Boxers or Briefs: A Gay Look at the Evolution of Underwear in the Movies
Men in their underwear.
The words are enough to catch the attention of most gay and
bisexual men, but the sight of an actual man in his underwear is even more exciting.
Better still is a scene of a man in his underwear in the movies, where it’s
okay to stare — where you’re supposed
to stare! — or even rewind.
Sometimes such scenes are well integrated into the plot of a
movie, as in 13 Going on 30 (2004) when Jennifer Garner, a 13 year-old
girl who finds herself in the body of a 30 year-old woman, is shocked by the
provocative strip-tease of her boyfriend, and realizes just how out-of-place
she really is.
Warning: a few of the clips may have some language not safe for work.
13 Going on 30
And sometimes scenes of men in their underwear are
completely gratuitous, as in Living Out
Loud (1998), an unabashed chick flick that throws in a revealing (and
career-making) scene of Eddie Cibrian in his white boxer briefs, seemingly
solely for the interest of the film’s purported female audience (weirdly, the
film bombed anyway).
Living Out Loud
Hollywood
has a complicated relationship with men in their underwear. From its inception,
the industry has been controlled by heterosexual men (or closeted gay ones), making
movies for a male-dominated, supposedly heterosexual audience. As a result,
women in their underwear have almost always been objects of desire, even from
the very beginning.
But a man in his undies? That’s not so simple. Just having
the movie acknowledge that such a man might be desirable has been fraught with
danger, throwing suspicion on the filmmakers, and possibly alienating the
heterosexual male audience.
How did this come to be? And how have things changed since
then? Let’s find out on a “brief” stroll through the history of men in their
underwear in the movies.
All this will be accompanied by appropriate video clips — but
only in the interests of scholarship, of course!
The Early Years
By the time the American movie industry was firmly
established in the early 1930s, men in the movies weren’t objects of desire.
That was the idea anyway.
“Men couldn’t be sensual with their bodies,” says Paul
Ehret, who has researched and written about underwear for InternationalJock.com. “If a guy had his
shirt off, he had to be chopping wood or performing some function that was
manly. It wasn’t supposed to be sensual — which, of course, just made it more
sensual.”
The early Tarzan
movies were a good example of this “inadvertent” sensuality. Former Olympic
swimmer Johnny Weissmuller spends the movies in nothing but a very revealing loincloth. But it wasn’t
considered sensual, at least openly.
Next page! Tarzan, Tom
Cruise, and more!
“Weissmuller was a star of 1932 Olympics,” Ehret says. “The
public was used to seeing him with nothing much covering his loins.”
Tarzan and His Mate
As for men’s underwear, it didn’t show up much in the movies
at all. When it did, sometimes it was for realism, as in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(1948), which showed the would-be miners in their union jacks. But mostly, it
was simply for comic effect.
“Men’s underwear was the punch line to a joke,” says Alonso
Duralde, author of 101 Must-See Movies For Gay Men. “It was boxers covered with
hearts, and the only time you ever saw it was when a guy’s pants got pulled off
or something.”
This was because of the Hays Code, a set of “guidelines”
enacted by the movie industry in 1930 and enforced starting in 1934, in an effort to forestall
actual government censorship. The code had a long list of do’s and don’ts -- no
inter-racial relationships, for example, and no mocking of religion. None of
the guidelines dealt specifically with underwear, but the whole point of the
code was supposedly to preserve “modesty” and “good taste” in the film
industry.
From 1934 until the 1950s, modesty and restraint ruled the
day. As such, even though form-fitting briefs were introduced in 1935 and grew
rapidly in popularity, men in the movies wore baggy boxers in movies like Brewster’s Millions (1945), Everybody Does It (1949), Father of the Bride (1950), The Seven Year Itch (1955), and Damn Yankees! (1958). Jimmy Stewart’s
underwear in It’s a Wonderful Life
(1946) was as far from erotic as you can get.
Still, some filmmakers, chafing at the limitations of the
Hays Code, occasionally found ways to liven up their movies. It’s probably an
urban legend that Clark Gable caused t-shirt sales to plummet when he took off
his shirt in It Happened One Night (1934) to reveal that he
wasn’t wearing an undershirt, but he made an impression nonetheless. And Paul
Newman caught more than Joanne Woodward’s eye when he walked across the screen
in just a pair of boxers in The Long, Hot Summer (1958).
The Long, Hot Summer
A New Realism
Through the fifties and especially the sixties, filmmakers
and even corporate executives began pushing back against the limits of the Hays
Code. American audiences were starting to see far more relevant, provocative
fare from foreign filmmakers. Many of these movies were even winning Oscars
and, far more importantly, racking up impressive box office grosses.
The Hays Code was finally retired in 1967 (replaced by the
MPAA, which rated movies G, PG, and all the rest). “People had decided they
were tired of being told what they could see,” Ehret says. “The movie industry
decided they had to mature or they were going to lose the audience, because America had
grown up.”
As for men in their underwear, that meant a jarring new
realism. Since briefs had become more fashionable than boxers over the years,
that meant that’s what most men now wore in movies like Midnight Cowboy (1969), The
Last Picture Show (1971), An
Unmarried Woman (1978), and The
Amityville Horror (1979).
The Amityville Horror
But for the most part, even these form-fitting and often
very revealing briefs weren’t intended to be erotic, just realistic. After all,
the seventies were the era of gritty realism in film, and it was a realism as
seen by very heterosexual male director-auteurs such as Martin Scorsese and Francis
Ford Coppola.
Next page! The pants
finally come off!
“Most of the time it was to show a character’s
vulnerability,” Ehret says. “Or it was shedding clothes at the gym, which had
to do with male camaraderie.”
But what was considered merely realistic to a straight man
could be intensely erotic to a gay or bisexual one, especially someone not used
to seeing much of the male form on screen.
The Glorious,
Revealing Years
Almost every man in the movies wore briefs in the seventies
and eighties, from Brad Davis in Midnight
Express (1978) to Aidan Quinn in Reckless
(1984), Michael O’Keefe in The Great
Santini (1979) to Keanu Reeves in Parenthood
(1989).
Even major stars had no qualms about donning form-fitting
briefs, including Clint Eastwood in Play
Misty for Me (1971), Michael J. Fox in Back
to the Future (1985), Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie (1982), and Mel
Gibson in The River (1984).
The scenes where Richard Gere dances around in his ratty
briefs in Looking For Mr. Goodbar
(1977) truly have to be seen to be believed. And when
Dan Aykroyd received oral sex from the ghost in Ghostbusters (1984), he was wearing — you guessed it —
tighty-whities.
Parenthood
“If you see a woman in lingerie [in the movies],” Duralde
says, “the implication is that she’s inviting the sexual attention of men. The
question is, is the same thing true for a guy in his underwear?”
In the seventies and much of the eighties, for the most
part, the answer was no. It’s impossible to watch Jeff Goldblum in his briefs
in The Fly (1986) and not be struck
by how incredibly revealing they are, but also wonder exactly what the
filmmaker was up to. Is the scene supposed to be erotic? More likely, the
filmmakers are merely contrasting the actor’s virility — and Goldblum
definitely looks more fit than he’s probably ever looked in his life — with the
physical transformation that takes place after the housefly DNA begins to take
over his body.
The Fly
Tom Cruise in his
Underpants
No one has done more for underwear in the movies, or
benefited more from being in his underwear, than Tom Cruise. And most of the
time, briefs have been his underwear of choice, from the highbrow movies like The Color of Money (1986) to the lowbrow early films
like Losin’ It (1983).
In fact, Tom Cruise’s breakout performance in Risky Business (1983) included what is
perhaps the most famous underwear scene of all time. Is the scene supposed to
be erotic? Possibly, but only in an innocent, seemingly uncalculated way. The
scene is simultaneously the gayest thing ever put on film while somehow
managing to be not gay at all.
Next up! Tom Cruise in
his underwear — again and again and again!
Risky Business
Cruise dropped trou again a few years later, and was
surrounded by a bunch of other guys dropping trou, in Top Gun (1986) — a pivotal movie in the history of men in their
underwear in movies. At last a major Hollywood
movie was openly and deliberately eroticizing guys. Incredibly, because a gay
consciousness had not yet permeated America, the film, which clearly
flirted with homoeroticism, was not seen as particularly gay at the time, at
least outside the gay community.
Tom Cruise has shrewdly played with a gay sensibility
throughout his career, using a strong fashion sense and the overt homoeroticism
in his movies to appeal to women and trend-setting gay men, and to also give
himself a sense of edginess.
“Tom Cruise presents himself as this male action hero,”
Duralde says, “but there is something boyish about him, which makes him
appealing to women. Off-screen he’s cultivated the ‘I’m not gay’ thing, always
appearing on a motorbike or with some hot actress on his arm. But he puts his
toe in the water of gay sensibility. It’s subtle, and he’s always pulling back,
so it never appears to be too gay.”
Cruise’s delicate “gay” tap-dance has worked
wonderfully — until recently, when his career has spiraled out of control,
fueled, in part by gay rumors.
Still, in a nice bit of career symmetry, Cruise later did
one more very attention-getting underwear scene, in Magnolia (1999). Incredibly, the contents of his briefs seemed to
have grown considerably since the days of Risky
Business.
Magnolia
The Teen Sex Comedies
The 1980s, of course, were the age of the teen sex comedy.
It all started with Porky’s (1982), a
raunchy, lowbrow sex farce the likes of which no one wanted to make — until it
grossed $105 million (on a budget of $4 million).
Suddenly everyone wanted to make a teen sex comedy.
Porky's
But if there was ever a genre created by heterosexual men for
heterosexual guys, it was the teen sex comedy. If gay people existed in these
movies at all, it was as an object of ridicule or the punch line to a joke.
This made sense, since the target audience of these movies was mostly homophobic
adolescent boys.
But the great irony of the 80s teen sex comedy is that,
despite being very, very heterosexual, they were sex farces, and in a sex
farce, it’s almost impossible to keep even your male leads from stripping down
to their underwear.
Reflecting the realism of a time in which most men wore
skimpy briefs, that’s what was reflected in movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Losin’ It (1983), and Porky’s
Revenge (1985). The Last American
Virgin (1982) includes an underwear scene that is hard to believe (here’s an NSFW link to the
In other words, the ranks of the nation’s closeted gay and
bisexual teenagers had something to look at even in these avowedly heterosexual
sex comedies.
Next page! Briefs go
gay!
Eventually, of course, the teen sex comedy fell out of
fashion. And when the genre inevitably remerged in the form of American Pie (1999), something had
changed. The girls were still just as topless, but the revealing briefs on the
guys had been replaced by modest, baggy boxers.
American Pie
What happened between The
Last American Virgin and American Pie?
Briefs had gone out of fashion. Interestingly, the reason why had a lot to do
with gay men.
The Gayification of
Briefs (and the Return to Boxers!)
In the eighties, as movies like Risky Business and Top Gun
were showcasing men in their underwear in a more erotic way, men’s underwear
itself was being eroticized by the underwear manufacturers. In 1982, Calvin
Klein introduced his first attention-getting Times Square
ad of a young man in nothing but white briefs — a campaign that would continue
throughout the decade.
“That was the first
era where men were being objectified in the media,” Duralde says. “You had the
Calvin Klein ads, the Soloflex commercial.”
All this coincided with the emergence of a visible gay
presence in America,
thanks to AIDS and the activism it inspired. The underwear ads themselves were
designed to appeal to the “new” marketing demographic of gay men; they were
created by gay men and featured the supposedly “gay” ideal of the defined,
hairless man.
But while the homoeroticism in Top Gun was missed by heterosexual America back in the 80's, it wasn’t long before the
gay/underwear association was too great to ignore. As a result, like Speedo
swimsuits, briefs and underwear in general became associated with gay men. And
as board shorts replaced Speedos as the swimsuit of choice (at least in America),
boxers replaced briefs, especially among young straight men.
In movies, the change was swift. In Bull Durham (1988), Tim Robbins wore briefs, but he was the comic
relief, the fool. The sexy star of the movie, Kevin Costner wore boxers. By the
time of Dead Poet’s Society (1989),
briefs weren’t anywhere to be seen. In Across
the Tracks (1991), Ricky Schroeder and a young Brad Pitt wore boxers and
boxer briefs, respectively.
Across the Tracks
Were movies reflecting fashion changes, or creating them, or
both? Either way, all of Michael Keaton’s different personalities in Multiplicity (1996) wore differently
colored boxers. Bruce Willis wore boxers in 1995’s Die Hard: With a Vengeance, and for pretty much the rest of his
career. And Ben Affleck wore them in both Forces
of Nature (1999) and Bounce
(2000).
There are exceptions, like Chasers (1994) and White
Squall (1996). But both films used briefs to imply the vulnerability, even
naiveté, of their young male characters.
Chasers
But while briefs continued to outsell boxers in real life
(and continue to, if barely), boxers were suddenly the undies of choice for men
in the movies — and the baggier the better.
Next page! Foreign
films “go there”!
Foreign Films
Foreign filmmakers have long treated men in their underwear
differently than American filmmakers. “American society has generally been
constrained by all the Puritans that the Europeans had the good sense to kick
off their continent centuries ago,” Duralde says. “Europeans are, in general,
less torqued up about nudity and sexuality than Americans in general are, so
they’re allowed to be both more matter-of-fact and more sexual with their
screen nudity.”
Sometimes the scenes of guys in their underwear are very
matter-of-fact, as in the innocent French coming-of-age story Wild Reeds (1994), the bittersweet story
of a love triangle between a gay boy, a straight boy, and a straight girl.
And sometimes the underwear scenes have a deliberate
eroticism, even a deliberately gay eroticism, as in the films of the openly gay
Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. In Labyrinth
of Passion (1982) and Law of Desire
(1987), he introduced the world to a very hot, frequently undies-clad Antonio
Banderas.
Labyrinth of Passion/Law of Desire
Despite critical and popular success (including Oscars for All About My Mother [1999] and Talk to Her [2002]),
Almodóvar continues to portray the male body both realistically and erotically
with little regard for American sensibilities, most recently in Bad Education (2004).
Bad Education
Where Things Hang
Today
As with so many things, men’s underwear in the movies isn’t
quite as simple as it has seemed in the past. Boxers remain the rule in most
studio films while briefs are used mostly for comic effect, as with William H.
Macy’s hapless Dudley in Wild Hogs (2007).
“Most mainstream [American] movies still have a ridiculous
level of giggle factor,” Duralde says.
Still, it’s undeniable that we’re also experiencing a return
to the eroticization of the male form. Somehow the Greek epic 300 (2006) managed to draw in hoards of adolescent
heterosexual males without alienating them with the fact that it’s basically
two hours of oiled bodybuilders strutting around in Speedo-like loincloths.
300
Next page! What’s
happening now!
Meanwhile, independent cinema increasingly gives openly gay
men a chance to feature their own unapologetic, and specifically gay,
sensibilities in movies like Quinceañera
(2006), East Side Story (2006), the Boys’ Shorts (1993) series, and even an actual gay teen sex comedy, Another Gay Movie (2006). When it comes
to boxers or briefs, is it any wonder what these gay directors tend to choose?
Another Gay Movie
What will men in the movies be wearing under their clothes
in the years to come, and how will directors be showcasing it?
Whatever the answer, you can bet that gay and bisexual moviegoers
will be watching closely.