Gear is a 1969 character sketch written by Richard Goldstein that was one of a series first appearing in 1966 in The Village Voice, a weekly New York City newspaper started in 1955 that reports news and various subjects in pop culture. Similar to short stories, character sketches in journalism became popular among 1960s writers and in this era focused on providing a realistic "picture of a type of person", but differed in that sketches did not tell stories of particular individuals. Often, sketches served as warm-ups to an actual story, with light tone, mild mood and focus on a single aspect of the character type, "usually in details of status life", such as social or economic status. Source: Wikipedia (en)