Straight from the pig’s snout
Story by: Mike Miksche
Photography by: inkedKenny
January 15, 2020
As a youngin in the the ’80s, Chad Bush, the owner of Pig Week in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, hadn’t a clue what sort of creature he was. He initially settled on a cub since he was into big, hairy guys. As he got older, naturally, he then grew into a full-blown bear. But today, he feels like a completely different beast. He is, and says he always was, a pig.
“The dirtier the better.”
His annual Pig Week, which celebrated its fifth anniversary last December, allows guys from different scenes (or from no scene at all) to wallow in the mud, so to speak, for 10 days on the East Coast. The event, which Bush describes as an “insurance conference if ‘insurance’ meant ‘gang fucking,’” welcomes pigs from different communities and with different looks. Although Bush is not a bear/pig hybrid himself, he makes it clear that one can be a bear and a pig at the same time—they’re not mutually exclusive. So, what the fuck is a pig?
“A lack of inhibition seems like a mandate for this mammal.”
According to Urban Dictionary, “pig play” is associated with raunchy sexual behavior, such as armpit licking, bb, breeding, and “having sex after running around all day without having showered.” The crowdsourced dictionary says that it can also “imply” watersports, fisting, scat, or “blood fetish.”
A lack of inhibition seems like a mandate for this mammal. Feel it, do it, would be a fitting motto, and at a Pig Week party, you’ll find things like fisting, watersports, flogging, and bondage. Special events could include a lottery, where the winner gets gangbanged by five porn stars, followed by the rest of the audience.
“When the mantra is to do what you want like a hog in shit, it makes sense that the general look is feral, unfettered by mainstream gay fashion and grooming norms.”
Scent is also an important facet of this identity…and the nastier the better. Bush tells me that his Pig Week parties reek of lube, cum, piss, and “man-stink,” and that he himself likes to put his “face in an armpit” and snuggle into a “nice, sweaty ballsack.”
“It can also include watersports, fisting, scat, or ‘blood fetish.’”
It would seem that being a filthy pig is more of a state of mind (and smell), but like other animals in the gay kingdom, could pigs have a certain look? Scrolling through the Pig Week Fort Lauderdale Facebook group, it would seem so. Its more than 15,600 members post photos of themselves and there are some visual trends: although Bush believes a pig can be anybody, I notice a lot of scruff (facial and otherwise) as well as tattoos, jockstraps, and gear like collars and harnesses. There are bears—polar, muscled, etc.—as well as bulls, pups, otters, and wolves. Sure, there’s a whole zoo of animals, but the “species” seems to be the same: one that is raw, rough, and tumble. When the mantra is to do what you want like a hog in shit, it makes sense that the general look is feral, unfettered by mainstream gay fashion and grooming norms.
“It really can be anybody but when I look at my demographics, and I look at the same pictures that you do, I don’t see a lot of guys with shaved chests,” Bush admits. “I don’t see a lot of guys who are manicured. I don’t see guys with their eyebrows done. Don’t get me wrong. Those guys could be pigs too. And God bless them. Open arms.”
Pig Week is something of a success story, growing in popularity in five short years. Their tagline “because all men are pigs” implies that there’s a pig inside us all, which would seem to have some semblance of truth, given that the event keeps growing according to Bush. He believes that this is because guys can be uninhibited now, in ways they couldn’t be in the not so distant past.
“People are not afraid to let their pig out anymore.”
“In the last seven years with PrEP coming in and the knowledge that gay men have, it freed up the world to start to explore these things again without being inhibited, without being scared of our sexuality,” Bush says.
Also, the widespread acceptance that undetectable equals untransmittable (U=U)—which means that it’s impossible for somebody living with HIV, who has achieved an undetectable viral load for at least six months, to transmit the virus to others—has likely had a huge influence too.
Bush adds, “People are not afraid to let their pig out anymore.”
