Arena Homme+ | The Husband Diaries

*Image courtesy of Husband via Midjourney.*

Someone once wrote that they were not born a redhead but born to be a redhead. Some of us were fortunate enough to be both.

We remained that way until mother nature and our father's genes (or so I believed) colluded to force our hairline to retreat in early adulthood and disappear completely by the time we left our twenties. There is something semi-Masonic about being a redhead. The actress Julianne Moore has mentioned how we tend to notice each other and 'notice our identity'. It's a club, a tribe, a minority. A ginger group, of sorts. Baldness never bothered me, but I was crushed by no longer being a redhead. Ginger. Of course there are greater losses, but these came later, and others will come later still. Long after the loss of youth, hair, looks and loved ones comes the loss of faculties, mobility and independence. And when it comes to pain and illness there is an argument that redheads feel it more than your average mousey blonde, strawberry blonde, chestnut brunette or black head. Says who? Well, this century, neuroscientists examined the mysterious ginger gene and revealed that redheads are more susceptible to pain. In fact, they need 19 per cent more anaesthetic when coping with it. This is something I can relate to having had more general anaesthetics than I can be bothered to list here, yet still I was crushed by no longer being a redhead. Ginger.

Mine was the colour that Quentin Crisp aimed for in the 1930s and that David Bowie came close to achieving between creating Aladdin Sane and channeling Thomas Newton in the 1970s, when redheads were enjoying a rare moment in the sun, as many wanted to be one. This continued throughout the punk period when Johnny Rotten picked up the dye and others reached for the henna. This hair colour, on a man, was no longer simply associated with effeteness and oddness, but anarchy too. If there's a contemporary pop figure to compare it to when it comes to weave and texture, I'd say that mane of mine was closer to Bingo Fury than King Krule, but redder. In this year's Summer/Autumn issue of Arena Homme+ the redhead Michael Hann asked King Krule (aka Archy Marshall) if he was subjected to bullying while growing up, as 'gingerness has pariah status in Britain'. 'Even in media and cinema and stuff,’ he replied, ‘you’ll be watching and there'll be one moment of derogatoriness towards the red hair. As a kid it hurt. You go to school the next day and if there was a joke about red hair, I would obviously get the brunt of it.'

Was Eric Cartman to blame? In 2005, long before King Krule's reign, when little Archy Marshall was heading towards adolescence in south east London, an episode of South Park entitled 'Ginger Kids' attracted attention. It may have contributed to the Facebook group 'National Kick A Ginger Day' that some ardent social media fanatics acted upon a couple of years later. Having taken potshots at other minorities, notably Jews, Cartman turns his ire to redheads, declaring that they have no souls. 'We’ve all seen them,' he cries, 'on the playground, at the store, walking on the streets. They creep us out and make us sick to our stomachs.' He was riffing on an ancient prejudice that some believe has its origins in antisemitism. The Bible was big on bad gingers, with Judas, Eve, Cain and Mary Magdalene among them. Egyptians believed redheads to be vampires. Other societies burnt them at the stake. Red-haired women were classified as fiery or fallen. James Joyce wrote that they 'buck like goats'. The poet Sylvia Plath put it another way: 'Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/and I eat men like air.'

Redheads don't have pariah status in Britain, but in an age in which hardline grifters with minority form compete for gold in the oppression Olympics, the criteria on victimhood shifts daily, alongside the laws introduced to counteract it, which means redheads may finally be in the running. (They account for less than two per cent of the population.) A successful contemporary artist once shared with me details of a project he was encouraged to embark upon by his tutor in the midst of his art education. Students had to address something that set them apart as outsiders, and cast them as a member of a marginalised minority. As a white, heterosexual, ginger Englishman there was only one trait his creativity could call upon. He subsequently produced a work that, in it's title, utilised the G-word and the N-word, much to the alarm of his tutor and the rest of the class: 'G..... N.....'

Of course academia is where the lexicon on oppression that lays the foundations for the laws that later follow, begins. It is therefore here where, certainly in the last decade, there has been some specific movement in marking out redheads as a marginalised minority, and making a mantra of 'ginger racism' that is as catchy as other terms that have emerged from the mouths of academics in non-jobs, teaching dud courses. It won't catch on in the way the white stuff - privilege, supremacy and patriarchy - has, or the ever-expanding procession of phobias, but - yes, redheads are in the running. As one author put it in his online thesis, in a verbose bid to reach the required word count: 'What does the creation of and prejudice against/making fun of a “hyperwhite” masculine identity at this social/historical moment suggest about the current stability of the dominant white masculine identity?' And there's more: 'How is racism conceptualised and understood within popular culture, as seen through discussions of whether or not gingerism constitutes racism?'

Writing in her book on the history of the redhead, author Jacky Colliss Harvey takes a view that almost surpasses the proposition that gingers are a pariah in modern Britain. 'People still express biases against red hair in language and in attitudes of unthinking mistrust that they would no longer dream of espousing or exposing if the subject were skin colour, or religion, or sexual orientation.’ She describes redheads as the white-skinned other. She cites and calls out discrimination against them, describing this as one of the last great social prejudices. But as I point out in my book on class in the early days of this century (The Likes Of Us, since you ask), the white working class are the last group, racial or otherwise, that it's possible to deride. (Although at the time of writing, and in the wake of recent events in the middle east, and on the streets of London, Jews appear to be losing their own status as the white-skinned other.) In fact to be white working class and ginger is to be part of a particular minority within an increasingly marginalised majority, as little Archy Marshall discovered on those streets of Peckham.

In infancy my mane of red hair was just one thing that set me apart, being the skinniest boy in the street, with the highest voice in the neighbourhood, and the reddest hair in the borough, possibly the world. It made me a subject for ridicule and name-calling from boisterous blonde or brunette boys whose voices had broken, and whose bodies had broadened, yet ancient elders approached me and caressed my hair as though I might bring them luck or eternal life. This infancy was spent in similar south London streets to where Archy Marshall played out his childhood years later. They were possibly meaner streets in the 1960s and 1970s, long before gentrification, artisan bakeries, sourdough bread, and self-entitled cyclists. As I say, there was some respite, because Bowie had our backs by the early Seventies, as Keith at Smile (I assume) took his hair to the extremes he was running towards, and the unchartered territories he was discovering. As I say, Johnny Rotten picked up the baton during the punk years, before the Eighties arrived and a carrot-topped Toyah hit the charts, putting redheads back to the dark, ancient days when they were cast out as vampires or burnt at the stake.

Even at that point, at the less than tender age of twenty-one or two or three, that mane of mine was attracting comment. On a late night in London I was descending the escalator on the Bakerloo line at Piccadilly station. Paddy McAloon sang 'Couldn't Bear To Be Special' into the persimmon-coloured headphones of my Walkman. These complimented a head of hair that was shifting from vermillion to persimmon, as my thirties and baldness beckoned. ( I was making the four tube stops south towards home, where a large print of 'The Death of Chatterton' hung on the chimney breast above my bed. The famous Henry Wallis painting featuring the romantic poet, following his suicide at 17, stretched across this bed in a garret room, with that bundle of vivid red curls spread across his pillow.) An elegantly dressed woman in late-middle age tapped me on the shoulder and asked: 'Is that your natural hair colour? It's beautiful.'

The role of the redhead as outsider became official to me at the time, while waiting for a haircut, having forsaken the west end hairdresser for the local barber, where I skimmed a copy of Reader's Digest . It mentioned a revered geneticist at the beginning of the twentieth century who declared that there was 'something morally wrong with the red-haired asthenic man'. The ginger gene remains an issue today. Just over a decade ago the world's largest network of sperm banks stated that donations from red-haired men were no longer required, because of a lack of demand by prospective parents. In 2013, UK scientists announced a DNA test that couples could take to predict their likelihood of having a child with red hair.

But fashions change, and currently, at least in the world of fashion, redheads are once again enjoying their moment in the sun, when it comes to the catwalk. According to the New York Times: 'On Burberry’s London catwalk, the Dutch ballet dancer Toon Lobach emerged with a neon candy apple coif. For the Gucci show in Milan, the hair stylist Ben Gregory turned the model Julia Belyakova’s naturally blonde pixie cut a decidedly unnatural carmine. At Chanel in Paris, audiences were greeted with Seoyeon Lee’s garnet waves and Adwoa Aboah’s ginger spirals.' This trend coincides with a further development beginning to have an impact on the fashion industry, and that is generative AI.

There is now an AI fashion week, featuring films of catwalk models assembled from AI software, such as Runway and Midjourney, many of whom come with a biography, a backstory and a burgeoning fanbase. Despite the concerns about jobs being lost by living, breathing models from the real world, the move is being championed in some quarters because AI has the potential to create a more diverse range of models when it comes to shape, size, skin tone and hair colour. It was the magic of AI that returned this middle-aged bald man to his time as a redhead. Ginger.

Throughout the last couple of years I have contributed several essays entitled ‘Sick Notes’ to this magazine. Essentially it’s a reason to write about the band named Husband. This gang of three, and sometimes four, was formed in the era of Covid with myself as front man, in a role I never expected to fulfil, not being a musician and never previously having sung into microphone or written a song. In each essay the introduction to Husband, and the details about their development has drifted further down the essay. The subjects of their songs, the concerns of men of their age - illness, mortality, and the prospect of the aforementioned losses that come late in life, long after looks and loved ones have gone - became paramount and pushed the band further towards the denouement and the final paragraphs. In this essay, the band's moment arrives even later, as a means to mention their debut single, which reflects on an experience from the early eighties, and early adulthood, by which point Bowie had become a blonde and Johnny Rotten had reverted to his original name and natural hair colour. Toyah was in the charts, and tube travellers were pursuing me throughout London underground stations as though I were Samson or Rapunzel, to ask: 'Is that your natural hair colour? It's beautiful.'

As I say, the first single by Husband was ready for release. Photographs were required to put a face and an image to the band. The landscape of the music industry, like the fashion industry, is no country for old men. I therefore fed a picture of myself at the tender age of 21, from the year the story of the song is set, into A1 software Midjourney. A 'prompt' was required. I wrote: 'This 21-year old red-haired man singing into a microphone, in a darkened studio, at night, wearing Jacques Marie Mage glasses, dressed in Dior, in the style of a Prada ad'. And there's more: 'This 21-year old red-haired man in a Maison Margiela store, dressed in Lanvin, in the style of a David LaChapelle photograph.' Following each prompt, a blur emerged within seconds, and materialised into an image. Suddenly, there he was. And there I was, or who I once was - in there, somewhere.