The covers of FAB, Toronto’s gay scene magazine, tend to run together. They always feature hot young men near naked or in clothes skimpy enough to reveal bulging arms and rippling abs. Depending on the season, the models wear gimmicky costumes–hunky Santa Claus with elf, hunky hockey player, hunky barista in apron and glasses. Their bodies are as idealized and interchangeable as Ken dolls, and just as sexless. We’ve seen the six-pack-with-pecs torso so often, with none of the eroticism that flows from individual imperfections, that it barely registers as a real person’s body.
The covers of FAB are part of a culture that, through repetition and ubiquity, encourages people to feel bad about their bodies. I didn’t become comfortable with my looks until I collected pictures on Tumblr that celebrated men who vaguely resembled me–thick eyebrows, dark features, glasses, and beards.
The cover of this week’s FAB is different. The model is still gorgeous, but we see no part of his body as the camera zooms in on his face (that’s already unusual for FAB). Below amber brown eyes locked on the viewer, the model sports a wild, bushy, Mountain Man beard. Just as surprising, I think I spot the odd strand of grey. FAB has dedicated their grooming issue to the beard and selected 12 men from the community, some of who I know personally, as the ‘sexiest beards in Canada.’
My first reaction–they didn’t pick me! But then I thought, Does this mean I have to shave now?
I realize that was terrible. I whine about representation, and wanting to see people who look like me in magazines. But then when a trend like beards becomes mainstream, it makes me want to reach for my electric razor. Perhaps I found more pleasure in not resembling men in magazines than I realized.
And, for the record, the men selected by FAB are still inarguably hunky. Most are young, and only one looks anything like a ‘bear,’ the furry, larger men who embraced facial hair when all the other gays were still attacking their hair like clearcutters on Red Bull.
My European friend who used to live in Toronto was surprised when I told him that beards had ever been out of style: “I thought Canadians guys had always walked around looking like hairy lumberjacks.” Beards have cycled in and out of fashion not just for the last fifty years, but the last 5,000. Because the ability to grow facial hair was an obvious difference between men and women, and between men and boys, ancient cultures invested beards with masculine symbolism. Gender roles are important to many religions. That’s why there’s so many scriptural guidelines about facial hair. There were practical considerations as well. According to legend, Alexander the Great banned beards from his army so that they wouldn’t be pulled during battle.
In modern times, beards returned seemingly on whimsy. No American presidents had beards (picture the white-wigged, clean-shaven faces at the signing of the Declaration of Independence) until Abraham Lincoln, whose impressive beard caused a boost in popularity for the rest of the 19th century. Who says you have to be pretty to be a trendsetter? Many baby boomers shaved off their beards when they stopped being hippies, although they were still a presence on Dads during the 1980’s.
Now the sides have switched–beards are so popular among men in their twenties they are practically a cliché, but we rarely see them on middle-aged men. It’s so unusual that NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair defended his beard and reminded people that Canada has had a bearded Prime Minister… in 1896.
“Beards–or their removal–can serve to conceal or reveal and thus in the past may have been linked to concepts of transformation, disguise, metamorphosis or exposure,” writes archeologist Marion Dowd. That reminded me of another meaning of the word beard. In slang, a beard is an escort used to disguise a person’s infidelity or homosexuality. For instance, Betty White admitted to going to events with Liberace to help him conceal that he was gay. (For the premiere of Judy Garland’s A Star Is Born, the musician took his mother. Yes, he took his mother to a Judy Garland movie to hide his homosexuality. It was an innocent time.)
Gay men have gone from needing figurative beards to hide their identities to growing actual ones while declaring them.
Or maybe it’s not about being gay at all. Beards are just as popular, if not more so, among twenty-something straight guys. Gay and straight men have stolen trends from each other back and forth for decades. Perhaps we’ve reached a détente in which neither side fears resembling the other. With no less a mainstream gay publication than FAB celebrating beards, we might be reaching the end of a specifically gay style.
But my gut tells me not. After all, as soon as everyone’s doing something, that’s when you want a change. I’ll probably shave. The itchiness is killing me.
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Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
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