Gay Peter Pan-isms: Shorts, sandals, and t-shirts

Some examples of gays being stunted at around age 10 are hard to see because normal males have become infantilized in a similar way. For example, during the '90s it became acceptable for supposedly grown men to wear shorts, t-shirts, and sandals or flip-flops in a much broader range of places -- not just hanging out at the beach, pool, friend's back yard, etc.

That was a backward slide after the return of button-down shirts, suits, and ties in the '80s (even for the artistic types, as in the New Wave look, which gets Kevin Bacon in trouble at his new school in Footloose). In the mid-1970s, even a psychopathic taxi driver like Travis Bickle wore a button-down shirt, sport coat, and ankle boots when he took out a woman on a date.

And since gays are supposed to be such better dressers than everyone else, shouldn't they be the last group to succumb to the man-child look of today? Not at all -- their Peter Pan tendencies over-ride whatever desire they have to look snazzy. I've seen very little of that, by the way, I mean gays who dress in a way that women would call dashing. Their preferences lean so heavily toward campy that Tim Gunn, the mentor from Project Runway, has a stock phrase for the extremes that gay male designers so easily go to -- "clown clothes". Y'know, the kind of stuff a child would design, since kids think more in caricature than adults or even adolescents do.

I don't see them doing the preppy summer look either, like shorts with a polo shirt and boating shoes or something. It's more common to see them wearing some "designer t-shirt," sandals or flip-flops, and faggy looking shorts (tight and just past knee-length, formerly the capri pants but now jean shorts with the ends rolled up over the knee). As I've said before, I see at least a dozen or so queers a day at Starbucks, the supermarkets, and public transport around here. By now I would've known if they dressed in a more grown-up way. Even an adolescent's uniform of sneakers with jeans or pants seems to be too much for a good fraction of them.

How does this differ from the hetero man-child's dress code? Basically it's just more form-fitting, probably a by-product of their being slimmer and not trying to hide a tub of guts like an XBox junkie. And their clothes are more stylized and streamlined, reflecting their somewhat greater interest in how things look. Other than that, though, they both look pretty kiddie.

I stress again that this is not just some kind of part-time casual look, when they're done with their dashing grown-up look. They really do have an aversion to dressing more age-appropriately. It's so disgusting to see them once they're past 25 or whenever their AIDS starts rotting the skin, and they're walking around exposing their mummy legs.

You'd think that people crawling with disfiguring diseases would try to cover up more to protect their ego, kind of like how psychologically normal women stop wearing shorts and mini-skirts once their cellulite reaches a certain level. But in true 10 year-old brat form, faggots show little reaction to social shaming -- that's more of an adolescent development -- and insist on wearing whatever embarrassing, degrading shit they feel like. One of the easiest ways to set a homo off on a temper-tantrum is to tell them what they can and can't wear. Normal people respond in a variety of ways to that kind of advice, but they don't go into nuclear meltdown, unless they're also mental 10 year-olds.