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Notes on the Culture
In Hollywood, on Instagram and beyond, the male-on-male gaze still decides what’s hot and what’s not.
Aug. 9, 2024Updated 11:07 a.m. ET
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.
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