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Gay Men's Underwear
Why We Dress to Be Seen
A cycling accessory from 1870s Boston, a Supreme Court ruling, a Soho shop, a Times Square billboard. Why underwear carries so much meaning in gay male culture, and what that freedom costs.
In 2024 the jockstrap turned 150, and the Boston Globe asked the owner of Bike Athletic — the company that has made them since the 19th century — who buys them now. Not footballers. His estimate: about 70 percent of his customers are gay men. That's one company's figure, not the whole market, but it points at something real. A garment designed to support cyclists on cobbled streets became one of the most recognisable symbols of gay male desire.
The same thing happened, in different ways, to the thong, the posing pouch, the sheer brief and the wrestling singlet. This guide asks why — drawing on film theory, legal history, sociology and fashion criticism.
Underwear can carry meanings in gay male culture that go well beyond comfort: desire, identity, belonging and the pleasure of being seen. Jockstraps and other garments associated with sport became part of an erotic visual language through physique photography, nightlife, porn and fashion. Their significance comes from those cultural contexts, not from the wearer's sexuality alone. This article argues that gay underwear culture brings together three permissions — to look, to be looked at, and to want to be seen. Those freedoms can support confidence and self-expression, while also creating pressure around whose bodies count as desirable.
Our Argument: The Three Permissions
Here is the idea the rest of this guide develops. It is our interpretation — a way of connecting the history below — rather than an established academic finding.
Mainstream culture has long given men this one — as long as the looking is directed at women.
Usually granted to men only with an excuse: the athlete, the soldier, the model "just doing his job".
The one conventional masculinity has tended to withhold — and the one gay culture has claimed most openly.
Gay men's underwear, on this reading, is what clothing looks like when all three permissions exist at once. The difference isn't simply that it shows more skin. It's that wanting to be seen is allowed to be part of the point.
Why Did Men's Underwear Always Need an Excuse?
For most of the 20th century, men could be shown in their underwear only if the image claimed to be about something else. In 1983 the film theorist Steve Neale argued in Screen ("Masculinity as Spectacle") that cinema puts male bodies on display through fighting, sport and action, letting audiences enjoy looking while telling themselves they're watching something else. Neale was writing about film, but the same pattern runs through the history of men's underwear.
| Year | What happened | The excuse |
|---|---|---|
| 1874 | According to Bike Athletic's own history, C.F. Bennett of Chicago sporting-goods firm Sharp & Smith designs a support strap for Boston's "bike jockeys" riding cobbled streets. | Cycling |
| 1890s | Underwear advertisers, the V&A notes, use classical statues rather than real men "to avoid concerns about representation of the semi-clothed male body". | Art |
| 1897 | Bennett is granted US Patent 594,673 for a "Combined jock-strap and suspensory". The jockstrap moves into rugby and American football. | Protection |
| 1935 | Coopers launches the Jockey Y-front, named after the jockstrap. The V&A observes that its overlapping fly "drew attention to the male genitals". | Support |
| 1945 | Bob Mizer founds the Athletic Model Guild in Los Angeles, later publishing Physique Pictorial. Its models wear posing straps and white jockstraps; the bodybuilding framing helped such magazines avoid obscenity charges. | Fitness |
| 1954 | Physique photographer Bill Green opens Vince Man's Shop at 5 Newburgh Street, Soho, having sold "continental-style" briefs by mail order to "the outdoor man". It begins as a haven for gay men and theatrical types. | The outdoors |
| 1962 | In MANual Enterprises v. Day, the US Supreme Court rules that photographs of near-nude men in three physique magazines are not obscene — the first case involving gay content to reach the Court. | The law catches up |
Sources: Boston Globe; V&A (which dates the patent to 1887 — the patent record itself shows 1897); Andrew Groves; 370 U.S. 478 (1962).
Many gay men read these images for what they also were. Physique Pictorial presented itself as a fitness magazine while functioning, for much of its readership, as a gay one. Its readers understood the code; the postmaster mostly didn't. Gay men's relationship with underwear didn't begin with fashion. It began with reading desire into garments that were officially about sport, health and hygiene.
How Did Gay Liberation Change Underwear?
Liberation made it possible to drop the excuse. Once looking at men no longer had to be hidden, garments that "accidentally" framed the male body could be worn on purpose.
In England and Wales, the Sexual Offences Act 1967 partially decriminalised sex between men; Stonewall followed in New York in 1969. A decade earlier, in 1957, the Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen had his first cover in Physique Pictorial, where Bob Mizer named him Tom of Finland. His sailors, bikers and lumberjacks, bursting out of half-removed clothing, offered a masculine, unapologetic self-image; critic Kate Wolf credits the work with helping "pave the way to gay liberation". In December 1971, Boys in the Sand became the first gay adult film reviewed by Variety ("There are no more closets"). In 1974 the designer Rudi Gernreich — a founding member of the Mattachine Society, one of America's first gay rights groups — designed and named the first modern thong swimsuit, for men and women alike.
In 1977 the photographer Hal Fischer published Gay Semiotics, a deadpan field guide to the clothing codes of San Francisco's Castro, including the "basic gay" look and the jock. Approaching the wrong man could be dangerous, Fischer later explained to i-D, so "there was some very serious legitimacy in the coding." He also noted that the same outfit "wouldn't necessarily have read as gay" in Billings, Montana. The garments were often identical to straight men's. What changed was the audience.
Gay Men, the Gaze and Objectification
Gay men are often both the ones looking and the ones being looked at — which changes what being seen can feel like, without removing its pressures. In 1975 Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" described the male gaze in Hollywood film: men look, women are looked at. Mulvey was analysing cinema. Applying her idea to underwear and everyday desire is our interpretation, but it's a useful one.
When a man wears a jockstrap for other men, the roles Mulvey described can blur: the person being looked at may also be the one doing the looking tomorrow. In 1994 Mark Simpson, coining the word "metrosexual" in The Independent, argued that men who enjoy being looked at unsettle the assumption that "only women are looked at and only men do the looking" — and that gay men had been the test market for male self-display. For many gay men, that reciprocity can make being desired feel like participation rather than exposure.
"A lot of gay men express their sexuality through their underwear or imagery."
Model Dominic Albano, Los Angeles Blade, 2023But reciprocity doesn't make everyone equal. Mutual attraction doesn't erase hierarchies of age, body type, race or status, and it doesn't make every kind of objectification welcome. That's the real tension at the centre of gay underwear culture: the same freedom that makes being desired feel liberating can also make appearance feel like a test. Both are true at once, and the rest of this guide keeps both in view.
Why Are Jockstraps Associated With Gay Culture?
Because the jockstrap frames the body front and back, carries the erotic charge of the locker room, and was adopted by gay men from the 1950s through physique magazines, nightlife, leather scenes and porn. Each of the garments below does something specific with the body.
The pouch lifts and presents the front; the straps leave the backside bare, framed by elastic. As AnOther Magazine notes, that's why the jock appeals to tops and bottoms alike, and why it became linked with bottoming — once a stigmatised association. University of Exeter academic João Florêncio ties its recent loss of shame partly to PrEP and better HIV awareness, and describes the pleasure of taking straight sporting signifiers and making "them gay as hell".
The sociologist Brian Pronger, in The Arena of Masculinity (1992), called sport both the "metaphor and reality" of masculinity, with a homoerotic undercurrent it rarely acknowledges. The locker room — where men undress together and pretend not to look — became gay visual culture's most persistent fantasy. Colt Studio, founded in New York in 1967, built an aesthetic out of what fashion historian Shaun Cole calls "hypermasculine images", with characters "constructed through their clothing and costuming". Practical detail is in our Jockstraps 101 guide and our jockstrap collection.
The V&A traces a line from Renaissance codpieces to 1960s crotch-hugging trousers — "a codpiece, albeit a concealed one", as one writer put it — and on to aussieBum's 2007 Wonderjock, designed for men who wanted to look bigger, "just like women using the Wonderbra". Art critic Melody Davis put the logic best: the penis "is even more present if it is concealed or disguised." More in our pouch and enhancing underwear guide.
Gernreich's 1974 thong was a response to Los Angeles banning nude beaches: if you can't be naked, wear as close to nothing as the law allows. For many gay men it still carries that charge — a small, deliberate act of daring. See our guide to PUMP! thongs and the full men's thong collection.
Fashion historian Valerie Steele describes underwear as "simultaneously dressed and undressed". Sheer fabric makes that literal: it covers and reveals at the same moment. Our mesh vs sheer explainer covers how the fabrics differ; the sheer and mesh collection has the range.
The bodysuit borrows from wrestling, one of the few sports where male bodies touch openly under the cover of competition. Worn outside the sport, it keeps the silhouette and drops the excuse. More in The New Masculinity.
Why Don't More Straight Men Dress to Be Seen?
These are tendencies, not rules — plenty of straight men wear jockstraps and plenty of gay men wear boxers. But one influential explanation for the broad pattern comes from the sociologist Eric Anderson, who coined the term homohysteria: "men's fear of being homosexualized, through association with feminized behavior." He argues it peaks when homosexuality is understood as a fixed identity, the culture disapproves of it, and femininity is read as a sign of it. Under those conditions men police themselves, avoiding anything that looks like vanity or wanting to be desired by other men.
Underwear designed to be looked at sits right in that danger zone. Yet mainstream culture has happily consumed the imagery as long as the excuse stays in place. When Calvin Klein launched his briefs in 1982, Bruce Weber photographed Olympic pole-vaulter Tom Hintnaus in Santorini for a Times Square billboard; Klein believed "underwear was pure sex". In 1992 came Mark Wahlberg for Herb Ritts. The body is displayed, but framed as athletic performance rather than invitation.
Anderson's later work argues homohysteria in Britain has been declining, producing more "inclusive" masculinities. In 2016, YouGov found loose boxers were the most common style among British men overall (38%), but tight-fitting boxers led among the youngest — the survey didn't split results by sexuality, so it describes men in general, not straight men specifically. And in 2022 Vogue ran the headline "With Jockstraps Hitting the Runways, Fashion is Saying Gay Loud and Clear", after Calvin Klein, JW Anderson, Gucci and Rick Owens all showed them.
Body Positivity: Who Gets to Be Looked At?
A culture built on looking is also a culture built on being judged. A 2016 analysis of five US national studies, covering 116,356 men, found gay men more likely than straight men to report dissatisfaction with their bodies.
Gay men uncomfortable wearing a swimsuit in public, against 16% of straight men.
Gay men unhappy with their muscle tone and size, against 30% of straight men.
Gay men dissatisfied with their overall appearance, against 21% of straight men.
Source: Frederick et al., summarised by Chapman University, 2016. US data, reported in 2016.
Writing for Soho House, Mahoro Seward noted that a search for "person in jockstrap" returns almost entirely "slim to athletic, cis-passing men", and that much queer-coded menswear "implicitly reinforce[s] conventional ideas around which bodies are 'worth' desiring". That criticism is fair. The garments themselves weren't designed for perfect bodies — the jockstrap was designed for a man on a bicycle — and bears, older men, bigger men, trans men and everyone in between have long worn them. The freedom to be seen is worth less if only one kind of body qualifies.
What Gay Men's Underwear Actually Means
Most of the key garments here were first designed for sport, safety or support. What gay culture did was read them differently, drop the excuse that made looking acceptable, and share the gaze. That's why a jockstrap can mean something in a gay club that it doesn't in a rugby changing room, even though it's the same object — and why "gay men's underwear" describes something real: underwear chosen and worn with an audience in mind, by people who are often that audience too.
Shop the Best Buys
One pick for each garment in this guide, from our gay men's underwear collection.
Frequently Asked Questions About Gay Men's Underwear
Sources & Further Reading
- Boston Globe, jockstrap at 150 (2024) — bostonglobe.com
- C.F. Bennett, US Patent 594,673, "Combined jock-strap and suspensory" (1897) — Google Patents
- V&A, "A brief history of men's underwear" — vam.ac.uk
- MANual Enterprises, Inc. v. Day, 370 U.S. 478 (1962)
- Andrew Groves, "Vince Man's Shop" — andrewgroves.com
- Hal Fischer interview, i-D — i-d.co
- Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Screen (1975); Steve Neale, "Masculinity as Spectacle", Screen (1983)
- Mark Simpson, "Here come the mirror men", The Independent (1994) — marksimpson.substack.com
- AnOther Magazine, "From sport to sex: how the jockstrap became part of gay culture" — anothermag.com
- Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity (1992); Shaun Cole, "Costume or Dress? The use of clothing in the gay pornography of Jim French's Colt Studio", Fashion Theory (2014)
- Eric Anderson on homohysteria, Journal of Feminist Scholarship — umassd.edu
- YouGov, "Exposed: Britain's underwear preferences unveiled" (2016) — yougov.co.uk
- Chapman University, national study of male body image (2016) — news.chapman.edu
- Mahoro Seward, "Menswear is queerer than ever, but who's it really for?", Soho House — sohohouse.com
- Los Angeles Blade, "Why are so many gay influencers launching underwear lines?" (2023) — losangelesblade.com
Matthew Priestley trained in fashion at Central Saint Martins, then worked as a designer in Milan and New York and lectured in fashion design at De Montfort University and Nottingham Trent University. He founded BANG&STRIKE in 2006.
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