When I was coming out during the 1970’s, construction workers in hard hats was an iconic sexualized image for gay men. Not only was it one of the characters portrayed in the Village People, but bars were decorated with hard hats, and construction workers in Levi cut-offs (aka “Daisy Dukes”), thick woolen socks, and ankle high construction boots were a frequent look in gay porn of that era.
But it just came to my attention that the hard hat look is no longer regarded as sexy in the modern gay world. The reason for the shift is clear – over the past 30 years manual labor has been mostly performed by immigrants. Sexy white guys are so rarely seen doing manual labor in real life, the idea just doesn’t come to mind as an option for jack off material. Are there sexy Latino, Asian and black guys working in hard hats? Of course there are, but due to our collective racism we see them as their ethnic group first and their profession later.
It always was (and still is) ludicrous to me to see porn models put into supposedly iconic costumes like construction workers or football players when the models themselves don’t have a clue to that subculture. If the tear in the t-shirt or the paint splatter looks too deliberate I just laugh. These guys don’t look like they know which end of the hammer to pick up, but they do look hot.
See more of “Hard Hats” in the VIP Room.
