Got a question that would scandalize your group chat? That’s what this column is for. Go Ask Alex is an anonymous space for queer readers to ask the questions they’re afraid to ask anyone else—about sex, love, life, and everything in between. It’s judgment-free and completely anonymous.
⸻
Hi. Gay man, early 30s, pretty vanilla, been out about 8 years. I followed the Nasty Pig thing online this week and honestly it sent me down a rabbit hole because I realized I don't know the history or what the padlock actually means. I don't want to be ignorant but I also didn't totally disagree with the guy who started it. Is there not some context where that stuff is maybe not appropriate? I feel like I'm not supposed to ask that. Is there an OK way to talk about where kink gear belongs, or does asking that question make me the bad guy?
Hey,
No, you're not the bad guy
For readers who missed it: A guy on X tweeted that wearing a Nasty Pig padlock to a nice restaurant is "negative culture." He followed it by writing that Nasty Pig, in his view, isn't "chic." A lot of gay men piled on, some agreeing, some mocking, and some sharing their own stories of wearing a padlock without knowing what it "means." Them published an explainer calling the whole thing a "discourse."
It was everywhere for a bit, so yes, let's talk about it.
You write that you don't totally disagree with the person who posted. Various posts on X seemed to share and clarify his position, an aesthetic belief, not a moralizing one, that Nasty Pig clothing simply isn’t formalwear.
Indeed, it is not. I know David Lauterstein and his partner Fred, the lovely men who founded and continue to run Nasty Pig, quite well. David and I are press mates. We both published books with the same indie, renegade, queer literary press, and I blurbed David's book, Sodomy Gods, about how he and Fred founded the brand. I even did a reading from my own book at Nasty Pig's NYC headquarters. I feel confident, from knowing these men, that neither of them would say their clothes are appropriate for all occasions and environments.
But the tweet seemed to inspire two different strands of opinion: one, that outward markings of kinkiness have no place in certain contexts because they’re improper; and two, that a particular brand doesn't go with white tablecloths. Those are two different positions. When you say you half-agree, which is it?
If the latter: I agree with you! Sometimes you have to rent a tux and leave the padlock at home. But from reading your question, I think you hold the first position: that outward signs of private sexual taste aren't appropriate in certain places. That's something else.
First, here's the history. Nasty Pig launched in 1994, the year I turned 2, and the same year hundreds of thousands of people had already died of AIDS while the U.S. government spent a decade pretending it wasn't happening. Gay fetish and party culture, the New York scene that Nasty Pig arose from, had been one of the major organizing cultures of gay male life for decades by then. That culture was where men found each other, built chosen family, developed support networks, mourned each other, buried their friends, built bonds of sexual discovery and love amidst unspeakable loss, and created erotic codes and aesthetics that are still used and understood today. The padlock, specifically, in BDSM culture, typically signals a power exchange dynamic. Often, the wearer is collared, "owned" in the consensual and intimate sense, by a dominant partner.
That history matters. Years before same-sex couples could put rings on each other's fingers and call it a legal bond, they put padlocks around each other's necks and called it love. No one needs to know that history to buy a Nasty Pig chain, but knowing it adds beauty and resonance to what is otherwise a clunky, uncomfortable, and in some eyes unattractive, even clichéd, fashion accessory. For some, that history is why they wear it.
Similarly, consider the hanky code. Starting in the 1970s, gay men developed a system of colored handkerchiefs worn in the back pocket of their pants to signal sexual interests to each other in bars, on the street, and in spaces where being explicit was dangerous or even impossible. Left pocket meant top, right meant bottom. The color told everything: red for fisting, blue for fucking, yellow for water sports, black for S&M.
The hanky code still exists. Walk into any gay leather shop from New York to Berlin, and you'll find harnesses, jock straps, and gear in those same reds, blues, and yellows. Gay men still buy them and wear them. Most couldn't tell you what the colors even mean; the code has migrated into just an aesthetic. What was a private language is now looser and more open, available to anyone willing to buy. That's how culture evolves. The padlock is doing the same thing.
Now, one argument against wearing them, at least on X, seemed to be about consent. Do people in a restaurant, including children, need to consent to encounter a sexual symbol? Is a padlock, by default, sexual? Is wearing one a sexual act?
The answer must be emphatically no. A padlock chain is not explicit imagery. It is a small metal object that the overwhelming majority of people in any restaurant will read as a fashion choice, perhaps a puzzling one, but nothing more. The only people who will decode its meaning (if its history always constitutes as its “meaning”) are other gay and queer people. The consent argument has teeth when talking about genuinely graphic content in public, but not here. If we apply it to this, we must apply it to a great many other things that signify sexuality and end up in a place where any visible marker of queerness becomes impermissible, and that is truly dangerous.
The not-new argument that kink and fetish symbols are "inappropriate" in public has always been about respectability politics, a way to push queer sexuality back into hiding. When you feel agreement with the original poster, look under it. Is it a genuine belief that certain signs of sexuality must be private? Or is it the instinct of a queer man who has been taught that being too visible, too sexual, is dangerous? Is it shame?
Here's what I really think is going on in this "discourse." I think some gay men, particularly those who are more vanilla and more comfortable in straight spaces, have a complicated relationship with the more visibly sexual members of our community. That degree of visibility makes them feel exposed. They think that the more visibly sexual gays make it harder for the rest.
On one hand, I understand. The closet affects us all differently. That distaste for guys who wear sluthood on their sleeves, or around their necks, is borne of the closet and fear. Many gay and queer men have it. Feeling it doesn't make you bad, but when it gets positioned as etiquette or context-appropriateness, it serves a hetero view of respectability. It is the closet extended into self-policing. It is the closet continuing to harm us when people are just wearing a necklace to dinner.
Whose comfort is centered when we ask what should be worn in public? If the answer is straight people or gay people who want the respect of straight people, that conversation does not interest me. I did not come out to bend to the comforts of straight people, and I never will.
We can talk about fashion and taste. That's fine, that's a real conversation, but a padlock at a restaurant doesn't warrant it. Wear the damn chain.
Alexander Cheves is a writer and former sex worker who spent more than 12 years in the adult industry. He writes Out’s sex-and-culture column Last Call and is the author of My Love Is a Beast: Confessions (Unbound Edition Press), which Kirkus Reviews called “not for squeamish readers.” In Go Ask Alex, he offers candid advice for readers with real questions they’re afraid to ask anywhere else. Send your question to askbeastly@gmail.com —it may be answered in a future column.
