Gay Body Culture is Become Everybody’s Culture

 

By Mark Harris

The New York Times

LAST FALL, I found myself facing a health issue caused by, among other things, a lifetime of running away from my own body. Getting better and stronger, my doctors informed me, would require the surgical removal of the air quotes I had for years placed around the phrase “aerobic exercise.” Henceforth, working out wouldn’t be optional, and it would need to be defined as more than a brief, daydreaming amble on the treadmill while Bravo played on mute in the background.

Like many nonathletic gay guys, I had coasted in and out of the gym irregularly, content to be in it but not of it, and not especially eager to spend a minute more than necessary in a milieu that I still associated with various childhood humiliations — being picked last, striking out, feeling perpetually insufficient. None of that is particularly alien to any number of straight men, but there’s one difference: As a gay man, what I had been trying to dodge wasn’t just fitness but an entire universe of body-image issues, decades of them, honed and shaped and sculpted by popular culture, especially the gay version of it, in ways that have helped countless of my brethren look a little better and feel a little worse. That, I had long said with confidence, wasn’t my world. But I was kidding myself: If you’re a gay man, there’s a good chance that, unless you’re a hermit, you will find yourself staring dejectedly at your reflection at some point, and an equally good chance that you will end up, sooner or later, sweating in a large space with a lot of other gay men and loud music and way too many mirrors, hoping it doesn’t end in embarrassment. It might be a dance club or a workout room; it almost doesn’t matter.

My gym isn’t gay, but it’s gay enough (the only really heated argument between two men I have ever heard there was about Taylor Swift) and, as I walked into the uptown Manhattan weight room for the first time, I felt relieved that my position at the northernmost tip of middle age meant that, when I am around younger men, I am essentially swathed in an invisibility cloak. Still, there were indeed mirrors on every wall, and I, once again the smallest (at least by bicep circumference) kid in class, had to take a walk of shame past a long row of large free weights until I got to a set so tiny that they literally come in pretty pastel colors — Baby’s First Dumbbells. Welcome to every primary trauma I never wanted to revisit: As a Pet Shop Boys song that is now older than half of the men in that room goes, “This must be the place I waited years to leave.”

DO GAY MEN have a particularly tortured relationship to body culture? The answer is: It’s getting better! The other answer is: It’s not getting better nearly fast enough. On TV, you can stream the 2023 Showtime limited series “Fellow Travelers,” in which the clandestine McCarthy-era relationship between a closeted gay man and his younger lover is depicted in scrupulously observed period detail — that is, until the actors Matt Bomer, 46, and Jonathan Bailey, 36, take off their clothes for the sex scenes and display muscle groups that hadn’t yet been invented in the 1950s; they are no longer characters but actors, unveiling bodies that are products of the best training and nutrition programs money can buy. When the story jumps forward 30 years and Bailey’s character is ravaged by late-stage AIDS, you may forgive yourself for the highly inappropriate thought “He looks pretty good.” 

It would be a mistake to assume that this kind of anachronism is actorly vanity when all circumstantial evidence suggests it’s self-protection. After all, we live in an age in which the famous onstage locker room group shower scene in Richard Greenberg’s play “Take Me Out” won’t simply be discussed and analyzed among gay aficionados, as it was in 2002, but surreptitiously photographed and immediately uploaded to be picked apart by a potential audience of millions, as it was when the play was revived on Broadway two years ago. Who can blame some of the cast for choosing to display zero-body-fat physiques instead of beefy baseball guts? When the gay pop star Omar Apollo, 27, can post a shirtless picture on social media and immediately be disparaged as “skinnyfat” simply for lacking the steroidal reticulated torso of a Marvel superhero, we can all be forgiven for feeling a sense of futility. No wonder Andrew Scott, 47, looks terrified in the scene in Netflix’s new “Ripley” in which he has to step onto a beach on the Amalfi Coast wearing only a very small, tight bathing suit — he knows exactly who’s watching, judging and memeing. 

A man facing away from the camera wearing nothing but a thong.

Bob Mizer’s “Richard Pursley (Back View)” (1952).Credit...Courtesy of the Bob Mizer Foundation

The concern of gay men with how our bodies look often gets labeled a fixation, an obsession or, most glibly, an expression of narcissism. What’s less frequently acknowledged are the forces of insecurity and anxiety driving that obsession. For gay men of all ages, types, statuses and lifestyles, body image remains such a fraught, weird, private, painful subject that, even among friends who talk about everything, it’s often off limits for discussion. Officially, we’re all supposed to look fantastic while not caring. Get caught peering in the mirror too closely and you’ll be called vain; fail to look closely enough and you risk an even harsher judgment. This is where I am legally obliged to say, “Not all gay men.” Many gay guys are delighted beyond measure at how they look; others never give it a thought. Good for them/you. This debate is for everyone else — those of us who sing the body dysmorphic. We glimpse ourselves on the fly, maybe from the side, on our way out of the shower or in a store window, just long enough to notice exactly what we don’t like about ourselves.

If we think we look wrong, what do we think looks right? What did the culture we grew up with tell us a man was supposed to look like? The masculine ideal has varied over the decades, and for gay men it has always been more complicated than for straight men, since how we’re told we’re supposed to present ourselves is sometimes intermingled in challenging ways with whom we’re attracted to and who we hope will be attracted to us. This has been true from the earliest appearances of popular imagery that targeted gay men: In the 1950s and early ’60s, the first nationally available gay photography appeared in what were known as physique magazines — independent, very low-budget publications that had names like Grecian Guild Pictorial, Tomorrow’s Man and Body Beautiful. At a time when homosexual conduct was still illegal and the word itself (let alone its synonyms) couldn’t be spoken in American movies or on television — and was used with clinical distaste on the rare occasions when it showed up in newspapers — these magazines, hidden and treasured by men who were lucky or determined enough to find them, had to toe a careful line. They did so by eroticizing the concept of plausible deniability. The men who were featured had to look like straight guys next door; the almost-nude photos of them needed to be credible either as bodybuilding guidance or as representations of classical art — or to be so situationally inoffensive that they would be immune to prosecution. What kind of perv would impute homoeroticism to photos of a man lighting a campfire or shooting a bow and arrow, even if he happened to be wearing nothing but what was then called a posing pouch? The men in many of these pictorials, clean-cut, youthful and blandly wholesome, looked like the actors one might see in B-movies or TV westerns: straight men (or pretending to be) who were oblivious (or pretending to be) to the fact that gay men were looking at them.

Our knowing gaze became part of a strategy that far outlasted those magazines, most of which went extinct once porn became available. For decades, the body image that gay men craved, although it morphed as tastes evolved, was predicated on monitoring straight male culture, identifying whatever the heterosexual world had decided was masculine or sexy at that moment and then tailoring, editing and selectively italicizing it. This was partly defensive: Keeping an eye on the mores of heterosexual men, how they stood, walked, moved, laughed, interacted, carried themselves and wore their attractiveness, was a way of making sure you could imitate one of them in moments you needed to. Turning yourself into a simulacrum of a straight man was a survival tactic. But going one step further became a way of taking ownership. Turning your appearance into a calculatedly self-aware physical performance of straight masculinity, with a flourish or two of ironic detailing, gave gay men some autonomy and subverted straight culture by reinventing it as something gay, a look one could wear as a costume that might be visible only to the like-minded. 

AFTER STONEWALL, WHEN young gay men in large cities became more emboldened, that costume became more overt and provocative, enough to generate anxiety and anger among straight men. In 1970, Gerald Walker, then a New York Times Magazine editor, published his gay-serial-killer novel, “Cruising,” the basis for a notorious movie released a decade later. Walker opens the story by casting a murderer’s eye over a pickup site on Central Park West across from the American Museum of Natural History, writing, “The fags had taken over this side of the street, a Museum of Unnatural History here. Dozens of them, mostly young, strolled, lounged on benches, displayed their goods leaning against the park’s stone fence. … They wore light, tight summer clothes, T-shirts and self-advertising Levi’s mostly.”

That slouchy, elbows-back, hips-forward self-advertising — an unashamed decision to lead with your physicality — could be seen as a progressive, even revolutionary act. But it meant you had to have a body to lead with. And this became tricky for gay men: Were your clothes — the uniform, as many called it — the showcase, the statement of identity? Or could you transform your body itself into the look? The question percolated through the liberatory ’70s but, back then, the imitation didn’t depend on gym culture, steroids or eating disorders. The naked, tan men seen frolicking in a pool or taking a shower or having sex in the David Hockney quasi documentary “A Bigger Splash,” which scandalized some moviegoers at the 1974 New York Film Festival, were lean and pretty but from a pre-gym era — “before the body thing started,” as Roy Cohn says in 1991’s “Angels in America” (which, full disclosure, my husband, Tony Kushner, wrote).

The decade’s reigning, smirking sex symbol, Burt Reynolds, was rugged and masculine, but more solid than streamlined. Still taking their cues from straight culture, gay men immediately adopted and tweaked his look: Plush lawns of dark chest hair and coal-black Mark Spitz mustaches epitomized masc-gay attractiveness for several years, and bodies were a secondary consideration, generally fine as long as they weren’t too short or fat and were encased in black leather or tight jeans. Never mind that Reynolds, balding and ornately toupeed almost from the moment he became a movie star, and in physical pain from sports injuries and stunt work for much of his career, was himself a fragile construction of masculinity whose secret was that he publicly took it all as something of a joke. The culture — more specifically, the white gay men who then dominated the realms of public tastemaking — had dictated that he was the standard. And if you couldn’t look like him, you’d better try your best to look like Robert Redford or Jan-Michael Vincent, with a blond shag and a ski-slope or surf-beach tan.

A shirtless muscular man wearing jeans with his hands in his pockets.

Norm Yip’s “Yusuke” (2012).

By the late 1970s, the body thing was happening — if not yet in the world at large, definitely in the Manhattan-to-Fire Island corridor of cutting-edge gay culture that was readying it for exportation to everywhere else, just as it did with fashion, with disco and eventually with the very definition of male attractiveness. Two breakthrough gay novels published in 1978, Andrew Holleran’s “Dancer From the Dance” and Larry Kramer’s “Faggots,” take note of the upsurge in muscularity as a meat-market asset — and of the prevalence of instant, unforgiving judgment that made it necessary. In clubs, on beaches and in bedrooms, Holleran writes, the only thing “prized more in the homosexual subculture than a handsome face, or a large [euphemism], … is a well-defined, athletic body.” And Kramer’s protagonist Fred Lemish, dreading his impending 40th birthday, joins not one but two gyms in order to beat his love handles into retreat. He whittles himself down to a 30-inch waist, a requirement since the men he wants to want him “annoyingly always placed their hands, casually, in greeting,” on his abdomen, “prospecting the land beneath the shirt to judge how hard the terrain, and hence how desirable.” 

Straight culture took a few years to catch on, but it got the message. By the 1980s, hirsuteness was on its way out: The 23-year-old John Travolta of 1977’s “Saturday Night Fever,” testosterone bursting through every active follicle on his body, had given way to the John Travolta of “Staying Alive,” launching his new look on a 1983 cover of Rolling Stone in nothing but a loincloth, waxed, plucked, slicked with oil — and bereft of body fat.

Travolta’s new image was indicative of a recent sea change. A year earlier, Calvin Klein had commandeered Times Square with a massive vertical billboard photograph, shot on Santorini, in Greece, by Bruce Weber, of Tom Hintnaus, a Brazilian-born pole-vaulter, his eyes closed, his musculature intimidating, his body fully exposed except for a pair of blinding white briefs that, filled with implication, felt like a brazen challenge to male America. The image marked a revolution: It forced straight men to accept the fact that a madly fit man in nothing but tighty-whities was definitionally erotic. You couldn’t look at that photo, even as a heterosexual, and claim that you didn’t get it. In Artforum, the critic Vince Aletti aptly described Hintnaus as “a colossus looming over a crossroads,” but the crossroads wasn’t just geographic — this was the moment that gay body culture stopped taking its marching orders from straight body culture and started giving the orders instead. From now on, we, primarily through our influence in style, photography, journalism and the star-making apparatus, would decide what constituted a hot man.

This wasn’t exactly the gay rights win it might have looked like on paper, since all it proved was that we could embrace body fascism with the best of them. (In fact, an unappetizing gay/Nazi cross-pollination could be found in dark corners of American pop culture as far back as Kenneth Anger’s 1963 underground film, “Scorpio Rising,” and in early erotic gay-pulp novels from the 1960s, a subset of which feature endless, slavering descriptions of a particular, narrowly defined type of male physical beauty that all but use the phrase “superior race.”) From the time the Calvin Klein campaign launched, gay men found themselves in uneasy dialogue with it, perhaps even uneasier than the reaction straight men were having. The photo — a big enough deal to be named in American Photographer magazine in 1989 as one of “10 Pictures That Changed America” — told us many things at once: “You should be him. You should want him. You will never have him. He doesn’t see you. Be so attractive that you can’t even bother to look at another man, or to notice yourself being looked at. Be unavailable. Be unobtainable.” It’s an attitude that, more than 40 years later, persists in much of gay culture, as well as in the mind of every gay man who’s told himself that he’s sexier if he doesn’t smile or make eye contact — and in the mind of every gay man who looks at his reflection and can see only the distance between what he is and what he thinks he should be.

The AIDS pandemic was in its earliest stages when that billboard appeared; the disease had barely been given its name yet. Over the next 15 years, it would change everything about gay life and culture, including body culture. Gay men knew what sudden, terrifying weight loss looked like; soon enough, straight people did, too. Just as thinness became synonymous with illness for gay men in the 1980s, the first viable drug treatments in the mid-1990s caused their own unwelcome physical transformations — lipoatrophy (more commonly and cruelly known as facial wasting) and swollen bellies were indicators of illness as well as of survival, and many gay men viewed them as sexual stop signs. The cultural stigma of those visible symptoms was the origin of those ubiquitous ads for new and better H.I.V. medications in the aughts that used muscly, athletic models who looked like they had just happily sprinted up Mount Everest. “I look amazing,” “I am healthy” and “I don’t have AIDS” became so intermingled that, for gay men, the definitions of beauty, fitness, virility and wellness effectively merged. Woe to anyone who couldn’t tick all of those boxes — who couldn’t, whether on a movie screen or in everyday life, embody an ideal.

HAVE THINGS IMPROVED in our presumably more enlightened century? I’m not sure. In 2024, gay men’s body issues seem to be in a contradictory tussle that will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever read a women’s magazine. Today, we’re all told that we should love our bodies exactly as they are — which is clearly not as chiseled or as fit as they could be. We are just right and pathetically short of the mark. We should be stronger, be thinner, care less, try harder, be more defined, be more comfortable with aging, be younger, put more effort into looking more effortless and embrace the limitations that everything from advertising to fashion to movies to porn to, yes, a long-overdue trip to the gym will regularly remind us are, in fact, limitations. 

That said, it took surprisingly little time for my fears of entering the weight room to evaporate. The other guys there all seemed reasonably pleasant, quiet, deferential, willing to give one another space. Moreover, none of them were looking at me or at anyone; they were all looking into those inescapable mirrors. And their expressions, as they looked, were not the preening once-overs of self-satisfaction that I assumed were their earned right. I recognized their furrowed brows and skeptical grimaces because they were my own. No matter how built they were or how much they were lifting, each man seemed to be in private, dubious and slightly unhappy conference with himself, as both judge and defendant. Nobody was entirely what he wanted himself to be.

A man photographed from behind with “Only God Can Judge Me” tattooed across his back.

Shikeith’s “Bryan” (2022).Credit...Courtesy of the artist

This may represent a small step forward for the solidarity of the insecure, but that’s not much of a victory. The gay-industrial complex — more in America than abroad, and more in the New York- and Los Angeles-based centers of cultural production than anywhere else on earth — tells us that we’re supposed to celebrate the fact that there isn’t just one approved gay body. And officially, we all want that kind of progressivism to extend to the notion of self-worth and attractiveness, even when our actual desires don’t fully cooperate with our good politics. The endlessly repeated “If you can’t love yourself …” affirmation of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” has been drummed into us (notably, that line is always spoken moments after the least-loved contestant of the week has been sent packing) and we’ve even been granted gay-normcore shows like Andrew Haigh’s aughts-era HBO series “Looking,” which quietly insists that very attractive gay men come in many shapes and sizes (and proved it by casting a number of very attractive gay men). There are new, independently published gay-erotica zines that celebrate all shapes and sizes (well, some shapes and sizes, all belonging to a self-selecting group of men who are willing to put their particular shapes and sizes on display). Other publications and Instagram accounts intentionally mime those ancient, pre-liberation muscle magazines and the body types in them; for some gay men, turning themselves into a 1950s (or 1970s or 1990s) physical ideal can be a way of claiming an ancestry. Why not reshape your body itself into tribute, a point of historical reference? Gay men love references!

We’re also fond of self-sorting. Young men, gay and straight, are now bombarded with input about adding muscle, losing weight, taking supplements or performance-enhancing drugs and remaking their bodies. They’ve also grown up in a world with more instant, touch-of-a-phone-screen access to nude male bodies — in everything from amateur porn to texted or uploaded selfies — than anyone in history. While one could argue that it’s fostered an understanding that a huge variety of physiques can be sexually attractive, a body-first world combined with a thumbs-up/thumbs-down internet-consumer mentality isn’t, for many men, a gay utopia. It’s the worst of bar culture minus the human contact that made bar culture both stressful and exciting.

Here is the grim contradiction of our ostensibly body-positive, performatively egalitarian era: We no longer need to embrace one body type — but we’re still bent on defining ourselves by, you guessed it, body type. All this isn’t only hard to navigate but deeply ingrained. You can’t retrain people to be attracted to what they’re not attracted to; that’s kind of a foundational principle of gay civil rights history and, besides, libidos don’t like to be bossed around. On Grindr, the hookup app, men can choose to label themselves Toned, Average, Slim, Muscular or Large. (You can also opt out, but to opt out is to risk being seen as having something to hide.) A round of applause to any gay man who is confident, courageous or foolish enough to announce that he is average, knowing that the word may be instantly interpreted as below average. And why wouldn’t it be, since every other available alternative can be read as above average? 

Not that there’s anything wrong with eye candy, in the real world or in pop culture. A throwaway gay-fantasy prince-meets-princeling romance like last year’s “Red, White & Royal Blue” on Prime Video wouldn’t be a better or deeper movie if its two extremely pretty leads were contending with paunches and male-pattern baldness rather than just paparazzi or the eyes of the world or whatever manufactured crisis they’re pretending is a big problem. (Sorry, all I can remember are the torsos and pouts.) Sometimes progress in one area can feel like a setback in another. When the gay rom-com “Fire Island” premiered two summers ago, its writer and star, Joel Kim Booster, now 36, said that he wanted to interrogate the image of the Fire Island Pines as an enclave of Speedo-clad white gays with sculpted muscles and perfect abs. It was an essential, witty corrective to a cultural history in which nonwhite gay men were rendered invisible and, as cultural consumers, treated as irrelevant. But in terms of body image? After seeing Booster in the movie, we now know that the gay destination is also home to Speedo-clad Asian gays with sculpted muscles and perfect abs. One step forward for representation, one Homer Simpson-esque recession into the nearest shrubbery for the soft bellied.

Body insecurity can take us into some maddening places. We’ve all had the experience of watching a movie in which the shy, nerdy, wallflowerish gay character is played by someone who’d be among the most attractive men in any real-world gathering. It’s irritating and also probably inevitable: It’s not a deficiency or a failure of maturity to want to feel attractive, to want to be attractive, to want to be seen as attractive — or to enjoy looking at hot guys. And it’s certainly not unique to gay men. What is unique is that, in claiming it, we have weaponized it — first against straight people, then against one another and finally against ourselves.

At this point, it’s a jolt — and a welcome one — to come across any piece of gay filmmaking that doesn’t showcase near-unattainable bodies. (The excellent 2021 Max limited series “It’s a Sin,” about a group of gay men in 1980s London, is notable for featuring actors with bodies that might actually have existed in 1980s London.) But much of gay pop culture still seems designed to enforce an impossible standard; though it pretends to embrace anyone from the super jacked to the super slender, it’s far more enthralled by those extremes than by anything in the middle. Take the gay Australian pop star Troye Sivan, 29, who had a song of the summer-ish moment last year with the video for “Rush,” a thrumming dance track that endorsed the pleasure of instant random sexual possibility amid a crush of available hot young bodies. Sivan’s stringy, ectomorphic physique is very much on display and, for all kinds of reasons, the video got a lot of negative commentary; the writer Choire Sicha referred to it as “a return to body fascism and emaciation — two gay tastes that actually never went out of style.” That was parried by interviews in which Sivan talked about his own journey from feeling he was “disgustingly thin” to, clearly, getting over it, while also saying on Instagram, “Don’t ask me about this in interviews. I don’t wanna talk about it unless I wanna talk about it.” It’s the perfect modern gay body image arc: A young man grows up in a culture that tells him his body isn’t good enough, becomes famous and successful and learns to love his body enough to put it at the center of a video that will make a new generation of young gay men think their bodies aren’t good enough. It’s not even a zero-sum game. Who wins?