AT WHAT PRICE BEAUTIFUL?

Has the gay pursuit of the perfect body become a deadly obsession?

What is the proper balance between health and obsession? For many gay men and lesbians, the question is more than academic. Everyone wants to be fit and healthy, but sometimes it is all too easy to move from being health-conscious to health-crazed. A lingering (if false) sense that being gay is somehow less than perfect can lead people to overcompensate in ways that are dangerous to both body and spirit. For them, just being gay is not necessarily enough. Too many men are caught up in drugs and the quest for the perfect body. Not all the news is bad, however. Many of us are trying to strike the perfect balance for optimum health. Lesbians, in particular, are turning to technology to conceive children together and deepen their own commitment. The following stories offer an in-depth examination of that trend and the others facing gay men and lesbians today.

Tell Martin Lewis that a gay fitness craze is afoot, and the Boston exercise expert cringes. "I'm really cautious about putting a bad light on it, which is what you do when you say `fitness craze,' because I'm trying to encourage people to go to the gym to improve their quality of life," says Lewis, an exercise physiologist and registered nurse who care owned a business that provided personal training at health clubs throughout Boston and now develops exercise programs for people with HIV. "You say that, and all anybody ever thinks of is that exercise is only for a certain superficial group of shallow people, only for people who want to have sex in the saunas, only for people who want to go to circuit parties and party all night."

Tell Dawn Atkins, an authority on body image, about that same fitness craze, and it makes her cringe for an entirely different set of reasons.

"It's about time the media started paying attention to the issue of our obsessions with our bodies because people are literally dying from it," says Atkins, who edited the anthology Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities, published earlier this year. "I wish people were exercising because they hear that it's good for them, but I doubt it."

While Atkins doesn't condemn exercise per se, she says she is alarmed that "some gay people exercise to the extent that they damage themselves." But Lewis and others in the fitness industry say people like that are a tiny minority unworthy of hogging the spotlight when the issue of working out arises.

Therein lies the conflict surrounding the latest upswing in gay and lesbian fitness, as with every fitness fad that preceded it. Nobody disputes that gay men and lesbians are flocking to gyms: in greater numbers these days, but whether the motivation is wholesome or harmful is a matter of strong contention.

The argument reached an apex last year when Paul Falaschi, a 25-year-old personal trainer in San Francisco, became so obsessed with attaining the perfect body that he underwent liposuction, only to die of a blood infection four days later. "He had absolutely no body fat whatsoever," San Francisco health commissioner Ron Hill, a friend of Falaschi's, told the Bay Area Reporter. "I hope that if anything positive can come out of this, it's that gay men take a real hard look at being OK with themselves the way they are."

But it appears few have heeded Hill's call. "I don't know statistically, but compared to where people seemed to be ten years ago, I know almost every patient I have is signed up as a member of a gym," says San Francisco psychiatrist Bob Cabaj, editor and chief writer of Textbook of Homosexuality and Mental Health. "Certainly there's not even a comparison to be made to 20 years ago."

Cabaj is among those who say that the burst in barbell bench-pressing and treadmill traffic is tied to unhealthy pressures to fit in. "Ideally, the healthy side of it is just that--health. But in many cases they're [fighting] the image of the sissy that most people think gay men are. Gay men are so afraid of this image."

Atkins adds that several essayists in her book lament a gay scene in which looks impact "admissions to bars, how men are treated by other men, the fact that older men are called things like `trolls.' This causes serious discrimination, this belief that gay men can be acceptable only if they're somehow perfect."

The fallout from this fitness craze can be extremely dangerous for gay men, ranging from traditional eating disorders to a recently named syndrome known as body dysmorphia disorder, in which people overexercise in pursuit of an unattainable figure. While these side effects are nothing new--studies from the mid 1980s show gay men are disproportionately represented among men with eating disorders--the current surge in the stylishness of exercise among gay men has reawakened old concerns.

For lesbians, the fitness infatuation has brought rise to an age-old friction between lesbian feminists who rail against the beauty paradigm as damaging to women and those accused of trying to assimilate into the mainstream by looking the ideal expected of straight women. "It's not as important to me how many people are exercising, but there's a level of intensity out there that has come into this community that says you're not OK if you don't work out," Atkins says.

Questions also are being asked about various nutritional products, including energy boosters and vitamin supplements, as well as the increasing popularity of steroid use. "The steroid craze is pretty bad," Cabaj says. "I've seen that explode in the last five or six years. Used to be, there wasn't as much. It was the rare person who had the incredible body, but now everybody has to."

Still, many fitness professionals point out that there is little research data to prove the prevalence of these addictions and disorders among gay men and lesbians. Nutritionist Charlie Smigelski, who provides counseling at Boston's Fenway Community Health Center, says he's not observed the trend reported by Atkins and Cabaj and has not heard any horror stories about over-the-counter nutritional products. "I don't think there's too much out there that's poisoning anybody," he says. "If there were, it would have happened already, and there would have been a big harangue about it in the press."

Indeed, Smigelski and others involved in the fitness field have a vastly different take on the issue, claiming that the new wave of gay gym rats may be predominantly people with HIV or AIDS who are discovering that exercise can keep their immune systems strong. This incentive is the opposite of a belief earlier in the epidemic that those with the virus risked compromising their health by exercising because the stress might weaken them. Now experts believe that working out, at the very least, "breaks the cycle of exhaustion" many HIV-positive people become mired in, says Colleen Corcoran, a nurse practitioner at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital.

Corcoran heads a first-of-its-kind research project examining the impact of exercise and testosterone on HIV-positive men. The 50 men in the study, half of whom are taking testosterone, exercise three times a week under supervision of a physical therapist who acts as a personal trainer. Results from the study won't be published at least until fall 1999, but Corcoran says, "I have seen a lot of guys who have come back and feel much, much better, whether or not they're on testosterone." The unusual fat buildup experienced by many people taking protease inhibitors is another motivation to work out, Corcoran says.

The same motivations are observed by Craig Greenberg, general manager of the predominantly gay Chelsea Gym in New York City. Greenberg says the mind he's observed is that people are including more cardiovascular and aerobic exercise and less weight lifting in their regimens. "[Our customers] just want to take care of themselves," Greenberg says. "It's true that everybody who works out wants to keep themselves youthful, feeling good. But the overriding concern is not `I've got to work out to go to the parties.' That's a small section of the people."

No matter what side of the issue they fall on, most experts have thoughts on the media's role in this fitness boom. Cabaj, for instance, says that the proliferation of body-beautiful icons in the gay press and the availability of such imagery in porn videos and on the Internet contribute much to what he sees as a problem with body image. "Most of the time it's the gym-active, party circuit-active young people who make the covers of the gay press," Cabaj says, reciting a common refrain.

But Lewis says, "Look, this is something that is good for you. Yes, people have always been inspired when they see a perfectly chiseled body or a beautiful torso. If you're not captured by advertising, you may never set foot in that gym. But that alone is not going to sustain that activity. It takes a lot of work to get to that point, and most people find they don't, want to do it."

Atkins, while noting that the gay media in particular "has a disproportionate amount of power" over how gay men and lesbians perceive themselves, acquits the media of acting alone in creating the hype surrounding largely unrealistic goals of physical appearance. "The media reflect back what we want to see. Why does The Advocate put that picture on the cover? Because that's what they think people want. It's not one-way. It's two-way. It is a joint project."

Friess is a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.