I read somewhere that someone had said: ‘beauty is not an accomplishment,’ what a statement. We are dancing in the club and it is fun, but I begin to become aware of a type of disconnect, a feeling that I can only relate to adolescent insecurities about belonging and becoming. I feel capable of subverting inscribed beauty ideals, yet I am still totally conscious of how I appear to others

The paradox is that the pressure of maintaining appearances can endow people with the most unattractive self importance. Most queer people have developed in way that has meant we need to defend ourselves from attack. With that in mind, what I am concerned with establishing is where this leaves us in terms of emotional fulfilment and congruent feelings of communality — when we’re together, how is it that we can feel so apart?

I am interested in the intersection between fashion and liberation causes, but I am sceptical about the regimes of exclusion incurred in the beautification of identity politics. I should say that I am not immune to the pomposity and humour around the romance of going out and the empowerment of dressing up. However, when I am confronted with the idea that we are all together through our shared identities and proximity, it can sometimes feel like something remarkably vertical with the best looking, most read or well connected at the top.

By together, what I mean is a shared consciousness and concern for something outside of ourselves. We are custodians and of a violent and precarious history that relies on us, in whatever context feeling support and supportive towards one another. I can be mean to people at the club, foreground my insecurities and rely and what I imagine another’s perception of me is. Perhaps my abiding point is that, it’s a choice to be rude to one another and we can always not.

– The Aphex Twink