As hinted in the initial installation of this two-part feature, there was always gonna be a follow-up. This piece is it; the wrap-up to it, & yet it’s also a gateway to some more fascinating upcoming explorations as y’all we’ll soon observe.
To have a more satisfying connection to the context of this piece, help yourself to the search bar & type in this feature’s title without the “Pt. 2” part. In any case, just as a refresher, we’ll kick this off with a recap quote from the last installation:
“Are you a dude in your midteens to late 20’s? And are you the kind that has cast off restrictive shackles from your expressions of inter-male affection or male joy? Do you often add a calculated glam or tenderness to your apparel? If your answer is a yes to all three, then you, my dude, are on that #YFD_arc; young, free & delicate. Better put, you’re oozing #YFD_energy. You’re in your #YFD_era!”
To build on it all, if any of you were delighted to find that what you read in pt. 1 comes close to a description of yourself, then you’re in luck because we’re about to scratch in deeper. You’re welcome, you narcissists! Anchoring this in pt 1’s framework…
Y-oung; Youth is not forever, at least not in a physical sense. Though the spirit of it itself can persist on. Talking of now though, y’all prolly at the stage where you’re becoming less impressionable than in your early 20’s, & your acquired tastes are getting more solidified. But more decisive, less wavering tastes produce a yearning for a community of similar interests. And such communities would need a common uniting point, concept or even a figure to commune around. Such (a) figure(s) would be (a) cultural avatar(s) of sorts. Given the cultural potency of art, they’d likely be art-driven; musician, tastemaker, creative-adjacent & the like. More on that at the end.
F-ree; Though this is in the context of social conventions, it’s worth noting that social clusterings of all sorts in the 256 could use a taste for freedom. It’s nurtured, not automatic. You can’t learn to crave it, if you haven’t tasted it. The scarcity/lack of freedoms often sedates its victims into thinking it should be taken as the norm. But back to social conventions, if we may be dramatic for a bit, free expression of inter-male affection & joy is a war, a war against repression of what would come naturally, a countering of decades’ old social programming. It’s akin to force-feeding a culture, which is first & foremost done through increasingly intense visibility of what you’d like a people to take on culturally. Point being, your very presence in different spaces as an individual who’s free, in the sense described here, is a defiant feat, an act of war in a conceptual sense. So it’d mean much if you’d be more visible with it, you freaking warrior, rebel or whatever other dramatic term you may fancy for yourself😂… (Seriously though, think about it.)
D-elicate; Your ballsy affinity for external beauty, which stands out for its fine balance, is a superpower. And it’s that same balance that weeds out cultural vultures from among you. ’Cause see, neither are you a component of queer culture nor opportunistic LARPers of a passing fad. After all, it’s impossible to be either of the two without forfeiting the balance.
Now onto what we’d hinted we’d close with, given the cultural force that art is, we’ll soon be delving into art-driven self-labeled subcultures with the backdrop of the template we’ve already set. Eyes peeled!
