One person's relaxation . . .

A favorite old picture of mine from the golden age of Tumblr.

. . . another person's horny fantasy.

I had one biology teacher in high school who was a square-jawed, ex military type. Very classically handsome. All the girls had crushes on him, and so did I. He wore shirts, ties, and khakis to class all the time, his tie knot always snug and neat as a pin. Even when he wore blue dress shirts, you could see the outline of his tanktop underneath, the way the scooped neck emphasized his chest and shoulders. Especially hot when he wore white shirts too, since he still worked out and hard a full chest and thick arms.

One day, I had to stay after school to finish a project, and he reached behind his tie knot to unbutton the top button, and slowly started reaching a finger underneath the collar and just barely tugging it loose. As he kept grading, he fidgeted with the tie knot, pinching it, nudging it slightly looser and looser. Down and down it went, the noble silk, sinking down the top two buttons of his shirt, each of which came surreptitiously open.

I had to stay at my desk, I was so hard. By the time the hour was over, he had slowly jerked his tie knot loose and had the knot hanging down past the second button. He flicked that button open, too, and just left his tie knot dangling under he second, with a hint of his tanktop just above the third, that point of no return. I would fantasize about what it would've been like if he had undone the third buttons, that point where his shirt would have revealed a little too much of what was underneath. A desperate tease indeed .

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I've been obsessed with it ever since, this kind of permissive striptease in public represented by the loosened tie. And I think much of that goes back to formative memories of ours, back when people wore shirts and ties more regularly, when there were little erotic "tells" or "hints" that meant nothing to the person doing them, but meant the world to us. As queer folks, we are often taught from a young age to hide who we are, to snatch what little erotic stimulation we can from the world around us, while cisgender heterosexual people are bathed in attention. Because our sexuality has historically been treated as illicit, so too we feel the need to hold on to those moments when our sexuality began to awaken, moments when we were feeling things that we weren't supposed to feel.

I'll present another example, this time from the movies. The 1995 film Virtuosity didn't exactly age well, but it was one of those minddless action flicks that I remember seeing in the theatre one year during summer vacation. It stars a young and fit Russell Crowe (though the daddy bear version of Crowe in Gladiator will always hold a special place in my heart), who plays a cybernetic criminal unleashed onto the real world from his online confines. In one scene, he terrorizes a night club. When he enters the club, he's immaculately attired in a green suit with a classic rockabilly haircut, with a black tie cinched against his neck. As his deadly scheme unfolds, the tie grows looser, suggesting lowered inhibitions.

Our handsome crime fighting protagonist Denzel Washington descends on the scene, chasing Crowe out of the night club. Crowe steals one of the police cars, leading to a chase scene with occasional cuts of Crowe at the dashboard of the vehicle, his tie knot descending past the second button, neckwear emulating the increasingly tattered state of his tailored ensemble. When a blockade forces him to flee the car, Crowe's knot is hanging down at its lowest point, his shirt rakishly open past the fourth button, offering split-second glimpses of his chest underneath as he flees the scene and stages a daring escape.

I doubt that the wardrobe directors intended this sequence to come across as a striptease, but to my teeming adolescent brain this was one of the most erotic things I'd ever seen. When we got the VHS later on, I would occasionally sneak the cassette into the player just to watch that sequence over and over again.