While I am loud online about the things I would let Rachel Weisz do to my body, I still sometimes feel like I’m finding my personal style as a former heterosexual, now full-time queer femme, part-time bottom. There’s coming out, then there is settling in, and sometimes it takes a second — and sifting through a few ex-girlfriends’ closets — to finally feel at home in your queer presentation.
For some queer women, gay signaling looks like a carabiner heavy with a haphazard collection of keys clipped to a belt loop. For others, like a shag haircut or skinny glasses or hands with tattoos, short nails, and silver rings. For me, the Citizens of Humanity Horseshoe jeans do much of the heavy lifting.
Citizens of Humanity hit its stride back in the early aughts and had left my frontal lobe entirely until I saw these jeans on my phone screen when they came to me mid-doomscroll one night as a sponsored Instagram Story. They were styled rather plainly and professionally, but I found myself lingering on the image to take in the wide-legged, low-waisted, lightly distressed denim again and again. They looked large and lived in. They were baggy and boyish but fell in this fitted, feminine way on the waist. They seemed like something Diane Keaton or Whoopi Goldberg wouldn’t think twice about. Denim doth not a dyk* make, but these jeans scream femme-top fall.
The nearly $300 price tag initially stopped me. But the pants kept popping up every time I opened Instagram. My weight had fluctuated, and I constantly felt myself unsettled in — even trapped by — the seams of all my other pants. I generally hesitate to buy new clothes, as bodies change all the time, but I was itching for something different — something roomy, which my body could evolve in, and something gender affirming that could bind my butt and childbearing wide hips. I caved and added to cart.
Since they arrived two years ago, I have lived 14 lives in these pants. My sense of style is high impact and low effort, and the durable stitching and full-barrel leg lend themselves to exactly that. They are gently distressed on the thigh, but the holes aren’t big enough to piss off one’s parents.
I’m a writer, podcast host, and social strategist, and within one week, I wore these jeans for an Adweek panel, a viewing of a Broadway play, a lesbian check-in at Fort Greene Park, a coffee-walk of shame that next morning, and a comedy show I guest starred in at Webster Hall. These pants go just as well with a six-button blazer and kitten heels as they do with a Hanes white tank and a chunky black boot. By the end of the week, I had ordered them in black, too.
Anytime I post myself in these pants, I instantly receive 20 DMs asking where they are from — always some variation of “more on the pants.” One look at me and my midriff in these low-rise, billowy bottoms with panties probably peeking out, and you can tell I’m off book when I sing the bridge of Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”
While I don’t want to oversimplify gender and sexuality, fashion can be and always has been a tool to both identify and unify. Queers dress in 100 different ways, but certain ensembles can create a kind of gender euphoria, even for femme bodies like mine.
I suggest sizing up once for the desired, most gay fit.
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