M Arida, a barber at Barbershop Deluxe in Boston’s South End, takes pride in offering gender-affirming haircuts and the LGBTQ-welcoming space the shop provides. As a recent story on Boston Public Radio WBUR reports:
Years ago, Arida, who is now 41, said they would feel frustrated getting their hair cut as a queer and nonbinary person.
“I would go to barbershops, and it was fine,” they said. “I never had like, a bad experience there, but I was like, they’re not really my people, exactly, you know?”
When they found themselves without a job in 2017, they enrolled in a course at New England Hair Academy in Malden. They dreamed of one day opening a shop that created a welcoming space for the queer community.
“Wouldn’t it be dope if there was like a barber shop, but it was all queer people, or there were like queer people in there cutting hair, or queer people hanging out,” Arida said.
They loved the idea of a casual, communal vibe for queer folks getting a cut.
While it’s easier to find those type of barber shops in cities like New York and Los Angeles, Arida said that to their knowledge, they became the first barber in the Boston area to market specifically to the queer community in 2019. Today, clients who are ultra-masculine, nonbinary, gay women and people of all gender identities come to Arida’s chair to freshen up their looks.
Read the complete wbur.org story here.
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