Castro clone
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Castro clone is LGBT slang for a homosexual man who appeared in dress and style as an idealized working-class man. The term and image grew out of the heavily gay-populated Castro neighborhood in San Francisco during the late 1970s, when the modern LGBT rights movement, sparked by the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City and the Summer of Love, gave rise to an urban community. The first recorded usage of the term is from Arthur Evans's "Red Queen Broadsides", a series of posters he wheatpasted around the Castro at the time. The look was most common from roughly the mid-1970s to around the mid-1980s. The Castro style regained popularity in the first decade of the 21st century, particularly among LGBT hipsters.
Fashion
See also: Lumberjack § Fashion
The "Castro-clone" appearance typically consisted of masculine attire such as uniforms, leather or Levi's jeans, and checked (or plaid) shirts. Typical of the look was a form-fitting T-shirt, shrink-to-fit denim trousers worn snugly (bell bottoms and low-rise jeans in the early 1970s, later more traditionally working-class Levi 501s), sneakers or boots, and often a full moustache and sideburns. Hair styles were relatively short, not a crew cut, but definitely something that would not blow in the wind or require much hair spray to hold it in place. The look was modeled heavily on the greasers of the 1950s and 1960s, which was also an influence on punk, heavy metal and fetish subcultures.
The elements of the look all served to emphasize the wearer's physical attributes, especially those associated with masculinity; those with buff body shapes believed that less clothing was often better, so that their hard work at the gym was evident. Gay men so frequently adopted this attire, at first when bar-hopping, that it soon became associated with males of the post-Stonewall gay community.
| Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) slang |
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