Stuff Gay People Like: Copying lesbian haircuts

Popular conception says that gay people are the world’s visual trendsetters, pouncing on unexplored ideas when social conditions are ripe and spreading them throughout pop culture. The anatomy of a style trend is thought to flow like this: 1) effeminate or artsy gay men start doing it, 2) it gets big in Japan and Europe, 3) all the other gay men follow, 4) hipsters dominate it, 5) celebrities showcase it, 6) suburban teenagers finally catch on, and then, at last, 7) the world moves in.

By that point, gay men consider the look to be dated and unsightly and have gone on to something else.

That flow of culture is mostly correct, but leaves out the crucial first seed of any new style, at least when it comes to hair. That seed is lesbians. If you meet a guy whose haircut you’d discern “looks gay,” there is nothing really concrete that flipped that switch in your brain except that you saw lesbians doing it first. Three years from now you’ll see it on a sporty guy on One Tree Hill  – a CW teen drama – and won’t even blink.

So to predict how gay men will style their hair in 2013, Google Jane Lynch or Rachel Maddow. To explain the conservative, short-cropped look that has been popular for some gay guys during the last decade, search no farther than Sinead O’Connor.

Effeminate gay men of recent years have adopted a whispy, whimsical hairstyle that is reminiscent of something between an Anime character’s hairstyle and an up-close view of a solar flare. It is long and spiky in one part, curves in on itself in another, yet it’s shorter on the sides and in the back. These men are often credited with pioneering the look, but it will occur to any reasonable observer that the true inventors were lesbians. So, too, emerged the faux-hawk, the “reverse mullet” and most punk hairstyles.

Stuff gay people like affectionately refers to these and all other hairstyles moving through a gender-neutral social phase as “bottom-tops.” Soon, each style will diverge into numerous manifestations as every kind of group adopts them differently; a slightly more restrained form of a hairdo will develop for straight men, a version with longer length will pop up for straight women and a $5,000-apiece highlighted adaptation will become popular in Hollywood.

Yet this all traces back to gay women. You probably want some more concrete examples to back this claim up, but we’d be wrong if we simply tried to list a whole bunch of well-known lesbians who started trends. In truth, famous people of any sexual stripe adopt a haircut late in the game (at step five on our flowchart), only when it is already on the cusp of widespread acceptance. Celebrities may take credit for starting a trend but if you live in the city, you were already familiar with it a couple years before it ever appeared on TV.

So the queer-girl-on-the-street is a far more pertinent and relevant source of future culture than any celebrity. If you want to look up some famous gay and straight males – like Adam Lambert, Chance Crawford, Clay Aiken, Justin Bieber and Lance Bass, you’ll see which lesbian haircuts are already beginning to go mainstream. Sure, anything could be said in retrospect, but we dare you to find a haircut that three or more of your male gay friends share that wasn’t previously seen on lesbians. Gay men get a lot of credit for moving the bar on style and fashion, but the secret is they stole their best ideas from girls.

Stuff Gay People Like (SGPL) is a satirical/cultural column featured in Out Front Colorado. Visit the Facebook Page or view the whole list.

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