Candy coloured queer aesthetics

Queer aesthetics: visual signifiers of queerness, of otherness. In London it’s colorful hair and shaved sides, septum and eyebrow piercings, tattoos, and general brightly-colored flamboyance.

For many disabled people, poor people, trans people who can’t/don’t pass, people of color, looking different and Other is a risk.

Most of my friends are trans and queer. Most of the people I know with this look are white, bougie, and educated; they’re anarcho-commies, with relatively stable housing and immigration status.

I’m bitter because as a trans person I used to put a lot of effort into being invisible, into being read as “normal”, into “passing”. I’m bitter because my friends who aren’t white can’t hang out with you without feeling unsafe, because you make them appear [more] Other by association with you. It’s safe for you to look like a queer (quirky, creative) but if they dyed their hair like yours they’d get even more side-eye and harassment than they do already.

No, I don’t think assimilation is the answer.

I don't want to tell people who’ve been marginalized that they should hide their Otherness, that queerness shouldn’t be visible or celebrated or a big “fuck you” to cisheteronormative society. But like I ask the bougie white gays—who fought for same-sex marriage and seem uninterested in queer homelessness and trans murder and suicide—what are you doing for the most vulnerable people in our “community”? Do you care about their safety, or is this just a big party for you because you live in London where you can comfortably go to kinky sex shindigs and find other people like you?

I’ve got lots of friends and have/had several lovers who sport this particular aspect of the “queer lqqk”, and almost all of them are white and financially stable. They’re good people with empathy and compassion and I love them. But everything is political, especially hair.

It’s almost like your queerness isn’t Other enough so you’re clinging to the cultural capital of it, like queerness is almost mainstream now so you need to prove your difference in a visible way. “I’m not like you ‘normal’ people”. “Normal” is a dirty word to you but that’s a position of massive privilege which you’re not acknowledging. Lots of us want to survive, which means passing as normal.

I’ve got tattoos. Sometimes I wear “confrontational” clothes and make-up (the more I look like a man from being on HRT, the more confrontational my femme look is). I had multiple ear piercings and a nose ring, back when I was a “girl” who was “not like other girls”. I’ve flirted with assimilating into the bougie white queer aesthetic (which feels like the grown-up version of “not like other girls”). So I’m a part of this too.

But I can’t take off my transness. I can’t choose to not be discriminated against. I can’t choose to be rich, or be picky about the work I do, or grant myself indefinite leave to remain, or just decide to be comfortable looking however I want.

Difference makes us great, diversity is beautiful, blah blah blah. Yes, ok. Tell that to the people who harass me and my trans friends. Your dyed hair doesn’t make you different in queer radical circles, it makes you the same as everyone else. It’s a flagrant display of social capital. You're telling me that you won't get fired for looking "unprofessional".

It’s your body. In cisheteropatriarchy which constantly polices the gender expression of queers, especially femmes, you do whatever you want. But at least consider that cisheteropatriarchy polices the bodies and gender expressions of black and brown queers, poor queers, disabled queers, more than yours, to the extent that they can’t/don’t deliberately and visibly mark themselves as (more) different.

Maybe there’s nothing bougie white queers could do to make me consider their marginalization as serious. Maybe I’d resent them just as much if they looked normative and fully embraced their wealth and privileges—but at least that wouldn’t be disingenuous, hiding behind a “radical” facade of "I’m not like those other rich white people”, I’m Oppressed (TM).

Roots of these aesthetic signifiers: punk (which has been gentrified to death) and “arty” “creative” “quirky” manic pixie dream girl vibes. It’s like you don’t have a personality so you make up for it in hair. I hate that argument and think fashion can be a great mode of personal expression but who gets to do it? Who has access? How can we make it more accessible instead of just redefining the boundaries of this brightly-colored privilege so it includes us?

The queer “look” is white, bougie, skinny, young, and flamboyant. When this is what queer “looks like” it means that queer looks white and rich, and other people aren’t “really” queer. When this is what queer “looks like” it means that people who don’t look like this are punished by queers for not conforming, on top of being punished by cisheteropatriarchy for being queer themselves. I get that we want to signal our queerness to each other but aren’t we upholding heteronormativity by assuming that people aren’t queer unless they signal their queerness in this particular way?

I’m in a privileged position where nearly everyone I meet is genuinely likely to be queer, because I don’t really spend time with cishet people unless I’m working for them, and then most of the time they tokenize and fetishize my queerness as “edgy”. It has some social capital which I absolutely milk. But I used to work at a very-establishment military studies think tank where I was terrified of coming out as trans; I was still shy about being queer in my private social life, and was definitely not visibly queer in my public work life. I felt like because I didn’t party at gay clubs in Soho (where, by the way, I was harassed by misogynistic gay boys, or excluded and ridiculed by biphobic lesbians) that I wasn’t “really queer”.

You’re allowed to “look queer”, to be queer, to “be yourself” and “express yourself”. Cool for you. But don’t turn that (actually quite stale) expression into the uniform for queerness because not all of us look like doubles from Eternal Sunshine For The Spotless Mind. That reference is 13 years old. Your look was colonized by cis straight manic pixie dream girls ages ago.