The Nasty Pig Discourse, Explained | Them
There are questions that have plagued the modern man since we first crawled from the primordial soup: Why do people suffer? What is the meaning of life? Can I wear my padlock to a restaurant?
While the former two questions may be fodder for philosophers, it’s the latter that preoccupied gay men’s minds over the weekend, as a series of social media posts erupted into a full-on fetish gear discourse.
How did the Nasty Pig discourse start?
Well, it all began with a tweet from one user who said that wearing padlocks, a popular fashion accessory in some gay subcultures, was not a good look.
“Attention gay guys: wearing your pad lock necklace to a nice restaurant is negative culture,” one user wrote on X. The same user followed up after some blowback, adding: “People trying to moralize about this but it isn’t complicated: Nasty Pig is not chic!”
What is Nasty Pig?
Nasty Pig is a clothing brand that began in 1994 with apparel that emphasized the gay leather subculture, but has since expanded to include jockstraps, thongs, socks, accessories, shirts and more.
“People told us we were crazy to call our brand Nasty Pig,” the founders Frederick Kearney and David Lauterstein wrote on the brand’s mission page. “They still tell us to change our name if we care about getting our line into department stores. Well guess what? We don't. We won't change how we cut our clothes to flatter more of the mainstream market. We aren't focused on anything other than turning out the guys and gurls who are feeling Nasty Pig.”
Nasty Pig may have started as a niche brand, but is now anything but. In its thirty-year history, the brand has been worn by A-list celebrities such as Madonna and Frank Ocean, per the New York Times. And Lauterstein even wrote a memoir, Sodomy Gods, recounting his and Kearney’s romantic and business partnership.
Kearney told the Times that the influences for the brand included gay artist Tom of Finland, designer (and friend) Thierry Mugler and photographers Alvin Baltrop and Stanley Stellar, who both rendered the gay scene surrounding New York City’s piers in their art.
OK, so where did the discourse go after that?
Well, the whole thing really picked up when a popular account with almost 100,000 followers quoted the original “not chic” post and added their own commentary.
Who else chimed in?
The original tweet prompted a lot of gay guys to tweet about their experience with padlock necklaces which, in BDSM cultures, are often used as a way to symbolize that a person is in a consensual dom-sub relationship with a person who has the key to their lock.
“One time i borrowed a gold padlock necklace from my girlie and i loved it and wore it all the time and it wasn’t until 3 years later during my first semester of law school that a gay guy on campus said ‘who has the key?’ And I never wore it again,” one person wrote on X.
Another person shared, “I wore a padlock necklace for literally 2 years straight without knowing what it meant.”
There were also plenty of humorous reactions to the discourse. “Normalize Nasty Pig in the monogamous community,” RuPaul’s Drag Race season 11 winner Yvie Oddly wrote.
“Hey guess what? Go fuck yourself,” user @pinkgiantjay wrote. “Nasty pig was actually a huge counter culture driver in the 90s when people were actively dying of aids. Gays were treated like ‘nasty pigs’ for having sex and this brand was launched to normalize having gay sex. Go shove it asshole.”
This post has since been deleted, but lives on in screenshots.
As some people later pointed out, the Nasty Pig co-founders have told several different outlets the origin story of the brand’s name, and it is named after the couple’s dog.
“Nasty Pig is named after me and Fred's Jack Russell, Piggy. I didn't know how to start a company, but I wanted to get a lease on this little tiny store. And the landlord was like, ‘Okay, well, what's the name of your corporation?’ Piggy was humping my leg while I was on this call, and Fred was like, ‘Get off.’ And I was like, ‘Get off me, you little nasty pig,’ Lauterstein told Paper. “And then I was like, ‘You know what? I'm going to call it Nasty Pig.’” He added, “But I was also thinking about the idea of masculinity and the idea of chauvinist pigs, and how that was bad and the way that sometimes heterosexual men treated women, and misogyny was so gross. But yeah, it's named after Piggy Puff.”
The owners told a similar story to the Times, as well.
After the original tweet claiming that Nasty Pig’s origins were in the AIDS crisis, the original poster deleted the tweet and said they were “bowing out” of the discourse.
