LGBTQ
Or Maybe Harry Styles Dresses as He Does for No Other Reason than to Please Himself
Sometimes a dress is just a dress and it’s none of your damned concern
CW: ‘Straight’ is used in the post as an umbrella term for cisgender heteronormativity. This is an author’s choice and is explained within.
I just read a well-written and interesting article by Christine siamanta Kinori reporting on the debate over the Style choices of the androgynous phenomenon who is Harry Styles. The piece titled, Is Harry Styles queerbaiting or destroying toxic masculinity? was relatable to me because I’ve been accused of similar motivations for the way I present. I am also often accused of seeking attention by shocking people — I am not doing so intentionally and I am not convinced Styles is either. I do however recognize that inevitably, one ends up having an effect or being read as having motivations one may not necessarily intend. If forced to choose, I reckon Styles is chipping away at toxic masculinity but without an organized agenda; he's got a monumental job ahead of him if that is his goal. Getting rid of toxic masculinity is ultimately an inside job and as cool as Styles is, in our current society, It’s a fair statement that few ‘straight’ men dress in opposition to expectation. There are some exceptions, Styles is apparently one of them. Although, who really knows? Maybe Styles doesn’t even really know. Maybe he just follows some intrinsic inclination that makes him happy.
For me, It raises the question though, how is it we come to our conclusions of what is and isn’t feminine or masculine attire? I often wonder how many taboos must be consistently and repeatedly broken and for how long before our cultural gender coding and attitudes shift. Let’s look at a couple of examples of this; the high heel and the umbrella.
In his fascinating 2013 article for the BBC World Service titled Why did Men Stop Wearing High Heels, author William Kremer reports on how the high heel evolved from a fiercely masculine symbol of martial power, political might, and wealthy opulence, to the fetishized symbol of ultra-femininity it is today. Kremer interviewed Elizabeth Semmelhack of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto who said in his article:
“In the 1630s you had women cutting their hair, adding epaulettes to their outfits,” says Semmelhack.
“They would smoke pipes, they would wear hats that were very masculine. And this is why women adopted the heel — it was in an effort to masculinise their outfits.”
Further on in the article, Helen Persson, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London adds:
“You start seeing a change in the heel at this point… Men started to have a squarer, more robust, lower, stacky heel, while women’s heels became more slender, more curvaceous.”
This was at the beginning of the era we now call the enlightenment that saw what Kremer calls,
“the Great Male Renunciation which would see men abandon the wearing of jewellery, bright colours and ostentatious fabrics in favour of a dark, more sober, and homogeneous look. Men’s clothing no longer operated so clearly as a signifier of social class, but while these boundaries were being blurred, the differences between the sexes became more pronounced.”
But in an age of practical rationalism, the high heel came to be seen as what Kremer calls, “foolish and effeminate.” By 1740 men had stopped wearing them altogether. Within 50 years, following the French Revolution, the high heel also went out of favor with women.
Semmelhek then goes on to describe how at the time photography was “transforming the way that fashions — and the female self-image — were constructed” in the 20th century. Pornographers latched on to the high heel “positioning models in poses that resembled classical nudes, but wearing modern-day high heels.” She opines that it is this connexion to pornography that turned the high heel into an “erotic adornment on women’s feet.”
Then there is the umbrella — once reviled as an effeminate french intrusion on stalwart English practicality. According to Michael Waters’ 2016 Atlas Obscura article, The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User, so great was the outrage over the thing that when Jonas Hanaway used an umbrella on the streets of London, he was pelted with jeers and rubbish. As reported in the article, it took decades after that before the average Englishman would use one. I reckon most of us will look at this from the incredulity of retrospect but at the time, this was serious business.
Based on history, my opinion is this: The only way to get men to publicly put on chiffon dresses and lace-fringed pencil skirts or wear patterned tights (or any tights for that matter) unabashedly and sans irony or sexual arousal, is if it becomes a broadly normalized part of what it means to be a ‘straight’ man. That will take a massive cultural shift the ‘straights’ aren’t yet ready to make.
The problem therein lies in something I used to say a lot that I nabbed from a video of Betty Crow (external link):
“Straight is generally used to denote heterosexual but it also carries with it this sense of normalcy, yada, yada, yada. The moment you come out as crossdresser, transgender, to transexual — you’re no longer straight.”
From the video My Husband Betty — Life with a transvestite (External Link)
As a culture, we make a lot of assumptions — is cross-dressing truly just the domain of those who openly call themselves members of the LGBTQAI+ community? A 2009 paper published in the National Library of Medicine titled, Reported Effects of Masculine Ideals on Gay Men, (Sánchez et al.) cites numerous reports suggesting that many gay men would likely not dress the way Styles does — they are, after all, men. One must also wonder — if men were to adopt a sartorial style based on what we today consider feminine, would it still be feminine? After all, the high heel went from a sign of virile military, political and economic power, to one of delicate, womanliness that many women now use as potent symbols of feminine power in and of itself. Consider also the fact that the Fedora hat (external link), now a symbol of tough-guy rugged masculinity, was first a woman’s hat. Granted, like Katharine Hepburn’s trousers, it carried some transgressive masculine aesthetic as a symbol of women’s fight for equality but it was nonetheless a woman’s hat. That rugged Indiana Jones Fedora we usually see stamped “The Adventurer” was first worn by women, then became known as The Poet Hat and worn by the bohemian likes of Oscar Wilde, before Humphrey Bogart was born.
Given enough time, things, objects like high heels, hats, trousers, and umbrellas, can shift and swap places in their cultural gender coding. Given that so many women now wear them, like the knee boot, I often wonder why men still wear pants.
Something Christine siamanta Kinori wrote regarding the way some in the queer community see Styles really grabbed my attention because it reminded me of my own experience:
“They believe he is benefitting from appearing / presenting as queer even though he doesn’t explicitly claim to be part of the community.”
I don’t believe he has to. It’s enough for me that he claims the way he dresses to be an authentic expression of himself, I don’t care what his gender or sexual attraction is. In a Vogue article, Playtime with Harry Styles (Bowles, 2020) Styles talks of the joy to be had in playing with clothes and that he’s never thought much about what it signifies, concluding, “It just becomes this extended part of creating something.” To me, that attitude is a mark of amazing strength and I admire it in a younger person. When I was his age, I was self-conscious, not self-aware, and I was nowhere near that self-assured. Many may laud him but a significant portion of the population clearly decry as audacious, what they assume his gumption to dress as he does.
I reckon the controversy in this is bound up in the monolithic idea of straightness and the taboo of gynephillic men (men who are sexually attracted to women and femininity) who are too ‘flamboyant’ in the way they dress. It goes back to “the Great Male Renunciation,” to the enlightenment ideals of men as rational, stalwart beings whereas women were deemed flighty, not as intelligent as men, too emotional, and therefore unworthy of political enfranchisement or to hold and manage money and property. They weren’t even deemed worthy to own their own bodies. They still often aren't.
The genesis of the business suit and the sensible, somber nature of modern men’s clothing date back to that period. The supposition continues to this day, that only frivolous, vain, wastrels, ill-possessed of the gravity of manhood and hard work, or gay men, dress with flamboyant flair. Gay men, by virtue of their attraction and assumed intimacy with other men, are stereotypically thought to be more like women. And so the tail chasing begins.
‘Straight’ people often rankle at the word homophobia — “But we’re NOT afraid!” they pronounce with great and unfettered umbrage. But I assert they are afraid. They think gayness and transness are catchy, that children can be indoctrinated into it if they so much as read the wrong book from a school library, or worse yet, a drag queen reads the book to them. Homophobes fear what the world will look like, what they imagine they will lose in a zero-sum defeat, if we loosen the rigidity of these notions we have about what men and women are supposed to be, what they should and shouldn’t do, and begin to treat all human beings equally with dignity and respect. I think of homophobia as a coin whose flip side is stamped misogyny and transphobia. We think less of people born male who we decide behave like women, or those who take measures to become, live as, and BE women, because women and femininity are given less social value.
That underlying homophobia and the shame of ‘watering down’ my male privilege, of willingly wishing to be a woman, or like a woman, and entertaining plans to make it happen, was something I personally struggled with for decades; it metastasized into internalized transphobia. I played with feminine clothing and my gender presentation, managing not to name it for almost half a century before I began to think that maybe I just might actually be queer or trans. But frankly, I still don’t quite feel legitimate or that I have accepted identifying myself as such. I sometimes get the message I am not trans enough, or not really trans or queer at all because I’ve yet to take certain steps to properly validate that ‘identity’ to others via medical and physical transition. In fact, I’ve come to cringe every time I hear or write the word valid and it’s frankly why I stay out of chatrooms. It’s as if I need to account for how it is I was born male, am gynephillic, have had the persistent thought that I was meant to have been a girl, have crossdressed since I was 5, and yet spent four-fifths of my 53 years presenting myself to the world as a straight man, and haven’t gotten ‘round to taking the plunge for the clunge.
Alas, I was as confused and vexed as they apparently are. On top of the befuddlement, I was also self-loathing because I knew I wasn’t (scare quotes) “normal” and I also knew I had no community. I sure as hell knew I wasn’t straight but didn’t think I had a right to call myself queer. Since I was a teen, I’ve avoided calling myself a ‘man’ whenever possible, instead referring to myself as ‘a person.’ Still, I never felt the fact that I wear women’s clothes but wasn’t gay was a legitimate way to be because I was raised constantly being told that if you do that, you are either a gay man or a perverted fetishist.
So, I waited.
I waited, and I waited.
I waited for the day I would see a boy and feel that surge of desperate attraction I feel for a woman; it never came.
This left me thinking I was a perverted fetishist. Is it any wonder then that gynephillic males with feminine inclinations compartmentalize and hide it? If they do finally ‘come out.’ they are rarely lauded. Instead, they are generally reviled for expecting others to participate in their pervy fetish or told they are really gay and in denial. Some members of the trans community will accuse people like me of just playing at being women, like we are not as serious or (scare quotes) “valid” as them, or not really trans because we’ve not left the male privilege sanctuary of part-time womanhood and sought medical transition and are irrevocably dealing with all the sexism and dangers heaped on women. It is a no-win.
It’s a no-win, but I freely acknowledge they are so much more courageous than me and deserve to pat themselves on the back as they are sometimes wont to do. Yeah, I know, I’m a sarcastic cuss. Where I stand now is ultimately my business and I’ll not be told what I am and am not or what I must and must not do in what steps and in what timeframe — nor will I be called a coward. I’m not simply taking the easy path, I am powerful. My process is my process and if I’m hanging out investigating and enjoying an interesting area along that path, or considering the fact that my wife has a stake in my life and I love her, I think that’s pretty damned alright. And really, pause here and think of a world where every broad category is narrowed into sameness, where every story, every goal, every achievement is homogenous and the one path to that same endpoint, is uniform. HOW monotonously boring, I have no interest in that.
I give Styles the benefit of the doubt. More often than not I think people just do what they do, they are who they are, there is no nefarious agenda to appropriate or undermine others — I don’t think anybody accused The Glimmer Twins (external link) or New York Dolls (external link) of that. Well, on second thought, there are probably dissertations written about it. I really struggle with labels because so many people use them so damned rigidly, often setting themselves as the touchstone by which they apply them. They might as well make a checklist and application to be vetted by tribunal so we can properly sort people to their satisfaction.
On the one hand, I get that with the limits of perception and language, we need labels to communicate ideas and form connexions based on commonalities. Nevertheless, I find categories and labels often vexingly exclusive and limiting.
On a personal level, I may still be read as an eccentric, girly sort of man — goodness knows I’ve been called girly and even faggot enough times — but nobody knows my inner thinking or process the way I do. After half a century of living, I know what I need and I know why I do as I do, very well. Others may or may not know I have taken nicked hormones before. They are usually ignorant of the fact that I talked about that with my doctor at the time but for reasons I shan’t detail here, I’ve not gone that HRT route. Perhaps, but not yet. Straight, cisnormative people don’t do these things, period! I’m not straight so where do I fit? Am I just a gross, pervy, autogynephillic crossdresser then?
My path and my process are my own and nobody else’s business. Like all humanity, I am unsure of what my future holds, of how my “identity” will develop — trans people don’t corner the market on trying to figure out the meaning of their gender. Perhaps we experience incongruence in a way cis people ( I opine) do not, we are certainly more acutely aware of that one part of our humanity than they are, but uncertainty and insecurity about sex and gender surely impact all people to some degree. But those who decry my stated identity at any point in my life ultimately lack the knowing to give them any right to judge, comment, or prescribe my course in life or my right to self-identify. I mean, seriously, on yer bike you officious people. It’s like the woke white guy who told me I had no right to “appropriate” Mexican culture because I am white — doggedly self-assured ignorance strikes again.
In a 2020 interview with Scottish journalist and television presenter, Lorraine Kelly, Styles’ mum revealed (external link) that he embraced dressing up and experimenting with clothes as a child. But really, go and google images of him when he was younger (external link). He’s beautiful. He’s always been androgynous and expressed a partially feminine aesthetic. I reckon he simply arrived at a point where he no longer cared what people thought of him if he dressed to please himself and blossomed.
When I go out pushing the boundaries of what is culturally acceptable for a man to wear, people don’t know what box to put me in so they usually assume I am gay. In and of itself, I’m not the least bit bothered by that but I do take note of the stereotypes and assumptions people hold. As a later teen in the 1980's, I’d go out in eyeliner, an androgynous oversized women’s shirt I’d made my own, tight black jeans, and Beatle boots (yeah, think Noel Fielding). One evening, a femme gay man I sort of knew because he came into the restaurant where I waited tables, laid his palm on my face, and with not a little pity said, “Oh. My. GOD! YOU. ARE. SOOOO GAY, and you don’t even know it!”
Was I an imposter appropriating gay culture? No, I was investigating my selfness in a way that felt authentic. In the end, my sexuality played no part in the way I dressed, I did it because I liked it. It felt good.
On the flip side, I know gay men who are essentially “straight-acting” and who don’t hesitate to comment about my feminine clothing and grooming choices with a notable level of disdain. One of them, a bear, went off on a diatribe about how he likes men to be hairy. “Good for you,” I said, “It’s for me, not you.” Through the open collar of my shirt, he’d noticed my chest hair was gone and felt at ease expressing his distaste. I’ve never said a thing to him about his cargo shorts and knee socks — Is he appropriating dorky straightness? I have to wonder though: if I grew a huge beard and let my body hair grow in, and if I bulked up and then gained a layer of chub around my overdeveloped muscles, would anyone accuse me of queer-baiting bear culture or would they just accuse me of appropriating Roy Anderson (external link)?
Citations with external links to sources:
Is Harry Styles queerbaiting or destroying toxic masculinity by Christine siamanta Kinori - September 1, 2022
Why did Men Stop Wearing High Heels, author William Kremer, pub. BBC World Service, 25 January, 2013
My Husband Betty — Life with a transvestite
The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User by Michael Waters’ pub. Atlas Obscura, 2016
Reported Effects of Masculine Ideals on Gay Men (Authored by Francisco J. Sánchez, Stefanie T. Greenberg, William Ming Liu, and Eric Vilain) published in the National Library of Medicine, 2009
Playtime with Harry Styles, author Hamish Bowles, published Vogue, November 13, 2020
Harry Styles’ Mum Reveals He Has Always Loved Dressing Up & Experimenting With Clothes | Lorraine — Lorraine Kelly’s official YouTube channel, Nov 17, 2020
Photos: Photograph of transgender activist Virginia Prince (1912–2009) Courtesy of University of Victoria Libraries, Transgender Archives.
A great tip of the hat to KP_the_writer for their time editing.
