A Gay Brand That Lasted and Edured and So Did Its Owners
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Fashion changes. Jockstraps, not so much.
Those are fighting words to David Lauterstein and Frederick Kearney, husbands and founders of the sex-meets-street brand Nasty Pig. For 30 years, Mr. Lauterstein and Mr. Kearney have reimagined what jockstraps, harnesses and other fetish-inspired apparel can be, and turned their company into a household name — if your house is a West Hollywood bungalow or Fire Island share.
This week, Mr. Lauterstein released “Sodomy Gods,” a memoir that traces in soul-baring and sexually frank detail his 31-year relationship with Mr. Kearney, and how they transformed Nasty Pig into one of the most recognizable gay clothing brands on the market, worn by celebrities such as Madonna and Frank Ocean.
During a recent interview at the company’s Manhattan design studio on West 28th Street — in what longtime customers would insist is Chelsea and deny is Hudson Yards — Mr. Lauterstein, 55, was in head-to-toe, darkroom-black Nasty Pig: T-shirt, shorts, garters, socks, boots. Mr. Kearney, 63, had on a chest-hugging top in black and white with the logo in blood red.
Mr. Lauterstein is the chattier, less filtered of the two. In his book, he writes candidly about his sex life and drug use. He said he hoped his memoir would be an educational and entertaining time capsule about the brand but also about 1990s gay New York, with remembrances of the kind “our ancestors couldn’t pass down to us because we lost a lot of them” to AIDS. Mr. Lauterstein and Mr. Kearney share a sex-positive sartorial vision for the brand, but divide daily responsibilities as chief executive and creative director, respectively. (“I’m concept, he’s detail,” Mr. Lauterstein explained.) The couple declined to discuss sales, though Mr. Lauterstein allowed that “Fred and I are terrible capitalists.”
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Mr. Kearney said his inspirations include the gay artist Tom of Finland — whose vision of distended denim and straining tank tops refined an archetype of the hypermasculine clone — and the photographers Alvin Baltrop and Stanley Stellar, who captured New York’s gay pier scene of the 1970s and ’80s. They said their biggest design influence was a friend: Manfred Theirry Mugler, the maverick French fashion designer known for outrĂ©, BDSM-inspired creations who died in 2022.
“He taught us to stay out of the fashion industry because it will eat you alive,” Mr. Lauterstein said. “Make clothing for your customers. The story is between you and them.”
‘It’s Like Lululemon’
Nasty Pig isn’t the first apparel brand to present an aspirational vision of what being gay can look like. But it did refract that vision through the gay leather scene and men’s physique magazines of the 1950s, when a classic Bike brand jockstrap came in maybe one style. They’re hardly alone in the gay apparel marketplace; Andrew Christian, one of the brand’s chief competitors, is a mainstay in gay shopping districts and well known to watchers of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
“It’s like Lululemon,” said Tony Lance, 41, an arts consultant who lives in Manhattan, who was spotted with his Nasty Pig hat and tracksuit at an airport when an employee asked him if he had shopped the summer sale.
The designer John Bartlett said Nasty Pig has remained relevant by “staying true to the brand” in a notoriously inconstant industry.
“What Nasty Pig has done is take archetypal pieces of the gay subculture, what you used to have to get at the Leather Man on Christopher Street, and make them more commercial and accessible to a much larger audience,” said Mr. Bartlett, the New School’s director of fashion for executive and professional studies.
Critics say the brand reinforces a narrow understanding of sexy, excluding men who aren’t the type to frequent gyms or sweaty dance parties. Ari Arya, 24, who is queer and nonbinary and recently graduated from the Parsons School of Design, said that the brand “belongs to a different generation,” and they and their friends most likely wouldn’t wear it.
Arya granted that its clothing could be “useful in an under-the-radar way” for queer people interested in signaling sexual daring and availability. But for younger queers partial to blousy tops or boxy silhouettes, Nasty Pig doesn’t cut it.
A Trusted Messenger
Mr. Lauterstein, who was raised on Staten Island by parents who were public-school teachers, studied poetry at SUNY Binghamton and took a job in music merchandising after graduating. Mr. Kearney, who grew up in Kearny, N.J., graduated from Rutgers and worked as a professional patternmaker.
The two met on May 6, 1993, over $1 margaritas at the Break, a long-gone gay bar on Eighth Avenue. “I was entranced,” Mr. Kearney said. “Engulfed.”
“He took my virginity,” Mr. Lauterstein replied, laughing.
After finding side-hustle success selling tricked-out goggles at Sound Factory and other nightclubs, the couple started designing and wearing their own apparel on nights out. That eventually became the line they sold under the Nasty Pig brand — named for their Jack Russell terrier, Piggy — at their first store, which opened on Dec. 23, 1994, in a 64-square-foot Chelsea storefront.
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At the time, fashion was confused about what gay men wanted to wear. Other than Gianni Versace and a few others, designers weren’t making clothes that overtly sexualized the male body. AIDS had entered its second decade, and as protease inhibitors made H.I.V. a bit less scary, many gay men got muscled, and men’s wear silhouettes tightened.
It was in this body-conscious environment that Nasty Pig first made a splash with clothes that belied the fear that coursed through many gay bodies. In 2021, a year after its last retail location closed, the company opened its design studio, where a staff of 10 designs and markets the collections, manages the online shop and keeps the more than three dozen stores that carry the brand around the world well stocked.
In January, after Mr. Lauterstein and Mr. Kearney met with L.G.B.T.Q. public health officials at the White House, Nasty Pig hosted a “Pep Rally”: a booth at Mid Atlantic Leather, an annual fetish event in Washington, where the brand joined an effort by the city’s public health office to distribute doses of doxy-PEP, a kind of morning-after pill to prevent some S.T.I.s, in black, Nasty Pig-branded boxes.
Shaped by the AIDS crisis, the two founders consider gay sexual health, not just sex, to be part of their brand’s ethos.
“Sexual positivity wasn’t a thing then because sex was terrifying, especially for gay men and queer people,” Mr. Lauterstein said. “Nasty Pig opened to reclaim that identity and fight for it.”
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