When Your Kink is Hanging in Your Closet

I'm not sure how much I'm going to "explain" this kink, but I sure will ramble on about it. So my editor asked me to write about a kink of my choice. Which probably means "write about a kink you enjoy." And that means I need to let my kink out of the closet. Nowadays when you say "kink," people think porny kink like leather gear, gruff play, fisting, and the like. The use of a lot of accouterment comes to mind: floggers, whips, cages, electric gear, and other BDSM-type regalia. Then you get into those predilections that are a bit more specific: watersports, sploshing, food, gaining, and a few others I find just a tad too distasteful to mention. (You know who you are, brown hankie!) And that's all (mostly) fine and good, but it's not my thing. No, what I find really stirring my loins is uniforms of many varieties, especially of the "blue-collar" stripe. And I've narrowed down some of the possible whys of why many men find men in some type of uniform so appealing.

 

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Now when you hear "uniform" you probably go right to police, firemen, military, and of course leatherman. The menage á quatre of "manly" uniform action with the image of muscled, burly men! eyeing you up and down lasciviously as their hand runs to their crotch and pretty soon your fantasy man has you bent over...something... preferably in a public area. Yer boy Hank here's personal favorite though, has to be the less obvious "blue-collar" vibe of construction workers, loggers, truckers, and road workers. I'll explain why in a bit.

Photo courtesy of Raging Stallion.

The pinnacle of all homoerotic uniform imagery clearly goes to Tom of Finland, hands down, full stop. Yes, the men in his much-lauded artwork are the male equivalent of Barbie dolls as their physical proportions of pecs and bulges are almost unattainable by real humans. But what he did was to sexualize and iconize working-class men. Men we see every day: cops on the street; those road workers we pass in construction zones; the bikers blazing down the road; and cowboys if you're lucky enough to live in such an area. He also included a lot of military, which when he was coming of age were men he experienced which, yes, included WWII German uniforms.

 

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I'll have to admit that there's maybe more than a tinge of internalized homophobia in the lust we have for such images, at least, back in the day. We often lust for that which we cannot have, or be, and what we want to be. The men in his artwork were almost modern Jungian archetypes of manliness, which we might have found unattainable. Gay guys could never actually be that! Luckily those days are mostly gone for most of us and we have found over the years that, yes, gay men can be those guys, in every sense of the word. In real life as well as in our fantasies, or as purely a fund sex thing. Interesting side note, I had a friend who was a cop who looked almost like a ToF drawing come to life, and he told me that the biggest turn-off was when a guy wanted him to wear his uniform during sex because the guy wanted to get drilled by a cop and live out the fantasy of it all. He always refused.

 

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I think one of the key elements of the uniform kink is that it's a fetish that can be experienced in one's day-to-day life. You see these men out on the street, or you drive past them in your car, and you can experience that tingle many times a day. You don't really experience such IRL moments with flogger-wielding leathermen on the street corner at 9 am while you're rushing to work!

And "uniform" can mean many things to many people. It's all drag, as some might say. Several years ago I was volunteering for events during Bear Pride in Chicago. One of my gigs was to greet the shuttle bus pulling up to one of the party venues from the host hotel, welcome the guys, and tell them the venue's rules before they disembarked. It was a Uniform Party theme, and everyone was wearing their best cop, soldier, and construction worker drag they could find. I went a bit different. I wore a business suit. What was great was that many of the attendees thought I worked for the venue, and that I wasn't "one of them." So they see an attractive, if I do say so myself, bearded Bear in a suit hop on the bus and start taking verbal charge. I never got more leering and flirtatious responses in my life!

Photo courtesy of Men At Play.

Of course, if I'm going to be completely candid, some of the uniform kinks I enjoy lead to another big fetish of mine, which is outdoor/public area sex. Waysides and rest stops, the woods, truck stops...did I mention I used to drive a truck and had amazing sex while doing so? No? Oh, sorry. So truckers, loggers, road workers, it all feeds one into the other.

You don't have to have a big bank account to fund a uniform kink. You probably have some good stuff hanging in your closet right now! Got a penchant for it? Go hit that thrift store, get creative, and walk around in your uniform right out in the open. And give us all a thrill!

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