I recently had dinner with a friend who had commissioned me some pieces for the publication she works at. She informed me that a few days prior I had been the subject of intense discussion among the editorial team.
I naturally hoped it was due to my fabulous writing. But no – after putting together a team chart of freelancers, the 22-year-old Spanish intern had apparently fallen in love with my picture. ‘Gingers are special,’ he breathlessly told the female editorial team.
This is not the first time I have been bestowed this kind of prestige by a fellow gay man – one solely granted by my hair colour. Yet as a ginger denialist throughout a good part of my twenties, I find it incredible that something that once caused me such embarrassment is now the very thing that gets me laid the most.
I first became aware of my Ginger Powers a few years ago while kissing someone.
I noticed he was staring hungrily at my hair rather than my eyes, before going onto describe me as a ‘scarlet fantasy’. My dating life has been punctuated by these demented interactions ever since: just the other day during a coffee date, a man soliloquised to me about the ethereal beauty of red pubic hair, claiming in wonder that our crotches ‘rose like the sun’, a description which made me almost choke on my Americano and was surely a case for the argument against free speech.
Such is our status that there even tends to be sexual myths around us – that we’re better in bed and have bigger penises. Having never slept with a fellow ginger due to internalised gingerphobia, I’m afraid I can’t make any comparisons.
The truth is, we weren’t always treated with such deranged reverence. In fact, to grow up gay and ginger is to know shame intimately. I was also skinny, bespectacled, effeminate and irritating to boot, so I really stood no chance. No sooner had I come out of the gay closet at the age of 19, I bolted and went back in the ginger one, and began bleaching my hair. When I finally, begrudgingly conceded defeat to living an authentic life as a man who was both gay and ginger around the age of 27, I immediately set my attention to my frail body and became obsessed with the gym.
With each new identity cast off only to be greeted by another Russian Doll grappling with a new humiliation, the cycle of self-loathing had the potential to continue ad infinitum.
Earlier in the year I had blocked out some time to go to Devon for a week to work on a book. The evening before I was due to travel, I received a message on Instagram from the founder of the Red Hot calendars, Thomas Knights, asking if I wanted to march with them in the London Pride Parade. Thomas, another former denialist turned ginger evangelist, has found huge success by ‘rebranding the ginger male stereotype’ and turning us into sex symbols, and has genuinely turned the dial, amongst gay men at least.
I decided that the opportunity to mince around the capital with an enormous group of gingers was something I owed to my inner four-eyed waif and so I booked the train back for the day. It was of course riotously fun, and a ginger safe space; we discussed sunburn and suncream at length, and cheered at other gingers in the crowd. Walking around Soho following the parade past hushed whispers of...
‘It’s the Red Hot boys!’, like we were pale, hairy Victoria’s Secret Angels, I couldn’t help but marvel at the screeching volte face from the expressions of disgust that marked my childhood.
My mother came to support, manically waving from the sidelines with a rainbow flag lodged in her ponytail. I didn’t point out the fact to her that once I’d come across a baby journal she’d written about me where she had recorded, ‘John has lovely sandy-coloured hair. NOT ginger’, capitalised, underlined twice. I was happy she’d decided to become an ally, although whether it was for the gays or the gingers, I couldn’t be sure.
When I first came out to my parents at the age of 19, like all gay people I did so with my heart in my mouth, I feared rejection and disownment. As the only ginger in the family, perhaps I should have worried more about them bringing shame on the family with my hair colour, especially after reading my mother’s clandestine note-making on the matter.
At the Pride March, we passed the hateful Christians predicting damnation for us all, and I was reminded of the time that I was referred to as a ‘Red Devil’ by a woman in my apartment complex in Shanghai. Presumably if anyone was the spawn of Satan, it was most likely a red-haired homosexual.
Yet there’s no conversion therapy for redheads, where we are clamped to chairs, injected with drugs and forced to watch violent anti-ginger propaganda. One cannot pray the ginger away or marry a pious brunette who would lead you away from the sins of the red mist. Unfortunately, much like fancying boys, your roots are going to come through regardless of how often you go to the hairdresser’s.
To balance out the ginger-fearers, of course, there are the fetishists – known as rutiluphiliacs. I queried whether my fellow Red Hot gingers had also been subject to the kinds of insane metaphors that I had encountered.
One had been told his orgasm was like ‘an atomic bomb’ going off – there’s nothing sexier than being compared to a devastating weapon of war – and apparently a ginger guy ejaculating inside someone is known as ‘being ‘gingerbred’.
Another said he was constantly referred to as a lumberjack, with someone demanding he ‘plant his seed’ in them. Given lumberjacks actually cut down trees rather than plant them this sparked much confusion, although we speculated that perhaps the person in question was acting out a niche sustainability fetish.
It must be said that racial minorities experience this kind of fetishisation in a way that is far more harmful, although they share some common experiences including being subjected to jaw-dropping food or colour-related similes. I know that when encountering a fetishist of such a persuasion, one must try to ascertain whether they’re able to see past the object of their desire to register any of your other features, physical or otherwise. For example, the Spanish intern tried to take stealth footage of me at a festival, and it turned out not to be me at all – just some other random ginger bloke having a dance.
There must also come a time where one must decide how much to take issue with being fetishised if it helps you hook up.
After all, it’s certainly better than being bullied, although those hardly seem like two appealing options to choose from. I went on another date recently with someone who told me he thought I was fit in spite of being ginger. I really can’t go back to those days, so I suppose I’ll have to take being a fetish.
It is clear, as one friend who works in fashion puts it, we are ‘chic’. We are the moment. But as Heidi Klum used to say in Project Runway, ‘One day you’re in, the next day, you’re out.’ What happens when we’re out?
I suppose we ought to sleep with as many people as possible until everyone except the most devoted of rutiluphiliacs have abandoned us. Now as I am uncomfortably close to 40 and my hair begins to thin, I realised I haven’t got time to clutch my pearls over the matter. Life has played one final cruel joke in that after finally reaching the point of acceptance, time is fast running out to enjoy my status as a bit of red meat.
Hate yourself, then love yourself, then hate yourself for not loving yourself enough, then die: that’s just the circle of life, as inevitable as the sun rising. Or indeed, my crotch.