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

“Weissmuller was a star of 1932 Olympics,” Ehret says. “The public was used to seeing him with nothing much covering his loins.”

Tarzan and His Mate

As for men’s underwear, it didn’t show up much in the movies at all. When it did, sometimes it was for realism, as in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), which showed the would-be miners in their union jacks. But mostly, it was simply for comic effect.

“Men’s underwear was the punch line to a joke,” says Alonso Duralde, author of 101 Must-See Movies For Gay Men. “It was boxers covered with hearts, and the only time you ever saw it was when a guy’s pants got pulled off or something.”

This was because of the Hays Code, a set of “guidelines” enacted by the movie industry in 1930 and enforced starting in 1934, in an effort to forestall actual government censorship. The code had a long list of do’s and don’ts -- no inter-racial relationships, for example, and no mocking of religion. None of the guidelines dealt specifically with underwear, but the whole point of the code was supposedly to preserve “modesty” and “good taste” in the film industry.

From 1934 until the 1950s, modesty and restraint ruled the day. As such, even though form-fitting briefs were introduced in 1935 and grew rapidly in popularity, men in the movies wore baggy boxers in movies like Brewster’s Millions (1945), Everybody Does It (1949), Father of the Bride (1950), The Seven Year Itch (1955), and Damn Yankees! (1958). Jimmy Stewart’s underwear in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) was as far from erotic as you can get.

Still, some filmmakers, chafing at the limitations of the Hays Code, occasionally found ways to liven up their movies. It’s probably an urban legend that Clark Gable caused t-shirt sales to plummet when he took off his shirt in It Happened One Night (1934) to reveal that he wasn’t wearing an undershirt, but he made an impression nonetheless. And Paul Newman caught more than Joanne Woodward’s eye when he walked across the screen in just a pair of boxers in The Long, Hot Summer (1958).

The Long, Hot Summer

A New Realism
Through the fifties and especially the sixties, filmmakers and even corporate executives began pushing back against the limits of the Hays Code. American audiences were starting to see far more relevant, provocative fare from foreign filmmakers. Many of these movies were even winning Oscars and, far more importantly, racking up impressive box office grosses.

The Hays Code was finally retired in 1967 (replaced by the MPAA, which rated movies G, PG, and all the rest). “People had decided they were tired of being told what they could see,” Ehret says. “The movie industry decided they had to mature or they were going to lose the audience, because America had grown up.”

As for men in their underwear, that meant a jarring new realism. Since briefs had become more fashionable than boxers over the years, that meant that’s what most men now wore in movies like Midnight Cowboy (1969), The Last Picture Show (1971), An Unmarried Woman (1978), and The Amityville Horror (1979).

The Amityville Horror

But for the most part, even these form-fitting and often very revealing briefs weren’t intended to be erotic, just realistic. After all, the seventies were the era of gritty realism in film, and it was a realism as seen by very heterosexual male director-auteurs such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Next page! The pants finally come off!