Boxers or Briefs: A Gay Look at the Evolution of Underwear in the Movies

Men in their underwear.

The words are enough to catch the attention of most gay and bisexual men, but the sight of an actual man in his underwear is even more exciting. Better still is a scene of a man in his underwear in the movies, where it’s okay to stare — where you’re supposed to stare! — or even rewind.

Sometimes such scenes are well integrated into the plot of a movie, as in 13 Going on 30 (2004) when Jennifer Garner, a 13 year-old girl who finds herself in the body of a 30 year-old woman, is shocked by the provocative strip-tease of her boyfriend, and realizes just how out-of-place she really is.

Warning: a few of the clips may have some language not safe for work.

13 Going on 30

And sometimes scenes of men in their underwear are completely gratuitous, as in Living Out Loud (1998), an unabashed chick flick that throws in a revealing (and career-making) scene of Eddie Cibrian in his white boxer briefs, seemingly solely for the interest of the film’s purported female audience (weirdly, the film bombed anyway).

Living Out Loud

Hollywood has a complicated relationship with men in their underwear. From its inception, the industry has been controlled by heterosexual men (or closeted gay ones), making movies for a male-dominated, supposedly heterosexual audience. As a result, women in their underwear have almost always been objects of desire, even from the very beginning.

But a man in his undies? That’s not so simple. Just having the movie acknowledge that such a man might be desirable has been fraught with danger, throwing suspicion on the filmmakers, and possibly alienating the heterosexual male audience.

How did this come to be? And how have things changed since then? Let’s find out on a “brief” stroll through the history of men in their underwear in the movies.

All this will be accompanied by appropriate video clips — but only in the interests of scholarship, of course!

The Early Years
By the time the American movie industry was firmly established in the early 1930s, men in the movies weren’t objects of desire. That was the idea anyway.

“Men couldn’t be sensual with their bodies,” says Paul Ehret, who has researched and written about underwear for InternationalJock.com. “If a guy had his shirt off, he had to be chopping wood or performing some function that was manly. It wasn’t supposed to be sensual — which, of course, just made it more sensual.”

The early Tarzan movies were a good example of this “inadvertent” sensuality. Former Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller spends the movies in nothing but a very revealing loincloth. But it wasn’t considered sensual, at least openly.

Next page! Tarzan, Tom Cruise, and more!