Last Saturday’s The London Times Magazine ran an extract from ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt’, a memoir by Jon-Jon Goulian ‘the New York Review of Books first cross-dressing staffer’. I haven’t read it yet, but the extract inclined me to do so very soon.
Here’s Goulian on the semantics of earrings in the 1980s – a semantics which I also recall as having a very definite and decisive import when I was at school in the UK back then which you ignored at your peril, but which now seems as daft as Crystal and Alexis mud-wrestling:
In 1984, in La Jolla, California, as was true in most places in this country, a huge amount of significance was attached to which ear an earring appeared in. If it was in the left ear, that meant you had a liberal conscience, and that you wanted people to know it. It was essentially like having a bumper sticker on the back of your VW bus that said NO NUKES. It was a gesture. Nothing more. So no one took it seriously.
An earring in the right ear, on the other hand, meant that you were gay, and that you wanted people to know it. That, people took more seriously. An earring in the right ear could get a bag of Tater Tots thrown at your head, which I saw happen to a gay kid at La Jolla High School. In La Jolla, Tater Tots. Other places, bats and bullets.
Earrings in both the right ear and the left ear were unclear. They meant that you were a) gay; or b) that you were not only gay but also a budding transvestite; or c) that you were not gay but only a budding transvestite; or d) that you were not gay and not a budding transvestite but, just weird and confused and in need of some sort of counselling.
When my mother set eyes on me, the same thought ran through her mind as would have run through the mind of any middle-class woman who grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in the Fifties – ‘Oh, my God! I don’t understand! Is he a or b or c or d? Or all the above? This is not a fair test! I don’t understand the question!’
His poor mother.
Nowadays, the monosexual semantics of earrings on boys has broken down. The earring war is over. It ended, like most things have in this new century, not in white doves and petals and earrings being beaten into plowshares but incoherence.
Or as someone on this thread put it, in answer to a quaint question about which side was ‘gay’:
‘Um. Are you stuck in the 80s? It doesn’t mean anything any more.’
Which is perhaps bad news if you wanted like Jon-Jon seems to have back in the day, to make a statement that ‘people took seriously’. But then, it’s not just earrings that have suffered that fate.
I’ve noticed over the past several years that a lot of younger heterosexual guys wear dime sized plugs in their ears. They are different colors and are pretty attractive. Never seen them on gay guys. Here they all try to look as straight and “normal as they can.
Today, on Facebook, someone was offended to death because a New York Gym had advertized something to the effect that” If you want to get married you have to get in shape” which I thought was kind of funny; while I’m not heavy, wouldn’t go to a gym just to get married. i wouldn’t get married to get married.
I wonder if there isn’t a market for earings denoting ownership if you get married, or matching chastity belts.
Goulian was an American growing up in La Jolla, a well-to-do suburb of San Diego, Ca. so yes he was a bit sheltered.
But so was most of America when it came to punk and New Romanticism.
And Ronaldo is never gay. Ronaldo is always Ronaldo.
Ha! So two earrings in the right ear meant ‘gay virgin’.
I had 2 earrings in my right ear until my sex life started. Didn’t need them anymore.
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