Acceptable In Amsterdam

Sean Moran tiptoes tolerantly through the tulips.

- Sean Moran

The bearded man wearing a white wedding dress in my photograph seems to be smoking a joint.Since this was Amsterdam, he attracted no negative attention, as far as I could see. According to a 2015 EU survey, the Netherlands is among the most tolerant countries in Europe with respect to LGBT issues and ethnic background,alongside Sweden, Denmark and Ireland. Though even in the Netherlands things are changing, as I discovered chatting to locals who would know, and observing Dutch politics.

Intolerance seems to be on the rise internationally. The election of Donald Trump in the USA and the Brexit vote in the UK may be partly due to an increasing unwillingness to tolerate difference. ‘We’ have found the right way to live, and will not put up with ‘others’ who are different.

But, you might ask, why shouldn’t we tolerate the man I photographed? As long as passers-by didn’t inhale too deeply, he offered no threat to anyone. And his image, though unconventional, is harmless. Indeed a beard is virtually compulsory (for males) in some quarters: in the pogonophilic – beard-loving – districts of Shoreditch, London, and Brooklyn, NY, for example, where it is an essential part of the hipster lumberjack look. But beards can also provoke hostility – pogonophobia – in areas where facial hair denotes radicalisation. Other aspects of my subject’s lifestyle could be attacked too: on ethical, medical, religious, political, or aesthetic grounds.