If the following sentence, which appears early in Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Folding Star and describes the protagonist's first encounter at a Flemish gay bar, doesn't give you a shiver of erotic recognition and also a boner, then you are either illiterate or not a gay man:
"Sometimes he scratched at his chest with a thumbnail, and the tiny crackle of chest-hairs under the cotton of his polo-shirt filled me with a wondering sense of his whole body, as keen as if he'd been leaning by me naked."
Okay so maybe it's just me: I have an actual fetish for pique cotton. The soft but continuous grinding of its weave against my nips, keeping them in a perpetual state of pleasant turgidity and display; the way the fabric feels beneath the hands. In comparison, frictionless jersey cotton just feels bland, even oily. Also, I grew up hardcore Long Island preppy, so there's always been something absurdly hot and subversive to me about grown (gay) men rocking too-tight polo shirts.
Unfortunately, the days of rocking--or being rocked by others' rocking—polo shirts are over. The last time this look could truly be taken as in any way hot/queer was probably in the 80s, and even then I am probably mistaking the hotness of period recreations of pique-draped men from that era—literary or cinematic--for the (no such thing) real deal. Gay men in polo shirts in the 70s and 80s...did they, as I'd wish it, think they were subversively reappropriating straight signifiers, doing for preppie softness what Tom of Finland and leather culture did for signifiers of hard, masculine authority: cops, truckers, sailors, etc.? More likely they just thought preppy guys were hot, and wanted to look like rich preppy guys, and the two-sizes-too-tight fit of their shirts was not, as I'd wish it, some deliciously knowing erotic lampoon but just standard-issue laughable homo-cluelessness about how to really play the part of a straight dude.
And if I took a time machine to a 1970s gay bar and chatted with one of these men, wouldn't their eager and maladroit preppy playacting be all too obvious, too much an embarrassing case of class dress-up, killing my interest? And besides which wouldn't they, intuiting my ridiculous attachment to a (even more) ridiculous notion of the Preppy Gay Warrior, make themselves scarce before I'd even have a chance to formulate my disillusionment?
Hmm, now that I've finished masturbating into this balled-up thriftstore Polo I may as well end this post as well.
That's a very vivid depiction of the subtle ways we become attracted to others' bodies (as well as the more or less obvious fact that an actual person standing next to you naked is rarely as sexy as that person wearing clothes, as long as the clothes aren't, like, baggy sweatshirts with Tweety Bird on them or something) but I have to say the boner killjoy of this sentence occurs in the very first clause! "Sometimes he scratched at his chest with a thumbnail." Ugh. There's something about thumbnails that makes my stomach curdle. Thick, barbarous hooves of the hand. Cut your nails, polo man!
Oh, and PS, as a tennis fanatic I also love polo shirts, although I have to point out that they, having been invented by French tennis great Rene Lacoste, le Crocodile himself and one of Les Quatre Mousquetaires, they should be referred to as "tennis shirts".