Sometime in the middle of last winter, in the middle of my 50s, I got my hands on some clippers and shaved my head down to a velvety stubble.
It was something I’d been dreaming about doing for years.
And by “years,” I mean “decades.”
I can still remember an article I read in The Village Voice way back in the late 1980s about women shaving their heads as an act of both liberation and beauty. This was during the height of Sinéad O’Connor’s popularity, and I suppose her iconic example gave permission to many other women to get rid of their hair as well. There were a series of photos of all these women with buzzed and bald heads—and to me, they all looked stunning. I remember many of the interviewees using the word cleansing to describe the act, and one woman said that the ritual of shaving her head every week made her feel not only powerful and healthy but as if her life was suddenly in perfect order. “Shaving your head is like going to the gynecologist and the dentist on the same day,” she said—and the fact that I can still remember that quote after 35 years is an indication of how compelling I found the subject!
I have always been attracted to the idea of buzzing my head because I have had difficult hair my whole life.
Or at least that’s what I was told, ever since I can remember.
Every woman with “difficult hair” has a different difficult-hair story, but mine goes like this: My hair is a chaotic combination of frizzy and straight, dry and oily. My hair is thin, but there’s a lot of it, and it can easily end up in bird’s nests and tangles. It can’t grow long and lush like princess hair, because it starts to break around the time it hits my shoulders. I can’t just grow it out and put it in a ponytail for convenience—because I don’t have enough hair to fill a standard rubber band. I can’t keep it in an easy bob, either, because the shorter it gets, the puffier it gets. My hair always baffled my mother (who cut it short for her own convenience when I was a kid, causing me to constantly be mistaken for a boy—which I hated), and as I grew older, it baffled me, too. And thus began my lifelong search all over the world for hairdressers who could “do something” with my hair.
There were a series of photos of all these women with buzzed and bald heads—and to me, they all looked stunning.
If you’ve ever seen a picture of me where my hair looks pretty, it’s because somebody else did it. Somebody whom I paid to do it. I have spent a fortune, and I don’t use the word fortune lightly, to make my hair look pretty over the years. And in my culture, having “pretty” hair means: silky, shiny, with golden blond highlights and a light wave. It took me decades, but I finally found the exact formula that will make my hair look more-or-less decent, most of the time: daily shampoos (it’s that thin-hair-plus-oily-skin nightmare that makes me have to wash daily), monthly highlights, quarterly keratin treatments, and blowouts for special occasions. And then I can look pretty! Sometimes! The whole situation averages out to about $700 a month, and also involves an enormous amount of time and chemicals. But on the right days, with the right investment and the proper levels of humidity, I could walk out of the house with a look that caused people to say, “I love your hair!”
But my hair doesn’t look like that, actually.
It doesn’t look like that naturally.
What comes to mind now is a line that I’ve always loved of Dolly Parton’s: When someone once asked her if she got offended by dumb-blond jokes, she replied, “No, because I know I’m not dumb. And I also know I’m not blond.”
Very few of us, in fact, are blond. About 2 percent of the world’s population has naturally blond hair, but over 50 percent of American women of all races and backgrounds dye their hair some version of blond. It seems to be a necessity, practically, if you want to be successful, to try to be as blond as you can possibly be. In a 2016 study about “blondness,” over a third of America’s congresswomen and about 50 percent of America’s female CEOs were reported as blond. And let’s not even talk about television broadcasters. (Can you even get an interview for a job at Fox News if you aren’t blond?)
There’s so much garbage and nonsense wrapped up in this—including a somewhat perverse obsession with youthfulness (my highlights were literally called “baby blond”), some nasty white-supremacy overtones, and a widely held misogynistic assumption that blond women are not only more fun but more friendly and likable and approachable.
And I’ve been part of that foolishness for a long, long time.
But I’m getting older, and I’m tired of it, and in recent years, I started fantasizing every day—every single day—about buzzing it all off. I would talk about it with my wonderful hairdresser every month when I spent two hours in her chair.
“One of these days,” I would say, “I’m going to tell you to grab those clippers and take it all off.”
Left: Camera-ready Gilbert, with $700 worth of Goldilocks hair. Right: The behind-the-scenes joy of highlights, keratin treatments, and blowouts.
“Why don’t we just give you a nice short and stylish cut?” she would ask—and eventually we did do that—but as anyone who has ever had a nice short and stylish haircut knows, you have to keep it up. You need those monthly trims to keep the shape of it. It doesn’t necessarily make your life any easier.
In the end, though, I chopped all my hair off myself.
There were two motivating factors that finally gave me the courage to do it. The first was a week I spent with a spiritual teacher of mine—a woman in her early 80s who is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her hair is white (not white like “platinum” but white like Mrs. Claus), her skin is parchment and lined, her eyes are brilliant and kind, her hands are covered with age spots. And she is the freest person I have ever met, possessed of the wildest mind. And after a week in her luminous presence, I was like, Why am I still pretending that I’m not getting older? Why am I afraid of looking my age? Why does any of this matter at all? What if I just allowed myself to become a gorgeous old amazing woman, like her? What if I were just free?
The second motivating factor was that I attended an event in New York City a few weeks later of about 100 professionals—men and women, all of whom were about the same age as me. Nearly every one of the men in that room had cropped, buzzed, convenient-looking hair. They were all a bunch of silver foxes with lined faces and handsome features, and they all looked great. And every single one of the women in that room had some version of long, extremely expensive-looking, complicated hair—most of which was “blond.” And I thought, Why are we still doing this? Why has hair become so gendered? This is New York City—one of the most liberal places in the world—and this is a room full of people who all work in the arts! And we still have to follow these stupid rules?
That night I had a realization: I could either complain about how unfair and imbalanced the beauty and aging standards are for men versus women or just claim for myself the entitlement that these men held. I, too, could just decide to have buzzed hair and a lined face. I, too, could decide to just stop chasing “pretty” and instead to look great—unadorned, powerful, comfortable, and un-fussed over.
That did it.
The next day, I bought myself some clippers, watched a few instructional videos (check out a woman known as “Gray Hair and Tattoos” on YouTube if you want to see some really amazing buzzed-hair style) and enlisted a friend who used to be a punk to help me with the first swipes of the buzzer over my scalp.
It took about five minutes, and when I was done, I almost cried. Not because I was horrified by my looks, but for the exact opposite reason: I felt like I had never looked more like myself. I had made this decision because I wanted freedom and convenience, and because I had decided to be “post-vanity,” but what I saw in the mirror looked like beauty to me. Fierce beauty. That was not what I was expecting. I thought I would look tough and weird and old, and I was okay with that. But when I saw myself with no hair, I thought I looked gorgeous, and I still do. I loved being able to see my whole entire head—my whole entire self. I loved the white and brown and gray speckles that catch the light and sparkle like the scales of a swimming trout. And I love the way it felt when I rubbed my hand over my scalp—soft and plush, like a puppy.
I, too, could decide to just stop chasing “pretty” and instead to look great—unadorned, powerful, comfortable, and un-fussed over.
“This is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life,” I said to my friend— and maybe that was hyperbole, or maybe it wasn’t.
It’s been nine months now, and I can’t imagine ever growing my hair out again.
I love everything about it—being able to jump in and out of pools, rivers, lakes, oceans, and showers with abandon; waking up and instantly looking perfect; getting off the plane from a 12-hour flight and looking perfect; needing only five minutes of prep time before I go on stage and perform; constantly rubbing my hands over my delicious-feeling scalp as if I am my own lucky talisman. Most of all, I love the radical independence that this hairstyle affords me. I have spent more days of my life than I care to count sitting in a chair as if I were some incompetent 18th-century aristocrat while others tried to “do something” with my hair. But now I do it all myself. And yes, each time I buzz my hair away, it feels like a cleansing—and like a reclamation of my true spirit. I actually find it weird now to look at pictures of me from when I had hair. The prettier my hair looks in the old pictures, the sadder it makes me feel—to imagine that I gave so much of my time and attention and money to trying to look like something I am not. Something that I am not even sure is attractive—except for the fact that everyone always said it was.
A lot of men don’t like this haircut of mine, of course, but I find that I don’t care.
Let me rephrase that—I can’t care.
I cannot organize my life anymore around what men like; there simply isn’t time for it.
Some Black men like it, I should clarify—which I find really interesting. I was walking down the street in Richmond, Virginia, a few months ago, and four young Black men all turned to look at me when I walked by. “Hi, fellas,” I said, and one of them replied, “I really like the cut, lady”—which totally made my day.
Queer women love it, of course—but so do straight, femme women. In fact, it is the women with the prettiest, most complicated-looking hair who gaze upon my buzz cut with the most longing. “Maybe someday I can have that,” they say wistfully—as if I have a castle in the South of France, rather than a five-minute haircut that I give myself every five days, bent over the toilet.
But here’s the thing: Most white men don’t like it, and I cannot help thinking that is why this haircut is, indeed, “important.”
It is important because white men should not always get what they want—it isn’t good for any of us.
The first time I ever posted a picture of myself on social media with my buzzed head, some random bro in the comments wrote, “Why you wanna be bald tho?” and it still makes me roar with laughter.
That was the ultimate confirmation that I had done the right thing.
Dude, I wanna be bald because I wanna be free.
Dude, I wanna be bald because I am free.
And if you don’t get it, sir, that’s all the more reason I want it.
