“Can Sheep Really Be Gay?”: A Grindr Fashion Show Diary

Downtown writer and editor Drew Zeiba takes us behind the scenes at fashion’s gayest runway show, a Grindr collaboration with costume designer to the stars Michael Schmidt, made entirely from the wool of gay sheep.

———

8:15 PM

The basement of the Altman building on 18th Street. A score of 6’2” men stomp around barefoot while being chased by a lint-roller-wielding twink, hair a-flounce. I’m backstage for I Wool Survive, a Grindr-supported presentation of one-of-a-kind garments designed by Michael Schmidt—a designer known for costuming pop stars like Cher and Doja Cat—using fleece from gay sheep. Yes, gay sheep. Or homosexual sheep. Male-for-male sheep. Can sheep really be gay? 

Basically, I’m told, the situation is this: Although most male sheep, in the absence of an ewe, will get it on with each other, one out of twelve is strictly homosexual. These rams, useless for breeding, are often sent to slaughter. So Michael Stücke, a, um, German shepard, started Rainbow Wool to rescue them.

The Rainbow Wool team reached out to Grindr through LinkedIn, Tristan Pineiro—a marketing executive from the hookup app—tells me. He thought, “What about if we take this farmer in Germany, connect him to a designer in the US and create the gayest fashion show ever?” I suggest that maybe fashion isn’t famously the least gay enterprise, but Pineiro is unflappable. “These sheep are a metaphor for all of us. And how we’re treated by society,” he says.

“Did you meet any sheep?”

“We had a Zoom call.”

“Were they…”

“I didn’t see them being gay. And if I had, I wouldn’t like to disclose that,” he says. This man’s media training is iron-clad. And Grindr is a platform for consenting adult humans, he reminds me.

8:17 PM

“I’ve seen more dicks this week than I’ve seen in a year. I need to go on a dick fast,” said the publicist Kelly Cutrone when we got on the phone earlier this week, but the nude man who just walked by us is holding a knit thong in front of his. “Can I get anyone a margarita?” a blonde woman asks no one in particular. “Please,” I say. 

8:20 PM

Schmidt, the designer, sits beside me. His sweater sparkles. He squeezes my leather-pant-clad leg. The goal of the collection we’re about to see tonight—which presents 36 archetypes of masculinity from “the dawn of time” to the present—he explains, is to, “Tell the story of the gay sheep by expanding that concept and talking about homosexual desire universally, not just among the animal kingdom.” The sheep are cute, he says, but it’s more than that. “They’re literally killed for being gay, it’s such a metaphor for what queer people are going through all over the world.”

8:27 PM

My margarita arrives and I slurp it down before chatting with the punk who’s sat beside me. I know he’s a punk because he’s got lots of patches on his black vest and his hair is spiked sky-high. He tells me he was originally gonna be the pizza boy, but he’s happy with the reassignment. “I’ve been feeling pretty punky lately.” I ask if he has any crushes among the cast. There was one guy he thought was hot in his street clothes—who,  it turns out, is the daddy.

“He’s doing daddy really well. But I saw his chest, like just now, and there could be more hair.”

8:43 PM

I approach the leather daddy (not to be confused with the regular daddy) as someone—the makeup artist, perhaps—rubs his mostly-nude body with lotion. He’s looking glossy. 

One of tonight’s big refrains has been that if sheep, among many other animals, can be homos, shouldn’t that encourage people to treat we gay humans better too? “What do you think about this whole ‘born-this-way’ narrative?” I ask the leather daddy. “I think Lady Gaga really poisoned the well with that song,” he replies coolly.

8:57 PM

I return upstairs to find my seat for the show. The official photographer can’t get any shots at the step and repeat because too many influencers are using their two phones and hand-held lights to make their own content. 

9:00 PM

On each seat a wool bandana sticks out from a denim pocket; a nod to the hanky code from a digital platform strikes me as a bit ironic. Mine’s light blue. The person next to me gets Kelly green. Neither of us know the colors besides the big ones—you know, yellow’s for piss, red’s for fisting, the remarkable stuff. Thank god for Google. Turns out Kelly green is sex work (hustler left, client right), and light blue is cocksucking. (For better or worse, I’ve never needed to use a hanky to signal my oral fixation to the interested public, but the color suits me.)

9:30 PM

I’d assumed the uneven-edged black tarp covering the floor served as a sex-dungeon allusion but a staff of three are now rolling it up, while the club queen Susan Bartsch dances behind them. Beneath the black tarp floor is another black floor.

9:46 PM

Lights. From behind a dark-gray vinyl curtain steps Pineiro, who delivers a speech. The only time I’ve seen someone give a speech before a fashion show is on Emily in Paris, which I guess is also a fever-dream of absurdist marketing propositions, so that checks out. “The beautiful and valuable sheep are a metaphor for all of us,” he says again. We humans are “sometimes disregarded and misunderstood, and yet, when we find our flock, we build networks, and those networks become our power and our strength.” 

Applause. Cue the jungle sounds. Out comes a serpent-wrapped Adam—the man who made all the other men possible, I suppose. We then work our way through time: a knit toga, a knit suit of armor (no pants—not sure how well this knight would fare on the battlefield), a lumberjack. Disco-pop standards blare. A pool boy drips glitter. Tarzan stomps with half-closed eyes. Are paper boys usually of legal age? The accessories are technical marvels: a wool newspaper, a wool pizza, wool handcuffs. 

As the models loop back they take position on a set of risers framing the runway’s entrance, waggling like figures in a video game character selection screen, like Street Fighter: The Village People edition.

9:50 PM

“Such big butts, it’s crazy!” says a man two seats over from me.

10:01 PM

We mill about post-show. “Hey, do you remember me?” a guy says sidling up to my neighbor. “Um…” “We met at the baths.” I take this as a sign to search for a new conversation partner. 

I find a friend who is talking to one of the show’s hairstylists. “I’m not sure if you remember me, you showed me your balls in an art gallery,” my friend says. “Oh, yes, they’re huge,” the stylist says, as if this accounts for the public indecency. “All natural?” I ask. “No. Silicone, of course.” 

11:02 PM

Arrive to The Eagle, the leather-ish gay club where the official after party is being held. I wind up behind the punk in the line for the open bar. “I’m not sure I feel like the hair is me anymore,” he says. “Can I feel it?” I ask. “Sure.” “It’s soft.” “Yeah, it’s like cotton candy.” I order us vodka Red Bulls (sugar free). “These taste really good,” he says.

“Hey, hey man,” says a model coming over, not making eye contact with me. I think he was the sailor, although with the self-tanner slightly wiped off and his civilian clothes on it’s hard for me to be certain. “You had the best outfit.” 

“Oh, thanks,” says the punk.

“Yeah. Like, you looked the straightest. Are you straight? I’m straight,” he says, nervously glancing toward the bartender whose leather harness frames his pierced nipples and matches his zipper-fronted leather jockstrap.

“No, I’m not,” says the punk.

“Oh, yeah, well that’s cool, uh…” the sailor sails off into the throngs.

11:30 PM

My front-row seatmate has befriended a demon twink who has snuck in and is liberally enjoying the open bar.

12:00 am

I start making out with another gay magazine writer next to another step-and-repeat which promotes erection pills, but when the party photographer moves in we both reflexively pull away. Whatever happened to privacy!

12:45 AM

What happened to privacy is people like me broadcasting my entire life in magazines or whatever, I guess. Am I living life, or am I living the illusion of a life that can be reproduced in content: can life be anti-narrative? Do I have to do it for the plot? Ugh. I can’t be thinking shit like this right now. “Should we get shots?” someone asks, rescuing me.

1:30 AM

I know what happens when I stay at The Eagle too long and let me tell you it’s never good. Thankfully the glam-rocker from the show, whose eyeliner has smudged prodigiously, says his friend’s having a party downtown, so some of the actually gay models and I pile into two cabs. Turns out it’s not a party, just a bar, and his friend’s nowhere in sight. Also turns out the bar’s closing. “Karaoke?” proposes Ziggy Stardust as we stand outside puffing skinny cigarettes.

2:20 AM

Not fucking showtunes. Someone needs to put a stop to this. I wrap a $10 tip around the little paper with the punk’s song request. “You’ll be next!” the bartender smiles.

4:15 AM

One of my new model-friends asks for a tour of my apartment. I’m a freelance writer living in Chinatown so the tour doesn’t take very long: here’s an oven I don’t use enough, here is the bookshelf which I dusted just today, and, voilà, here’s the bed.

6:11 AM

Time to chug water and count (gay) sheep! Good night!