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Notes on culture
In Hollywood, on Instagram, and beyond, the male-to-male gaze decides what’s trendy and what’s not.
By Mark Harris
LAST FALL, I found myself facing a physical challenge caused by, among other things, spending a life running from my own body. My doctors informed me that to get bigger and stronger, I would have to surgically remove the air cysts. that I had placed around the word “aerobic training” for years. Now, the workout would no longer be optional and would have to be explained as more than just a brief dream walk on the treadmill while Bravo played quietly in the background.
Like many non-athletic homosexuals, I had entered and left the gym irregularly, satisfied to be there but not satisfied to be there, and not very eager to finish a minute longer than required in an environment that I still associated with various humiliations of my years of training. – being chosen last, withdrawn, feeling inadequate. None of this is particularly foreign to many straight men, but there is a difference: As a gay man, what I sought to avoid was not just physical fitness, but an entire universe of body symbol problems, exacerbated over decades. and molded and sculpted through popular culture, especially its gay edition, into tactics that have helped countless of my siblings look a little bigger and feel a little worse. This, as I had long confidently said, was not 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’ll find yourself despondently chasing your reflection at some point, and there’s also a good chance that you’ll end up, sooner or later, sweating. in a large area with masses of other gay men and loud music and too many mirrors, hoping it doesn’t end in embarrassment. This may simply be a dance club or a gym; It almost doesn’t matter.
My gym is rarely very gay, however, it is quite gay (the only heated argument between two men I’ve ever heard was about Taylor Swift), and when I walked into the weight room in midtown Manhattan for the first time, I felt relieved. . My position in the far north of my fifties meant that, when I am with younger men, I am necessarily cloaked in a cloak of invisibility. Still, there were mirrors on each and every wall, and I, when the smallest child of elegance (at least in terms of bicep girth), had to walk embarrassingly past a long row of large loose weights until they gave me a set, so small that they literally come in quite extravagant colors: the baby’s first. dumbbells. Welcome to any and all primal traumas I never wanted to revisit: As a Pet Shop Boys song that’s now older than some of the men in that room goes, “This will have to be the position I’ve waited for. ” years to get out. “
Do GAY MEN have a tortured dating culture? The answer is: it gets better! The other answer is: the scenario is not fast enough. On television, you can stream the 2023 Showtime limited series “Fellow Travelers,” in which the clandestine McCarthy-era trysts between a closeted gay man and his young lover are depicted in scrupulously observed period detail; That is, until actors Matt Bomer, 46, and Jonathan Bailey, 36, stripped naked for sex scenes and showed off muscle equipment that hadn’t yet been invented in the ’50s; They are no longer characters but actors, revealing bodies of the most productive educational and nutritional systems that money can buy. When the story jumps forward 30 years and Bailey’s character is devastated by late-stage AIDS, you can forgive yourself for the beside-the-point thought: “She looks pretty good. “
It would be a mistake to assume that this kind of anachronism is acting vanity when all the circumstantial evidence suggests it is self-protection. After all, we live in a time when the famous locker room shower scene from Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out” will not only be discussed and analyzed among gay fans, as it was in 2002, but will be photographed surreptitiously and uploaded without delay for publication. attended by a potential audience of millions, as was the case when the play was revived on Broadway two years ago. Who can blame some actors for choosing to show off a lean, fat-free body instead of big baseball guts? When 27-year-old gay pop star Omar Apollo can post a shirtless photo on social media and promptly be denigrated as “skinny” just because he doesn’t have the steroidal lattice torso of a Marvel superhero, we’re all shocked. You can forgive for feeling a sense of worthlessness. No wonder Andrew Scott, 47, looks terrified in the scene in Netflix’s new “Ripley” in which he has to walk along a beach on the Amalfi Coast wearing only a skimpy, tight suit: He knows exactly who is watching, judging and even. Training
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