Back in the 1980s the idea of being gay was NOT something that was openly accepted in America. You could be attacked, or worse, if the right crowd decided you needed to pay for your lifestyle.

Around this same time, Reagan had completely changed how prisons were funded. Before, it mostly came out of the pockets of the government. And after Reagan, we got what we have now. Prisons for profit.

Which meant conditions went way down, almost overnight, and prison populations started to boom. Because before, prisoners were a burden on tax dollars. If you arrested someone for jaywalking, you now had to convince a judge why a jaywalker belonged in prison.

But now, with megacorporations footing the bill, the expansions of the prison systems could explode. If you paid for prisons to be built and you made profit on each prisoner, you wanted them full.

Which meant…THE WAR ON DRUGS!

So, now you have massive populations of prisoners, all being held for crimes that shouldn’t carry a long sentence, and in many cases, never even happened.

What this meant is, these prisons became almost a community among the prisoners. And as such, you inevitably had gay prisoners.

So to signal to the other prisoners that you were gay, and wanted to get fucked in the ass, you’d wear your pants a little loose, and a little low. The look became known as “sagging”. And for about 10 years, nobody outside of prisons knew about it.

Then the 90s came, and these prisoners started getting released. And they continued sagging outside of prison, even though it no longer carried the same weight. It just became a fashion sense among urban communities without a trace of its former meaning.

So when I see this picture…it’s like…TOO on the nose. Thats not pants sagging, that’s pants dropping. The ironic thing is, if you told him that look signaled him as the bitch of the group, he’d probably be very angry. Especially since in the 90s being gay STILL wasn’t socially acceptable.