This story is from Sunday magazine

Nathan Joe is an award-winning writer, performance poet and theatre-maker and is the creative director of Auckland Pride. His most recent project Gay Death Stocktake, which ran at Tāmaki Makaurau’s Basement Theatre last September, was touted as “a theatrical experiment exploring the gaps between who you were, who you are, and who you want to be.”

As Auckland Pride kicks off for 2023, he tells Tyson Beckett about how his identity has been shaped by beauty ideals, now and in the past.

"Being a queer, Asian person you’re constantly fighting against the extremes of invisibility and objectification. Those who do not see you because you don’t conform to their expectations of beauty and those who only see the ways in which you don't conform.

Intersectional politics over the past few years has really forced us to engage with what we define as beautiful. I think being compared to people who look like you can really harsh the vibe of finding those particular aspects of yourself beautiful. I probably don’t challenge beauty ideals enough.

I think being queer really saved me from being too prey to the pressures of normative beauty ideals. In that, being quintessentially masculine isn’t something I feel necessarily that bad about. Particularly in a country that has pretty conventional ideas of what beauty is at times.

In terms of the ways cultural influences have impacted how I interact with notions of beauty, I think those Jockey ads with Dan Carter were kind of fascinating (see: horny) for that reason. They set a standard for Kiwi male aesthetics that were tied to ruggedness, masculinity.

Despite the ads being somewhat homoerotic, I think they probably did a number on most gay kids, let alone gay Asian kids. I don’t think they were bad, I think the absence of anything to push back or reflect the other types of beauty was the real issue. And still continues to be a real issue, when we think of non-conforming body types, shapes or ethnicities.

I think the movement of sex positivity over the past decade has probably done wonders for notions of beauty, but I do sometimes wonder who gets to be sex positive. It's unfortunate that notions of beauty are often contingent on who gets to be beautiful or who society gatekeeps as beautiful, rather than coming from a deep place within ourselves. I’m still navigating that."