why tf are people staring at me 😭

On the unwanted touch of someone's eyes and why I now wear pants (sorry to disappoint everyone).

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When I lived in Los Angeles, I never wore pants. This isn’t a joke, nor is it an exaggeration: from the year 2010 through 2022, I did not wear long pants outside of a few occasions that I can count on a hand (two were for jury duty, one was for a funeral — which my family made me change into shorts, because my great aunt would have wanted that— and one was for the first day of a new job, where my boss took back the order to wear pants, noting that I “looked weird” in anything below the knee). I’ve written about the culture of men in shorts, have advised men on shorts wearing, include “short shorts” in my professional bio, and once ran a Tumblr called Shorts Report, which obviously is and isn’t related to The Trend Report™. Rain or shine, cold weather or warm weather: I wore shorts. Sometimes over leggings or with tall socks, sometimes below the knees but mostly above, this was my uniform. This was an identity.

Since moving and adjusting to a more northern climate, I still wear shorts — but I also started wearing pants. Sadly! Roughly a year ago, as winter had finished creeping in and was firmly laying atop of you, I went out and did something that I hadn’t done since at least 2008: I bought pants. A few Uniqlo jeans that I cropped to the high ankle, a few vintage items to mix up styles, I assembled a small collection to wear when I was out. But let me tell you: the reason for adding literal short pants into my sartorial repertoire wasn't because I was actually cold — it was the stares.

In a city like Los Angeles — along with New York and London and Paris and other progressive and or big cities — people don’t stare, or the stares are drowned out by people minding their own business or being discreet. People aren’t surprised by a spectacle! But, in my current European surroundings, wearing shorts despite the season isn’t computing. This is only exacerbated by my having brightly colored hair, being visibly queer and in a non-traditional relationship, and having two tiny dogs, one of whom wears flamboyant sweaters: you stick out. I’m not hungry for attention, nor am I doing any of this to stand out: this is all me-being-me which most of my adult life has been in the context of other people who look similarly or within a context of such “oddity” that is interpreted as creativity instead of oddity. People simply don’t know what they’re looking at here — and the stares are brutal.