How blue jeans got their sexy reputation

I’ve often thought of jeans as “sky pants,” trousers woven from cotton clouds. Jeans are the wild blue yonder above the canyons, plains and crumbling escarpments of the West. Pants to die in, as Andy Warhol once proclaimed. 

But also pants to live in: When I visited Los Angeles for the first time, I went to The Eagle, a gay bar tucked into a curve of Santa Monica Boulevard. It was cowboy night, and denim was all but required. At my hostel, I struggled to decide between two pairs of jeans. One was a pair of boot-cut Levi’s I’d worn into the ground, working as a ranch hand in Colorado’s Wet Valley. The other pair was more risqué — skin-tight jeans from a brand called RUFSKIN, which I’d bought earlier that day in West Hollywood. I could barely fit my calves through them, but after wrangling them on, I headed out the door.

At The Eagle, I paid a small cash cover and got a stamp on my hand. Techno music bumped and vintage cowboy-themed flicks played on the TV sets in my peripheral vision. Most of the bar patrons wore white tees with their denim, highlighting their beards or scruff. One bartender was shirtless and commando in gravity-defying low-rise jeans, like a mid-aughts pop star except for way hairier, 30 years older and wearing a small museum’s worth of body art. Others wore full Canadian tuxedos, while a muscular couple rocked cut-off jorts with matching ’80s mustaches. 

Jeans have long been synonymous with an effortless cool, from gay biker clubs to queer icons like Marlon Brando and James Dean. The queer community has particularly embraced them, especially as an erotic staple in leather subculture. Of course, it wasn’t always that way; for many years, blue jeans — like my boot-cut Levi’s — were just work pants. I had no idea that an artist who once lived around the block from The Eagle helped give them their now distinctive cultural connotation. 

Jeans have long been synonymous with an effortless cool, from gay biker clubs to queer icons like Marlon Brando and James Dean.

George Quaintance was a hairdresser and vaudeville dancer originally from Virginia who began painting professionally in the 1940s. He moved to Los Angeles in 1947 and became known for his gay “beefcake” oil paintings, many of which depicted Southwestern ranch hands and Adonis-like cowboys. He created cover art for male magazines like Physique Pictorial and Demi-Gods, which got away with publishing photos and illustrations of men in G-strings by billing themselves as “health and fitness” publications.

The scene at The Eagle was straight out of a Quaintance painting, especially 1954’s Saturday Night, in which four men lean over a bar in what can only be described as an ode to indigo bulge and butt. “He put Levi’s on the map as a garment that was sexy as well as serviceable,” Ken Furtado and John Waybright wrote in their biography, Quaintance: The Short Life of an American Art Pioneer. It’s impossible to know for sure, but some writers and historians, especially in queer culture, credit Quaintance with being the first to fetishize jeans.

When he moved to Phoenix, Arizona, in the 1950s, the painter entered his “golden era,” creating work that celebrated the fantasy of his new desert home. Writer Reed Massengill wrote that this home, which he called Rancho Siesta, was a place of “male camaraderie, tight Levi’s, and models who lived just a horseback ride away” — in other words, a full-on technicolor denim daydream. In Sunset (1953), a man in a cowboy hat, jeans and assless chaps (another highly fetishized piece of gay leather culture) watches a man slipping out of his jeans as two men shower in the background beside a saguaro. Denim also appears in Red Dust (1955), which portrays the artist’s lover, Edwardo, shirtless with a lasso in front of a stampede of horses. And in Lake Apache (1954), two cowboys prepare to skinny-dip in a canyon, their jeans draped over a saddle.

Over time, Quaintance’s paintings gathered such a large, dedicated fan base that he formed Quaintance Studios, a mail-order business that sent out a catalog of prints, postcards and sculptures of his art. At its peak, he garnered around 10,000 subscribers, an analog business reminiscent of today’s OnlyFans, where sex workers and celebrities distribute adult content online directly to paying subscribers.

But while the artist insisted that his Rancho Siesta was located in “Paradise Valley” amid sprawling, creosote-dotted acres, it was always a fantasy: The real Rancho Siesta was Quaintance’s suburban home in east Phoenix — a place that didn’t even have a pool for skinny dipping. For a painting like Rainbow Falls, for example, Quaintance draped white sheets down a staircase and leaving his models to pretend they were bathing in Havasupai Falls. Even the jeans he painted were a fantasy, so impossibly tight that the jacked cowboys who wore them looked as if they’d been sprayed with indigo body paint. And yet they somehow appeared comfortable wearing them as they trekked across the desert and wrestled on slickrock. 

“He put Levi’s on the map as a garment that was sexy as well as serviceable.”

Quaintance carefully constructed his own myth, often painting idealized self-
portraits and even “airbrushed” photos of himself with paint. He truly lived the fantasy. And while he dressed his lovers, models and daydreams in Levi’s, he never wore them himself. “George dressed well; he always wore tailored Western clothing, but never jeans,” one of his exes told Quaintance’s biographers.