How did having piercings in the right ear become associated with homosexuality? It’s something I’ve heard for a long time and never questioned it until now. Whenever I see a guy with an earring, I instinctively check if it’s left or right out of curiosity.
When did this association become prevalent? Where did it come from? Does it vary by culture?
Not only does it vary by culture, which ear is the “homosexual” ear varies from region to region in the U.S. In the northern WV, eastern OH, western PA region where I grew up, left was the “straight” ear and right was the “homosexual” ear. I think that’s the more common version, but I’ve met plenty of people who said it was the other way around in their area.
I don’t remember earrings for men being very common in the 1970s. 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. It seemed to be a much bigger thing in the 1980s when wearing one earring became fashionable for the “new wave” crowd (but you had to be careful which ear). 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. The “hip” crowd with the trench coats and the Flock of Seagulls hair were the ones wearing the earrings.
Back in the 80s you were very likely to get comments about it if you only wore one earring. These days I don’t think people really care much about it, and it’s more of just a fashion preference rather than indicating a sexual preference.
Back in the day:
Left is Right and Right is Wrong.
Where that reasoning came from is beyond me.
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.
I always thought it was the left ear.
3rd grade in 1980, the word was that left is gay. Whatever that meant, we weren’t entirely sure. Then at some point conventional wisdom shifted decisively to the other ear, but at that point nobody got just one ear pierced.
That gorgeous hunk Mr. Clean has been wearing an ear ring conspicuously in his left ear since 1957. All the ladies loved him, but did he love them?
Left ear buccaneer, right ear queer.
Back in the early 90’s I wore a earring in my right ear, I had no idea there was any significance to this. 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 his hotel room there and then.
I was absolutely baffled by this, but i basically reacted on each occasion by declining in as graceful manner as possible and moving on while wondering when the hell i became irresistably attractive and deeply regretful it wasn’t to woman. 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. Sadly, the girl wasn’t impressed by my idiocy either.
Northern Indiana resident here. The one earring look didn’t really catch on here until the early eighties. I always heard the* Left Is Right, Right Is Wrong* guideline but would occasionally see a guy with just the right ear pierced. I assumed they didn’t know the rule not that they were gay.
I remember going to Indy in 1986 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 1985 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. I also heard the “left is right, right is wrong” shibboleth–and in fact I had a gay friend with a piercing in his right ear, though I also later knew gay and straight men with both ears pierced. I think after freshman year I became a little more sophisticated/a little more uncaring about the sexual politics of the ear. However, it was also “common knowledge” in our freshman-year conversations that in California, the LEFT ear was the “gay” ear.
When I was growing up, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was no code, because any guy with an earring was assumed to be “that way”.
I’d like to see a cite that it was ever a real “code” among adults.
It strikes me as very much the sort of thing that’s invented (and widely believed) by schoolboys.
I have both ears pierced and I’m not bi. Got the left one done when I was 16 (in 1981) and the right when I was 19.
The left ear is the more common one to pierce for a right hander, because it’s a little easier to access. Right-handers being much more common than lefties, the left ear was perceived as the “normal” ear to pierce. Which led the creative minds of schoolboys to invent nonsense about it being a sexual code.
The fact that boys, and clearly some adults, believe it to be true doesn’t mean anything.
Goodness know how these things get started. Back in the nineties it became fashionable (if that’s the right word) for truck drivers to have blue led lights, like fairy lights, in their cabs. A driver where I worked, who always jumped on any fad going, soon had some fitted. One day in the canteen, I told him, as a leg pull, that the blue lights were a ‘gay’ signal. He promptly ripped them out and threw them in the skip and I could not convince him that it was just a joke.
A while later I discovered that many drivers saw the little blue lights as exactly that - A sign saying “Hey guys - I am gay.” I often wondered if it could have been me that started it, after all, somebody did.
Same here. I don’t recall seeing many earring-guys until the late 70’s. 60’s and early 70’s was more the early Cheech and Chong look, a celebration of untamed (and unwashed) manhood, long hair, long facial hair too, often, and uncombed and unkempt.
Earrings were kind of pointless unless your ears were visible. My impression is that earrings became more popular in the 80’s, with the David Bowie look, short hair, impeccably groomed homo/metro-sexual fashion.
I always heard various stories, but I assumed they were all urban legend. Nobody I knew gave any credence to the distinction between left and right ear, it just became fashionable over the 80’s to have earring(s), and left-right became an opportunity to needle younger co-workers who started to wear one. I remember distributing literature door-to-door for an election in the later 80’s and being shocked to find a young single mother whose (normal-looking) son looked to be about 7 years old and sporting an earring. Obviously it was more socially acceptable in different circles. Of all the people I’ve encountered I’ve never even noticed which side the earring was on. Not something I care about.
I assumed this left-right thing was just a joke, like the urban legend about hankies in the back pockets. One side indicated “gay on top” preference, other side “gay on bottom”. (Is there even such a distinction in gay life? Who really cares?)
Same idea as I noticed that some school busses in the 1990’s started running a flashing white light on top. I told one of my friend’s kids that meant, they turned the light on to indicate at least one mentally retarded child on board.
The schoolyard folklore in my town was that one side meant you were gay, but in a steady relationship, and the other side meant that you were gay, and looking to meet someone new.
The “right ear is queer” is no longer a thing and hasn’t been for 15 years at the very least. The majority of kids these days are getting both ears pierced.
When I told me son about the right ear thing after he got his ears pierced, he just gave me that “Old people are weird” look.
A lot of this might go back to circle pins of the 1960s, which were supposed to be worn on one lapel if you were a virgin and the other if not. As Linda Ellerbee put it in her biography, she could never remember and put it on randomly, assuming it was right 50% of the time.
That’s not an urban legend, there is a well defined color code to indicate just about every fetish and left side means you like that fetish as a top/active (depending on fetish) and right is bottom/passive. It’s not used as much these days, but it’s not even remotely legend.