Perfume Genius, body horror, and the queer aesthetic struggle
In feathers of ruin, we will soar, our bodies translucent and luminous
To summarize Perfume Genius’ works in a phrase, it would be “unapologetically queer”. While that identifier seems to get dished out rather generously these days as queer-made music becomes more prominent, Perfume Genius is one of the rare artists that truly puts his queer identity at the core of his work1. He wrote extensively about being queer, being in love, being happy, and being insecure, all with tremendous intimacy. He taught me how it feels to be a queer man through song, especially regarding personal queer struggles and vulnerability. In the first part of this two-part essay, I shall showcase his foremost talents: how he captures the images of man’s body and desires through imagery, and connects them to the relentless aesthetic struggle that queer people experience.
I. The body
The body is an inescapable imagery in the experiences of queer people, particularly queer men. I figure that is partly because the body, and the sexual desires that result from it, is something of a forbidden fruit, and therefore much more sacred to our humanity; partly because the male gender is often stereotyped (quite justifiably) as the lustful sex-driven half, and as a consequence, the body represents the superficiality and emptiness that gay men’s relationships are said to suffer from.
A tour of gay men’s popular hookup apps like Grindr readily reminds you of this sentiment - faceless images of bodies, positions, body types, and preferences before one’s name. 28M, 1m75, 15cm. ‘Please no fat men,’ ‘please no skinny men,’ ‘please be muscular.’ And the body is the only thing that matters, at least at first glance. Reduced to the outlines of one’s limbs, of one’s face, one feels the imperfections of the body even more closely. I personally had never looked as closely at the features of my own face as when I finally decided to put an image on to a dating platform. The horror! Of having to face one’s own image! Of having that image, that unseemly ambassador of your whole being, subject to the judgment of society!
It is almost as if the body is the center of the queer experience, simultaneously the most desirable and most reprehensible. It is a site of conflict between the desire to be loved and the feeling of inadequacy in physical intimacy; it is, therefore, a site of pleasures and horrors.
Perfume Genius excels at capturing this corporeal horror aspect of queerness. In his music, one is a phantom, constantly flooded with unwavering voices of insecurity, constantly yearning for another. One is overcome by anxiety even in the most intimate moments, yet is irresistibly drawn to such intimacies. At once, one is obsessed, yet repulsed, by the overt expression of sex. At once, one is engulfed in pleasure, yet beriddled by doubt.
This contrast is heightened by Mike’s experience with Crohn’s disease. His body, not only inflicted with the “disease” of queerness, but also with a clinical intestinal disorder, offers an even more contrasting ground for a love-hate relationship. The body at once both brings absolute pleasure and inflicts immense pain. The way his music deals with the body is always informed by this love-hate relationship. He obsesses over it, and from there drafts the most pictorial and vivid imageries.
From the violent, ecstatic, obsessive writhing of ‘On the floor’,
‘The constant buzzing all through the night
The fighting rips me up inside
The rise and fall of his chest on me
I’m trying but still it’s all I see’
… to the esoteric, mystical intimacy of ‘Moonbend’,
‘Carving his lung
Ribs fold like fabric
Moon sketch the line
Moon bend the knife’
Perfume Genius has a talent with imagery that makes everything he sings about so sensitive, so frail, so ephemeral. Combined with his tender voice and his intricate production, the music feels like it envelops you, yet it can just as easily disappear in an instant. One is convinced that even through his troublesome relationship with his body, the queer body remains sacred, utterly gorgeous, and sensitive to any pleasure possible.
‘I wear my body
like a rotted peach
You can have it if
You can handle the stink’(My body)
Even outside a queer context, the queer body is awkward and uncomfortable. When I was younger, I had always felt the discomfort caused by being in a men’s bathroom. I feel immensely awkward with my body when it’s half naked in a swimming pool changing room; meanwhile everyone else parades nonchalantly, seemingly at peace with showing their skin! Growing up, I would realize that since they hadn’t the faintest interest in other men’s bodies, they never felt the embarrassment of being confronted with their sexuality in public. The body - this object of queer desire - exists like a taboo: always alluring, often repulsive. It is the thing that reminds you that there is no escaping your queerness, the part that reveals a closeted person for who they are, an involuntary performance of one’s own disfigured desires.
I observed that queer people seem much harsher on physical beauty standards, probably since the thing that one wants is also the thing that one is. For a heterosexual man, he can be attracted to a woman without ever wanting to be that woman. For queer men, these desires sometimes get obfuscated: one wants to be with an attractive man, but also wants to become an attractive man themselves. One is always put on a scale with their potential partner as a judgement of their worth for love. It is easy to feel unworthy, in the manifest shape of the body, so visible and vulnerable. It is easy to be a walking horror.
We must love our own bodies - that is true. However, glossing over their imperfections in a generic body positivity message is not love. To love them, we must understand them, all their nooks and crannies, and content ourselves with even the imperfect. Otherwise, we are only parroting an illusion of love, an unfortunate disservice to ourselves. Perfume Genius taught me how obsessing over the troubles of one’s own body is the first step in loving it.
On the cover of Set my heart on fire immediately, Perfume Genius stands half-naked, his body the focal point. There, he seems to have made peace with his troublesome body. In his performances and his videos, his movements are raw, vulnerable, almost writhing. He is full of conflict, full of energy. He channels it through his ghostly, flailing limbs, as if to declare the inevitability of his body, as if saying, whether he likes it or not, there is no getting rid of it.
II. The queer aesthetic struggle
The sense of body horror in Perfume Genius’ work, specific and passionate as it is, is translated to something greater that I feel acutely as a queer man: the queer community’s constant aesthetic struggle.
Hearing Perfume Genius for the first time made me experience some form of dissonance. His voice, tender and frail, stands weakly against the elaborate and eccentric instrumentation, muffled, indistinct. It feels as if one is living alone in a farmhouse in a blizzard: here, within this immediate sphere, is tenderness and serenity; outside, senseless disaster is ravaging. Soon I identified the core of that sense of dissonance: it is the musician’s complex relationship with queerness, with ugliness.
In Ugly Season’s title track, he groans like a grotesque and heretic abomination.
“I’m hideous, raving, feeling my fantasy
Turned from God, slick with rot, thick as Vaseline“
Queerness and ugliness do have a lot in common - they are both deviations from the golden accepted social standard of their time: the former a deviation from standard heterosexuality and nuclear family standards, the latter a deviation from accepted beauty perceptions.
Is it because of this that people in queer communities feel a pressure to present as beautiful as possible, as if it is heretic to break both social standards at the same time? I have encountered many men who use physical appearance as a compensation for their queerness, men who talk as if they believe that being gay is only acceptable if one is attractive. Is being attractive a requisite to validations of worthiness by society, having already violated another norm?
Being queer, therefore, often comes with feelings of inadequacy, which we readily channel into aesthetics. As I grow up and see more ‘gay icons’ on TV, I can’t help but feeling they are insanely unrealistic versions of myself. These fabulous, decked-out-in-makeup faces, these models - I won’t ever be like them.
I was used to feeling ugly as I grew up. At that time, I couldn’t even articulate my aesthetics preference, nor did I have any frame of reference for beauty. But I know there was something wrong. As a queer man, you never look as fabulous, as buff, neither as masculine nor as feminine, as the models you see on screen. It is as if there was a correct way, presentation wise, to be queer, a condition for the queerness to be acceptable to the mass.
To be fair, in mainstream media, this concept is further reinforced by both straight and gay’s people obsession with marketability: if you have to be gay, at least be Heath Ledger and Jake Gylenhaal. There is this tiny niche of gay people that one has to fit into to even see oneself represented, which inevitably results in an aesthetic crisis. How do we even learn to present ourselves, to express ourselves, when the mold isrigid and idealized? If one can only identify with aesthetic standards dictated by palatability and conformity, where is our authenticity?
‘Take everything away
This gnarled, weird face
This ripe swollen shape’(17)
Again, Perfume Genius is masterful at capturing this unwantedness, this internal conflict of wanting to be presentable, yet yearning to be one’s authentic self. Amongst jokes along the lines of “be yourself, just don’t be ugly”, Mike paints insecurity with such gorgeous queer strokes that I can’t help but be proud - proud that someone managed to vocalize the specific aspect of queer aesthetic struggle so eloquently. It is hard to be yourself when you’re constantly convinced that you have a mental illness; when your identity is associated to depravity and disease; when you can’t be too masc nor too femme; when the pressures come not only from outsiders, but even from your own community. The identity crisis, the pestering desire to alter oneself, the struggle in reconciling one’s aesthetic vision: they’re all there.
But eventually, one will have to learn how to be secure in their identity. Just like he confronted his own body, Perfume Genius would confront the misshapen mold of an accepted queerness. The answer, unequivocally, is that there should be no ‘acceptable queerness’. In Queen, he took the queer man’s stigma and sung about it in the most celebratory manner, rephrasing the bigoted narrative of queer people being a disease, a peculiarity, a source of dissonance in society, and throwing it right back.
“Don’t you know your queen
Cracked, peeling, riddled with diseases”“No family’s safe when I sashay”
- he proclaimed. In this moment, we see clearly that Perfume Genius is not only a pensive lament of the blight of being queer; he is a rebel, too. The thing that society once deemed ugly? We’re reclaiming it, reveling in it. Our beauty and our defects are one. We are beautiful for precisely the things we used to be deemed ugly for. We will parade them triumphantly and fearlessly. Seeing a very femme queer man on stage - who is honest about his insecurities, who makes no pretense to be a hot pop star or a sex icon, but who insists on singing about gay experiences so candidly, the kind that would make conservatives reel - is inspiring.
The only way the queer aesthetic struggle can end in triumph is when we tear down the notions of beauty and ugly, of normalcy: this is queerdom, and the kind of beauty that conforms to heteronormative standards can’t be the only valid option.
Maybe, then, we can learn to love ourselves a bit more.
(to be continued)
Not that I have anything against queer artists who don’t center their work on their identity - both are valid.