Skinhead
A gay man who wears the skinhead look as a style or fetish: cropped head, high-laced boots, bleached jeans and braces, hard and working-class.
In the gay scene a skinhead, or skin, is a man who wears the skinhead look as a style and, very often, as a fetish: shaved or cropped head, heavy boots with the laces done up high, bleached or turned-up jeans, braces over a tight polo or a checked shirt, maybe a bomber jacket. The look is hard, working-class and aggressively masculine, and that is exactly what makes it hot to the men who wear it and the men who want them.
A gay skin is usually not a political skinhead. For most, the look is about masculinity, gear and sex, not about any movement, and many gay skins go out of their way to make clear they have nothing to do with the far right. But the history is complicated, and the word still carries it.
Where it comes from
Skinhead as the name of a British youth subculture appears in print in 1969, when a Daily Mirror article lists "crop-heads, skin-heads or peanuts". The original skins were young working-class Britons with shaven heads, heavy "bother" boots, turned-up jeans and braces; later, part of the movement was drawn into neo-Nazi politics, and that association stuck in the public mind.
Gay men were part of the story almost from the start. Murray Healy's book Gay Skins, published in 1996, draws on memories of gay skinheads from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and looks at how gay men took over the "hardest" youth cult of them all, and how that changed the gay scene. The irony is obvious: a look meant to scream straight, tough masculinity turned into one of the most recognizable gay fetish styles.
The look as fetish
In gay fetish culture the skinhead look sits next to leather, rubber and sportswear as a "gear" scene of its own, with its own nights, apps and dress codes. Boots are the heart of it: polished, laced, worn and sometimes worshipped. The fantasy often plays with the rough, dominant lad, and skins are a recognizable category in fetish porn.
Skin, masc, jock
A skin shares a lot with the masc and the jock: all three trade in traditional masculinity. The difference is the uniform. A jock is defined by sport, a masc man by attitude, and a skin by a precise dress code that comes from a real subculture with a real history. A shaved head alone does not make a skin; for that you need the boots.
Outside the gay scene, "skinhead" still makes many people think of neo-Nazis first. Context matters, and inside the skin scene itself small details of dress can be read as political signals, so the men who wear the look tend to know them well.
Related terms
Sources 2
- Green, Jonathon. "skinhead, n." sense 4. Green's Dictionary of Slang, online edition. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/oaepkly
- Healy, Murray. Gay Skins: Class, Masculinity and Queer Appropriation. London: Cassell, 1996.