Celebrating ugliness is always going to be more radically queer than widening beauty standards.

Redefining beauty standards to include gender-nonconforming, body hair, fat, disability etc is all nice but ultimately it strives to include more people in the concept of beauty, but never all people. Some people will always be considered ugly in order for the word beautiful to have any meaning at all.

So redefining beauty standards is what we call an assimilationist goal. Just like redefining what we call normal is an assimilationist goal.

Abolishing beauty standards and boldly celebrating ugliness is radical because it challenges the root assumption that anyone should be beautiful and that beauty gives a person more value than the value of glorious ugliness, shameless repulsiveness, the wonderful freakishness of being queer.

This isn’t easy. Beauty standards are everywhere in the queer scene, always slightly different from the mainstream but just as suffocating. It takes work to truly embrace ugliness in ourselves and to see how exciting it can be in the people we desire. But it is worth it. Beauty is always going to be a trap, it is always going to leave us struggling as we go through change and aging and sickness and chance. Falling in love with our own ugliness is freedom.

We are revolting. We are revolted. We revolt.