just saw a “period typical homophobia” tag on a fic set in the early 2000s and like…you arent wrong but jesus things changed fast huh
I mean part of it was this was during a style shift from baggy to tight apparel and being on the cutting edge of fashion was considered symptomatic but something the personality change sexuality stuff has me realizing is that a truly heterosexual man does not, in fact, have judgement of what is attractive in a man. So to consistently style himself attractively reflects real cultivated talent, as straight girls have been cultivating reading Seventeen and Vogue and practicing makeup all along.
(this is one reason queer girls often had a quirky fashion sense: they could derive a sense of how a girl looks good without reference to an existing tradition)
That’s why Queer Eye For the Straight Guy, “ability to simultaneously conceptualize the interior experience and recognize the external appearance of masculinity” was the expertise being provided to the straight guy.
It was less “these dudes are dressing gay”, it’s “these dudes are unusually self-aware of how attractive they look… which is gay.”
Then of course I remember from the turn of the 2000s that maybe more abstract things might make their way into heterosexuality from gay relationship styles and come to think of it we kind of have seen a boom in understandings where solid straight couples sometimes have sex with other people or switch up roles so the girl’s fucking the guy in the ass since then