The Gay Connection of Paper Towels. Seriously.

Paper towels are just there.  They do the job.  They're about as exciting as toast.

During the 1970s, two advertisers tried to make paper towels more exciting.  Bounty got feisty comedienne Nancy Walker to promote the "quicker picker upper."  And Georgia-Pacific countered with Brawny, sold by a Castro clone in a lumberjack outfit, open at the top so you could see his manly chest hair.

So he chops down the trees to make the paper towels?  Does that make sense?

Regardless, Brawny soon became a favorite of housewives and gay kids looking for beefcake in their paper towel purchase.

Lots of gay men say that they got their first glimpse of gay culture from the Brawny guy.  Seriously.

During the 1980s, he got a haircut and changed his shirt.

In 2004 he was replaced by a more muscular Bush-era hunk with a severe black haircut.

The Brawny Guy hasn't been used in tv commercials or print ads.  He doesn't even have a name.  But he still gets a 70% product recognition score (70% of people polled associate his face with paper towels), and some cosplay.

And a surprising gay connection.