When I was a teenager I made the fatal mistake of wearing skinny jeans on a council estate. I remember having seen musicians of old peacocking, as they do, in skintight denim with all the majesty and flamboyance one would expect from any self-respecting rockstar.
And then there was me, as easily influenced as I was, deciding to don the denim with the misplaced hope of emulating the unspoken and unremitting coolness of my heroes. I slithered into a pair of black skinny jeans – checked myself in the mirror with all the uncertainty of adolescence – nodded to myself with approval, and then strutted out of the house.
It took two minutes before I heard an anti-LGBTQ slur screamed out of an upstairs window. I looked around the empty street, saw nobody on the pavement and nobody at the window. I kept walking.
Fifteen minutes later a car passed by, a man with closely cropped hair looked straight back at me and yelled, ‘bender.’ I searched for a witty response, found nothing, and then, when he was just out of ear-shot, shouted, ‘wanker,’ without an ounce of conviction.
I checked my reflection in windows in the hope of finding some injection of confidence, if David Bowie or Marc Bolan could wear skinny jeans, then so could I.
I pushed on, into the city. A group of men emptied out of the pub, one of them clocked me immediately, he nudged his friend with his elbow. His friend’s eyes illuminated when he saw me and a second later he’s chanting ‘puff, puff, puff,’ as I tried to walk by.
I turned a corner and then stopped. I couldn’t go on. I decided none of this was for me. Rockstars were rockstars and maybe they could do what they like – dress how they like, talk how they like, and walk how they like – but clearly, this wasn’t meant for me.
I scrambled home, face to the pavement.
Once home, I tore off the skinny jeans, or at least, attempted to tear them off as I clambered around my bedroom floor; trying to rid myself of the shameful garment.
From then on I was down but not yet fully defeated. I plucked up the courage from time to time, during my teens, to push the boat and try something a little more different and a little more daring. There was an attempt at long hair that resulted in people telling me that I looked like a girl. Then there was a floral purple shirt that I thought made me look like nineteen-sixties George Harrison, but I’m told, made me look like a ‘giant ponce’ with a meth addiction. Lastly, there was a questionable foray into waistcoats which we needn’t talk about.
As the years went on I found myself conforming more and more. The skinny jeans were out and the bootcut jeans were in. I found solace in plain t-shirts and plaid shirts, and perhaps like all millennial men, I grew a beard. I did what most men were expected to do from my background. I toed the line and I was left alone.
Looking back, the one thing I feel an element of shame in is not that I conformed, so to speak, and gave up on most forms of flamboyance; but rather that I let this informal policing of fashion enter my own thought process and muddy the way I see anyone who deviates from this notion of normal.
In context, over the past decade, we have seen an incredible move away from this limiting sense of masculinity and fashion. We’ve seen the extraordinary rise in popularity of drag culture, pride festivals, alternative fashion for men, and an abundance of male celebrities setting the way towards normalising different presentations of masculinity.
My mind however was sadly stuck in the nineties. Conditioned in a roundabout manner to notice any person deviating from their gender constraints. I began judging them internally as I had been judged myself. My mind saw a man in skinny jeans, makeup, glitter, or anything I judged in some way effeminate as perversions or insults to any form of order and decency.
I realised that I’d allowed my mind to bathe in the hate of others and that putrid sense of normality had seeped into my skin and now I reeked of it myself.
Sadly, however, years of mental programming cannot be undone at the flick of a switch. There is no simple solution and there is no direct undoing of what has been done. Instead of having an existential crisis I began to challenge my own thought process and started reading more and more about gender and masculinity. I started to embrace, once more, my love of those rockstars of a bygone age, pomped in brilliant colours and style. I pushed myself, opening my mind enough to let some cracks of colour in.
And so, like the changing of the seasons, albeit a twenty-year season, I began to allow the flair, colour, and flamboyance once more into my clothes. But the remarkable thing, whether it’s with the changing of our culture, or whether with my age, nobody seems compelled to hurl abuse like days of old. I’m now free to walk along the streets, dressed as weirdly as I want, and not a single thing is said.
On reflection, it becomes apparent that gender isn’t an issue solely for niche communities but something that can affect and afflict each and every one of us. Going on, toeing the line, can lead to a sea of beige conformity and a repressed sense of self. When we question ourselves and the world around us, when we accept change and when we are able to celebrate difference, we, in turn, empower not only ourselves but those around us. To deviate from normality is to embrace the self, to embrace the different, but most importantly it is to embrace life with colour switched on.
—
This post is republished on Medium.
—
