The Nasty Pig Discourse, Explained
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.
