My Heroes Have Always Been Longhairs

My dad took me to a barber shop for the first time when I was five. This turned out to be a pivotal point in my life. I remember walking into the barbershop, which seemed dark and was full of strangers, and I just went ballistic. I screamed, I pulled on my dad's arm, all I wanted to do was get out of there. And we did after a sufficient display convinced my dad that no way was I going to get a haircut that day. In later years my dad told me he had never felt more embarassed. For my part, I have no doubt that I had never been so traumatized.

Now, that's probably not the main reason why I have long hair these days. It probably played a part in a certain nervousness around barbers that lasted into my late teens or so. Even though I did more or less willingly allow myself to be brought into a barbershop, about once a year as a teen, I did get good and scruffy before I submitted to the clippers.

What was the main reason I wanted long hair even when I was a kid? Well, I guess I was a bit of a rebel back then. Now, this was in the 70s when only hippies had long hair. I was a little too young to be a hippie, but I think I wanted to be one anyway. Perhaps I knew something about what long hair meant even when I was unable to understand it.

Now I have some very definite ideas. Guys with long hair are definitely bucking the trend, even now -- even as you see so many models and GQ- types with long hair, the general societal trend is still for short hair, collar length at best. Not only are you defying the quiet societal pressure to be close-cropped, you're also defying a certain practicality. A couple of years after my last haircut in 1991, I came to realize that sometimes, long hair is a little problematic. Think wind rushing through windows of moving motor vehicles, and the need to untangle the hair when you pull in for the night. Ouch doesn't completely cover it. And yet, is it that great of a price, this impracticality? (Besides, I quickly learned how to tie it up so that it wouldn't be teased into knots by the breeze.)

There's a greater thing at work here, and it's related to that rebelliousness I mentioned earlier. In the best of cases, long hair on a man symbolizes a non-mainstream attitude, thumbing it's nose at the business-as-usual world. Think long hair, and it's easy to connect it to creative types, wild types, natural types, and other types not easily shoved into corporate or consumer boxes. Even for those of us trapped (for now) in corporate America, being able to have long hair is an important symbol that somewhere a rebel heart beats and connects to all that is subversive to the same-same-same world around us.

That subversiveness attracts; it not only attracts people (men and women) who like the sight of long hair on a guy, but also attracts guys to go for the look themselves. Yet it's not the ones who are going for the look who are most attractive. It's the ones for whom long hair is in a way a side effect of the life they're living. They're the "whole package," not just a facade, and they're the ones who are most attractive to me. Maybe that's what I was thinking in that barber shop when I was five. Perhaps even then I knew what I wanted, and what I wanted to be.

—Charlie Songdog
February 17, 1997