The gay community has resisted cultural blandness more and better than any other. Ryan Khurana on Palladium:
By the early 20th century, dedication to aesthetic values had become the province of artists and bohemians, people explicitly outside respectable society. The bourgeois rationalization of existence left no room for beauty as primary orientation […] Where did it survive? In marginalized communities that couldn’t participate in respectable bourgeois life anyway. Gay men, barred from conventional paths to social legitimacy, maintained cultures where aesthetic refinement remained an organizing principle.
Khurana’s post is a call to action:
Every person living aesthetically in a culture that devalues beauty demonstrates that alternative orientations remain possible […] The call is to reject the modern bargain that made productivity primary and beauty optional.
As so often, the best way to improve things is to improve ourselves, rather than trying to improve others.
Nehaveigur 