While I am a frequent outfit repeater, I’ve never really had a go-to look I considered a “uniform” outside of the literal uniforms I’ve worn for work or sports. I do tend to find pieces of clothing I’ll wear to death, though often styling them differently to avoid boredom. My mother, sister, and I will justify splurging on pricier clothing by calculating the hypothetical Cost Per Wear, and I’ve worn sweaters down to a CPW of less than a dollar, nice boots down to pennies. There are many things in my closet I’ve considered staples: little black dresses —femme fashion’s enduring staple —and jeans I’ll wear four times a week. But the concept of a uniform feels different, not just something I happen to rewear often but an outfit with a purpose, a function, a feeling, something to be worn in specific contexts for specific reasons.

Well, I’ve finally found my gay power uniform, and I’m going to be wearing it a lot in 2025.

Over half a year ago, I started strength training with my strength coach, Autostraddle writer Stef Rubino. I had many reasons for wanting to do this. I’d recently started playing tennis at a highly competitive level for the first time since adolescence, and I knew lifting could improve certain areas of my game and help with injury prevention. The second I started playing tennis again, I feared injury because of how much my mental health benefited from tennis. The thought of being sidelined for a week, more, months? It scared the shit out of me. There’s only so much we can do to avoid injury in competitive sports, sure. Accidents happen. Our bodies are not machines. But strength and resistance training have been proven to help reduce the possibility of injury when it comes to sports and also just everyday life.

I wanted to get strong, too. And now that I am, I can confidently say I never was before.

I also started strength training because I knew it would force me to eat more. The isolation, despair, and uncertainty of the pandemic caused a lot of people I know to regress to bad patterns and behaviors, and for myself that meant a bad relationship with my body and with food, resulting in some of the worst disordered eating I’d experienced since my early twenties. It sucked. I probably have a lot more I could write about it, but not today, not yet. I know this is an absurd thing to say, but I’m good at disordered eating. I’m good because I’m disciplined. And if discipline was my way in, it could be my way out. If I was going to strength train, I was going to do it right, and doing it right means the discipline of showing up to the gym every day, even when you don’t want to, but it also means the discipline of making sure you’re eating enough. You can’t build muscle without protein. On days when I hit the gym without having eaten enough, I feel it. I’m weaker. And I don’t want to be weak. When I see photos of myself from a couple years back, following a long period of restrictive eating, I think damn, that bitch couldn’t lift shit. That reaction alone shows me just how much I’ve gained from strength training and reorienting my relationship to my body.

Tennis, too, gives me a reason to fuel my body. On the mornings of matches, I make sure to carb up, eat a big breakfast, hydrate. My tennis bag stays stocked with snacks. When some of the women on my team complain about getting fatigued or tired mid-match, I tell them they probably didn’t eat enough beforehand. I’m usually right.

I was talking with my wife and with Stef recently about the concept of motivation. My wife wanted to know how we stay motivated to go to the gym. We don’t. Or, rather, we don’t wait for motivation, because if we did, we’d rarely make it to the gym. The thing about successful strength training —and training for any competitive sports, like tennis —is that you can’t only do it when you feel motivated. You have to do it even when you don’t. That’s discipline.

Toward the end of 2024, I started wearing the same outfit to the gym a lot, especially on my lower body day. Whereas compression is a big emphasis of my tennis clothing, for strength training I like to feel looser. I often wear a big t-shirt over leggings or bike shorts. But after borrowing a pair of gray sweatpants from a friend, I realized how badly I needed the staple of gray sweatpants in my life. I started wearing them around the house a lot but also to the gym. And there’s one t-shirt I found myself reaching for more often than others. I’m a sucker for an impulsive t-shirt merch purchase when I’m traveling —from bars, local restaurants, breweries, gift shops, museums. I love a commemorative shirt. So when visiting the Trixie Motel —Trixie Mattel’s boutique motel in Palm Springs —I was an easy target for the oversized tie-dye tee emblazoned with the Trixie Motel logo.

Gray sweatpants, my Trixie Motel shirt, and the high tops I bought in 2017 because they’re the closest approximation of the vintage Converse worn by Elio in Call Me By Your Name —these have become my new gay power uniform. I assembled this recurring look before I even knew about Trixie Mattel’s quote about gray sweatpants, calling them the push-up bra of the gay world, a sentiment I didn’t encounter until editing this brilliant essay by M. K. Thekkumkattil. How fitting to wear a Trixie shirt over gray sweatpants. How gay.

I feel very hot and very strong and very gay in this uniform. And another bonus is that gym bros don’t talk to me when I wear it like they did when I wore my University of Michigan tank or things more form-fitting. In the past few years as I’ve learned more about myself, I’ve become a lot more femme than my early years of queerness, and it has brought on an uptick in unwanted attention from straight dudes. For the most part, people leave me alone in the gym, but it’s the only place where I don’t wear my wedding rings, and guys loved throwing a “go blue” my way in the Michigan tank or to ask me if I watch football (I don’t, but somehow that didn’t stop the conversation).

But my new gym uniform is hot in a specifically queer way, even if it’s subtle. And I don’t only wear it to the gym either. I wear it out, too, when I’m wanting a more casual, athleisurey look. I’m careful about the gay shirts I wear out in Orlando, not necessarily wanting to attract the wrong attention in certain contexts. My favorite gay shirts to wear are the ones that are like a wink and nod to fellow gays but that straight people will likely miss, like my Autostraddle gal pal shirt and now this Trixie Motel shirt. In a lot of ways, this new uniform is completely different from the outfits I wear 90% of the time: low-cut dresses, flowy skirts, jean cut-off shorts, crop tops, white linen, sparkles, floral prints, and nautical stripes. It’s shapeless and sporty, though not in the fashionable way my tennis outfits look. But this is the point of my uniform: to be distinct from everything else I wear, to carry with it a specific feeling of strength and transformation.

When I deadlift or squat in it, I feel all my muscles engaged under the soft fabric. Strength training has surprised me in the softness I’ve found within it. Yes, you grind hard, push yourself, challenge your body, but there’s a delicateness to a lot of the movements, a quiet comfort in the minutes between sets while you let your body rest. Gray sweatpants and a big gay shirt are the perfect symbolic uniform for the job, functional and freeing. Something about wearing it reconnects me to my body. I can be femme and strong and gay and comfortable and hot and relaxed, all embodied in one outfit. I think a year ago, this outfit would have felt more like a costume than a uniform, like I was cosplaying something just out of reach. But now I feel a sense of belonging and comfort in the gym and in my body I never could have imagined before.

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