A new anti-gay aesthetic had been born.
Not all of this happened overnight. The metamorphosis was gradual but relentless. On the basketball court, as early as the mid-Eighties, Michael Jordan was showcasing an original way of looking macho in shorts that were longer and baggier than any worn before. In college basketball, Michigan State and some few other schools became early converts to this new and still slightly odd style of covering up to display manliness, covering up to be cool.
Not surprising that a game dominated by African-Americans should be the trendsetter. Young blacks, long at the cultural forefront, were now using their innovative prowess to undo what they themselves had helped to create over the previous twenty years. This urban culture of rap and hip-hop would become the dominant force of the Nineties—more than just a way of dressing, actually a new lifestyle of Hetero Extremism, a street religion of cartoonish and exaggerated heterosexual behaviors and attitudes, beliefs and taboos.
What Michael Jordan had first popularized on the basketball court was now adopted and adapted and embellished by this culture of hip-hop into an extravagant caricature of sloppy, goonish virility. Of course, hip-hop is just an easy label for the new way of thinking and behaving which has come to define maleness. It’s a huge catchall of mannerisms and music and language and, not least, fashion. It’s a manifestation of Hetero Separatism, but not the cause. Simply ascribing the current burlesque of male bagginess to “hip-hop fashion” is to mistake the symptom for the disease.
Quote: Do gay guys wear tight pants so other guys can check out their butts?
That’s what some teenaged boy wanted to know in a 1996 film documentary dealing with gay issues in the classroom. How else could he think? What else could he wonder given today’s dress code of Hetero Correctness? His question has been answered by many dismal years of American males in oversized, baggy clothing—men and boys hidden from one another, hidden from themselves, hidden from the dangerous reality of their own bodies.
I've actually seen that documentary! It's called
It's Elementary: Talking about Gay Issues in School. It's fantastic. The latino boy who asks the question looks like a character from a Kevin Esser story.
