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

Eventually, of course, the teen sex comedy fell out of fashion. And when the genre inevitably remerged in the form of American Pie (1999), something had changed. The girls were still just as topless, but the revealing briefs on the guys had been replaced by modest, baggy boxers.

American Pie

What happened between The Last American Virgin and American Pie? Briefs had gone out of fashion. Interestingly, the reason why had a lot to do with gay men.

The Gayification of Briefs (and the Return to Boxers!)
In the eighties, as movies like Risky Business and Top Gun were showcasing men in their underwear in a more erotic way, men’s underwear itself was being eroticized by the underwear manufacturers. In 1982, Calvin Klein introduced his first attention-getting Times Square ad of a young man in nothing but white briefs — a campaign that would continue throughout the decade.

“That was the first era where men were being objectified in the media,” Duralde says. “You had the Calvin Klein ads, the Soloflex commercial.”

All this coincided with the emergence of a visible gay presence in America, thanks to AIDS and the activism it inspired. The underwear ads themselves were designed to appeal to the “new” marketing demographic of gay men; they were created by gay men and featured the supposedly “gay” ideal of the defined, hairless man.

But while the homoeroticism in Top Gun was missed by heterosexual America back in the 80's, it wasn’t long before the gay/underwear association was too great to ignore. As a result, like Speedo swimsuits, briefs and underwear in general became associated with gay men. And as board shorts replaced Speedos as the swimsuit of choice (at least in America), boxers replaced briefs, especially among young straight men.

In movies, the change was swift. In Bull Durham (1988), Tim Robbins wore briefs, but he was the comic relief, the fool. The sexy star of the movie, Kevin Costner wore boxers. By the time of Dead Poet’s Society (1989), briefs weren’t anywhere to be seen. In Across the Tracks (1991), Ricky Schroeder and a young Brad Pitt wore boxers and boxer briefs, respectively.

Across the Tracks

Were movies reflecting fashion changes, or creating them, or both? Either way, all of Michael Keaton’s different personalities in Multiplicity (1996) wore differently colored boxers. Bruce Willis wore boxers in 1995’s Die Hard: With a Vengeance, and for pretty much the rest of his career. And Ben Affleck wore them in both Forces of Nature (1999) and Bounce (2000).

There are exceptions, like Chasers (1994) and White Squall (1996). But both films used briefs to imply the vulnerability, even naiveté, of their young male characters.

Chasers

But while briefs continued to outsell boxers in real life (and continue to, if barely), boxers were suddenly the undies of choice for men in the movies — and the baggier the better.

Next page! Foreign films “go there”!