable and other screen stars brought back the mustache. In the ’40s WWII had all the soldiers shearing their faces and in the ’50s burgeoning gay activists decided to wear suits and clean themselves up so they would be taken seriously and seen as clean, upstanding citizens when they first protested the White House.

Starting with the ’60s, when hippie culture and gay culture seemed to collide, facial hair really got out of hand, as gay beat poet Allen Ginsberg and his bushy face exemplify. In 1969, with gay liberation after the Stonewall Riots, those on the front lines were the drag queens without a hair on their faces and the hippie types, who wanted to buck the establishment and had nothing to lose. Again it was the smooth and the hairy in perfect harmony.

Things started to change in the ’70s, however, as the proliferation of gay porn and an exploding gay culture gave birth to what is known as “the clone look,” which started with super-popular gay porn star Al Parker. You couldn’t swing a handbag on The Castro without hitting a guy with a beard and a mustache, and everyone felt the need to conform because not only was it a way to spot other gays, it was the beauty ideal, and something that was considered masculine.

“That’s the chicken-or-the-egg question [about Al Parker],” says JC Adams, gay porn expert and author of the new book Gay Porn Heroes. “Did the gay porn directors at the time reflect the culture or did they influence the culture? I think both. I think porn was absolutely integrated into the culture. They were making porn that reflected their lives. The filmmakers came out of the culture and reflected what was going on.”

And of course, as it happens even today, what men saw in porn changed what they found attractive on the streets. Facial hair in the gay culture had decidedly taken over.

But everything goes in cycles, and gay porn would swing in the opposite direction soon. This started to happen again in the late ’80s when porn studios like Falcon and Bel Ami rose to prominence. No longer was the super-macho, Tom-of-Finland mustachioed blue collar the ideal. Now it was preppy, pretty boys  with blond hair and smooth everything else. “If you go back 40 years, to the 1970s, nearly every man had three things: a mustache, a perm and a turtleneck,” says Aaron Perlut, the St. Louis-based chairman of the American Mustache Institute, an advocacy group for men with mustaches. “At the tail end, there was an organized effort of ridding ourselves culturally of everything from the previous decade and the mustached American became an extinct species, like the panda.”

Hair, not only on the face but everywhere, was decidedly out of fashion.

“The most influential porn filmmakers at the time liked 18–23-year-old-looking guys with smooth chests and mostly blond and a clean, polished look. That was the dominant look,” Adams points out. Thanks to the gay men in fashion, advertising and the other culture-influencing media, we started to see this bleed into the mainstream to the point where, in 1992, Marky Mark was on a giant billboard in Times Square wearing only his Calvins and not a trace of hair anywhere on his body. The gay clone was replaced with the Aberzombie.

But as Nair for Men and the metrosexual were becoming mainstream, there was still the undercurrent of bear culture: the big, hairy, macho gay men. Considering Bear Magazine has been around since 1987, this was a movement before it resonated with the gay culture at large. It took hold slowly but surely, bubbling up first in leather bars and more rough-and-tumble clubs before finding its way to the more easily apparent gay bars, spreading its pelt as it grew.

In a reaction to the skimmed-clean look, more and more gay guys started growing beards in the new millennium. “Gay men have always tinkered with facial hair,” says Bob Mould, gay rock ’n’ roll legend and one of the founders of Blowoff, a gay dance party in DC, New York, and San Francisco that caters mostly to a hairy crowd. “With the simultaneous growth of the bear community and the hipster crowd, gay whiskers seem to be the norm.”

Ah, yes, the hipsters! They seem to be a common theme when talking about hair these days. While those who are young and cool are into facial hair, Perlut of the AMI says that they’re also more likely to wear their facial hair to job interviews and that in this age of business casual, sporting something other than a freshly trimmed jawline in the corporate culture is quite acceptable.

But some still consider facial hair, and especially the mustache, to be “ironic.” “Very sadly, I think it’s [the] other things that accompany the mustache, whether that’s skinny jeans or what the mainstream deems hipster-ish, but I don’t know what constitutes an ironic mustache,” Perlut says. “There is no such thing as a bad mustache, only those who don’t own or operate a mustache.”

While beards and goatees seem to proliferate these days, mustaches seem to be the final style to be reappropriated by the gays and the culture at large, maybe in part due to the “porn ’stache” stigma started by Colt models of days gone by. But, as Perlut points out, the mustache is perhaps the most sexually dynamic of all facial hair styles. He says jokingly, “We’ve done studies that shows mustached Americans can experience an orgasm that lasts 27 minutes and the mustache adds attractiveness of 38%.”

Strangely enough, the one aspect of gay culture that hasn’t been so quick to adapt to the facial hair trend is porn. Colby Keller, the gay porn star and blogger (who has a section on his site for “Boys with Beards”) has worked everywhere from the smooth Sean Cody to the scruffy Raging Stallion but says more often than not, porn studios want him clean-shaven or a bit stubbly. “They don’t want something that’s too trendy or that’s obvious so you can point to it and say that’s 1995,” he says. In trying to capitalize on their market they’re trying to find something timeless.

So even as Scotch Inkom is putting the porn back in “porn ’stache” for TitanMen and the streets show ’staches coming back in style, others are banking on smooth-faced or stubbly being the look of the future. But one thing is for sure, as far as gay culture is concerned, for every hairy bear, there will always be a smooth twink, and while we may celebrate one now, the opposite will rise in its place in no time.

Brian O’Brien is an editor at the porn, sex and pop culture site Fleshbot. Visit Gay.Fleshbot.com for more info. Illustrations by Justin Russo based on photographs by Gustavo Monroy and Jeff Eason. Part of the upcoming show The Beard Project. Visit Coroflot.com/JustinRusso for more info.