Sans Fig Leaf

Previous
Index
Next

Email

w

"Crimes of Fashion"

12 April, 2002

I lost an earring recently. I don't know precisely when I lost it, just one time when I went to scratch my ear, there was a gap between the other two earrings.

It wasn't an expensive earring, but it's loss still annoyed me. More annoying was the number of days that went by before I remembered to put another earring in the hole. I just wouldn't remember by the time I got home, and a day or so later I would either notice it missing, or one of my friends would point out that I'd lost an earring.

There was a time, not that long ago, where such a thing couldn't happen. Every morning, after I'd decided which shirt to wear to work, I would spend several minutes deciding which earrings to wear. I have an unbelievably large collection (though it isn't entirely my fault; I inherited Ray's jewelry after he died). I have one of those large hardware organizers, you know the kind with little plastic drawers for keeping your nails and bolts separated? And I mean large. Mine has 60 drawers in it. And they all contain earrings. I have eight drawers of Christmas earrings alone.

And the drawers are just for the costume jewelry. The "real" jewels--the diamond studs, emeralds, saphires, and so forth--are kept elsewhere. So, in addition to rhinestone studs in every color of the rainbow and the aforementioned Chrismas earrings I have hoops and bangles and flashies and big, gaudy, brightly colored "gold" and colored glass combinations that a drag queen would be embarassed to wear out in public.

And I've worn every one them. Sometimes to parties or concerts. Many times just to go to work.

It was my "big earring phase" as one friend called it. A few friends questioned my sanity. I'm sure many others questioned my basic fashion sense. At least one person accused me of doing it to "squick" the straight mundanes. Interestingly enough, that was a gay friend who berated me for wearing big flashy earring solely for the purpose of provoking non-gay friends. I have to point out for the record that just as many co-workers and casual acquainances asked me if one female friend or another was my wife during this phase as they did before... and more often than it happens now.

In the interest of full disclosure I also have to admit that the earrings did provoke at least one set of homophobic construction workers to shout insults and threats at me one day while I was walking to work.

When I was asked during the phase why I liked the big, flashy ear jewelry, I usually said that I just liked it. It was a fun and mostly harmless way to express myself. It made people smile. Sometimes it made them laugh. There isn't enough laughter in the world, and not all instances of laughing-at-someone are mean-spirited. So I don't mind being laughed at every now and then.

The change in my jewelry choices was very sudden, but not entirely conscious. When Ray went into the coma, they asked me to take possession of the jewelry he was wearing at the time the paramedics had carried him into the hospital. He was wearing two diamond studs and two plain gold studs. One of the diamonds was one I had given him. Another had belonged to a friend of ours who had died a couple of years earlier.

The safest place to put his earrings at that moment was in my own, empty, earlobes. I made a little promise to myself that I would wear them until he woke up. When he died I couldn't bring myself to remove them. It was a completely irrational thing. It felt like a betrayal, somehow, to even contemplate it. So I wore them for a few months, taking them out every now and then only to clean them.

Both diamond studs had "screw on" backs, which supposedly meant you couldn't lose them. I was eating dinner by myself one night when I felt something land on my shoulder, inside the collar of my shirt, and then roll down my chest. It was one of the diamond studs. The back was gone. It had just unscrewed itself, so far as I could tell. I found the back in my office a few days later, so I'm not sure how long the earring had just hung in my lobe with nothing but friction keeping it in.

I didn't want to lose any of them, and by that point I was able to make slightly more rational decisions. So I put the two diamond earrings away, with our nice stuff, and I found a third plain stud to go with the other two in my left ear. I went through all of our jewelry, then, trying to decide if I wanted to start wearing the flashier stuff, yet. I decided not to, just then. I felt a need to continue the original gesture of keeping Ray's earrings in as a sign of mourning, even if only I knew what the jewelry meant.

I took one of the titantium rings from Ray's collection (a medium-sized hanging ring with captive bead) and put it in the only hole in my right lobe. It was very all very simple and tasteful. I figured I'd wear them at least until the first anniversary of Ray's death, and then decide if I wanted to change to something else.

It's been three years, and I still wear the titanium ring in the right ear 99% of the time. Most of the time I wear matched sets of hypo-allergenic studs in the other ear. Ray often had trouble with cheaper metal used in some earrings, so I had bought him an amazing number of sets of these small, tasteful things over the years. They have the advantage that I can wear them for days without any fuss.

I've thought a lot about that question of why I had a "big earring phase." I still own them all. I still think all of them are cool or pretty or fun. But I also understand that part of the reason I wore them was that I needed to establish an identity of myself outside of the expected role of a chubby, balding, white guy from the rural west. Yeah, probably on a subconscious level I was hoping to shake up some people, but mostly I just needed an external symbol that said, "It's not what you think" when people looked at me.

Some of it was insecurity. Some of it was the wild need to break free from the past. I had lived a closetted life until I was 31 years old. Before then I was constantly worrying about what people would think of every little thing I did, what clothes I wore, how I gestured with my hands, how I pronounced certain words, what topics I expressed interest in, lest someone guess that I was a faggot. Once I had shaken myself free of those shackles, I went just a little crazy.

It could have been worse. Gaudy earrings is harmless compared to some things people do during that wild high of feeling suddenly free.

Which isn't to say that I'm no longer a fashion outlaw. I have my collection of brightly colored baseball caps, including the leapard skin one. I have my collection of Hawaiin shits. Some, such as the one I'm wearing today, are very subdued and tasteful. Others are a bit more loud and tacky. As I'm getting older, I'm finding that subtlety appeals to me more and more. It's fun to flaunt it in such a way that people aren't certain you're flaunting it.

Always keep them guessing.