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Miss Poubelle's friend Miki needed a shoulder to cry on. "I hate my hair and I'm going to kick somebody's ass." After half a box of Kleenex, the following story unfolded.

Miki had her eye on the bagel girl at Uncommon Grounds. She swore that said bagel girl put extra honey walnut cream cheese on her bagel whenever she came in. And that she smeared it in an especially provocative way.

So after weeks of mooning over the bagel girl, she finally got up the nerve to talk to her. "I've been meaning to ask you something," Miki said. "What's your name?"

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"Amber," she replied. "And I've been meaning to ask you something too. Are you a dyke, or is that just a bad haircut?"

Miki stormed out in tears another victim of the dyke mullet.

A mullet is a haircut in which the back is long, while the sides and top are short often quite short. The mullet is also known as business in the front, party in the back (the whorehouse cut), the Kentucky waterfall, the Tennessee tophat, the neckwarmer, the mudflap, and the Canadian passport. Our friends in Quebec call it the coupe longueil.

The Oxford English Dictionary includes this definition of mullet in its newest edition. The editors say that the term is humorous and often derogatory slang whose origin is uncertain. It appears to have been coined by the rap group Beastie Boys in their 1994 song "Mullet Head" :

You've got names like Billy Ray
Now you sing Hip Hop Hooray
Put your Dakleys and your stone wash on
Watching MTV and you mosh on
#1 on the side and don't touch the back
#6 on the top and don't cut it wack, Jack

#1 and #6 are references to the combs that attach to razor clippers. #1 is for the shortest cut, boot-camp style, while #6 is about an inch and a half long. So the mullet is nearly shaved on the side, short on top, and long in the back.

Where did the Beastie Boys get the word? Well, mullet-head or mullet-headed is actually a fairly old American idiom, meaning 'stupid.' It first shows up in 1857, and is used in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884): "They're so confiding and mullet headed they don't take notice of nothing at all." The fish called the mullet had the 19th century reputation of being a stupid fish, and so mullet-headed is formed along the same lines as bird-brained or hare-brained.

One can invent a story here. From mullet-headed meaning 'stupid', you think "Okay, so a person who's a mullet-head is stupid. So what's a mullet? It must be that shitty-looking haircut the guy has." The only potential hitch is that until recently, mullet-headed was a fairly obscure bit of regional American slang. Prior to the Beastie Boys, the last citation is from 1942. So did the word disappear for fifty years only to show up in a rap album?

The Beastie Boys song is also the first expression of the stereotypes that are attached to this haircut. The guy who wear a mullet has a name like Billy Ray (as in Cyrus), and wears stone washed jeans. "Mullet Head" ends up with lyrics about Joey Buttafuoco, an epitome of mulletude.

The mullet is usually associated with working-class men, and possibly also has Southern (or Canadian) regional overtones. It combines the aesthetics of the old-time crew-cut, beer-drinking redneck with the long-haired, pot-smoking, rock and roll hippy. Think of Buddy Holly's haircut on top, then add Lynyrd Skynyrd in the back, and you've got a mullet. We think of mullet wearers as particularly concentrated among young, male fans of heavy metal, NASCAR racing, and pro wrestling. And for some reason, the men in heterosexual porn also seem to be disproportionately mulleted.

So it may come as little surprise that one is not likely to find a gay man in a mullet. That aesthetic is not our aesthetic. We may cast a lustful eye on the working stiffs, but we wouldn't be caught dead in their clothes or hair. The pages of Torso or The Advocate are mullet-free. And the beaches of Fire Island, Provincetown, and Key West are remarkably poor hunting grounds for the mullet-- unless one concentrates on the women.

Dykes with mullets tend to favor a spiky sort of crew-cut on the top, with shoulder length hair in the back, and this was what Miki was wearing. She belongs to a certain segment of the lesbian population that has adopted signifiers of working-class male virility. The old-time butches wore crew cuts because that's what working-class men in the middle of the 20th century wore. But now the guys working on the road crew are more likely to have mullets than crew cuts, and butches have followed suit.

American lesbian life comes in many flavors lipstick, granola, corporate, and butch, to name a few. The bagel girl turned out to be a granola dyke, and Miki's mullet put her in the wrong camp. Poor Miki tried to look like Billy Ray Cyrus, but only ended up with an Achy Breaky Heart....