I saw Girl God and she has a Mullet
All Rise for the unexpected hair epiphany of the High Holy Days
I saw Girl God at Ottobar a couple weeks ago. It was early school days and a friend had an extra ticket to the comedy duo. We made a plan to meet at the bar across the street and arrived just in time for Grace Freud and April Clark to sidle onstage and make us laugh a lot. It felt good to release the tightly-gripped expectations of that first week of teaching; it felt good to sit in a crowd of mostly fellow queer people and exalt the trans women on stage doing their deft comedic footwork; it felt good to rest in a communal experience for a second.
It honestly felt religious. I’m used to being pressed up against the stage at Ottobar as a wall of sound blasts my eardrums, or else hovering at the top step above the crowd by the back bar, or else standing at the edge of a swirling mosh pit, body guarded by my partner Allison and pregnant.
As we walked around the assembled chairs entering the space I had this feeling like “you’re gonna want to sit down for this.” There was an aisle left down the middle. It was downright pew-like, adding to the heady mix of stale beer and cigarettes that kept the place vacuum-sealed against time.
Girl God was funny as hell but if I’m being honest, my clearest memory of that night were the haircuts. Grace Freud, one half of the comedic duo, has a very notable gay mullet.
At a housewarming party about a month ago, I was explaining HAIR CLUB to a new friend and they immediately said “oh, like gay mullets?” I beamed, nodding with deep respect at their own gay mullet and said “yes, EXACTLY. Like gay mullets.”
Trends of hair styling within specific communities and cultural groups have always helped to flag safety and shared values. This has been true forever and across so many cultures and histories. While the mullet has a rich and varied history—from the Mohawks of indigenous peoples in the early Americas who grew their hair long in the back for spiritual reasons, to contemporary trends in Hockey hair—the mullet is certainly having a queer moment.
The pandemic years provided a generation of house-bound queers a perfect pupal stage to grow out their secret mullets, all reappearing with the vocal glee of Brood X at the end of 2021 and now crowding up queer bars across our cities. How beautiful, how gorgeous. Forget the practical hairstyles of helmet-ready Greeks, the privileged boredom of Roman teen 6th century elite donning mullets—the hairstyle of Rome’s direst enemy, the Huns—to anger their fathers, and please let’s forget Ben Franklin’s “skullet” (bald top with long frizzy sides) which he used to tug at the opulent heart- (and purse-) strings of the French monarchy by poor-baiting them into giving their financial backing to the early “United States.”
All rise, the heady lesbians of the 1980s, who used their mullets to find each other like beacons in a dangerous social landscape. All rise, David Bowie, whose orange-androgynous Ziggy Stardust mullet made being here and being queer more bearable, iconic even, glam. All rise, Virgil Abloh’s Spring 2018 collection for Off-White, which walked the Paris runways during Fashion Week. All rise, RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 12 finalist Crystal Methyd. Stand up, KD Lang, Zendaya, and pop duo Tegan & Sara. Take your bows for queering the mullet.
Sit down, AC Slater from Saved by the Bell. Move aside, Tiger King.
Jade Gomez, queer journalist and writer, has been quoted with a beautiful take on the queering of the mullet in recent years. She says,
“The reclamation of mullets by queer people is so powerful. We’re allowed to experiment with our identities by reclaiming what the mainstream considers ugly.”
Queerness as cultural alchemy, churning the rejected detritus of mainstream heteronormative culture into the glowing pearlescence of the newly cool? I believe it.
I often fear my hair is complicit in my passing as straight.
I am not straight, and I don’t want my hair to be a beard.1
When I am out alone in the world, my femme-presenting body and styling habits make me easy to mistake for a straight. As much as I try, and I do try, to embody a dandy-ish masculinity, a flair for the glammatic—sparkles, sequins, and wild print button-ups buttoned all-the-way-up are all well within my closet repertoire. But how to get my hair out of the closet?
So I sat in the audience at Girl God, in my denim shorteralls and my teva flatforms, my curly hair sitting like a helmet of tangled brambles over my head, and I counted mullets. There were at least 25.
I burned with a deep queer longing for what they all had.
This isn’t a coming out story. Except that it always is. It’s a mark of privilege to pass as femme and straight, as I often do. And while I’m relatively safe in public restrooms and at gas stations, as a person I am in a near constant state of coming out. It’s a daily risk-reward evaluation with anyone who might assume I’m straight when I’m not, who might assume my gender when it’s not “apparent” to them.
In an application I was recently filling out, I checked “prefer to self-identify” under the Preferred Gender question and in the space provided I typed: Robin Williams’ character from The Birdcage (1996).
My current stylist often warns against straying into mullet territory. She says “I don’t want to give you a square shape on top” as though this is obvious, as though this is the right choice. I nod because I trust her, but inside I’m shouting: “GIVE ME A SQUARECUT, MAKE ME A JAUNTY LITTLE FRILLY BOY.” Anything that will help my insides match my outsides, anything that will flag.
A queer haircut acts like an exclamation mark. But really it’s more than an exclamation, it’s also a question: a queer haircut is an interrobang. |‽| It says: I exist inside the radical questioning of gender, of heteronormativity. I exist in an in-between state that seeks answers outside the binary of genders western civilization has offered to us.
It was in this mindstate that I arrived at services for the High Holy Days on Rosh Hashanah last Saturday. And as though in answer to my urgent incessant internal interrobanging, as I found a seat at the back of the Quaker Meeting House where this roving Jewish congregation holds services, the rabbi said “Now let’s make one thing clear: we don’t arrive at the New Year whole. In fact, some of us might feel like a hot mess.”
The rabbi, I notice, is rocking an impressive shag. I think, maybe I should email the rabbi about this. Hair in Judaism is already sacred—”like a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead” as the Bible says—maybe the rabbi will have some advice on my squarecut beshert.
In the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah—this holy return to an embodied Jewish space after many long years feeling diasporic to my own people—folks kept sending me news of the woman who now held the record for longest mullet in the world, Tami Manis.
Was this an omen? Or, in the spirit of Rosh Hashanah, was this a testing of my faith? Am I strong enough to keep growing my hair out? Am I strong enough to shear it down into the shullet (a hybrid shag-mullet) of my dreams?
Up until this past Saturday, I was unsure if I would ever feel truly at home in a temple again, a space that used to be the seat of my intellectual curiosity as a kid. It is where I learned the concept of internal questioning, the fuel of my earliest academic engines. I hadn’t set foot in a temple in nearly ten years. It was a loss I hadn’t realized I had been fostering, a hole that was so much void it had disappeared from view.
As I sat in the back pew of this temporary holy space, I looked at the congregation settled in before me. Heads bowed in prayer or lifted in attention, heads craning to see a friend or thrown back in laughter. Belonging surged through the crowd like an energetic pulse. I found home in the familiar melodies of the prayers and the sequence of the blessings.
It all fit back onto me like an old glove, and I felt that warmth and rootedness I hadn’t felt in years surge through my whole being. I’m no shill for organized religion, but Judaism has always been more than an institution to me—it’s a space of belonging over centuries, against all odds, through ritual. I always understood that to fully participate in Judaism was to exist in a state of constant questioning, which is to say, engagement. Welcome to the year 5784.
While I sat there feeling all of this at once, it occurred to me that I had been preparing for this ritual return by examining my own rituals of preparation through hair. I had been meticulously combing each impulse to return to my body as the temple for meaning, and ruminating on hair maintenance as a special space of ritual, and I had been missing the spiritual in all of it.
It was joyous to see so many young people crammed into this space with their kids and their elders, surrounded by their chosen families. As I stared at the back of everyone’s heads, I realized, beginning to lose count, that I was surrounded on every side by queer ass haircuts!
I had chosen this congregation because I liked their message of radical inclusion. It was a safe space for Jewish people interested in liberation of every kind. The more I looked, the more I found. Every other person had a mullet or a shullet or a gender-affirming asymmetrical undercut of some kind. And there were other hair moments: vast tangles of curly hair just like mine.
It felt like staring down a real time real life google image search of “dark brambly curly hair shag and mullet.” They were sitting all before me like a glorious hair buffet. And they were each possible.
Love y’all. We’re back and we’re going bi-weekly.
Let me know if you ever feel like your hair is a beard, or how you let your identity shine through hair choices. Or just write in to say hi. I love hearing from you.
I’m working on a future newsletter about the history of beards, as in, methods of gay concealment, so stay tuned!
Loved this one