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But over successive films, his wardrobe has continued to shrink more and more. Several of Craig’s shirts in Casino Royale were designed with showing-off-muscles in mind. Straight men who wear trunks with such a low rise and a short inseam want to be seen and if it’s a gay man gazing on they should be flattered, not flustered. The much-discussed swimming trunks Casino Royale were a watershed moment, showing that shedding almost all of your clothing in the water is just as acceptable for straight-identifying men as gay men. Flynn identitied figures like Mark Wahlberg, David Gandy and David Beckham as being especially responsible, making it more socially acceptable than ever before for straight-identifying men to show off their muscles - and what’s in their underwear.Ī descriptor for a subgroup of gay men, ‘muscle Mary’ has been in use in gay circles for decades but (as is always the way with slang amongst minority groups) has only recently been codified in dictionaries.Ĭraig’s portrayal of James Bond has surely played a substantial role in bringing muscle Marydom into the mainstream. Of the seven key styles associated with gay men, one of these has had particular crossover success: the ‘muscle Mary’. Writing in 2017, Paul Flynn, author of Good As You: From Prejudice to Pride – 30 Years of Gay Britain (strongly recommended), looked back on the fashion of the last 30 years and concluded that gay style has become more mainstream. With his tongue thoroughly in his cheek, writer Alexander Abad-Santos went from the ‘exclusively heterosexual’ dad jean to the ‘predominantly homosexual’ chino, right up to the ‘almost exclusively homosexual’ designer jean (as worn by the four lads above) and ‘exclusively homosexual’ jeggings for men (meggings). You don’t have to be gay to receive homophobic abuse.īut there are apparently some items of clothing which immediately mark you out as less-than-straight.Ī 2013 article in The Atlantic attempted to be more nuanced than merely gay/straight, putting different trousers on the Kinsey Scale, ranked by how tight they were.
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Inevitably, some anonymous trolls threw homophobic abuse their way. Some of those who turned the image into a meme judged that their tight-jeans and conspicuous musculature meant the men were stupid, racist and even headed out for a night of violence. While many of the comments they attracted were light-hearted, many were not, making erroneous assumptions about the men just based on their appearances. To many people’s eyes, their tight-attire made them look ‘other’. There’s a reason an otherwise innocuous photograph of four lads on a night out in Birmingham (near where I live) went viral in 2020. Even if you don’t have much muscle-definition to speak of (mine would barely warrant a whisper), gay men generally wear tighter clothes than most straight men. And although these codes may have become somewhat muddled, making it harder to pin down whether someone’s outfit makes them ‘gay’ or ‘straight’, tightness usually carries gay connotations. Having said that, social codes do of course exist. We can all wear whatever we want of course, whatever our sexual orientation. If I don’t, I will get my gay membership card withdrawn. If I’m caught between buying a small and a medium sized item I will go with the small. And another part of it is because being as an out gay man, there’s an expectation that I wear fitted clothes. Part of this is because I lost a couple of stone in weight in my early twenties. Most of them are also a fair bit smaller than when I was younger. For once, my clothes are almost exclusively brightly coloured. If you were to open up my closet right now (metaphor fully intended), you’d find things are quite different. If a boy fancied me… well, that would be even more of a nightmare. I didn’t want to look attractive to anyone because that would mean facing up to my seemingly intractable problem: if a girl fancied me, I knew it couldn’t go anywhere. Clothing was just a necessity, nothing more. In my teens, traditionally a time when most want to look attractive to others, I cared little for what I wore.