When Your Barber Assumes You’re A Racist Too

Being a spectator at the men’s evil bullshit parade every time I sat down for a haircut sucked. What was worse, maybe, was that my silence implicated me every time. And I let it

Illustration by Bea Hayward

The second time I saw Gavin McInnes’s dick it wasn’t my fault. It happened when I was getting a haircut, and the hungoverly chatty barber was telling me about his partly professional and occasionally social relationship with Gavin McInnes. If you’re lucky enough not to know, McInnes is a founder of Vice Magazine and Vice Media, whose post-Vice career has involved a lot of hate speechifying, denying that he meant said hate speechifying, and founding a group called the Proud Boys. Give you two guesses what they’re proud of.

Now, Nazis who try to keep that they are Nazis kind of secret (despite it being 100% obvious) like to use two words. There’s “pride,” which is invoked when they are accused of hate — no, they are just proud! Of being white! That’s the only feeling they have about their whiteness! This charade never lasts for any length of time whatsoever. But, to be fair, “white pride” is shorter than “everybody else hate.” They also love to talk about “humor,” as in “the left has no sense of,” as if they can brute-force compel people to laugh at jokes that aren’t funny, and shame them if they don’t. Uhhhhhhhh, sorry that you’re only funny when you fail clownishly, which is often? Because you know what is fucking funny? Naming their — in their words — “pro-Western fraternal organization for men who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world” the Proud Boys (which sounds like nothing more than a group of four-year-olds who have cleaned up their toys or gone potty successfully, both major accomplishments in early child development of which one should actually be proud). Though the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the Proud Boys as a hate group, McInnes denies this and has even sued the SPLC for defamation, a not at all hate group-y thing to do.

So by the time my barber held out his phone to show me a photo that I already didn’t want to see (but didn’t know just yet how very much I didn’t want to see it), my heart was already sinking, sunk, fully submerged. In the photo, Gavin looked drunk…