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Bare Attitude On the virtues of being an un-underclad lad. By T.I. Miami The cruel world can thank Antonio Banderas for forever affixing my body to my jeans, sans middleman. He stays at a friend's house in El Ley del Deseo and when off his shrink-wrapped slacks came, he took me with him. Because the nada he had under was enough and more. I was glued. The same way lungs get sold to R.J. Reynolds via Bogart's or Betty Davis' cancerous kisses every year, my loins were (un)bound to a new kind of freedom and daily renewal, hung on the line of my inseam to dry every day since 1987. Until Antonio, I was always warned--by mi madre no less--not to be too warmed by underwear. There was the story of my Uncle Chucho, whose procreative prospects were fatally curbed by the legacy of '70s Bill Blass bikini briefs. Though the dark scooped front smoothed out one's jewels, there lurked behind that austere, convex front the alarming possibility of being burnt by the sun, fried like Icarus, too close to the bodily center. The nubile, bare-assed Banderas mopped my mind often, buffing a celestial fashion runway and outpacing the (rather rumpled) Jim Palmer Jockey ads by a long shot. Some have wondered if letting the flag always fly doesn't bring up both hygienic and comfort issues. I reply that I ain't loca--any tweed or wool garment, however refined, can at any time turn on you, leaving you a blistered victim of friction. My sparing use of underwear in these special cases makes the elastic last indefinitely. And as far as hygiene goes, I've never had any complaints. The lint factor is the same. Un-undered means one less bell to answer, one less barrier to cross, one more way to say si when your nocturnal someone purrs, "May I?" [ San Francisco | MetroActive Central | Archives ]