Hair to Stay: From the Shaggy '70s to the Modern Otter

By Kit Christopher & Joe Thompson

Hair. For gay men, it can be a complex topic.

Those thousands upon thousands of tiny strands do more than frame your features and enhance your masculinity. They are a social signifier that can communicate everything from how you feel about politics to how you want to be viewed to who you want in bed—and what you’ll do with the guy once you get him there.

For the last few decades it’s been easy to track the twin progressions of hair and sex in the media. In 1968, Hair brought shaggy manes, bearded faces, and sexual abandon to Broadway; in 1970, Joe Dallesandro memorably debuted his past-shoulder-length, stick-straight tresses in the movie Trash; and in 1972, Burt Reynolds stunned the world in his Cosmopolitan centerfold wearing just a smile and the most beautiful mustache ever grown—oh, and some luxurious chest hair that would be popping out of unbuttoned shirts for the next few decades.

While these public figures were models for the mainstream world, gay men often looked to fellow gay men for what was deemed hot—and in gay culture, what was considered “sexy” was often determined by porn.

In the late ’70s there was an explosion of now-classic male porn where models sported bushy mustaches and sometimes thick beards and chest pelts: Al Parker (left), Paul Barresi, Franco Arbruzzi, Richard Locke, Glen Steers, Ed Wiley, and Colt Studio’s Ditmar boys (Hank and Jesse) all possessed the hair that drove boys wild. There were a few exceptions, like Casey Donovan, Peter Berlin, and Jack Wrangler, but for the most part hair was the passport into Pornland and gay men mimicked that design.

Then came HIV and AIDS. This delivered condomed sex, and muscular bodies that looked supremely healthy became all the rage. In the process long hair, mustaches, and beards were banished in favor of chunky highlights, bi-level bobs, and thong tan lines. The new clone was the preppy, hairless Falcon model. Maturity and manliness were dirty; boyish pubescence and smoothness was a must. Tanning salons thrived, and mulleted young studs wearing pastel Polo shirts with a single dangling earring replaced guys who looked like they could repair your roof and haul your ashes.

Yet as ACT UP and Queer Nation brought back grassroots politics, there was an inevitable revolt against the Ken doll images of the 1980s. The now-famous (infamous?) porn director Chi Chi LaRue was one of the first to eschew deforested bodies in favor of the hairier variety, and the hair-starved public rallied around titles like Body Search, starring furball icons Tom Katt and Steve Regis. At the same time, Jeff Yarbrough, then editorial director of Men and Freshmen magazines, began insisting on more hirsute models. “I used to demand that models stop shaving before they were photographed—body and face—which at the time, was not part of the porn lexicon,” Yarbrough says. “If we had a few weeks before a shoot, pubes, chests, legs, and balls were to be left alone. And a few days before, the face was off-limits, too. We could always make the decision to clean somebody up at the last minute if things were getting out of control. But if a guy showed up with a Hitler mustache over his dick, we were committed.”

Still, these images were the exception, not the rule—and hairy men seemed to be as much of a fetish as leather or cowboy gear. But viewers of the clean-shaven ‘80s and ‘90s porns grew older and created a sexual evolution of their own.

“You had fans of those earlier porn videos now making movies of their own that featured guys who turned them on,” says Dear Richard, the Gay.com columnist who gets many letters on the topic of body hair. “Suddenly Titan and Raging Stallion were major players, and they weren’t just making these hyper-masculine movies, they were making movies that sold like crazy. They’d touched on a secret desire and made it okay to have the hots for hairy men. Around that time you started really seeing guys at bars with facial hair or chest hair.”

So was it all an attempt to copy the porn stars gay men fantasized about? “Maybe,” Dear Richard concedes. “But let’s face it: Gay men generally desire masculine men, and we want to appear desirable to other guys, so we model ourselves after those men we think are sexy.” He pauses, adding, “Besides, all that trimming and shaving is a pain in the ass. It was just easier to go natural.”

Like with many things in mainstream culture, it was only a matter of time before straight men started emulating the gay look—they were just a few years behind. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy popularized the metrosexual male, the man who wasn’t gay but was confident enough to pluck his unibrow, trim his nose hairs, and clean up that bush around his boner. Combine that with numerous articles by women extolling the physical virtures of their gay best friends, and soon straight men were donning gay grooming habits. As Dear Richard observes, "It makes perfect sense, because if you’re a straight guy looking to get laid, why not give your girl the style she likes and get something back in return?"

“It can go a bit far with straight guys,” says author Kurt Vestor, who wrote both gay and straight porn for a number of years. “When straight amateur porn got huge and the Guys Gone Wild DVDs came out, you kept seeing young straight guys who were shaved completely barren. It was like they needed someone to stop them mid-clip and yell, ‘Woa, stud, hold it right there!’ I mean, we like it clean but you don’t want the pubes of a 5-year-old.”

Fortunately, that may change with current crop of male stars sporting more natural manes. Bradley Cooper, and Alex O’Loughlin all sport curls on their muscular physiques; even cuties Ryan Reynolds and Chris Evans, who were bare in early movie roles, are back with mattes on their pectacular chests.

There was also a backlash to all this grooming. At the height of Queer Eye, bear culture really took hold among gay guys. Larger, hairy homos labeled themselves bears, cubs, otters, silver foxes, and every other beastly moniker to form a community of their own. Big became beautiful and these bruisers challenge any clipped and coiffed queen to say otherwise. Straight celebs like Kevin Smith and Kevin James adopted the title as well, and now being a bear is as common in the straight world as in the gay one.

To be clear, no one is disputing that bare-chested boys are cute, but it now seems as though the sexiest style is natural—going with what God gave you. Dear Richard offers, “I’m seeing gay guys with unique styles, like monkey tail facial hair and shaggy heads— while there’s also the freshly-out gays looking waifish with very little hair. Guys my age, 30s and older, are sporting scruffy beards, buzz cuts, five o-clock shadows and body hair. I think gay men are growing comfortable in their own skins and allowing themselves to explore their looks, changing them up as often as they like.”

Why do some men still complicate their lives with denuding routines involving scissors, razors, chemical depilatories, expensive drugs, and even laser surgery? To look younger? Someone who is really younger will always beat you at that game. To look more hung? Perhaps for an instant, but flattening your pubes won’t truly lengthen your one-eyed love lizard. So at what point do you put down the manscaping tools and finally let nature take its course?

As Vestor explains, “Hair is manly. Manly is hot. Hair is hot. So grow it if you got it.”