This post was submitted by Zack Rosen

At some point in the far future, I will let everyone out there in TNG-ville know some of the craziness I’ve endured and caused during my tenure as a reporter for a gay newspaper. Until that day, I’ll whet your already dhamp appetites with a story about underwear. And not just one pair. Many, many pairs of underwear. More underwear than the eye can see. Underwear whose unbelievable breadth of  styles would make you breadthless. But mostly, underwear that comes in shapes and hues that suggest they were made by a crayon-wielding toddler who then cut them up to  snow flakes.

In short, gay underwear can take on some very bizarre characteristics. And like the butterflies or poison arrow frogs of the Amazon rainforest, new species are being discovered every day. Often in a seemingly normal looking guys’ pants. Underwear has the ability to cause some serious surprises when it is revealed. I’ve seen some of the cutest guys ever whip off a pair of fashionable, tight fitting jeans to discover baggy, knee-length boxer briefs that look as though survived not only four years of college, but also a trip to the south pole and an alligator attack.

More paradoxically, though, I know some so-called hipster guys who will whip off their v-neck, 1970′s faded Adidas t-shirt, remove their Rod Lavers and calf-length stripes socks, unpeel jeans so tight that they reveal the pattern of their wearers’ leg hair, and be left only with a pair of micro-sized briefs with an angry-looking cartoon eagle on the front. An eagle whose beady eyes and outstretched talons seem to be saying “Yeah, I’m incongruous. What are you going to do about it?”

I know this because that guy is me.

You see, in my days at the Washington Blade I received some crazy things in the mail. We would get bull whips from the people representing the new Indiana Jones movie. Someone angling for a spot in our holiday gift guide sent me a plastic bottle of “bowser beer,” and an accompanying tube of dog treats, to ply me during Christmastime.

But the most consistent gay gift I was showered with was underwear. Always briefs, always in colors that don’t exist in nature, always so tight that my ass looked like a peach with a condom in it, or so low cut and pube-exposing that if seen in close up you might actually think their waistband was a bandanna tied around my forehead.

And from what I’ve gathered from looking around my gym, or from my regrettable sojourn to Universal Gear, is that gay men eat this stuff up. For the usual reasons, of course. We’re marketed to as if it’s our only options. We’re told that this kind of garment makes us sexy, desirable, or a more prominent member of the gay cult. But the thing I didn’t realize is that they’re kind of fun to wear. As someone with a, uh, unique body type (think of me as a two-meter dachshund) I know that my options are usually limited to either adult briefs that sag off my small ass and come up to my belly button (yes, even you American Apparel) or child’s size briefs that make me feel like a pederast for looking at, buying or (god forbid) trying on in the store.

So all this gay underwear serves me well to a point. It fits like its supposed to and is sufficiently flattering if seen by others. They are also horrifically embarrassing. A little part of my dignity turned ashen and crumbled when a friend saw me changing at the gym and shouted “nice purple undies” across three aisles of lockers. An otherwise steamy makeout session is interrupted by my explanation of why my dainties have both tiger stripes and a tigers face on it. Those days when I haven’t done laundry in too long and actually consider wearing the blue-trimmed maroon banana hammock with the “Y” shaped string back. I mean, I understand a jockstrap. But that thing is the reverse jock strap. I’d call it butt floss, but floss isn’t supposed to be neon.

I suppose I could to H & M and buy affordable underwear that fits me like I’m geriatric. Or I could stay with my current motley collection of old boxer briefs and Walmarts boys’ larges and occasional candy-colored Ginch Gonch. Or I could suck it up, drop my aversion to all things mainstream and actually go somewhere gay and buy a bunch of highly egregious underwear that makes me look good and feel like my twizzler will have turned into a toucan’s beak by the end of the day.

Or I could end this post with a question, as I frequently do. What kind of underwear do you all wear? Do you put this much consideration into it, as I do, or am I as nuts as I’ve always suspected?

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