In Defense of the Circuit Gays:
"It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances" -Oscar Wilde
The Circuit Gays may need a letter of their own in the already bloated LGBTQIA+ acronym (Or 2SLGBTQ+ which Blaire White refers to as the “wifi-password” community”), as they have faced off recently with the loony organizers of a “Queer” event known as Adonis.
Adonis, the Greek figure of masculine beauty, would be boiling on Olympus if he knew his name had been tacked on to a tacky soirée. Despite claims to be radically inclusive, Adonis, is anything but. Allegedly, prospective attendees were refused entry for being too ‘basic’. The ensuing drama, which we’re living for, has indeed highlighted the broader ideological schism between the LGB and TQ+ communities.
The controversy between the Queer community and the Circuit boys highlights a broader disagreement between two competing aesthetic paradigms. I argue that human judgements on beauty are in a large part biologically determined, and have been expressed throughout cultures and times, but most powerfully through the ideal of male beauty of classical antiquity.
Why then, does the “Queer” community, in it’s death drive to deconstruct beauty, end up promoting ugliness? Decked out in piercings, or all tatted up, Queers embrace extreme body modification, even to the point of self-destruction (or sexual mutilation). Isaac Peifer argues in his article “Pride Can’t Be Reclaimed”, published on the Bellows, that Queer identity is, in fact, meaningless. Queer ideology: “speciously imagines itself in opposition to capital, though in fact can only offer a competing aesthetic, i.e., Brooklyn to the other’s Manhattan. Queerness, through its righteous ethos of radical inclusivity, reveals itself to be, essentially, nothing in particular. (Anyone—deliberately or not—can be Queer.)”
If Queer is undefineable, we can at least define the Circuit Boys. A Circuit Boy is an often muscular gay man who goes to enormous, expensive, circuit parties on many of the popular destinations of Barcelona, Sitges, Fire Island and Mykonos.
The irony of a Queer soirée donning the name Adonis is lost on no one. Adonis was the youthful embodiment of male beauty. He was the lover of both Aphrodite and Persephone, who quarelled over his attentions. The tragedy, is that Adonis beauty is short-lived, ephemeral, as he is gored to death by a wild boar whilst hunting. Why then is this eponymous “Queer” event turning beautiful men away at the door?
The Circuit Boys refused at the door, took to their keyboards, bawking at the irony of a supposedly “inclusive” event refusing people at the door. The Adonis event organizers doubled down, showing their true colors.
The response of Adonis was telling, and further stoked the flames of drama. He asks them to “reflect on their sense of entitlement” and ask them to check their attitude, so as to not make the Queers feel “uncomfortable”.
Jeez Louise! the high crime of making “Queer” people “uncomfortable”. Note the shots fired at ‘circuit gay’, and the jargon: male-privilege, toxic masculinity. Other buzzwords include: bodies, identity, uncomfortable, dominance, unpack, chosen-family, Etc.
Someone handed girl a shovel and she just kept on digging!
The anti-circuit boy sentiment is made clear in a comment by the Instagram account @adonis.adonis.adonis who to add fuel to the fire adds: “You’re an embarrassment to gay men and should be ashamed of yourselves” along with the overdramatic hashtag #nolgbwithoutthet.
Dalston Superstoned, an Instagram page run in conjunction with Adonis’s page, posted a letter, with the tagline: “Too iconic”. Shay is presumably the DJ who started and runs Adonis. The letter starts off with a juvenile jab; “Hi Circuit Queen,” and quickly degenerated into a rambling screed. He’s a defender of his safe space, the “music led, queer, alternative, underground, family vibe of Adonis...” which is for “…queer people who don’t feel comfortable in more mainstream scenes.” He then invites the basic gays, the circuit gays, to go to other venues in London. We’ve all heard of stepping on eggshells, but who wants to go dancing on them?
In an alleged exchange between a discontented circuit queen and the same @adonis.adonis.adonis Instagram account, they write: “we are being overrun by obnoxious, entitled, vacuous groups of guys taking up the space from people the party was meant for.”
Well there she blows! (There she be blowin’!)
The time is upon us! We need to defend the obnoxious, entitled, and vacuous Gays! We need to demand the letter C, for Circuit Queen, hereafter be added to the LGBTQ acronym! Maybe throw in a B for all us Basic Bitches out there!
A firm defender of male homosexuality and the divine beauty of the male form, from antiquity on through the Renaissance to today can be found, ironically, in the lesbian thinker Camille Paglia. She writes in her 1990 book Sexual Personæ of “The mystique of the femme fatal cannot be perfectly translated into male terms. I will speak at length of the beautiful boy, one of the west’s most stunning sexual personæ. However the danger of the homme fatal, as embodied in today’s boysish male hustler, is that he will leave, disapearing to other loves, other lands. He is a rambler, a cowboy, and a sailor.” (p. 15, Sexual Personæ, Camille Paglia, 1990)
Furthermore, in her article Where Gay Boys Come From, Camille Paglia argues that the male gaze is also a form of admiration, one that Gay men have long practiced: “This is a form of admiration. The beautiful person is something to be admired and put on a pedestal. A beautiful young man in a gay bar is like a superior being. In The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde created a young man of electrifying beauty. The Greeks knew this being, too: that’s what the kouros sculptures are all about.” (The Best of The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1997, foreward by Edmund White, edited by Richard Schneider, Jr.)
Oscar Wilde’s beautiful Dorian Gray also bears a moral indictment of excessive vanity, his portrait aging in tandem with his increasing self-obsession. Wilde himself, regretted ending his novel in this way, calling it: “terrible moral” of the ending “an artistic error,” “the only error in the book” (page 515, Sexual Personæ, Camille Paglia). If male homosexuality posesses a male gaze, then it is doubled, like Narcissus peering at his own self-reflection. The notion of do I want to be you or do I want to be inside of you, is a uniquely gay male dilemma. Our gay male self-esteem is fragile, in spite of our ardous exercise routines, or our Olympian physique. Just as male arousal balloons up, so too can gnawing neurosis make it wilt. Indeed, comparison may be the thief of joy (and the biggest boner-killer).
The phrase “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” has become a cliché for a reason. The sentiment embodied through the line, is that beauty is subjective. I argue that beauty is a mix of objective and subjective. The idea that beauty is purely subjective is romantic sentimentality at best, and illusion at it’s worst. There is concensus on natural phenomena, such as sunsets, being beautiful. Beauty is in part biologically determined. According to a study called The Evolutionary Psychology of Facial Beauty by Gillian Rhodes, mate quality across cultures is determined by averageness, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism.
The Classical conception of beauty, seen through both Plato and Aristotle, upholds the idea that beauty is objective: “an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony, symmetry.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Beauty)
The Idealist conception of beauty comes from Plato’s Symposium where Socrates recounts the teachings of his teacher Diotima: “Next he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with and cherish—and beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends toward the building of a noble nature.” (Plato, Symposium)
Beauty was a political subject from the beggining of the modern period, for example French Revolutionaries criticized Rococo art, and Marxists pointed out how the arts could uphold the ideological superstructure of capitalist domination. Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said critiques the field of Oriental studies, which he argues serves political ends. The beauty of Eugene Delacroix’s paintings is undeniable, whilst they simultaneously distort the “West’s” vision of a caricaturized “East”. Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990) critiques how beauty is used as a weapon against women. Camille Paglia and Naomi Wolf had a televised debate on beauty in 1991.
The song “Pretty hurts” by Beyonce, shows the contemporary excesses of beauty. There are indeed excesses within Beauty paradigms, if taken too far. The roiling pace of modern pop culture has magnified the pursuit of beauty in excess. Just like Pygmalion who shaped the ideal woman from clay and fell in love with her, so too are male transgenderists cuting themselves to ribbons and falling in love with their mirror-image. Prometheus, who shaped the first man from clay, and bestowed him with fire, inspires the cautionary subtitle of Mary Shelley’s 1818 Romantic novel Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. The Transhumanist novel Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson further explores this. The pursuit of beauty, through technical advances and modern plastic surgery, has created monsters.
Whether Transgenderist or Gym Bunny, the LGBT movement has simply become a market, and pride “a summertime trade expo”. How can corporations continue to extract profit from a community which has reached full legal equality? I’ve written about the dangers of the T, particulary for young people, in an earlier essay. To the Trangenderists companies sell hormones, and sexual mutilation at a high price-tag, and to the circuit gays: gym-memberships, expensive travel packages, and steroids. The worst case scenario for a guy using steroids, blasting and cruising, is blowing out his endocrine system and having to take lifelong HRT. It is objectively worse for a female who uses testosterone, especially if she removes her uterus and ovaries, as this triggers an early menopause; risking dementia, osteoporosis, and vaginal atrophy. For teenage girls, the pro-anorexia blogs of the noughties (2000’s), have transformed into the “gender” self-harm tiktoks of the 2010’s and 2020’s. In all these cases you are Prometheus, your body is clay, and Pandora’s box is ajar.
In spite these excesses, the pursuit of beauty remains a laudable goal. In promoting Classical conceptions of beauty, and recognizing the biological inner-workings which undergird them, we defend an aesthetic paradigm worthy of our attention.
As Oscar Wilde famously said: “Knaves nowadays do look so honest that honest folk are forced to look like knaves so as to be different.” (The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde)
In a world where the “alternative” crowd has become so preachy, it’s high time we went back to basics.
