The Pass

I saw him on TikTok.

Twenty-four, a decent following, painted nails, and the kind of ease in front of a camera that I certainly did not have at twenty-four.

He said he had made a discovery.

There are hierarchies within the LGBT community.

My first reaction was not particularly generous.

Darling, I am not sure we needed a Finnish university for that.

But I kept listening.

Because he really had gone looking for the research. He talked about masculinity, desirability, sexual roles. About masculine men preferring other masculine men. About certain characteristics apparently moving you up or down a ranking system that officially does not exist.

Officially.

And that was where it became interesting.

Because the discovery that a gay man might be attracted to a very masculine man is not exactly Nobel Prize material.

Desire is not democratic.

It does not fill in diversity forms and, thankfully, it does not have to meet inclusion quotas.

You can fancy tall men, short men, muscular men, skinny men, hairy men, smooth men, masculine men, feminine men. You can even have a weakness for men who take three days to reply to a message.

We all have our perversions.

The problem begins about an inch later.

When I am not attracted to you becomes I am not interested in you.

Then you do not belong.

And eventually, without anyone actually having to say it:

you do not matter.

A tiny difference in grammar.

A rather bigger one in life.

The body is not a CV

We have been here before.

The body is not a CV.

And yet we have become remarkably good at reading it as one.

Experience required: gym.

Skills: masculinity.

References: preferably photographic.

Soft skills: optional.

On dating apps, we know the vocabulary.

Masc4Masc.
No fems.
No this.
No that.

Once upon a time, you needed a passport to cross a border.

Now, to get into certain little circles, sometimes a chest seems to do the job.

I am exaggerating, obviously.

Obviously.

But what interests me is not what happens in the bedroom.

It is what happens when we leave it.

Because I can have absolutely no desire to sleep with you and still find you intelligent.

I can not fancy you and want you as a friend.

I can look at you and feel precisely nothing below the waist, yet still be interested in what you have to say.

I could even invite you to dinner.

Sleeping with every guest is not yet compulsory.

As far as I know.

And yet sometimes that private hierarchy of desire escapes the apps and starts deciding who gets noticed.

Who gets heard.

Who gets invited.

Who belongs to the group.

And who remains conveniently at the edge of the photograph.

Research complicates the joke. An Australian experiment found that, even when the man, his CV and his words were otherwise the same, a more masculine presentation could produce a more favourable assessment for a high-status leadership role — including among gay participants.

At that point, we are no longer simply talking about who we want in our bed.

And that is where it stops being quite so funny.

Lately, I have come across another argument that takes the whole thing one step further.

Apparently looking good is no longer enough.

Now the body is expected to prove something about you.

Very fit young men explain, with the confidence of people announcing a newly discovered law of physics, that having a great body gives you more opportunities in life.

Not because of vanity, obviously.

God forbid.

Because of discipline.

A trained body, according to this argument, demonstrates consistency, mental strength, sacrifice and a refusal to take shortcuts.

Abs, essentially, have become references.

It is a wonderfully convenient theory.

You can look at someone’s body and convince yourself you have understood their character.

Does training require discipline?

Of course it does.

But when exactly did one form of discipline become the measure of every other one?

What about the person getting up at five every morning to work?

The person studying while holding down a job?

Someone raising a child alone?

Someone caring for an elderly parent?

Someone fighting a private battle nobody else can see, yet still managing to get dressed, step outside and face another day?

There is discipline there too.

It just does not necessarily produce pecs.

And unfortunately, it looks terrible in a fifteen-second reel.

There is nothing wrong with having a beautiful body.

Nothing wrong with training.

Nothing wrong with feeling proud of what it took to build it.

The problem begins when a physical achievement is turned into moral superiority.

When we move from body to character.

From character to merit.

And eventually to the idea that some people deserve more opportunities because their appearance somehow proves they earned them.

At that point, the body is no longer simply a CV.

It has become the reference letter too.

Possibly even the job interview.

We look at someone and imagine we know how disciplined they are, how strong they are, how hard they have fought, what they are worth.

A body may tell you something about the person living inside it. It cannot tell you everything.

The Olympics nobody asked to enter

Because, of course, we learn.

We watch who gets desired.

Who gets attention.

Who appears able to walk into a room without first asking permission.

And some people adapt.

The body changes.

The clothes change.

A posture is monitored.

A gesture corrected.

A voice restrained.

A character is assembled, piece by piece.

Not necessarily because the transformation feels natural.

Perhaps simply because someone has worked out what credentials are required at the door.

We could call it vanity.

That would be easy.

Sometimes I think it is simply hunger.

Hunger for sex, certainly.

But also for contact.

Attention.

Friendship.

Belonging.

That very ordinary human need to walk into a room and not feel like the person nobody sees.

To finally get the pass.

There is nothing ridiculous about wanting to belong.

What is sad is having to become someone else in order to do it.

Masks work beautifully, after all.

For a while.

Then they have this irritating habit.

They fall off.

Short memory

Things become stranger when we remember which community we are talking about.

A community that built much of its public struggle around words such as visibility, diversity and inclusion.

A community that exists partly because, outside it, somebody had decided there was a correct way to be a man, a woman, a family, a body, a love.

And sometimes we appear to have learned the mechanism rather well.

Sexual liberation was also a liberation from shame and control.

The paradox begins once that space has been won: new rules can start arriving from inside.

No longer: you must not be gay.

Now: you must be gay in the right way.

With the right body.

The right age.

The right kind of masculinity.

The right profile.

Even the right desires.

The categories have changed.

So have the bouncers.

The door, in theory at least, is open.

But someone is still checking the pass.

That is where memory becomes uncomfortable.

Stonewall is not a neat little fairy tale with four heroes and a photograph to post every June. It belongs to a much larger history of discrimination, resistance and liberation; the first Pride marches commemorated its anniversary.

And some of the people who became symbols of that history understood exclusion from inside the movement too.

Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson spent part of their activism fighting for people who remained at the margins. Through STAR they supported and housed queer youth and people then described as transvestites; Rivera also clashed with gay organisations that sidelined trans issues.

So no.

We did not invent exclusion with Grindr.

We already had it.

We just improved the interface.

And then there is politics

Memory matters here too.

It would be convenient to say Pride was not political once.

It would also be false.

Pride was born political.

Demanding not to be arrested, beaten, discriminated against or forced into hiding was political.

Demanding rights was political.

Simply existing in public was political.

Perhaps today’s question is different.

What kind of politics has it become?

A community can take a position.

It can protest.

It can choose sides.

It must be free to do so.

But when belonging begins to feel conditional on the correct package of opinions, language, bodies and behaviours, the room starts to feel rather small.

And there is a peculiar irony in that.

We fought so nobody else could tell us how we were supposed to be.

And occasionally we seem terribly tempted to do it to each other.

I am not here to decide who is right.

I am not a professor.

And, thankfully, I am not the bouncer either.

I am just looking.

And what I see is a community vastly freer than the one of thirty years ago, but not necessarily immune to the same human weaknesses as the world from which it once demanded acceptance.

We fought categories.

Then created some new ones.

We challenged labels.

Then became exceptionally good at wearing them.

We demanded that nobody decide whom we were allowed to love.

And sometimes we seem rather interested in deciding who is allowed to sit with whom.

Maybe it is inevitable.

Maybe we are simply human.

But perhaps we could at least notice.

Desire. Recognition.

Which is why I keep thinking about that young man on TikTok.

Twenty-four.

Painted nails.

A phone in front of him.

He belongs to a generation that, in at least some parts of the world, inherited freedoms other people had to expose themselves, fight and suffer for.

And yet he feels outside.

That is the part that stayed with me.

Because perhaps we have confused two completely different things.

Desiring someone.

Recognising someone.

The first is private.

The second concerns all of us.

I may not want to sleep with you.

You may not want to sleep with me.

I suspect we will both recover.

But we can look at each other.

Talk.

Listen.

Make room.

We might even discover that behind the body we had already classified was an interesting person.

Revolutionary.

Or perhaps just good manners.

I do not have a moral to hand out.

And I am not issuing passes at the door.

I am left with just one image.

A long table.

There are already plenty of people sitting around it.

Some we like.

Some we do not.

And somebody will almost certainly make us regret inviting them within ten minutes.

It happens in the best families.

We do not have to sleep with everyone at the table.

Just pull up another chair.

Because perhaps, after everything it took for us finally to get through the door, the question is no longer who we want sitting beside us.

It is why we are still so interested in deciding

who has to remain outside.