A couple of weeks ago, Toby dared me to grow "a big, bushy 70's homo mustache," — something along these lines, I imagine...


... which I have not yet done (sorry, Toby, but I got sidetracked with the whole mullet thing).  But I got the distinct feeling Toby finds mustaches comical, somehow, and as someone with family members in law enforcement and whose every uncle on my mother's side sports one (I hear predisposition for wearing one is matrilineal), I felt I could not let Toby have the last laugh.

I've sported a 'stache on a lark maybe twice in my life.  I really don't have the face for it. I found that no matter how I trimmed it it came out looking alarmingly lopsided.  When I neglected to trim it it grew right into my mouth where I commenced chewing on it.  I found that my eyes were drawn to it whenever I looked in the mirror, to the point where I saw nothing else when I looked at my face.  It didn't look like a part of me.  It was taking on a life of its own.  It grew like a parasite, draining me.  And then it started mocking me.  It soon became obvious, my face wasn't big enough for the both of us.  One of us had to go, and I got to the razor first.

I don't feel the same way at all about other people's mustaches, by the way, although misplaced facial hair can be distracting, even disturbing at times.  And, oddly enough, I don't feel the same way about mine when it's part of an ensemble.  I wore a mustache and goatee off and on for years and never felt my life was in danger.  I have facial hair now, but I don't feel the least bit threatened by it.

My father's mustache, which had been pretty flashy throughout the seventies, dwindled in the last years of his life until it was barely noticeable except in a certain light.  He had trimmed it almost out of existence.  But it was there.  A Nagging reminder — of what?  It was like a ribbon you tied on your finger to remember something, and even though you'd forgotten what it was you wanted to remember, the ribbon remained to remind you you'd forgotten it. 

At my father's advanced age it may have been to remind him that he was himself.  As jarring as it can be to see yourself without facial hair, if you have a heart condition, it can be fatal. 

Otherwise, I could not imagine why he kept it around at all.  Are they functional?  Do they do something? 

Facial hair is tricky, that's for sure.  I have no special prejudice against mustaches, though.  I am especially nostalgic, having grown up in the seventies and eighties, not for the big, bushy mustaches, which no one I knew wore, but for those starter mustaches a certain kind of high school boy — not the student council types, the shop types who hung out in the parking lot outside the vocational center smoking and talking about muscle cars — wore.  Those boys were dangerous.  Mysterious.  Sexy.  Behind that first mustache was some secret that as a kid who couldn't grow one I couldn't quite grasp. 

But, really, how far the 'stache had fallen by then.  I rightly read it, in that context, as a bold assertion of teenage sexuality.  But it was trashy, too.  My parents would not allow me or my brothers to grow one.  Along with tattoos and piercings, the teenage mustache was a sign of downward mobility.  Its social significance, as the badge of bourgeois virility in an age of robust ambition and international enterprise, had utterly evaporated in the century-plus since Maupassant wrote (in the guise of a letter between wives):

... a man without a mustache is no longer a man. I do not care much for a beard; it almost always makes a man look untidy. But a mustache, oh, a mustache is indispensable to a manly face. No, you would never believe how these little hair bristles on the upper lip are a relief to the eye and good in other ways. I have thought over the matter a great deal but hardly dare to write my thoughts. Words look so different on paper and the subject is so difficult, so delicate, so dangerous that it requires infinite skill to tackle it.

Dangerous, for the same reason those starter mustaches were dangerous. Because the mustache sexualizes the face.

Well, when my husband appeared, shaven, I understood at once that I never could fall in love with a strolling actor nor a preacher, even if it were Father Didon, the most charming of all! Later when I was alone with him (my husband) it was worse still. Oh, my dear Lucy, never let yourself be kissed by a man without a mustache; their kisses have no flavor, none whatever! They no longer have the charm, the mellowness and the snap- yes, the snap—of a real kiss. The mustache is the spice....There is no love without a mustache!

From a very different point of view the mustache is essential. It gives character to the face. It makes a man look gentle, tender, violent, a monster, a rake, enterprising! The hairy man, who does not shave off his whiskers, never has a refined look, for his features are concealed; and the shape of the jaw and the chin betrays a great deal to those who understand.

The man with a mustache retains his own peculiar expression and his refinement at the same time.

Then came porn.

And with it, the "porn mustache." 

Jay Della Valle, director of 2005's "Glorius Mustache Challenge" points out that the modern mustache is now mainly associated in pop consciousness with "homosexuals, white trash, child molesters, cops, and uncles." A young man from a good family with a mustache these days must be joking.  For today's bourgeoisie, the mustache is just another tool for knowing irony in a burgeoning arsenal.  It's kitsch that grows right on your face!

And while I will grant that the aesthetic excesses of seventies porn were at times egregious, there were, among the mustache-clad freaks and thugs, specimens of rare beauty.  None, to my mind, more transcendent than Colt Studio's Hank Ditmar...


When I was fifteen or so I somehow got hold of a Colt catalog and fell hard for ol' Hank.  The mustache was part of the package, and never struck me as funny. To have thought it "queer" at the time would've been like thinking chinstraps — all the rage among the incoming class at Tufts — were weird last fall. 

Like the mustache of yore, I'd venture that many of the young men sporting chinstraps had no idea why they were, and didn't seem to be doing it with cheek.  And the straps were about as attractive on most guys as mustaches are.  Which is to say, not the overwhelming majority.  

Like mustaches and mutton chops, chinstraps look hot on a very small percentage of the population (hint: it helps to have a chin).  Fortunately, students being students, after a couple of weeks it was too much work to trim their straps, and soon full beards were in season, and that suited many more. 

For the youth of today to poke fun at the mustache meme of the seventies and eighties is well and good, but however far it might have gone beyond the bounds of good taste, it was not worse than the recent chinstrap pandemic, and certainly nowhere near as vile as the crimes of eyebrow waxing perpetrated by today's more impressionable twenty-somethings. 

Fashion is a funny thing.  That the pursuit of beauty should so often be such an ugly, stumbling, lurching affair, with so many terrible casualties along the way is one of culture's overarching ironies.  But if all that excess produces just one Hank Ditmar, isn't it worth it?