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HIGH GEAR/APRIL 1978

TRUE BEAUTY

By Dennis Highland

In gay life particularly, preoccupation with purely physical qualities of people has, in

many instances, personified the grotesque generalizations that have been made of us by the straight world. Too many times we become our own worst enemies by defeating our avowed goals for liberation by participating in activities that, with their overly physical nature, ignore the emotional satisfaction we realize from our preferences which form the very basis of the meaning of "gay."

The mental and emotional health of an individual must predominate over physical beauty. The true worth of anyone can only be realized after looking beyond their exterior shell.

The true beauty that is really worthwhile is that part of us that is concealed from cursory, leering glances. It is that part of ourselves that is clothed in defense mechanisms rather than trousers. And we should only undress ourselves physically and mentally when we detect a human appreciation of our qualities. Our personal standards of what we like and don't like must have precedence over any communal "physical ideal." To live and not exist, all of us should shape our personality and emotional health into an object of true beauty which will endure throughout our lives.

Obsession with beauty and how to define that nebulous term have been part of the human experience, gay and straight, since time immemorial. Each of us has his own definition of beauty but, particularly in the gay life, this personal, individual standard has. unfortunately, all too often been neglected in favor of a communal standard among gay men and women. In other words, rather than develop our own definition of beauty to live by, too many of us accept the prevalent views of the gay population as to what constitues beauty in people.

So now there is the communal standard of human beauty. And this augurs ill for gays, because the community standard is too physical and unrealistic.

Look in the fashion magazines from Latin to Nordic, black to yellow to white, the rugged facial features and shapely bodies give us all something to dream about.

"I sure wouldn't kick that out of bed!"

Pictures of the "beautiful people" are used to shape our ideas of who is attractive and who isn't. We allow these pictures to affect our judgement of the flesh-and-blood people we meet in our lives. We impose non-human values on humans. The physical becomes everything, transposed from ink on glossy magazine pages to our experiences in bars and

other gay meeting places.

And the physical standard is, as said before, unrealistic. How many people do you see in real life who approach those physical specimens shown on photographically manipulated,

"touched-up" pictures found in fashion magazines and other social publications?

The effects of this overemphasis on physical beauty are particularly notable when observing people who do look somewhat like those photogenic fashion models. These are the ones who are good looking and know it, the ones who care so much about their exterior appearance that they permit whatever interior worth they may have to wither to the point of virtual invisibility. To put it mathematically, the physical beauty of a person is more often than not in inverse proportion to his mental beauty. The prettier someone is, the more likely he is to be a narcissus, concerned more with his looks and other people's acknowledgement of them than with his personality. Conversely, someone who is plain on the outside has the tendency to be more substantive on the inside.

Straight life is no stranger to this phenomenon. "An ugly woman makes the best wife" is a saying which has often been used to describe the disparity between looks and personality. It requires very little wordjuggling to adapt this saying to members of the gay club. I seems that the better looking someone is, the more he knows it and the more he acts like he knows it.

But this type of beauty is only temporary. There are only so many Saturday nights in one's life; like it or not, we must con-

tend with many more weekdays and day to day living than with disco casual sex. And it is during these less spectacular periods of our lives that we prove ourselves by what we do, and not what we look like. What is under the skin means a great deal more than the skin itself. Skin eventually wrinkles, so we must take precautions to avoid our personalities from wrinkling as well.

The true beauty of a person is to be found inside. Truthfulness, reliability, efficiency, and most of all love, are qualities needed to turn a mere existence into a life worth living. These are the attributes to which we should devote our attention. Not that looking good isn't nice it most certainly is it's just that feeling good should mean more. But feeling good means having more than a receptive mirror to look into. It requires friends and maybe lovers to share a life with. It means that the ability to laugh and cry must be nurtured as something distinctively human. Our hearts must do more than pump blood.

In addition to developing our personal qualities, we should remain alert to detecting similar qualities in the people we meet, like, and love. The time must be taken to know people's heads better it is, unfortunately, far too easy to know their bodies first, and then forget everything else. To live a life in this manner is a depreciation of our emotional capabilities as human beings. It is vulgarization of ourselves. It leads to little besides the risks of social diseases and emptiness. And it is definitely not gay, but a hopeless exercise in "faggotry."

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