The Body Eclectic

Gay male culture has a very complicated relationship to the physical form. We demand that men be impossibly muscular, supremely fit and dashingly handsome. At the same time, we cling to a belief that they tend to be less than intelligent and we ridicule them for their use of steroids and excessive beauty regiments.

Conversely, those whom we ridicule often wax eloquently regarding the need to stay "fit and healthy," even though steroid use and drug abuse tend to run rampant within.
Attractive and muscular men, too, often make blanket assertions about the laziness and lack of drive of the "average bodied," even as they wrestle themselves with the impossible standard, often turning to science and synthetics to keep up appearances.

Even though we averaged bodied guys deeply resent the "undue" reverence the fit are given, we still desire them. Demanding that their chests be big, their shoulders waists tiny. Relentlessly ranking people based on body-type, closely resembling the "high school hell" many of us have tried to escape.

I recently oversaw my first calendar photo shoot during which pretty boys stripped down and posed with my passion, books. It had me thinking about stories we tell ourselves about the physical and how that message can be really destructive. It also opened up my eyes to the reality that everyone, even the "pretty ones" struggle with our toxic body culture. It does not serve us, and yet we diligently uphold it.

I don't have all the answers. I do however, have some suggestions for how we might create a healthier body culture:

Let's agree that no body is naturally more beautiful than another.

Our bodies have a social history, and what we value has changed over time... and will continue to evolve. We, as gay men and women, must do our homework and understand where this hyper-muscular and smooth body ideal came from.

In my opinion, an extreme transformation occurred during the AIDS epidemic: Thin meant you were most likely "wasting" due to AIDS and death was near. The pumped "healthy" ideal largely stemmed from early AIDS treatments, which relied heavily on steroids as a way to maintain weight, thereby adding muscle.

I do not mean to say every buff guy is some traumatized gay man duped by the system. What I am saying, let's understand that this ideal, at least partially, came out of intense trauma.

Let's value our bodies for what they can do, rather than solely by how they look.

While there is undeniable beauty in an Andrew Christian model, there is also beauty in a nurse's body whose hands are used for healing, or the writer's body who sits typing furiously to produce the next, great gay novel, or the professor's body that is moving around the classroom teaching the history of Stonewall, or the old man's body as he holds his life-partner's face in his wrinkled hands. They are all beautiful because they contribute to our collective well-being.

Let's take a more artistic view of the body.

In media such as literature, there are multiple forms such as literary fiction, mystery, poetry, creative essay, memoir, nonfiction, etc. No real writer of poetry scoffs at a novelist, because there is a mutual understanding that those art forms arise from different specialties, talents and interests. The novelist does not assume a poet is lazy, nor does a nonfiction writer assume that a fiction writer is stupid. They mutually respect each other for what each, individual writer is creating.

If we apply this concept to everyone, we would see an end to the assumption that average men are lazy and unfocused and fit men are stupid and vain. Recognizing that each is engaged in their own "art form" without the value judgement.

The body is a thing of wonder. It has carried us collectively through beatings and fence posts in Wyoming, through prison cells, castrations, lobotomies, bullets, rape, hunger and the other abuses our forefathers lived and died over to get us here. It will continue to bear us through the continued journey toward a world free of homophobia. It deserves to be loved and honored for that.

Let's love each other a little more and leave behind the toxicity of a body culture that hurts all of us.