This post was submitted by Zack Rosen

“I’m in a sensitive situation and would like a little input from you… It goes a little something like this: my boyfriend is losing his hair. He is 22 years old.”

So began an advice letter I received this week from an anonymous TNG reader . His 22 year-old main squeeze is graduating from a light thinning of the crops to full-out fallow earth. I’ll avoid excerpting the whole letter (this is still my show, after all) but the basic gist is that our chromedome-phobe is committed to his boy come hell or bald water, but would prefer that his hair look as it did a year ago and not as if he needs the council of a wigmaker. The boyfriend has promised to do something about it in the future but is ” too busy working, hanging out with friends [and] being a good boyfriend to take any action of his own.”

The crux of the question is whether our partial observer should take matters into his own hands and buy the boy an OTC baldness treatment, and if there is any way to bring this up without recreating the video for “We’re Not Gonna Take It” on his beloved’s self-esteem.

My gut reaction to both these questions is “No, you asshole! Are you kidding? Do you want to be single, you scalp-ist fuck?”

But this is was a sincere question and it would be unfair to simply spew from my id in response. So I’ll try again. This time with manners:

You said it yourself that your boyfriend is aware of his hair loss. If he hasn’t done anything about it, chances are it doesn’t matter that much to him. And if that’s the case it shouldn’t matter to you either. Bodies change as their owners get older. You’re getting your first taste of this at a relatively young age. Now its his hair. In five years his pecs might get saggy. Ten more years after that, his genetic lycanthropy kicks in and you’ll have to lock him in the tool shed with an “Airwolf” DVD and some raw fish for snacking every time there’s a full moon.

My point: you love your boyfriend for your being boyfriend. If he wants to change anything about himself it’s his prerogative. If you want to change things about him you aren’t being true to the fact that you have to take this boy for what he is.

I too started losing my hair around the age of 21. Instead of a boyfriend, though, I was blessed with a style-conscious older sister who began to notice my receding hairline before I ever would have. I thought I looked perfectly fine but she dedicated a year of her life to getting me on hair loss medication. Like some twisted version of “Green Eggs and Ham,” she would pop up on trains, planes, in my bedroom and at family reunions to peer closely at my scalp during unrelated conversations and interrupt my sentences to say things like “Hmm… have you talked to your doctor about Propecia?

It eventually worked, but the toll on my self image and on my relationship with my sister just wasn’t worth it. Three and half years later I have a slightly thicker head of hair. Yes, this builds confidence and adds to the sum of my physical appearance. But I didn’t have any confidence issues to fix until my sister created them. I suspect too that your boyfriend thinks he looks fine right now. Why would you invest time and energy telling him something different?

(Although, just to play devil’s advocate, he could just be in denial about his problem. If this is the case, tell him ONCE that generic Finasteride is available from a doctor. It’s half the cost of namebrand Propecia and does more for receding hairlines than Rogaine, which is typically better for crown of the head baldness. Not that I’ve researched this.)

If you’ve never faced the loss of your hair, you don’t fully realize that hair is all a guy has. When a woman goes out for the night she can put on a dress, earrings, a necklace, bracelets, or shimmery shoes. She can paint her nails or match her handbag to her hose. A man has his clothes, which society usually dictates be subdued for formal situations, and his hair. An unusually combed or product-ed hairdo is all a guy has to make his acquaintances say “Oh, you clean up so nicely!”

I decided to go against this convention (and save some money) around this time last year. I buzzed my head to stubble every other week. I thought that I looked great, but in retrospect the world did not concur. My mom told me two weeks ago that I looked “frightening” with no hair and she was relieved I had grown it out. I had the pleasure of meeting Pansy Division’s frontman Jon Ginoli on Monday. He had only known me by my old TNG profile pic (pictured above) and was vocally shocked at how different I looked now. He said he thought I was going to be tough and scary, but he quickly appraised my tousled Jewfro and perpetual smile (it’s actually only absent in the above picture) and found the opposite to be true.

I call this column “The Indie Rock Fag” because its just as much about culture as music. Like it or not, your hair says a lot about the way the public will perceive you. Guys: Give yourself a mohawk and you’ll be an insta-punk. Girls: Dye your hair blonde and see if you get treated any differently. Right now, the advice-seekers boyfriends’ cultural options are limited. He could shave his head and get labeled something he isn’t. He could go on expensive pills to solve a problem he doesn’t think exists. Or he could stay as he is and be the hottest thing of all: Himself. Any failure to deal with this is the advice-seekers problem only. The boyfriend’s got nothing to do with it.

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