A man sits in a coffee shop. He’s wearing Red Wing boots and weathered jeans, Warby Parkers and a flannel. A head of shiny blonde curls cascades into a luscious beard. His bag is big enough to hold an ax, but its only contents are a Macbook Air and a Moleskine sketchbook. He’s not a lumberjack, he’s a graphic designer from Bushwick and he’s participating in 2015’s first fashion phenomenon.

The lumbersexual.

The forestry fashion statement doesn’t come without its discontents, though. Gay men are now crying out, “We were here first,” about the lifestyle trend, saying straight culture is now stealing the hairier “bear/cub” dynamic gay culture adopted years ago. What they don’t realize is that their rage misguided.

During the 1880s and 1890s, more men were working in offices, spending more time indoors, not doing physical work outside. Men were anxious, depressed and extremely fatigued. To combat this masculinity crisis, advertisers and journalists invented the glamorized image of lumberjacks: big, strong men who had a sense of honor, working outdoors at a job they loved. Originally, this theatricalized version of masculinity was what men were encouraged to aspire to.

This masculinity crisis has come full circle and now were back in a time where more men are working in offices, spending more time indoors, not doing “manly” things in the great outdoors. We’ve reverted to the time of the axe wielders, at the dangerous crossroads between the LGBT rights movement and the information age.

This cultural tug of war between gay and straight echoes the ones that came before it, most recently with the metrosexual in the early 2000s. Tim Teeman talks about this phenomenon in his November Daily Beast article, “How Straight World Stole ‘Gay’: The Last Gasp of the ‘Lumbersexual.’” According to Teeman, “The lumbersexual is just straight culture’s latest belated attempt to theatricalize masculinity, decades after gays got there first.”

But this whole discussion relies on the assumption that a group of people can ever own a facet of culture. In J. Bryan Lowder’s Slate essay from July 2014 “The Trouble With ‘Stealing’ Cultures,’” he dissects the idea of gay white men “stealing”  concepts such as “shade” and “reading” from black women. He argues, “No group can claim to ‘own’ an idea like shade, much less to dictate to others when and where it may be used — provenances and trajectories of development are just too complex to imprison culture in that way.”

The difference between being influenced by culture, and stealing it, lies in intention. A new theory cropped up by Out magazine’s Mark Simpson, he posits that straight men are not only adopting gay culture, but that they’re doing it to achieve the admiration of gay men.

Nick Jonas, for example, has been exploiting this movement lately. Jonas, a straight man, is now playing a gay MMA fighter on DirecTv’s new original series “Kingdom.” He recognizes his gay fan base in almost every interview, and he included several gay clubs in his national press tour. But I would guess the reason he’s doing these things probably has less to do with gay people, and more to do with money.

It’s hard to argue that straight men aren’t becoming more accepting, but the more likely reason for adopting gay trends is that the gay community is filled with some of the most culturally and economically mobile people in the world, and that they have leverage on other groups.

Using other group’s religion, traditions, etc. to your advantage isn’t right — such as Geisha Katy Perry at the American Music Awards. But it’s hard to believe that straight culture stole a fashion trend that was originally crafted at a time when gay culture didn’t even exist. Essentially, cultural appropriation does happen, it’s just not happening here.

Eric King is a sophomore magazine journalism major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @erickingdavid.

Published on January 20, 2015 at 1:35 am