In the late 1980s and 90s it was almost impossible to avoid encountering a sticker with the phrase “Skateboarding Is Not a Crime” in suburban America. The typical skateboarder of this era was an older teenager, white, male, and who listened to equal parts heavy metal and hip-hop, as well as sub genres like ska, and it was sport that unlike many others required no playing field, park, or arena.

The playing field of the skater was the urban or suburban area in which he dwelled.

It was also a safe place for many gay teens. I know it was one for me.

I also know how why this notion is both fraught and contradictory. Both for me and anyone reading it but when I think about that period of my life, junior high through college, it is through an amalgamated lens of skate and queer culture: equal parts Morrissey and Tony Hawk.

An essay by Jane Rogers in American History gets at this notion: “When you think about the culture around skateboarding, you might think about the laid-back vibe of acceptance and inclusion that the sport has come to foster. But skaters from the LGBTQ+ community haven’t always felt accepted and included. Violent anti-gay attacks in the early 1980s and 1990s within the male-dominated world of skate led many to hide their sexuality. Brian Anderson, a skater who rose to popularity in the 1990s, remembers regularly hearing gay slurs, which made him think at a young age that it was dangerous to talk about his sexuality.”

She continues: “Recently, however, skate has made great strides in its acceptance of LGBTQ+ skaters. To document this shift, the museum has collected from members of this diverse and fiercely dedicated community.”

One of the greatest skateboarders of all time, considered one of the founding fathers of skating, was Jay Adams. Adams, as Vice Magazine brought up shortly after his deathin 2014, “was brought into mainstream consciousness in 2001 thanks to the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, and then again in 2005, when he was portrayed by Emile Hirsch in Lords of Dogtown. Adams’s death was picked up by most major news outlets, almost all of which used the words “legend” or “legendary” in their headlines and went on to describe him as a bad boy who pushed the sport away from dance-y, ballerina-style contests and into the more aggressive street and pool skating that birthed modern-day skateboarding. Less discussed was the gay-bashing Adams initiated in Los Angeles that left a man dead.”

While I appreciate Adams’s contribution to skateboarding as much as the next guy, it seems odd that virtually every obituary published over the last four days has glossed over or completely failed to mention that one time in 1982 when he helped kill a guy. Adams, describing the incident to Juice magazine in 2000, said, “After a show at the Starwood we went to a place called the Okiedogs and two homosexual guys walked by and I started a fight.” One of those homosexuals was named Dan Bradbury, and, as mentioned above, was killed in the brawl. Although Adams was charged with murder, he claimed that he had left the fight by the time the man died, and was convicted of felony assault. He served just six months in prison.

Adams ironically was exactly the kind of skateboarder who captured gay imagination and was certainly an archetype of 80s gay desire. As Artsy said in 2018 in an essay entitled, “These Photographers Captured the Renegade Youth of Skate Culture,” they say:

In the mid-1970s, teen skateboarder Jay J. Adams descended on an empty swimming pool in Southern California, with beers and board in hand. A drought had recently ripped across the state, forcing residents to drain their backyard swimming holes. For many, it was a disappointing summer. But not for a crew of misfit young skaters known as the Z-Boys. From their vantage point, those smooth concrete craters made perfect skate bowls—sanctuaries for a sport and subculture they were unwittingly pioneering.

As Adams and his team of now-legendary skaters moved across Venice Beach’s mobbed streets and abandoned backyards that decade, photographer and writer Craig Stecyk was there to capture their antics. In one iconic image, Adams pulls off a frontside 5-0 while simultaneously downing a beer mid-air. On the other side of the empty swimming pool-cum-skatepark, his buddy looks on, wearing massive sunglasses and Converse high tops.

The initial New York Times obituary on his death failed to mention that Adams, who, as their headline says, “changed skateboarding into something radical,” participated in what looks an awful lot like a hate crime a few decades ago. A more in-depth follow-up story published Sunday with the title “In Empty Pools, Sport’s Pioneer Found a Way to Make a Splash” devotes one sentence to it: “In 1982 he was convicted of felony assault for involvement in the stomping death of a gay man at a concert in Hollywood.” The Associated Press acknowledged the incident in which the “colorful rebel” started a fight and then helped beat a gay man to death by writing, “At the height of his fame in the early 1980s, Adams was convicted of felony assault, launching a string of prison stints over the next 24 years”—with no mention of the fact that the victim was a gay man, or that he died as a result. The Los Angeles Times, who called Adams “legendary” and “one of the edgy Z-boys of the sport,” devoted one sentence to the incident, also with no mention of the fact that Bradbury was gay, summing it up neatly: “He served six months for his involvement in a fight in Hollywood that resulted a man’s death.” [sic]

When Adams was asked about the incident in an interview  with Wildland magazine, he denied the fight had anything to do with Bradbury’s sexual orientation: “The trouble we got into that night had nothing to do with the fact the people we got into a fight with were gay. It was during the Punk Rock days in Hollywood and it was a violent time. […] We weren’t bashing gays, we were just out to bash anyone who we came in contact with.”

One of the photographers highlighted who really straddled queer desire and street skate masculinity was Ed Templeton. In 1994, four years into his career as a professional skateboarder, Ed Templeton realized he was missing an opportunity to document the subculture that surrounded the sport he loved. Soon, he was carrying a camera wherever he went, photographing his friends as they skated, smoked, wreaked havoc in hotel rooms, and wiped out across the globe.

“The stuff you hear about happening on music tours is the same kind of stuff that happens on skateboard tours,” he’s said. “I tried to shoot that.” The photos that result show young men and women living recklessly and rebelliously. Cigarettes dangle from their mouths; gashes on their foreheads drip blood; and their lips lock in hungry, messy makeout sessions.

Above: Mohawk Skater, Missouri, 2006, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Ed Templeton

Big Brother magazine, which was the definitive bible for skate culture was emblematic of these contradictory impulses. Founded by Steve Rocco in 1992, Big Brother  was notable for ushering in street skating and the sub-culture of skateboarding.

Rocco, the head of World Industries, was becoming increasingly frustrated with Transworld Skateboarding and Thrasher magazines, and conceived the idea to create a magazine that would be entirely free from the constraints of censorship; one that would expose the behind-the-scenes idiocy in the industry; to inform the kids [about] what was “really going on” in skateboarding (if memory serves correctly, one of Rocco’s quotes from this period was, “The kids have a right to know.”).

A few of the people involved with Rocco and World Industries at the time, primarily Walter Sims and Natas Kaupas, expressed an interest in working on the magazine, so Rocco handed the project over to the two of them with a wad of cash for computers and whatnot.

Marc McKee and I were both employed as graphic artists for World Industries at the time as well, and the two of us considered the magazine to be a new toy and decided that we wanted to play also.

When the first issue of Big Brother arrived back from the printer and landed on his desk in mid-1992, Rocco couldn’t believe his eyes – it looked like complete crap.

Consequently, there was a falling out between him and Walter, and one of those mutual “I quit/you’re fired!’ deals soon followed.

As for the 20,000 copies of Big Brother #1, Steve treated them like a red-headed stepchild. He sent every single one of them out for free to kids on the World Industries mailing list.

Hence, the first issue was chalked up as a total financial loss.

In fact, the cover contained the following sticker:

“Warning: Test Copy. Due to the fact that no one here had any idea what the in hell they were doing, this issue has been declared a total failure. Therefore we have decided to give it away for free.”

Soon after this initial debacle, Rocco hired Jeff Tremaine as the new art/editorial director and a zine kid from Lawrence, Kansas, named Thomas Schmidt, aka Earl Parker.

Jeff had previously been involved with a BMX magazine, Go, and Tom was responsible for a zine called Polyurethane Monthly.

No subject was taboo. Early articles featured step by step ways to commit suicide and rip-off schemes such as how to make a fake ID. They would often use odd gimmicks like printing the magazine in different sizes, packaging it in a cereal box, and throwing in items like trading cards and a cassette tape. Early writers were Sean Cliver, Earl Parker (Thomas Schmidt), Jeff Tremaine, Marc McKee, Mike Ballard, Pat Canale, and others.

Surfer Today Magazine:

Although I honestly don’t know who first came up with the name “Big Brother,” in all likelihood, it was Steve.

Of course, there’s the obvious reference to George Orwell’s book “1984,” and, in a sense, I suppose this was accurate in regards to Big Brother’s role in the skateboard industry.

I tend to look at it more like the magazine is a surrogate “big brother” to all the little skateboard kids out there.

Like the older sibling who shows the younger one the ropes to growing up and occasionally slips them the naughty stuff that you’re not able to get on your own.

It was kind of funny, but the initial icon for Big Brother made it look more like a full-blown pederast organization than anything else – the silhouette of a young boy within that of a grown-up male within the aperture of a camera lens.

A documentary on the magazine’s history, Dumb: The Story of Big Brother Magazine premiered on Hulu on June 3, 2017. The documentary featured interviews with Bam Margera, Steve-O, Johnny Knoxville, Spike Jonze, Jeff Tremaine, and others who were involved in the magazine’s creation.

You may recognize many of these names as being the core of Jackass which brought that sensibility to a wider mainstream audience on the massively successful show Jackass on MTV.

Big Brother introduced and emphasized the nudity, stunts, pranks, (and random ramblings from its staff) to a wider audience then Transworld Skateboarding which in comparison was like Sports Illustrator.  Its later days were characterized by the clever wordplay of editors Dave Carnie and Chris Nieratko. After Larry Flynt  the magazine in 1997, the nudity (ironically) was toned down or scrapped altogether, though the vulgarity remained.

FUN FACT: At one point the subscriber list for Big Brother got mixed up with Taboo, one of Larry Flynt’s hardcore magazines: Big Brother subscribers were sent pornography, and those who subscribed to Taboo got a skate magazine. This incident was parodied on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in which one of the band members was delivered an issue of Big Brother live on stage, suggesting that he subscribed to Taboo and received it in error.

Truly, in the pre-internet age, Big Brother was a dark entity said KQED. “It was a window into the most self-destructive, nihilistic elements of skateboarding. It was uncomfortable to read. There were graphic depictions of bodily fluids and rampant, full frontal nudity. It was sometimes homophobic and frequently sexist. Its “KIDS ISSUE” had a cover designed to appeal to children, but articles about bestiality and BDSM inside. Instructions on how to take drugs and how to commit suicide were featured. Big Brother embraced every taboo possible in the same decade that political correctness became a thing, and thrived both because, and in spite, of it.”

When Big Brother first emerged in 1992, the shadier, dirtier, riskier elements of skating were already well-established (thanks in no small part to what was happening in the Bay Area in the late ’80s and early ’90s). Big Brother just did more to shine a light on them than anyone else ever had, and subsequently managed to push skateboarding’s focus almost entirely in that direction—at least for a few years. The more sexual and offensive content there was in the magazine, the more the entire skateboard industry embraced shock value.

As previously stated, without Big Brother, there would have been no Jackass. And without Jackass, the boundaries of how ridiculous and dangerous you can be on television and in movies would not be where they are now. Actor Jonah Hill, speaking in the Dumb documentary, describes Big Brother as his “biggest influence comedically” because it made him think “humor could be cool, because it could be dangerous.” In the world of print, one has to wonder if men’s magazines like Maxim (launched 1995) and FHM (launched 1999) would have had the idea of incorporating so much unclothed female flesh into non-related and mainstream content if Big Brother hadn’t done it first.

Ironically, it would take actual gay skateboarders to come out and shift the culture.

Conventional wisdom was that Big Brother and Jackass were homophobic in their humor. What they ignore is the blurring of lines that someone like Johnny Knoxville would make the notion of skate culture in 80s and 90s a safe space for someone like me.

When Brian Anderson publicly came out in September of 2016 in a video for Vice magazine.

In it Anderson said:

“I used skateboarding to not think about that,” he explained. “I knew I couldn’t go and meet some dude, or something, I was terrified of somebody seeing me doing that. I kind of consider myself a skateboarder first and gay second. … I’m a skater, that’s all I know.”

In truth, Anderson has known from a very young age. As a toddler, he was drawn to men’s facial hair and later Bluto from the Popeye cartoons.

“Something about that told me, ‘That’s right. I like that,’” Anderson said.

As a kid, the homophobic bullying he witnessed at school encouraged him to keep his sexuality a secret. “Hearing ‘faggot’ all the time,” Anderson said, “made me feel at a really young age that it was dangerous to talk about it.”

Anderson, who went pro in 1998, feared for a long time that he would be outed, but claimed that his profession shielded him from having to answer unwanted questions about his private life. “I was a big tough skateboarder,” Anderson said, adding: “I figured it out how to balance it to where nobody questioned it.”

Instead of coming out sooner, the sportsman remained in the closet.

“People ask, ’Why are you doing this now and not earlier?’” he told Vice. “It would have been a lot more beneficial. … I was really scared, and people would have perceived it a lot differently, I think, had I said this 15 years ago.”

Although he regrets not coming out sooner, said The Advocate, “Anderson said that remaining closeted had one positive benefit: It made him a better athlete. The skater, who is currently repped by Nike and Spitfire, was awarded Thrasher’s Skater of the Year in 1999, as well as the World Cup of Skateboarding title the same year.”

“A part of me was so irritated and angry from holding that in so it made me more of an animal on my skateboard,” he claimed.

By coming out, Anderson follows in the footsteps of athletes Tim Von Werne and Jerrett Berry, two openly gay skateboarders who have attempted to make a dent in a sport defined by heterosexual masculinity. Berry, who never reached Anderson’s level of success, graced the cover of Big Brother in 2002, a skateboarding publication that folded two years later. Von Werne was effectively forced out of the sport in 1998 following a coming out interview with Skateboarder magazine. His sponsor squashed the story before it went to print.

Berry talks about that issue in an interview with Jenkmen in 2016.

How did the Big Brother interview come about?
So I went back to Chicago in ’96-ish and went cold turkey and focused on skating. I got some local sponsors, and they hooked me up with a pro model and sent me out to Slam City Jam in 1999, that was my first pro contest. I was doing contests for about three years and choked a lot. I’d do good in practice, but then would just choke. I made the finals maybe twice, but could never win.

Anyways, I did the contest circuit and met all those people, and everyone was always cool. After about three years in the circuit one of my buddies was like, “Hey, you need to talk to Dave Carnie at Big Brother.” We had grown up with Big Brother since the early ’90s, reading every issue. Shit was funny as hell. No one took shit too seriously, but it was still talking about real shit. That’s the way to handle some serious shit, with humor.

I had local sponsors and was flow for Bones wheels, but that was the only big sponsor I had. So I was like, I’m working full-time and going to school full-time. I’m going to pro contests on the weekends and landing and going right back to work, I couldn’t care less if I lose any sponsors because I’m my own made man, I can buy my own damn skateboards, so I said okay, let’s do this. For me, I wanted to help the gay cause. I had a chance to do something that helped other gay people that were growing up, whether they wanted to take it as a jab and mockery of being gay or as empowerment, that’s on them.

How do you feel about BA coming out on that VICE video the other day?
All my friends are pissed because Ed Templeton called me a marginal pro, they’re like, “he wasn’t a novelty, you fucker!” But I’m like hey, it’s true. I don’t want to steal any thunder. We’re all in this together.

Everybody does something every day to try and better the world around them, or most people I know. We all want peace, we all want equality, we all want a better world. So it was awesome to see Brian come out. Hopefully there’s a little stepping stone in there somewhere so more people can come out. I remember skating Skatepark of Tampa after my interview came out. We’d run into each other a few times before, but this time he came over and shook my hand. My gaydar is all wack. It sucks. So I was like, cool, a pro respecting another pro, but then later I was wondering about him… It was interesting.

”MY GAYDAR IS ALL WACK. IT SUCKS.”

The internet has been blowing up after Brian’s interview, and everybody is saying shit – there’s been a lot of gay shit coming out in the past few weeks. (Can I say that?) Now this interview is going to come out and people are going to be like, “Fuck, still? Why don’t you let this gay shit rest?” I get it, let’s get back to watching Guy Mariano or Brian Anderson footage. Let’s get back to skating.

But the thing is, this is skating. People say politics don’t belong in skateboarding, but we became political a long time ago just by riding a skateboard. They said don’t go here, don’t skate that. They called us fags. They always put skateboarders down. But we were rebels because we didn’t follow their rules, we were going to go be ourselves and fuck what the world thinks. Skateboarders have always brought up social issues. So this has everything to do with skateboarding — we’ve been freaks forever.

 

“I think about how I felt when I was younger, totally scared — a lot of these kids don’t have hope,” he said. “To hear what I went through and how everything got better for me and how I felt a lot happier and felt more free and didn’t have all this shame buried inside my body… to convey that message was really important to me.”

There were also people like Jason Ellis.

Ellis was not only a professional skateboarder from 1985 to 2006, but is also an MMA fighter, radio host, and DJ. He is openly bisexual as of 2016 and wants others to feel ok with being themselves. He is most famous for his big airs as a skater. He often competed in the Mega Ramp portion of the X-games and held the record for biggest drop-in on a ramp (70 feet) until his record was broken by Danny Way.

His life is also super interesting outside of skateboarding where he has written books, started a band, and even fought a former heavy-weight boxer who had one arm taped to his body. Check this guy out if you want to learn how to live adventurously.

Max Dubler’s masterful response to Anderson’s coming out is an iconic essay.

Jenkmen:

Sexual identity would be irrelevant to skateboarding if skateboarding wasn’t so thoroughly identified with macho toughness and male heterosexuality. If you crack open a skateboard magazine you’re gonna see a lot of straight, mostly white dudes skateboarding, and some almost-naked chicks who probably don’t skate advertising skate products. When women are shown actually skateboarding, they’re usually presented to titillate the straight male viewers that brands consider their real customers. If you’re a woman or a gay dude, the message was pretty clear: skateboarding is a subculture for straight men, not you.

That’s why your friends might tell you to “stop being a pussy and fucking go for it” when you hesitate on a trick, and why they might call you a fag if you back down. When Nyjah said, “Some girls can skate, but I personally believe that skateboarding is not for girls at all,” he was saying he didn’t think women are tough enough to take slams. Calling someone a faggot is akin to calling them weak, cowardly, and feminine.

This is all some sexist, homophobic, jock-mentality bullshit. It cannot go away soon enough. But that doesn’t mean skateboarding is super homophobic, right? I mean, most skaters I know are cool with gay people. Nah. With some notable exceptions, the skateboard industry has a long and occasionally repulsive history of homophobia.

IF YOU’RE A WOMAN OR A GAY DUDE, THE MESSAGE WAS PRETTY CLEAR: SKATEBOARDING IS A SUBCULTURE FOR STRAIGHT MEN, NOT FOR YOU.

Let us pause for a moment to recognize the difference between skateboarding, skateboarders, and the skateboard industry. Skateboarding has never given a shit about who I date: I’ve never hung up on a homophobic piece of pool coping or gotten pitched by a pebble that hates fags. The skateboarders I meet are mostly pretty cool about the gay thing. Aside from some casually homophobic language used out of habit, not malice, skateboarders by and large have never given me shit for being gay. But when I talk about the skateboard industry, the professionals, brands, manufacturers and media outlets, that’s a different story…

Look at the 1990s in skateboarding for example. In 1998, Birdhouse am Tim Von Werne had his Skateboarder magazine interview pulled by his sponsors when they learned he planned to openly discuss being gay in it. Big Brother gave a gay skateboarder, Jarret Berry, the cover of the magazine, but the photo was him skating a handrail in chaps with his ass hanging out. Several times, Big Brother editor-in-chief Dave Carnie has asked people if they “ever, you know, gayed off with the Bones Brigade.” And while I shed no tears over the death of aggressive inline, it’s undeniable that skateboarding harassed rollerblading out of existence with a relentless campaign of homophobic bullying, exemplified by the joke immortalized in a Big Brother rainbow rollerblade sticker: “What’s the hardest part of rollerblading? Telling your parents you’re gay.”

Today, we continue to celebrate violently homophobic pro skateboarders. Jay Adams went to prison for his role in instigating the fatal gay bashing of a man named Dan Bradbury in 1982. This incident went unmentioned in most of Adams’ obituaries, and instead his life continues to be celebrated by murals all throughout Venice. Josh Swindell, a former pro skater for Think, went to jail for 19 years for beating a gay man to death outside of a bar in 1993. Although it’s unclear what his involvement in the fight was, Danny Way was also with Swindell and swung a punch earlier that night. Yet skateboard media don’t criticize these skaters or even talk about these incidents.

Representation matters. Skate media feature all kinds of skaters – jocks, preps, stoners, drinkers, heshers, punks, hip hop heads, pretty boys, people of color, hippies, old dudes, preteens, even severely disabled people – but no out gay dudes. So your average (male) teenage skateboarder never sees an LGBT person they can relate to, and LGBT kids never see a skateboarder they can identify with.

Now Brian Anderson has finally stood up and decided to be the first major dude to come out. That’s fucking rad. Most respect. Coming out has always been the most powerful tool for securing LGBT people’s social and legal equality. The appearance of an out gay pro is an important step toward making skateboarding more accepting of LGBT people (and, hopefully, making society more accepting of skateboarding).

Photo above: Brian Anderson

So where do we go from here? Will skateboarders freak out when they discover they are a fetishized masculine archetype among gay men? Are we gonna see a new wheel company based on Tom Of Finland graphics? Will a company with bara and yaoi graphics emerge to challenge Hook Ups for the softcore anime porn skateboard market? Will this t-shirt replace Janoskis as the hot item at your local skatepark? Are gay dudes finally gonna get the skateboarder beefcake calendar we’ve never wanted? Will Alex Olson go full Nick Jonas and cultivate a gay fanbase more than he already has? Will the Bones Brigade finally, you know, gay off?

Probably not, but thanks in part to BA, here’s to hoping it won’t take another 20 years for skaters to feel comfortable coming out.

Ironically when the most famous out skater started a magazine it was nothing like anything that came before.

In 2017 Anderson launched Cave Homo.

2019.0056.06; Cave Homo Skatezine.

According to JenkenMag:

There’s a part in Brian Anderson’s Vice documentary, when he describes his type of guy as a bear. It only makes sense then that a year later he would celebrate his coming out—not of the closet, but of the cave—with his bearish husband, Andrew. The result was Cave Homo a zine, painting, art, photo show all about BA being the gnarliest homo on a board.

This month was Pride Month, and in a rare instance of skater cross promotion, the party brought together skateboarders, art folks, and some big men to a crowded SoHo gallery space. BA’s been on somewhat of a press tour since his coming out doc, and the Cave Homo release show felt like a way to take all the labels people give him—legendary skater, LGBTQ activist, talented artist—and mix ‘em into one big party, leather BDSM masks included.

The man—or really men—of the hour: BA and his husband Andrew (photo below). Congratulations to both of them! I have no idea if their life plans are changing at all now that they’re married, but if they ever adopt a kid I’m gonna be jealous as fuck of that little human. BA is connected to so many different scenes (Anti Hero, Lady Gaga… etc) no matter what that kid is into they would excel instantly. I think I finally understand what rappers mean when they describe someone as being “the plug”.

Anderson is one of the few skaters who can pull off black and white photos of his tattoos and not seem either pretentious or goofy. Could you imagine a photo series of Sheckler’s or Nyjah’s tattoos? I hear staring directly into Nyjah’s throat tattoo for an entire minute will make you hallucinate just as much as an eighth of shrooms.

View the gallery of images here.

Just more proof that authenticity will never be what you expect and neither will Brian Anderson.