Leather–men, in general, had no intention of ‘passing’ as heterosexual, however, or so Shaun Cole, author of Don We Now Our Gay Apparel, has argued. Homosexual men whose public identity more nearly conformed to mainstream constructions of masculinity referred to leather-men as ‘butch.’ The leather–man’s presentational strategies were and are regarded by some as deviant and unacceptable, especially to those homosexuals eager to ‘pass’ as ‘normal.’ Leather–men were and are frequently marginalized within their own supposed community. Yet even within homosexual culture, dressing in biker leathers frequently did (and still does) create social tensions. It presented a particular mode of decidedly masculine dress in a highly stylized form, subverting the identity of masculine (and heterosexual) male biker and appearing more ‘real man’ than any heterosexual male might ever want to appear. The macho biker look implied hyper-conformity to male gender role expectations. These influences included the cowboy, the construction worker, the soldier, the policeman, and of course the biker. The biker archetype was one of many influences in a trend toward hyper-masculine dress styles for homosexual men.
And just as one did not have to know how to sing in order to dress like Judy Garland, it was not necessary to own a motorcycle in order to dress like a biker.ĭuring the Gay Liberation Movement spanning the 1960s and 1970s, many homosexual men cast off society’s clichéd view of them as effeminate, and gay culture became as a whole more consciously masculinized. Thus Brando’s character in The Wild One became for some not only a figure to lust after but also a figure to be. Homosexual males are sometimes perhaps more overt in assuming the identity of figures that they either admire or for whom they feel sexual attraction. Emulation of figures from the world of entertainment is a common enough phenomenon, regardless of sexuality. The first of these is images of masculinity portrayed in American film. The homosexual leather-man has at least two cultural origins. It concentrates instead on those men who appropriate the biker image and biker leathers solely to construct a masculine sexual identity that stands in opposition to the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual. The fetish aspects of wearing leather for S&M purposes are beyond the scope of this paper.
For the purposes of this paper, a leather-man will be defined as a homosexual male who wears biker-style leathers regardless of whether or not he actually owns a motorcycle, and who is not a participant in sadomasochistic sexual behaviors. This brief paper will therefore attempt to document the evolution of the phenomenon of the biker-leather-wearing homosexual male in late-twentieth-century American culture. And almost as soon as Brando donned his Harley cap, numbers of homosexual males appropriated biker imagery for use in a small segment of gay culture, utilizing the associated leather costume to construct for themselves a deliberately and calculatedly masculine social and sexual identity.īut despite his notoriety, the leather–man has been largely ignored by both mainstream socio–cultural historians and those in the field of LGBT studies. Bikers were and are stereotyped as overtly masculine, hard-fighting, sometimes hard-drinking, ‘real’ men.
More recently, Arnold Schwarznegger re-popularized biker macho and its associated attire in the Terminator movie series. Subsequent films, including Easy Rider and Chrome and Hot Leather, perpetuated the image of the biker as a free-spirit, an outlaw, and a renegade. Marlon Brando’s character, Johnny Strabler, in white t-shirt, leather jacket and Harley cap, immediately became synonymous with aggressive masculinity and disregard for social norms ( below, top left). The leather-jacketed man on his motorcycle has been an archetypal image in American culture since the release of the movie The Wild One in 1953.