The Gym Body and Heroic Myth.
As a young man I had a persistent fantasy about an all-boys summer camp where the athletic inmates had nothing to do except perform bonding rituals with me. Together, alone in the wilderness, we would perform heroic acts of friendship and become men. When I grew up and moved to New York, my wish came true. More or less.Last weekend I found myself bored (again) at another party in Chelsea with the same group of men I see out all the time. To avoid equally dire conversations on either side of me--to my right, an update on the changing size of celebrity rear ends; to my left, "industry" talk about next year's trends in jewelry design--I began digging through the coffee table books in front of me. Foreign Affairs and the Economist gave way to tomes on photographers William Wegman and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and finally something really worthwhile, the new Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly.
I began riffling through the catalog featuring Bruce Weber's now familiar parade of partially clad, square-jawed frat boys with blinding smiles and athletic bodies in pre-erotic poses. (All the clothes seem like an afterthought, as do the women placed in the margins.) To be honest, most of my attention was focused on the washboard abs, the wide, smooth chests, and the perfectly muscled backs of these beautiful young men, and for a moment I was back in the camp of my childhood imaginings. Before long the entire party had gathered around me in rapt attention, uttering only an occasional "Hold on a sec" or "Check this out."
The almost reverent silence in the room suggests that such images speak to gay men in a particular, powerful way. To be sure, the combination of athleticism and sexual readiness creates a potent image for many men, both gay and straight, as is apparent both in ancient representations of the male form and in modern merchandising. But the body style it represents--muscular yet slender, with "low body fat" the ultimate common denominator--is especially appealing to gay men.
I noticed most of the men at this party were themselves pursuing the same difficult ideal we were admiring in the A&F catalogue. It is replicated faithfully everywhere in gay life, from academic book jackets to gay pornography, and (to the extent that they're successful in their quest) finds itself imprinted in the flesh of Chelsea boys.
Before I start to wax rhapsodic about this physical ideal or its real-life manifestations, let me admit that I'm ambivalent about the place of this body ideal in gay life. I myself work fairly hard to achieve this ideal, and I look for it in others, but I'm not talking about my personal taste or style here. "Ripped," "swimmer's build," even "football type" (as defined in the gay world)--all are heading in the same general direction. I am more concerned about the motives behind the impetus to build this type of body in the first place. Of course it's shallow to care whether a man (including oneself) has a layer of fat around his middle. No doubt this body obsession can lead to commodification and manipulative advertising, steroid use and eating disorders. But while critics have pointed to these negative effects, they have often ignored the subjective experience of the men so engaged, assuming their motives to be purely sexual or narcissistic ones.
My contention is that the goal of these men is to turn their bodies into a heroic form that can be traced back to the ancient world and furnishes the model for gay perfection even today. This body ideal evokes not just lust or envy, but admiration, love, and awe. It is me back at summer camp looking up to the older boys, who were closer to the mysteries of manhood. It is an ideal that's meant to fulfill the highest aspirations of liberated gay men, shaped by myths associated with the pursuit of the good life in a more heroic age.
The perfected body has played a role in the central myths of many Western cultures, including ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, and the Soviet Union--and it has long been central to gay male culture. Abercrombie & Fitch models are only the latest avatars of the perfect male body. (Of course, no one person completely fulfills the myth, which for mortals is always just out of reach.) The body is the site of all this because it is a relatively malleable yet stable place to express these elements of myth. Compared to words or clothes, the body speaks in a low, steady voice.
I think there are excellent adaptive reasons gay men build these bodies, which serve as a potent symbol and instrumentality for getting through trying emotional circumstances. The closet is the ugly chrysalis of the heroic gay body ideal. The closet represents a theft of a man's early youth, when almost unavoidably he'll be bombarded with negative images of gay people. Not only is time lost, but important life events such as first love and first sex are often corrupted by shame and invalidated. For the youth to assume the mantle an adult identity, these stereotypes need to be resisted and countered. The myths of the closet are both terrifying and distorting, as we know all too well: that gay men are the opposite of real men; that they are men who have failed some rite of passage to manhood. They are doomed to be sickly, ineffectual, and frivolous. Their bodies are defective in some way, their desires out of control. Alternatively, they are sexless eunuchs who lack something essential.
For a gay person, entering the gay community after the experience of the closet can be both liberating and terrifying, like being rescued from drowning by a pirate ship. For the most part, young men are socialized in the bars and clubs--our version of "boot camp"--and this is true even today. When they arrive in the city, they desperately want to fit in, to find a place in some kind of community, perhaps for the first time in their lives. They enter this world hungry for attention, over-defended and mistrustful, and what they find can be rough. Leaving the closet and entering this new world means taking up an opposing set of myths, and the body is a focal point for the "little Stonewall" of each person's coming-out experience. To counter the closet's myth of effeminacy and weakness, the muscle body has become a central symbol in the rite of passage into this new world. On the crudest level, muscles can serve as armor to defend against the harsh conditions of the larger society--and those of the gay world itse lf.
ALL told, I have identified a set of ten myths that form the epic of the contemporary Gay Hero. The myths are about aspiring to manhood, overcoming difficult odds, playing the games we were told we couldn't play, living on our own terms, and triumphing in the end. Each man takes them up in his own way, and in many cases not using his body at all, but they remain alive somewhere.
The first myth is the Old Queen is Dead. She was our mother and she died of AIDS. By Queen I refer to the communal and personal history associated with gay life before the epidemic. It erases group memories of Liberace and Paul Lynde, the old clones, AIDS, and street activism. It's as if no one survived from previous generations and that the new generation is unique and alone. The body is saying unequivocally: we're not like those queens of yesteryear, and here's the body to prove it.
The Fountain of Youth myth, second, is a desire to be youthful again in order to accomplish the tasks left incomplete in the closet. Many gay men had a disastrous adolescence, not really developing as they should because they were living inauthentically. So life is postponed until at least one's early twenties. Acquiring this body is often a way men link up with rites of passage that have otherwise passed them by. Other adolescent behaviors such as serial dating, preening, and clothes shopping can be concomitant with this phase of gay life and building these bodies. Gay men are learning to show off and to admire each other's bodies, something they were denied early in life. Many people may be horrified by this aspect of gay life, but I think it's a necessary transition to adulthood, and the body is one way to achieve this. The bodies--and the vanity and sex and dating--are the manifestation of a second youth for many of these men, one that can be lived authentically and perfected. That the time allotted to ga y men has been truncated, there's a feeling of having to make up for lost time, and so the chase starts on one's twenties and continues well beyond. These muscles are bittersweet, late ripening fruit.
Closely related to the Fountain of Youth myth, third, is the myth of the Gay Coming of Age. I think since many gay men miss the familiar rites of passage into manhood, the gym provides a readily available and recognized method to achieve gay manhood. A new body accompanies this new life, symbolically leaving behind the sissy self and all the varied but related stereotypes that go along with it: straight-acting/straight-appearing, athlete, jock, buff, walking phallus. Weight and gravity are added to the man's build, and thus to his sense of importance, of substance, of gravitas. The athleticism missed in high school is made up for after one comes out. The body of steel, the machine, the citadel, all these hypermasculine attributes of the muscle body are part of why many gay men find it an attractive ideal. The bodies these men build are also masculine armor and symbolic weapons. To be sure, often this is accompanied by the fragile machismo that manifests itself in high school boys who are first feeling their m asculine oats.
The myth of Perfect Beauty is fourth. The combination of the two-way male gaze and late-blooming adolescent narcissism can be like a breeder reactor for vanity. A beautiful body is emblematic of a beautiful life. It represents the conquest and undoing of an ugly past and ugly stereotypes. I will never forget the first time I walked into a gay bar and discovered there were many men I found attractive. Perhaps this is the gay version of the myth of the ugly duckling, which most gay men can relate to. Needless to say, physical beauty often does not indicate inner beauty, a trap we all fall into at some point.
These bodies are an intentional expression, fifth, of the myth of Perfect Health. For gay men coming of age in the 80's, there was a continuous media drumbeat saying to them: "You will die young." The refutation of this myth is looking like you're in perfect health. Being buff is a sign that a man takes care of himself-not just at the gym but in the bedroom as well. At any rate, he doesn't look like someone who's going to die any time soon.
The Porn Star Boyfriend myth, number six, acknowledges that these bodies are being constructed largely for purposes of erotic attraction. Muscles are de rigueur as sexual bait in most urban areas now. The slogan that used to adorn the wall of a Chelsea gym--"No pecs, no sex"--has spread far and wide. Having been denied sex for so long in their closeted teens, gay men in their twenties often pursue sex at a fever pitch.
Related to this is the seventh myth, that of Celestial Bodies and Celestial Love. Seeking perfect love through the construction of a perfect body is part of this myth. Preparing oneself for the advent of Mr. Right, which has been so long in coming, becomes an obsession. The logic goes like this: "To find the perfect man, I must become the perfect man." Being boyfriend material, in short, means having a nice body, which one needs as a kind of dowry to be considered marriageable.
The Success Shows myth, eighth, is a variation on the old Puritan tune, God blesses his people with signs. These bodies outwardly represent a kind of wealth, a fullness in which a person has the means, discipline, the work ethic-and the leisure time-to perfect his body. It is a clean-cut, middle class body, symbolizing the final embourgeoisement of the gay community and its related aspirations. The values of the marketplace rule the central circles of gay life, perhaps to a disturbing degree, where the body is advertising and "knowing the price of everything" is a main principle of doing business.
Ninth, the myth of a Gay Utopia is elaborated by the arrival of various exclusively gay venues--"the circuit," Fire Island, the gay ghetto, the club scene--that present themselves as perfect gay communities, inhabited by the gay elite. One of the tickets into this demimonde is a buff body (along with the right clothes, the right education, and money). Being accepted into this world, which offers a sense of fraternity as well as opportunities for sex, drugs, and techno music, gives a man who may have been excluded in high school and college social life a sense that he's finally "arrived."
The myth of Triumph, tenth, is all about winning and looking the part. There is a Darwinian side to all this muscle, a symbolic representation of the survival of the fittest. The muscle cult clearly has a competitive edge, which can produce cruelty and pain within the gay community, but this competition is also an expression of the will to survive, to live, to overcome feelings of defeat and doom that prevailed in the closet. If living well is the best revenge, then so is having a beautiful body in a society whose adult members are overwhelmingly overfed and out of shape.
BUT is revenge what one is ultimately looking for? I think the body is a beautiful vessel and a powerful symbol, but it is also by nature frail and transitory. Eventually even the best bodies give way to gravity, part of the fleeting nature of all beauty. If the myths and the values these bodies express are only externalized, this is constructing an empty fortress, a triumphal arch in the midst of a desert. We are in danger of mistaking the bottle for the message inside. A sensible life course makes a place for the beauty of aging and the beauty of diversity. We need to make these myths come true in our lives and in gay life in general, not just on a few pretty surfaces in tiny private temples.
There must be a body politic for a community to exist and a story that goes deeper and wider than performative flesh. We need to create a robust, varied, and sustainable set of life possibilities using the essence of manhood, youth, eroticism, health, and camaraderie. Let us take up the myths, but not be ruled by them so literally. We need to explore beyond the ultimately weak walls of the flesh, to discover what real manhood is, real youth, and real community: in the end, real excellence. It is essential that we use, not only the body market, but also the marketplace of ideas, to transform our community into a more decent and pluralistic place, without being consumed by it. Replacing what is often a competitive war of all against all with a sense of common struggle and solidarity would be an excellent start.
John DiCarlo is a freelance writer living in New York.
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| Author: | DICARLO, JOHN |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Jul 1, 2001 |
| Words: | 2608 |
| Previous Article: | Body Double. |
| Next Article: | Living with HIV, 1992-Present. |
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