‘The Only Haircut that Makes Sense Anymore”

One could quite reasonably trace four strains of gay culture and representation after 1969: social realism/activism, spirituality (New Age, radical fairy), drag and punk, the last two especially marked by an interest in fashion, provocation, and style. This last category is the one most resistant to critical analysis, partly because within itself abstract ideas are unarticulated and there is a distrust of speaking “reasonably” at all. And also, one cannot speak of a gay “punk” visual media without recognizing that, perhaps more than most gay aesthetics, this one is formed by specific communities for whom punk is far more than a style, but a practice embodying a philosophical and political position in the world. ¹ This is a subculture to which punk plays the role that existentialism might have played for the Beats or William Burroughs, grounding them in a sense of futility in the world, a resistance to bourgeois values, a certain (moral) seriousness, and a zealous commitment to the act of negation. While this seriousness might lead in existentialism to an affirmation of the necessity for individual action and political commitment, the more anarchist strains of punk turn towards forms of self-effacement, deliberate provocation and (in place of individual “enlightenment”) towards pleasure, usually in forms not sanctioned by the larger culture.