The Indie Rock Fag Braves Universal Gear

"The Indie Rock Fag" is TNG co-founder Zack's new weekly column. Please be kind to it.

Original illustration by Ryan Blomberg.

Of all my stupid decisions — eating an entire coffee cake after Yom Kippur when I was 14, asking JD Samson if her mustache was real — the dumbest thing I've done in recent memory was getting stoned and going underwear shopping. Specifically, I got stoned and went underwear shopping at Universal Gear, the store that does for gay people what American Apparel does for Hipsters and Meyer Wolfsheim did for Jews: Reduce a people to their basest stereotypes and sell it off to the masses. However, neither of those examples made such an egregious use of hairless bodies, and neither gave me the kind of "fight or flight" reaction that UG did.

For the (blessedly) uninitiated, Universal Gear is a kind of one-stop shop for people who want to look capital G "Gay!" without having to put any thought into gay culture, art or politics. You can pick up some hideous sequined jeans in the front of the store, move to the north wall for sheer v-neck sweater and end up at the register to buy over-sized wrap around sunglasses and leather wrist cuffs.

My mission, unfortunately, meant I had to visit the scariest part of the store: The underwear section. It will probably take me four years of therapy and a lifetime anti-weed vow to get over what I saw there, but maybe talking about it will help.

I needed a pair of tiny briefs for a performance I was in. I'm in the unique position of having a 14 year-old's waist and a 25 year-old's penis on a dachshund-length torso, meaning that underwear either goes up to my belly button, leaves no room for my junk or gets so baggy it looks like skater shorts. The best solution to this problem is either to buy child's size large underwear from Walmart (which I do, and am embarrassed about) or to hit up the "Gay" brands like 2xist, XY and Gee My Cock Looks Huge in This Lycra Banana Hammock.

I have an aversion to the latter because I think brand loyalty (and the social cache implied) should not apply to the piece of cloth that keeps ones testicles from bouncing around when they run. I once had an old coworker tell me that "I should wear a trendier brand of underwear if I was going to wear my pants so low." I died a little bit on the inside then. But considering my upcoming performance involved an extended lip-synch in my underwear in front of hundreds of people, I figured I could relax the standards just once.

But when I actually made it to Universal Gear I found myself looking for a needle in a gaystack. The sheer amount of underwear cuts, colors, styles and pornographic packaging was staggering. I, red-eyed and mumbling, had to actually enlist a salesmen to help me with what I thought would be an easy, in and out job. He explained to me the merits of the brands, and how much of my ass they would show off and what the different package codes meant and what size I wore, and I walked out with a very flattering (and peehole-less) pair of green XYs. Mission accomplished!

But not really. What I bought at Universal Gear was fine- it was exactly what I was looking for. But the fact that such a store exists at all is what bothers me. At its simplest, UG is a gay store. You can go there and buy gay. And look like an idiot while you do it. Besides the fact that the clothing itself is an affront to the aesthetics of decency — imagine Annie Lennox and Right Said Fred having a baby made out of worn cotton and mega-sized logos — it just makes me wonder who sits in the giant control room, Big Brother style, and decides what gay men will dress like this season. I suspect that this great faggot in the sky could one day think "hmm... This summer, gay men will wear feathers! And they'll smear their torsos with the bull dung!" and three weeks later Apex would look look like a Big Bird orgy and smell like the Augean stables. And no one would question it.

If a volcano erupted on 14th Street right now, and Universal Gear was frozen in time forever, like a Pompeii of pomp and artifice, our homosexual forebears progeny would have so much to learn from it. The place is a museum even now. As an 80 year old man, I could take my grandkids and point out the dull sexuality of the place, and the mindless conformity to sparkle and the pack mentality contained therein and say to them "look, kids: there was a time when gay people weren't people. They were simply gay."

But what do I know? I paid $14 for an 8-square inch piece of cloth, and on the way home I went two miles out of my way to stop at Krispy Kreme for donuts.