[Vol. 13] The Man in the White Dress
An interview with Chris Gallardo, an old friend & inspiring androgynous fashionista.
The high of the day was supposed to be 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind chill was an unforgiving negative.
TL;DR It was frigid.
On any other day that cold, with the indoor scene shut down here in New York, you would’ve been right in assuming that I’d be in my apartment all day, sweatpants on and Netflix marathon going strong. Instead, my ass was seated in an unheated plastic hut on the sidewalk, the strong winds and protesting sounds of the creaking frames making me think the whole thing might just tumbleweed away at any minute.*
*with me in it.
In that little plastic hut were two drinks – a cappuccino and a chai latte (a little too light on the spices, mind you) – and two people – yours truly, and Chris Gallardo, an old friend of mine from High School.
Only, he didn’t look anything like my old friend.
From his long, curly hair, to his chipped blue nail polish, ankle-length brown trenchcoat, and shirt-unbuttoned just enough to catch a glimpse of a chunky, purple-and-blue pendant-necklace in the shape of a flower, it was as if he’d gone through a metamorphosis. No, it wasn’t a “caterpillar to butterfly” type thing – it’s not like anything about the Chris I knew before was lacking – he just seemed more in touch with himself now.
“So,” I asked him, “What’s the story behind that picture on Instagram of you in a dress?”
It was the question that coaxed me out of the warm safety of my apartment in the first place. The answer? Well, just as Chris himself might say, it’s better told in stories.
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With the bounds of what’s considered “normal” for straight, cisgender men to wear so impossibly tight, Chris said his outfits often garner questions about his identity.
“A lot of people think I’m gay … I get this all the time,” Chris admitted, “They’re like “Oh you’re straight? I at least thought you were bi!’”
Although I never asked him how these assumptions make him feel, I didn’t really feel like I had to.
They didn’t seem to bother him all that much. In fact, other people’s opinions of him didn’t seem to bother him much in general – at least not at face value.
While people often try to pin down the origin of Chris’s gender-bending style, most often drawing comparisons between his look and the late music legend Prince, Chris admits he kind of just got to where he is now with his fashion sense by wearing what came naturally to him.
As far as he could recall, it all started with a sheer blouse in the women’s section of a thrift store.
“I’d be thrifting, right, and then I would just look at the guy’s section and [think] there are no colors, all of this is black, grey, brown or navy blue,” Chris said, exasperated. “I didn’t even know that I was in the women’s section because thrift stores don’t separate it like that. I saw this dope ass … blouse, sheer top, still one of my favorite things – it’s orange – and I was like, that’s fucking dope! Then I realized ‘Oh, this is for women’ but I didn’t think about it. I didn’t look at it and think ‘Oh I’m going to look like a woman if I wear this.’ No, I was like, ‘I’m gonna look fucking sick!’”
I smiled when he said that.
He made self-experimentation sound so beautifully simple, as it should be.
I told him a lot of queer people would be very jealous given what he had just said.
“I was always very flamboyant … the more and more I tried to find what fit me, the more and more exuberant I got, you know?” Chris said, “That’s how I fell into what I like. I love feeling like a fucking queen. I love feeling like a fucking bad bitch, and men’s clothes won’t make you feel like a bad bitch. That’s not saying I don’t love a nice suit and tie, I love that shit, but there’s something about women’s clothing that made me feel like a rockstar.”
I mean, how cool is that?
For a second there, I couldn’t help but marvel at this person who somehow managed to find a way to exist outside of the shitty, restrictive gender norms most of us live and die by (literally).
I’ll admit, it was a little naive of me to think that.
Or maybe it was hopeful – like I hoped that that could be the truth; that someone could actually manage to live an entire life in this society without a care in the world for the norms that seem to run the show for the rest of us.
Either way, it wasn’t the whole truth.
Chris’s relationship with himself and his budding androgynous style wasn’t always so open.
As it turns out, I was the first gay person Chris ever met – or, at least, I was the first “out” gay person he’d ever met.
He grew up in an environment that was tinged with homophobia, which was at least in part, due to the very “macho” aspect of his culture, as he’s originally from the Dominican Republic.
Although he will probably never know for sure, Chris says he thinks his Dad thought he was gay for a long time. He always wanted to “toughen him up”.
Chris recounted for me a core memory from his childhood where his Dad woke him up early in the morning, lead him outside to the front porch, and gestured towards a big bucket filled to the brim with water and kitchen rags.
“I don’t know what the fuck was going through his head, but he was like ‘You do not move from this spot until you wring out every single towel, in one wring, completely,’ Chris recalled, “He just stood there, watching me.”
If he didn’t wring out the water-soaked rags in one go, there were consequences.
I asked him what memories like these made him think of gay and queer people – I could imagine it wasn’t very positive. While he said he was never anti-gay, Chris admitted he was “terrified” of people thinking of him as a gay man. Although he was never actually gay, Chris said experiences like these in his childhood made him feel like a “closeted mental gay” – almost as if he felt like he needed to hide something about himself when there was nothing there to hide.
The lesson learned here? No one is safe from the homophobic-leaning tendencies in our world.
Gay, straight, cisgender, transgender – we’re all negatively affected by hateful conceptions of queerness, whether we know it or not. The limits drawn by homophobia and transphobia trap all of us.
Although Chris said he used to hate his dad for what he’d done, he didn’t blame him so much anymore. All this, he said, could’ve manifested from something a lot worse that happened in his Dad’s past.
“As much as you can try to emphasize and sympathize with that person, you can never truly know what the fuck they’re going through and what they’re thinking, or what they have gone through,” Chris explained. “Even if you have had similar experiences, there will always be a difference. It’s uniquely yours and theirs.”
Chris’s breakthrough with his style and self-expression was inherently tied to his breakthrough with music.
If you need to know one thing about Chris, it’s this: He loves music
– listening to it, talking about it, and creating it. And he sees music in a very unique way. After the interview, for example, as we talked about our mutual love (borderline obsession) with Amy Winehouse, Chris described her voice as if it were the end-credits scene to a movie. To him, her voice is a warm drink on the rooftop of a lakehouse, overlooking a red-orange sunset over the water.
As the time came for him to start his third year at Syracuse University, freshly accepted as a transfer into its prestigious film program after taking a year off to hustle in Los Angeles on his own, Chris felt absolutely lost.
Then, he bought himself a mini keyboard, got his hands on some editing software, and fell head-over-heels back into music.
He said it saved his life.
“It was the most beautiful thing that happened – like ever … I felt like I lost the handle of everything in my life, and I felt like I didn’t want to try anymore, you know?” Chris answered, honestly. “Then I made that song, and it’s shitty, but it was the fact that I could … take an idea that I had in my head and make it real. At that moment I felt like I unlocked a lot of stuff that I had hidden away. I feel like I regained my purest, most genuine Chris I used to love.”
Not long thereafter, hooked on his rediscovered ability to express himself through art, Chris fell into modeling. The photo of him in the white dress, beautifully accompanied by white flowers and the backdrop of an open field, was only his second-ever shoot, but it was a big part of his journey to messing around with his style.
His friend and photographer, Codie, asked him to wear a dress. Chris said, “fuck it”.
“I don’t know why, but I was like, ‘Fuck yeah!’ A dress? Sure!” Chris said. “The me of a couple years back would’ve been concerned. I’d have questioned it.”
After spending his college years laboriously breaking through restraints, both those he had built for himself and the ones others had put in his head, Chris said he was ready to make his own decisions, regardless of what other people had to say about them.
So he wore the hand-me-down dress for the shoot. In fact, he stripped down and tried it on right in Codie’s living room.
Curious, I asked him what it had felt like to put on a dress for the first time.
“It felt awesome,” Chris recalled, smiling. “The first thought I had was just to twirl, and I was like ‘This is why women wear dresses!’ You just feel so beautiful. Like when you twirl around and you feel the weight of the dress swoop over you, you feel like you’re a gust of wind. You feel powerful.”
Although he forgot about those photos for the better part of the next year, Chris eventually stumbled onto them again with a friend, who ended up encouraging him to post them on Instagram.
Turns out, the rest of the world thought it was pretty awesome, too.
Before we could grab dinner and escape the ever-growing frigid cold, I wanted to ask my interviewee/captor a few last questions that I could leave my readers with.
Because I think his words say it best and would only be diluted by added clutter of my own, I’ll leave his answers as they are.
1) Do you think fashion is heading towards an androgynous future?
“I think the more you blend the line between the sexes, the more cosmic you get … the more free you become, away from any rules,” Chris answered. “I think humans as a whole due to nature tend to view things very black and white, and that includes sex … We think of everything in a very sexual way - something is masculine, something else is feminine. The common trend is to find the middle ground in anything and that includes slowly becoming cognizant of the fact that there is that grey area, and that the majority of all things aren’t masculine or feminine, they’re in that grey area. It’s that beautiful intersection of like, it can be whatever the fuck it is. I think the epitome of that idea would be that it doesn’t get talked about ever, you know, like it just is.”
2) What would you say to other men (gay or straight) that are afraid to experiment with their style?
“If you boast about being such a ‘tough guy’, being tough is being ok with yourself and not caring whatever the fuck anybody else thinks of you,” Chris said. “The real men I’ve seen in my life are like that. They don’t give two fucks about what people think of them, they’re just being who they are. That is what I respect in men.”
“Most men have this work tendency towards like, it doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing in their lane, worry about your lane and just fucking do it,” Chris added. “I think men lose the vision of that intensity and drive when it comes to things they’re fragile about, you know? You cannot talk shit about anything unless you’re able to do it for everything. Context shouldn’t matter, stay true to your beliefs. If you truly believe you don’t give a fuck about what anybody else thinks, then just fucking do what you want to do. If that means experimenting with your fashion, then fucking do it. There are no ifs or buts or what-ifs. Nobody cares, and if they do care they’re not worth your time. It’s not complex. And if you try it and don’t like it, then you don’t like it, everybody moves on with their lives.”
And then, we ate burgers in the cold, caught up, and talked about Amy Winehouse’s sunset-over-the-lake voice.
To say the very least, I walked away from this interview inspired to honor my identity more; to say “fuck yeah” like Chris at chances to shatter the limits of the norm.
I hope you do too.
Today’s discussion Q:
Do you think gender norms, particularly as they relate to fashion, are too restrictive? Is androgyny, for those who enjoy it, the way of the future?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below! As always, I’ll be writing my own response, as well as reading/responding to anyone else’s.
And that was That’s Gay, Volume 12. See you in Volume 13, folks!
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Yes yes yesss!! Gender norms constrict many things and that includes fashion as well. Something you wear should not be classified for men or for women. Clothing should be made to be worn by anyone who wants to wear it. When I was younger I had a very black and white view of what should be worn by whom. But as I get older I see androgyny everywhere and I love it. It also inspires me to wear things I would never have thought to wear before.