As anyone who has been to the internationally renowned restaurant-slash-gay-bar “Ketchup” in Asbury Park could tell you, the Jersey Shore has a flourishing and distinct gay population. But the Village Voice this week wants to make it especially clear: Gays do not just exist on the Jersey Shore — there exist such things as Jersey Shore gays. As in, Guido Gays. From their cover story this week:
“Dino,” a self-described “horny 25-year-old,” could have been ordered straight from Jersey Shore Central Casting. A grad student who lives in the Bronx, he is out to his second-generation Italian family, with whom he summers with in Seaside, but “nobody talks about it,” he says. “It’s never mentioned. That’s the mentality still for Italian families — homosexuality isn’t OK.” Dino is very much in the closet with his Seaside volleyball buddies, and although he does troll Asbury at night, he doesn’t care for that scene.
Indeed. A muscle-hugging shirt would be wildly out of place in Seaside.
In perhaps a more clear nod to the Guido/Gay paradox, the Village Voice did not tell the straight men of the MTV show Jersey Shore (or even the photographer!) that the greased-up cover shoot for which they posed would be used in the newspaper’s annual “Queer Issue.”
