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					Also this issue: Cabaret at Avenue B and The Prime Rib -A.D. Amorosi Icepack -A.D. Amorosi

June 27-July 3, 2002

naked city

Length Matters

Hair apparent: Sharif Street says his father, Mayor John Street, was the only person not to advise him to cut his hair prior to running for office this year. Photo By: jon stark

Long hair on men isn't back -- it never went away. And we aren’t all in metal bands.

by Frank Lewis

Sharif Street is my hero. Not because we’re friends -- I’ve only met him once. Not because he’s the mayor’s son -- I voted for the other guy.

Sharif Street is my hero for one reason: When he ran for a seat in the state House this year, he refused to cut his hair.

DON'T HATE ME BECAUSE I'M BEAUTIFUL: Adkins loves to ãthrow people for a loop.ä Photo By: jon stark

For the first time, I saw on campaign literature someone who looked like me. OK, not exactly, since I'm white, but color is only skin deep; long hair goes all the way down your back. So for that reason alone, Street's campaign, unsuccessful though it was, made me proud -- proud to be a longhair. And if no other elegantly plumed man has already reclaimed that once-pejorative term, then consider it now officially repossessed and off-limits to the clipped and shorn. Longhairs unite! We're here, we're not necessarily queer, get used to it.

Let's get something straight: We are not talking about the mullet, the short-on-top-long-in-back cut favored by hockey players and country stars. Mullet heads are the agnostics of the men's hairstyle world -- too skeptical to embrace short-hair dogma, too afraid of social damnation to let it all grow out.

Mulletheads are born of some warped sense of fashion. True longhairs are just born.

"You have likely yearned to be longhaired since childhood, because identity arises there," writes longhair philosopher Bill Choisser in his essay "On Being a Longhair" (www.choisser.com/longhair). "Fights with your parents over haircuts were possibly a frequent occurrence when growing up. You are not longhaired because you do drugs, ride a motorcycle or play in a rock band, and you may not like it when people draw social conclusions about you because of your hair. ... To find happiness, you will probably want to keep your hair long and accept that you are in a minority -- and accept the reality that society is not fair toward minorities but that you are doing the best you can do to be happy and live your life."

Sharif Street is a born longhair, even if it did take him 20 years to realize it. In high school and college he experimented with various hair styles, including no hair, before deciding to try dreadlocks (or locks, as he calls them, explaining that the term dreadlocks came from British colonizers who found the style dreadful).

"I liked that it said a lot of different things," Sharif recalls. "It showed a certain sense of cultural pride, plus it was a youthful, collegiate thing to do."

Today Sharif is an attorney and up-and-coming political player, and his hair is "part of who I've evolved into."

When Sharif was a boy, his father, John Street, was an activist councilman who liked to provoke racially profiling security officers. Over time guards around the city got wise to him and started posting John's picture behind their desks, so young Sharif was drafted into the movement. As his father watched from the sidewalk, Sharif would enter a building with a bag to see if the guards would stop him.

The Street kids, Sharif says, "were told that we were not to allow encroachments on our personal liberties." So when he got some static for his hair length during a college internship at the financial firm Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers), he pointed out that he was logging more billable hours than all but two others in the office, and those two were full-time employees. The pressure ceased, and Sharif learned a valuable lesson: If you make yourself indispensable, your personal eccentricities will be overlooked.

"Society would be better off," he notes, "if people took the position that 'I'm going to express myself, and be so good at what I do that everyone will leave me alone.'"

But does that apply in politics? Street says he never thought more about his hair as he did after deciding to run for the state legislature this year. Virtually everyone advised him to cut it, with one notable exception: his father. The mayor's position was that Sharif shouldn't stop being himself -- at least not for an entry-level post like a state House seat.

And from Sharif's perspective, running for office as a longhair would give him an even larger forum for changing minds about it. The veteran politicians and CEOs and other establishment types he would meet would no longer be able to dismiss all long-haired men as "MOVE members, drug dealers or hippies."

Sadly, he lost. Sharif says his hair was not a deciding factor, but admits some older voters, black and white, seemed to have trouble getting past it; one woman even told him he was "violating God's law." The situation wasn't helped by a mailer from the campaign of his opponent, state Rep. Frank Oliver, that used a photo that Sharif believes was chosen because it emphasized his locks.

But he believes that when he runs again, his hair will be less of a factor.

"The more it's talked about," he says confidently, "the smaller the group that thinks about it." Over time, however, he will be viewed as a "special case," and will no longer be able to make room, as he puts it, for other men who want to wear their hair long. He regrets this.

Early in his career as a conservative pundit, Tom Adkins wrote an article that caught the attention of Ollie North, who raved about Adkins' words on his radio show. So when Adkins spotted North at an event some time later, he introduced himself.

"You could see he almost shit his pants," Adkins recalls, laughing at the memory of buttoned-down former Marine North blanching at the sight of Adkins' voluminous mane. Today North not only won't have Adkins on his show, he avoids him when the two cross paths at events.

Adkins, who is 44, has had long hair since he was 15 and set on becoming a rock star. After 10 years in music, he landed in real estate, but he kept the hair. Even as he gravitated toward politics, he never considered going short.

"I like the ability to throw people for a loop," he says. This has been good for business, he says (no one forgets him after weeks of telephone negotiations end with his showing up for settlement in shorts, a ratty T-shirt and that hair) and good for marketing (he says he owes his frequent appearances on CN8's It's Your Call partly to his appearance, though he admits to pulling it back in a ponytail for discussions of especially serious topics).

"It's good for the [conservative] movement; it shows we're not all stodgy old farts," he says. "Young people are looking for, and finding, people like Ted Nugent and me. ... It's my way of dragging the conservative movement back to the cutting edge.

"Long hair says, 'I don't have to accept the dominant paradigm.' No matter what your views, it says, 'Not necessarily.'"

"Look, Jesus is here."

A few weeks ago I attended a funeral in a working-class town in upstate New York -- the kind of place where, had I thought about it, I would have expected to see lots of fellow longhairs. (I grew up in a similar town in Jersey.) Instead I overheard more wiseass remarks in a few hours than I'd heard in the previous few years. The Jesus crack was the only one even mildly amusing.

It's not that I don't have a sense of humor about it. My Instant Messenger name is an abbreviation of "Megadeth motherfucker," which a teenage boy called me on the street one day. But it's tiresome dealing not just with people's assumptions, but the fact that they feel perfectly justified in having them. We're nearly all agreed that jumping to conclusions due to someone's skin color or physical impairment is wrong, but long hair on men remains fair game.

Granted, I could get it cut tomorrow and never deal again with longhair stereotypes. But at the risk of sounding like I take this way too seriously, I'm not sure it's that simple. I know I'd regret it. And if I had to keep it short for some reason, I'd be miserable.

Mark Governa, a former colleague with really long hair who now works at Running Press, calls this "separation anxiety ... Your hair becomes part of your identity."

So call us Jesus, or metal head or MOVE member or faggot, if you must. Ask us for cigarettes even when you don't see us smoking, or for directions to the head shop because surely we must know. But know that these assumptions say more about you than they do us. We're just trying to make our way in the shorn man's world, and we will remember all of you when Sharif is in charge.