Why ‘Shirts Off’ Matters at Queer Parties

In a free society, telling people what they should or should not wear will never go well, particularly with gay men. It feels kind of dictatorial and no doubt oppressive. During a Honey Dijon DJ set at Coda nightclub in Toronto earlier this year, shirtless queer men were forced to put their tops back on by security to comply with the club’s “shirts on” policy. Granted, Coda isn’t a gay club but it has hosted many gay and gay- ish events with DJs like Dijon, who has a huge queer following, as well as Horse Meat Disco and local legend, DJ Deko-ze.

The shirt mishap turned out to be a huge misread by the club’s security, and despite it being policy, Coda recently apologized for it with an open letter to the community to address this issue and others. Their staff was re-trained, they donated money to The 519 queer community center in and are vowed to have more LGBT DJs.

To some, this controversy might seem like it’s much ado about nothing, but it’s a pretty significant part of the LGBT party culture.

Francis Gaudreault is the co-producer of Pitbull Events, and has been running successful gay dance parties across Canada since 2010. “I think if we were to go walk around and tell people throughout the night that they couldn’t take their shirts off, I think that would affect the party and it might remove some of the freedom that people experience when they go to a party like ours,” he told me.

“We’ve always been interested in our bodies and not ashamed of them,” says Charles Pavia, who is DJ Deko-ze’s agent for LGBT events. He has also hosted some parties for Coda and has been working with them for years.

Pavia admittedly takes his shirt off because his body temperature runs on high, so being topless at a club offers relief but he’ll also take it off when he’s feeling sexy.

“I think it’s part of the gay mating ritual,” he said.

“‘Flaunting’ was the word that one of my interview subjects used,” Russell Westhaver explains, thinking back to his research on the subject. Westhaver is an associate professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, and has studied the gay circuit party scene extensively. He offers up his theory: “It was about being sexy, but not simply about attracting a mate or attracting a partner but essentially an expression of power, right, in different forms. And not only sort of muscular but also sort of flaunting a sexuality to express who and what they were to one another.”

DJ Aeryn Pfaff is a well-known DJ in Toronto’s queer scene and mostly plays to sex positive crowds in the city, including fetish and sex parties. He’s DJed at Coda too and he believes that our community is bound together by sexuality; that that’s what makes us different from the rest of society.

“The idea that we are sexual together is assumed to me,” he says.

“There’s something really gratifying, personally, about waking up every morning and walking out into the world or going to a party and saying, ‘This is me. There’s nothing wrong with me and there’s nothing wrong with my sexuality, and I’m gonna wear my belly top or I’m gonna take my shirt off or I’m gonna wear my short shorts, and fuck you.”

Pavia and Pfaff both believed that historically, gay men removing their shirts is linked to the AIDS crisis; that some people living with HIV built up their bodies to show them off so that they’d appear healthy as a way to combat the stigma associated with the virus and with being gay.

Westhaver has heard this explanation too and although he thinks there may be a grain of truth to it, he’s skeptical that it’s the origin of this trend.

“You might read that folk theory as a kind of apology for taking the shirts off. So if indeed the sort of removal of the shirt is about an act of empowerment, that might not be enough for some people. That explanation might not be sufficient. There would have to be a deeper, more profound reason why gay men would want to take their shirts off and it had to do with illness. So I’ve heard that folk theory.”

According to a study about masculinity, body image and sexual behavior of men living with HIV, many men in the early days of the AIDS epidemic had been using things like steroid replacement, nutritional supplements and would weight train in order to improve strength and maintain their health. By the end of the ‘90s, the objective of using these things for some moved away from health and became a pursuit of a muscular “ideal physical appearance.” Although the theory offered up by Pavia and Pfaff might have applied to some guys, gay men were removing their shirts at parties long before epidemic. Whatever the reason for it historically though, today it’s still in and the act of removing one’s shirt has been ingrained into queer party culture without a doubt, so telling gay men to put them back on would be problematic.

“Gay men’s bodies are policed in complicated ways. In a way in which, I think, straight men’s bodies are not,” Westhaver says. “In ways that are similar, I think, to the way in which women’s bodies are policed. And I think removing the shirt in that context, it’s a kind of a reclamation of a policed body.”

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox.