PHOTOS: A History Of Hairy Guys

I admit, it might seem a bit strange, but sometimes book projects start with a flash. That’s certainly how Beards: An Unshaved History
came about. When Berlin based publisher Bruno Gmünder first discussed
the idea of a beard book with me, images of 1970s gay clones shot
through my head; to be exact: photos I had discovered a few years
earlier in the archives of the Schwule Museum Berlin while researching
my last Gmünder book, Porn: From Andy Warhol to X-Tube (2011).
These stubbled vintage guys had left quite an impression, mildly put,
probably because they reminded me of my own youth. I had always been
curious as to why they shaved off their trademark accessory once the
AIDS crisis hit in the eighties, the time I was finally old enough to
have sex with them. So I told the Gmünder editors that if I were to do a
beard book with them, I didn’t want to write about grooming products or
shampoo, but make the gay clones of the Golden Age of Promiscuity the
starting point for my journey through the centuries, and look at bearded
history from a pronounced gay perspective.

What
followed turned out to be a joy ride, full of surprises. For example, I
had never realized that the bear subculture-look of furry faces and
checked shirts morphed with the post-9/11
return-to-the-frontier-mentality-look, i.e. the renaissance of the Wild
West style that was part of the toughening-up act that accompanied
George W.’s War on Terror. Suddenly you couldn’t tell a straight diehard
Bush supporter apart from a gay muscle bear in full armor. And when, on
top of all that, the hipster movement adopted the Taliban beard as a
symbol of the cool outsider, all known beard order was turned upside
down. The result is that today, for the first time ever, you cannot tell
from a beard which politics or sexual orientation a man has.
Ironically, you can only tell the straights from the gays by looking at
their pubic hair. Ten years ago a shaved body and pubic area were an
almost certain signal of homosexuality: today it’s the other way round.
Straight guys grow enormous beards, wear hyper-masculine outfits, but
meticulously shave their pits and pubes. That’s what their girlfriends
demand, it seems, and that is the sacrifice these gents make for sex, no
matter how emancipated their beards make them seem. Gays, on the other
hand, went from the depilated Calvin-Klein look of the eighties and
nineties back to full body and facial hair, with a capital F.

inRead invented by Teads

Of course, the history of facial hair is not merely the last forty
years of follicular fashion, that happened in my own life time.
Therefore, the book’s center-section starts 10,000 years BKC. The
burning questions include: why did cave men suddenly decided to make the
effort to painfully remove their facial hair with sea shells and flint
stones; why were the pharaohs clean shaven, yet wore luxurious strap-on
beards at public festivals; why could Greek men in antiquity indulge in
anal intercourse with a bare-cheeked boy but not with a youth old enough
to sport a beard; and most importantly, why did not only the Catholic
church, but also the Jews and the Muslims, go to such monumental
troubles telling their flocks which style of beards were acceptable to
the One True God? (Does God really care about hair styles?)

Hans_Holbein_Bonfifacius_Amerbach_1519_Prof_Röm_Recht_Uni_Basel

For
me personally, the most remarkable discovery were the many images
showing young men of the Renaissance that my art-historian boyfriend
found in his extensive library. Many of these men could have stepped out
of the pages of any current fashionista magazine, style bibles for the
urban hip from Williamsburg to West Hollywood or Berlin-Mitte. The same
giant beards that were popular in AD 1480 are popular once more, and
look just as cool as on a Holbein or Dürer model. A great beard is a
great beard, in other: timeless.

Another happy discovery in writing this book was the openness of all
those intimidatingly butch people in the beard scene – photographers and
models mostly. Their support ultimately made this book possible. The
superb present day photo material comes from them directly, as do many
of the stories included. I’ll confess right away that my favorite comes
from a woman, the celebrated gay porn director Mr. Pam. In an interview
she claims, tongue in cheek, that beards work as “flavor savers” for all
those “piggy boys” out there. They can sniff their beards all day long
and happily remember whose ass they ate for breakfast. (Her choice of
words.) Obviously, it takes a woman to point out the finer things in
life to the world!

In the end, my voyage from clone to caveman and back again made me
notice beards everywhere: in museums, on the street and above all in the
most recent porn movies (think of such actors as ginger-headed James
Jamesson and his massive …. beard!) As MTV’s Mike Yerxa so eloquently
puts it in his intro to my book: “Forget about glasses, watches, ties,
shoes, or hats – the beard is the greatest accessory of all time.” Amen
to that, and long live the return of the clones!

Clarke’s Beards: An Unshaved History is now available at Amazon and other book suppliers. See a few photos from the book below.