Pat, a gay man in his early 30s from my small town in central Illinois, says his friends - “a gaggle of 30-something ’mos from all across the country (Michigan, North Shore suburbs, Minnesota and NYC) - all remember being a thing,” but they believed many variations of it. Maybe it was a thing in the early days of cruising, but since there isn’t a solid answer about which ear it is, I can’t help but get the impression that it’s just another stereotype pinned on gay people so that cishet men and women can feel a sense of power over them by thinking they can spot the faggot in the room.” “This may have been different 20 years ago, but I don’t think earrings were ever a large a part of gay culture or closeted communication.”ĭan Irani, a sound technician in Chicago who’s also in his early 20s, agrees: “The whole thing is stupid, it literally doesn’t exist. “Gayness has a variety of complicated nonverbal signal languages, but earrings aren’t really one of them,” Gelb tells MEL. … This cultural unease has spilled onto the internet, filling it with anxious queries from straight men about which ear to pierce, whether to pierce or how best to broadcast their heterosexuality via their facial jewelry,” Spena writes, concluding: “The nice part is, it seems to matter less and less.” So why do so many people believe the right ear piercing is “gay”? Andrew Spena, writing for Mic, references that T Magazine article, which “repeated what is by now a familiar saying for some: ‘Left is right, and right is wrong’ (in this case, ‘wrong’ being a euphemism for ‘gay’). In the end the male earring lost its sexual significance altogether, and simply became a generalized way of annoying middle-aged, latter-day puritans.
The problem was that nobody could remember which was supposed to be which. This led to some confusion and stories began to circulate that there was a secret code, that to wear an earring in a pierced left ear was homosexual, and in a pierced right ear was rebel heterosexual. At first it was assumed that the wearers were all effeminate homosexuals, but it soon became clear the the habit was spreading to the more avant-garde of the young heterosexuals. In the Western world, earrings, so long a purely female adornment, have recently been seen on increasing numbers of male ears. In the Elizabethan era, earrings were quite fashionable for men, he writes.Īnd in the 20th century, people got confused about which ear meant what: In his book The Naked Man: A Study of the Male Body, Desmond Morris explains that earrings have indicated wisdom and compassion in the stretched earlobes of the Buddha, while pirates wore them in the belief it would protect them from drowning. Earrings on guys have signified many things over the years, such as social stature or religious affiliation. Historically speaking, the truth is more complex.