Love the entire article, and reading this last line especially, I’m struck by how many parallels I see in unrealistic beauty standards being held up in communities of cis gay men.

We gay men often hold ourselves to impossible beauty and fitness standards, and we talk about it a lot, about how toxic that is and how we need to stop doing it. But with gay Instagram models constantly pumping out thirst candy, a lot of gay men feel inadequate.

It’s like as long as we’re buff and conventionally handsome, we’re cool. Being unattractive in a conventional sense is boring and useless. I think a lot of that stems from how we grow up, often with a smack of self-loathing that comes from societal homophobia. If we have to be gay, we can at least be fabulous. And if we’re not? Well … what good are we?

Part of the queer movement I really like is the idea of smashing conventional beauty standards. Rebelling against mandatory sexiness rules that only a small percentage of people can keep.

Lesbians are famously awesome at this. It’s like they got the memo decades ago. We cis gay men must have been too busy pumping up at the gym and trying the latest skin cream.

But I think we all have common cause — cis gay folks, trans folks, non-binary folks. All of us struggle with the chains of unnatural beauty standards that hold us back. We’d probably be stronger fighting against them together.