LGBT History Month – Imagining A Queer Future

As I grew up, and came to know myself, I learnt how I didn’t quite fit into the world. A world built for those not like me – normal people.

‘Normal’.

In the tangled, layered mess that is our society structured by privilege, I do pretty well. I can’t imagine the experience of those queer folk – queer in the broadest sense of different – whose radical identities are routinely refused; whose heritage is one of the deepest oppression and pain.

Though I can’t speak for everyone outside of the normal, I want to learn – to be ready to listen, to bolster others with the power that society, through privilege, arbitrarily bestowed upon me.

I think that living as queer gives us all a power, however.

Empathy.

10/10 Would Bang: Queer desire and the aesthetic scaling of bodies

He’s pretty hot. She’s so fit.

A total 10.

Sound familiar? You bet. For those who identify as sexual, it’s life. Whether internal monologue or cheeky chat with friends, these little declarations of desire punctuate the everyday.

We’re conditioned with a framework of beauty ideals. We know what makes the perfect male or female form. Sure, we combine these with our own idiosyncratic wants, what turns us on. Some of us might have a ‘type’, others embrace the unexpected. But the truth is, these concepts of beauty, culturally specific and constructed, exert a huge pressure on sexuality.

Beauty, that set of unattainable ideals. That audaciously fraudulent fiction.