The only thing as familiar to me as my queerness is compromise.
There are a multitude of ways in which people who present as femme in queer spaces often internalise the shame that others project onto us. The simple truth is that compromise is often so much less lonely than protest. I have been wracked with guilt over my own complicity in furthering this toxic hierarchy. I am ashamed that I did not tell him to go fuck himself that I didn't walk away. I have replayed those moments outside XXL that night in my head over and over again, trying to understand why I compromised with the bouncer. These values are reified in sexual and social hierarchies that dictate access to spaces, resources, kinship, and ultimately safety. Even the most femme-presenting drag queens and the the twinkiest gay men still crave the beatifying proximity (romantic or otherwise) of the visibly hypermasculine. It has damaging repercussions, beyond purely aesthetic questions of who is considered attractive and who is not. The only thing as familiar to me as my queerness is compromise”īut to theorise about where the shift in the culture came from, regardless of its understandable roots, is not to justify it. “There are a multitude of ways in which people who present as femme in queer spaces often internalise the shame that others project onto us. It represented a kind of hope in the face of death and destruction. Muscle mass and an Adonis build became standards - symbols of a thriving immune system, of vitality, and perhaps, in some superstitious sense, an amulet to ward off HIV/Aids. In a time where gay men lay gaunt, dying painfully in hospital beds from the plague that ravaged our community, the aesthetics of 'good health' became a-la mode. This brand of muscle-gay aesthetic is arguably rooted in our collective trauma – it boomed in the aftermath of the HIV/Aids crisis. But along the way, it’s gained a kind of toxic momentum – which is unsurprising, given that the aim of the game was to assimilate with straight culture, rather than be liberated from it. It set out to prove that a gay man could be as much of a man, if not manlier than his hetero counterpart. As homosexual men were ‘emasculated’ in mainstream media, gay men began to acculturate hypermasculinity as a way to place themselves on par with straight masculinity. Historically, this valorisation of the hypermasculine (to the exclusion of the feminine), rose partly in opposition to caricaturish feminine representations of homosexuality in pop culture. The latter, in particular, is a thinly veiled attempt to create some pseudo-spiritual link to a heavily revisionist antiquity, when 'men were men!' (who all looked like Michelangelo's David) – and, more importantly, imagining that these Herculean beefcakes fucked each other. You can see it in the celebration of Tom of Finland's muscly, aggressively homosexual, racially homogenous military-industrial fetish, or the use of Greco-roman 'God' imagery in circuit party and club advertising. Gay culture is endemically fixated on the masculine.
Door policies like these, and indeed the culture they represent, are all too familiar – not just in XXL, but in gay clubs and spaces all across the world. I wasn't the first person this had happened to at XXL, nor will I be the last. He let me know that, should I put the offending top back on while inside the club, I'd be thrown out. As I walked in, the bouncer had one last sting. I acquiesced, shrunk myself, and complied, in the knowledge that the humiliation would be over soon enough, and I would be with my friends who were already in the club ahead of me. I was told that I would be refused entry unless I changed or took it off. What I didn't know was that XXL’s door policy explicitly refuses entry not only to women, but to anyone wearing what they described as 'women's clothing' - heels, dresses, skirts - a laundry list that the bouncer reeled off to me when I arrived in my strappy corset top. When my friends suggested going there a few weeks ago, I swallowed my discomfort, naively presuming that it would be short-lived. Personally, I spent years avoiding clubs like XXL (a muscle-bound gay club near London Bridge) on the premise that it simply wasn't my vibe, sensing that its 'One Club Fits All' slogan didn't quite ring true for my body. This relationship is a quagmire, most obviously visible in the microcosm of nightlife. Queer communities, and more specifically gay communities, have always had a complex and messy relationship with the masculine.
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