Heartland Drag: Why Blue State Gays Started Dressing Like Red State Bros
A reclamation of masculine aesthetics ... or a subversion of them?
When I was growing up, there was a general cultural understanding that gay men were particularly fond of fashion, who monitored its ebbs and flows, and served as ambassadors from its frontlines, popularizing niche trends that would later be widely adopted. The idea was that, broadly speaking, style-agnostic straight men followed the lead of their tuned-in gay counterparts; to show any interest would have you labeled as gay or, later, “metrosexual.” In recent years, however, I’ve noticed something different. Now it is queer men who are adopting the stylistic gestures of their straight brethren. More specifically, the aesthetics of a certain genus of heterosexual male: that of the red state, blue-collar variety.
Go to any Brooklyn gay bar or buzzy Silverlake cafe and you’ll see it in action: gays in baggy cargos or weathered Carhartt double-knees worn with ripped-up Realtree camouflage T-shirts topped with a choppy mullet. Their tattooed arms dangle forth from wife-beater tank tops or vintage sports jerseys. Trapped in conversation with one, you’ll find yourself staring at your own warped image, reflected back from their wraparound gas station-style sunglasses (likely made by Oakley or, perhaps, Balenciaga) tucked under the brim of a five-panel baseball cap. Toned bodies have gone soft, more natural, as if bullriding has been swapped in for Barry’s classes. It’s giving trade. I’m calling it Heartland Drag.
“I think it's very much born out of, for some dudes, this rejection of a certain type of homosexual femininity,” says Rob Aquino, a Los Angeles-based party promoter and producer. “For me, it's very much gay-ing it up, as much as you can with a masc-presenting look. So, through a gay prism, you’re feminizing these historically masculine ideas.”
This sartorial movement exists less on runways and red carpets than it does at sweaty, queer dance parties (Loose in Los Angeles or MotherDisco in New York) or along certain city streets in Bushwick, say, or Chinatown. Though there are hints at Balenciaga and the LA-based brand ERL, it’s less of a codified designer dictum than it is an ineffable vibe. It has a whiff of the Rust Belt, the Great Plains, and the Deep South. It’s the 4H Club—but yassified.
Aquino, 34, grew up closeted in Long Island—awash with homoerotic images of muscled torsos shot by Bruce Weber for Abercrombie & Fitch—and dressed in a prep-meets-frat uniform (striped rugbys, polo shirts, boat shoes) during his high school and college years to fit in with classmates. It wasn’t until he later came out, moved to Williamsburg, and saw the seminal queer ‘zine BUTT that his eyes were opened to a certain “white, gay hipsterdom,” he recalls. “Which was sleezy, chic, and fun.”
Heartland Drag is cheekily on display on his Instagram, in the way he pairs an orange-accented tactical fishing shirt with painted-blue fingernails or wears a motocross graphic tee and backwards cap in a slideshow of images that includes a camo shirt from the brand Barragán emblazoned with the phrase, “J’adore Ur Hole.” “I’m bearded with a ton of tattoos,” he tells me. “But I’m still a faggot. I find that dichotomy fun.”
What Aquino is getting at is that this isn’t gay culture trying to merely pass for straight, but to, instead, inject an element of queer subversion—camp, even—into the look of swaggering masculinity. To reflect a fun-house mirror version of patriarchal ideals back onto itself, and in the process remind everyone that masculinity, much like everything else, is to some degree just a silly little costume. It’s why the term “drag” here is so apt: because much like traditional drag, where gay men both pay homage and exaggerate the hallmarks of femininity, in Heartland Drag, they both salute and satirize the performance of rugged manhood.
“I'm taking this historically patriarchal straight vision and doing it in a way that queers it,” Aquino told me. “Queering it and turning it on its head, because that's the antithesis of what it stands for.” An added bonus: “It’s fun, sexy, and cool.”
No culture—gay or straight—is a monolith. And in many ways, this is one subculture’s tribute to another. “It’s this deep subset of queer men that are looking at fashion through a different lens,” says Garrett Charles, a 31-year-old alcohol marketer who lives in Bushwick. “That, then, a couple years later, the mainstream queer guys started to take on.” He recalls a pair of long jean shorts he wore during a night out with friends in Hell’s Kitchen four years ago, “And they were like, ‘What the fuck are you wearing?’” he chuckled. “And now they’re all wearing them, and they bought them at Abercrombie or on TikTok shop.“
Echoing Aquino, Charles, too, says that a key element of this style is in its arch sensibility, the ability to take the uniform of cishet masculinity and turn it into an in-joke. “Like, there's something really funny about a gay man dressed like a construction worker whose wife is on opioids,” he said. “It’s done in a tongue-in-cheek way—this is funny because I'm gay, and nobody is going to look at me and think that I'm part of the subsection of culture that would wear this in a sincere way.”
“I see this almost as a way of reclaiming the masculine element of one’s identity,” said Angelos Bollas, author of the book Fashionable Queerness: Straight Appropriation of Queer Culture, which explores how some straight celebrities—Harry Styles or Timotheé Chalamet or Jacob Elordi, for example—have leveraged queer aesthetics to bolster their public personas. “It’s almost to overcome the association between sexuality and gender—that you are gay, so you're not masculine.”
Gay people mimicking—and undermining—heteronormative aesthetics is a foundational part of queer identity. Just take Tom of Finland’s effusive, hypermasculine drawings or the hackneyed clichés of The Village People. And queer people are particularly attuned to the nuanced ways clothing helps reinforce cultural understandings of both gender and sexuality. As minority that can sometimes move “invisibly” through society, gay men and women have always used fashion as a means of communication, to simultaneously blend in to society while transmitting messages hidden from the larger culture but clear to those in the know (it’s why, some critics theorize, queer people are attracted to nuances of fashion in the first place).
For men of a certain age, there’s even, to a degree, a sort of psychosexual exploration of our own adolescent experiences and desires. “The other day I wore this slim fit yellow slogan tee with longer skinny-ish jeans and flip flops,” Charles said, “And I was like, I look like somebody who would've bullied me in middle school. And that is still a form of reclamation of masculinity.”
“There’s a certain fetishization of these toxic masculine attitudes that, for better or worse, gay guys still are attracted to,” Aquino said. “It’s a full life journey.”
But why this particular shift, and why now? To many I spoke with, this current queering of heteronormative aesthetics is itself a response to straight men’s embrace of gay style. Post-pandemic, some cishet men have adopted queer-coded flourishes like cropped shirts, short shorts, and painted nails. Telling them apart from gay men has become downright memeable. These men, to a degree, benefit greatly from adopting this look—it gets them publicity and fame, in some cases lucrative brand deals; they play gay roles to further their careers—with few of the negative consequences gay men are vulnerable to.
“The fact that straight men are more comfortable wearing what gay men used to wear, and now it's become sort of fluid, I see gay men pulling back and dressing in a hypermasculine style,” says Clifton Mooney, a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work, in part, captures images of queer life and rural landscapes. Mooney himself was raised in West Texas, and his style is influenced by his upbringing there: black jeans, camo shirts, shitkicker boots. “My dad worked on airplanes and was wearing Dickies before Dickies were cool,” he says.
And so I got the feeling that part of the appeal of Heartland Drag was pointed. It was gay men moving on past an aesthetic they had first established and had been co-opted. And for their next trick, they retaliated by, yes, adopting the hallmarks of a traditionally masculine affect, but also, in doing so, “queering it,” as Aquino said.
There are other notable cultural shifts at play, like a certain romanticization—both sardonic and sincere— of rural life, coming from one of the most influential realms of gay life: pop music. There’s Beyoncé’s glittering “Cowboy Carter,” of course, but also Lana Del Rey, a beloved figure (“mother”) among Millennial and Gen-Z gay men, who dated Jack Donoghue, known for his red neck mien, before she married Jeremy Dufrene, who runs an alligator boat tour in Louisiana. Ethel Cain, a trans musician from Tallahassee, Florida, who has lived in Alabama and Indiana, is known for tapping into a sweeping, mournful Southern gothic style in her music and look. Last year’s breakout album was “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” from Chappell Roan, who toyed with an agraian-glam look, best represented by drag makeup worn with a Bass Pro Shop-style camouflage hat (later swiped by the Harris-Walz campaign and then adopted en masse by liberal urbanites).
Gay men influential in certain creative circles have since taken this further, like the director Gordon von Steiner, who employed this aesthetic for Troye Sivan’s asses-hanging-out-of-gym-shorts, shirtless-in-double-knees-workwear music video for “Rush,” or the oeuvres of photographers like Luke Gilford and Stuart Winecoff. Sivan himself, via stylist Marc Forne, has also embodied the look. (Forne’s own clothing line, Carrer, is very Heartland Drag). “I think everyone was gagged by the ‘Rush’ video,” Aquino told me. “And it's hard, especially in gay culture, to toe that line between taste and cheese.”
There are somewhat darker, uncomfortable contours to this stylistic movement as well. The first concerns the way the gay and trans communities are trying to understand their relationship to one another. To some, gay men reinforcing masculine stereotypes can be read as a sort of sartorial line in the sand.
“There are many ways to read this,” Bollas posited. “But some people might go to this extreme because they might want to disassociate themselves from the LGBTQ+ umbrella.” Bollas, for example, has noticed some gay charity organizations in the UK have made it clear that their mission is oriented toward gays and lesbians, sidelining trans people. “I believe a lot of gay men are afraid that their rights are going to be taken back, so there is one leg to that that needs to disassociate sexuality from gender.”
Relatedly, as there’s a perceived cultural shift towards Conservatism, best represented by Trump’s second presidential term, which was fueled by the right-wing Christian-nationalist movement Project 2025. In light of that, Heartland Drag could be seen as a regression or form of hiding. “Once people think that it's the idea of trying to ‘masculinize’ yourself, I think then you get into trouble because you’re trying to cover up or reject a type of identity,” says Aquino.
As is the case with any movement, once it is absorbed into the mainstream, it loses its original potency. And, friends, we’re at the precipice of that moment, if not just beyond. “Walking into Abercrombie and Fitch and seeing that now they have the clothes that I wear, it's like, ‘Okay, do I want to wear them still?’” Charles told me. “Do I want to continue my style in this way when it's not tongue-in-cheek anymore for a gay man to be wearing these clothes?”
In a snake-eating-its-tail moment, this queered version of heteronormativity is now earnestly marketed back to straight men, now minus the wink (see: Skims’ new Realtree camo collection, modelled by Post Malone). “Now straight men are wearing them,” Charles continued, “but I don't think necessarily that they’re performing queerness. Now it's just straight men who are wearing camo again.”
Heartland Drag’s inevitable evolution is already taking shape, and its foundation is, of all things, Abercrombie & Fitch. Not the brand of today, but the one of the early aughts, born of those horny ads made by Bruce Weber that so influenced Aquino as a teen. It’s the wayward prep stylings on the Miu Miu runway, part of the ERL aesthetic, and the bread and butter for popular vintage dealer and sourcer Marcus Allen of The Society Archive. It’s there in the bourgeois styling of Michael Rider’s debut at the French brand Celine. The sleezier elements are starting to fall away, or at very least being worn alongside dressier, more formal touchstones—a juxtaposition that welcomes class into the gender-sexuality conversation (for more on that, see my article on “Old Money” style from GQ).
Charles, for his part, says he’s starting to mix in more WASP-inspired clothes into his current Heartland Drag assortment—striped rugbys, button-up shirts—while Aquino is wearing boat shoes and ratty sweatshirts, the ultimate totem of East Coast prepsterdom.
“I mean, listen,” Aquino said. “At the end of the day, it’s all drag.”
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