Gay beauty

Paul Freeman ’s Vagabondo delves into the raw essence of male beauty, capturing men in rugged landscapes.

In honor of LGBTQ Pride

With a deep understanding of visual storytelling, Freeman highlights themes of resilience and vulnerability. It only takes a scroll through Grindr to see that a select few body types reign supreme when it comes to gay men: from oiled, glistening torsos to slim, hairless bodies, it seems our definitions of ‘beauty’ are fairly rigid within our so called ‘community’.

Find a gay community that embraces your beauty. There is no one way to be a beautiful and attractive gay man. Some gay men find skinny, hairless men beautiful. Other gay men prefer hairy, large men.

In other words, if you want to feel beautiful you don't necessarily need to change yourself. We rounded up a few of our favorite beauty brands run by members of the LGBTQIA community, so you can support them during Pride Month and beyond. 1. Good Light. Developed by David Yi, Good. BOYS! is a programme by The Little Black Gallery started in , curated by co-founder Ghislain Pascal, to promote queer and gay fine art photography.

It now represents more than 87 photographers from 34 countries - including China, India, Iran, Kenya, Poland and Russia where gay rights are repressed and queer lives under constant threat. With no X-rated mags to be found, gay men in search of bare flesh turned to bodybuilding magazines, some of which — most notably Physique Pictorial and Beefcake — became gay media staples in their own right, transforming everyday muscle men into objects of desire.

This fixation with physique only grew over time. Artists like David Hockney preserved the essence of physique culture through homoerotic paintings; Tom of Finland ramped up the aesthetic exponentially, creating explicit artwork featuring giant-dicked policemen fucking on the streets. His aim? To queer the notion that gay men were inherently feminine, something that was — and still is — weaponised against us.

It makes sense that we could be running from stereotypes by bulking up our bodies, or even by appropriating masculine aesthetics like the handlebar moustache or the skinhead both famously popular amoung gay men in the 70s and 80s. We live in a misogynistic world which stigmatises and regulates femininity, and this reality is stamped all over gay beauty standards. Arguably, none of these subcategories are as culturally dominant as the palatable white gay norm, established when advertisers earmarked gay men and lesbians as a lucrative market as early as thirty years ago.

In the context of the AIDS epidemic, it was also politically-charged. Some even say that hairlessness was particularly desirable, a way to display a body free of lesions. Issues around gay male masculinity and femininity have gone underexplored, but the pressure to fit into rigid beauty standards is collectively punishing us. I remember being scarred when I was jokingly told that fat and feminine gay men were particularly marginalised, and for years I internalised the idea that I could be too fat or too queer to be desirable.

I policed my masculinity and abused my body, drowning it with alcohol and using food limitation tactics to shape it into something more conventionally attractive. Unfortunately, research indicates that too many of us are still doing the same. We all walk through life differently, but ultimately we can be a community; the more we dismantle and disrupt archetypes of gay beauty, the more we can strengthen the ties that bond us.