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Reflecting on this from the other side: I am gay, but I have never been drawn to the "queer community" this user sketches out. Why not? Its aesthetics are off. Its culture is off. It misses a crucial element. It is insufficiently beautiful, so I wander elsewhere. This will be a half-formed thought, and one that treads in sensitive waters—please bear with me as I think out loud. "Queer culture" is fundamentally oppositional: it exists in a spirit of tearing down norms, of defying standards, of spitting in the face of expectations and celebrating people for being precisely who they want to be. I resonate with a certain amount of that. I left Mormonism, after all. I married another man. I playact as a golden jackal on the internet. But queer culture, to me, misses a crucial step: if you want to tear something down, you ought to provide something better to replace it with. Want to transgress? Do it right. In queer culture, I feel I am expected to clap and cheer as soon as someone transgresses a norm: a man in a dress! a movie about gay culture! two women kissing! How bold, how provocative, how queer! But what of the second step? How does he look in the dress? does it flatter his form; is it becoming? does it make him beautiful in a bold new way, or does it make you wince and turn away? do you admire him because you cannot help but be entranced, or do you admire him because you are afraid not to? The movie—is it good? does it strike your soul? does it speak forth some impossible beauty, touch on core truths about the human condition? or is it like Bros, garish and ungainly and daring people to dislike it so it can sneer and say it always knew you hated the gays. And the couple: is their relationship healthy? are they good for each other, good for the world around them? are they oriented towards meaning, perhaps towards raising a family? are their lives richer and better for it, and can you say it if they are not? Every new generation tears down some walls its parents and grandparents built. That is well and good. Times change, the world changes, we march ever onward. But too often in queer culture I get the sense of people wanting to tear it all down, to deny any distinction between good and bad, to forestall any examination of whether a choice is worth making so long as it transgresses. And I have never wanted to merely be one who tears structures down. I do not transgress old norms for the sake of transgression, but out of a conviction that something yet better is possible. If I am not achieving something good, I want my friends to have space to judge me and push me higher. Many LGBT people, I believe, take the same approach. My sentiment is consonant with that of many of my LGBT friends. But it is not a sentiment that has ever sat comfortably with the culture OP gestures towards. I would be thrilled to fit into a broader LGBT culture, but transgression is not enough. It must cultivate excellence.
Relevant: https://t.co/IOx1yCxY3i
If I had the time energy and resources to do it I would help demonstrate what a feminine aesthetic can look like for men. This is not correct imo. There is a way to make dresses work for men but you have to reimagine and redesign the dress from first principles to match the body https://t.co/dhtRFk5R6w
@tracewoodgrains hey now there's a strong aspect of anarchism that flows into "do-ocracy", as in, "hmm. I want this to happen. is anybody else gonna do it? no? well, let's get to it!" and this can be home-creating and -maintaining, as in guerilla pothole-filling / community gardens...
Cleo expertly expands this sentiment to ex-religious groups. Yes, have a moment of emphatic transgression! Leaving is rough, and unlearning unhelpful scripts is hard. But don’t stay in that moment forever. It’s not a coincidence that I quickly stopped posting in r/exmormon.
@tracewoodgrains I feel like Social Media creates a bunch of “Identity Pits,” where finding your “people” paves the way at for lots of growth via making the transition to a new identity easier the more people exist in that space (digging the Pit deeper). 1/2
@tracewoodgrains But the larger the Pit, the more differences about what is required to be that Identity (and therefore how deep the Pit actually is). Those differences often turn the Pit into a crab bucket, and we all know how well that turn out for the crabs.
@tracewoodgrains theres a lot of value in the community being safe for people getting the vibe wrong, and be aesthetically off, and also in celebrating people having the courage to take aesthetic risks but it's hard to have such norms without it devolving into celebrating wanton ugliness
@tracewoodgrains My opinion, unpopular with everybody, is that queer culture, like other transgressive subcultures, is actually quite interesting and a healthy part of society. But it doesn't work as a mainstream culture. It's inherently countercultural and has to be in opposition to the culture.
well well well, if it isn't our old friend the worst psy-op of all time https://t.co/XAgUV8pUWm