Gay ear to pierce

How did having piercings in the right ear become associated with homosexuality? There were some hippies wearing them but that was more of a protest of social norms than anything else. I remember hearing about the one earring means homosexual thing in the late 70s so it dates back at least until then. A lot of the punk rockers of the late 70s sported earrings.

As new wave was a bit more mainstream than punk, the fashions that came with it, including earrings for men, were also a bit more mainstream. Of course, in some crowds, a man wearing any earrings was considered homosexual. The working class coal miners and steel mill workers in the area I grew up in tended to share that view.

Back in the 80s you were very likely to get comments about it if you only wore one earring. Watch the movie Fierce Creatures. The fiercely hetero Kevin Kline character has an earring in the right ear. It must vary quite a bit. Or his character was being in idiot, which was pretty much who he was.

Then at ear point conventional wisdom shifted decisively to the other ear, but at that pierce nobody got just one ear pierced. That gorgeous hunk Mr. Clean has been wearing an ear ring conspicuously in his left ear since All the ladies loved him, but did he love them? On several occasions over the course of a year several men randomly tried to chat me up in the street, including one older foreign guy who stopped me as i was coming out of a shop and pretty much invited me back to gay hotel room there and then.

So i was none the wiser. Then at a party a girl who i was talking to who expressed surprise at my obvious interest in her explained the significance of the earring. The light dawned, i removed the earring, and suddenly my overwhleming appeal from gay men vanished.

Why Did We Grow Up Thinking a Piercing in the Right Ear Was Gay?

Northern Indiana resident here. I remember going to Indy in or so and our waiter at the bar had hoops in both ears. That was kind of jarring even though I knew rock stars were doing it at the time. Soon after that it was multiple piercings in both ears for both sexes. I pierced my left ear to celebrate my divorce in but stopped wearing an earring in the mid 90s when I started wearing my hair really short.

My understanding as a kid was that wearing earrings at all, in either ear or both, was pretty questionable. I got my left ear in pierced in freshman year of college—this was in the Northeast. Got the left one done when I was 16 in and the right when I was