The boy sitting across from me is, by anyone's definition, beautiful. He's barely 18, with dark hair, dark eyes, long lashes, pouting lips. Anyone's definition, that is, but his own.
"I'm ugly," he says.
I am dumbfounded. this is what he's stressing about. Call it a case of typical teenage insecurity, but it's more than that.
"You're not," I protested. "You're very attractive."
I struggle with boundaries: how far do I go in detailing his physical beauty before I cross the line between advice and lust? But that particular dilemma is swiftly replaced by another.
"Here," he says, standing up and walking over to a bulletin board, where I have tacked up a photo, torn from a gay newspaper, of Mr. Gay Hotlanta 1994. "Here," he says, taking it from the wall and handing it to me. "I'll never have a body like that."
I take it and look at it, remembering the compulsion that prompted me to tear it out and tack it up. A thought strikes me hard: am I part of this boy's oppression? Have I contributed to his feelings of inadequacy?
And what should I tell him now? That of course he could have a body like that? That all he needs to do is work at it? Or do I take the opposite tack, and tell him that such bodies are not - or at least, should not - be the only barometers of beauty?
But I suggest neither. All I say is: "Who does?"
"Lots of guys," he tells me, and he's right. "I've got to start working out," he says, "or I'll never be attractive."
I flash on my own time in the gym, my pursuit of the ideal. It's the definition of that word - attractive - that is so troublesome. How much is subjective, at least anymore? Has that definition of attractive become so tight that everyone's excluded? I wonder suddenly if I was wrong: if by anyone's definition, the boy across from me might not be considered beautiful.
In a recent issue of Out magazine, columnist Michelangelo Signorile asked what kind of message we send to our youth as images of gay male beauty become more and more precise: hard, chiseled, buff, smooth. "Looking out at the hordes of shirtless, pumped-up men, each virtually indistinguishable from the next, it dawned on me just how much pressure is put on young gay men as they enter the gay community - more than ever before," Signorile wrote. "It's true that there have always been paradigms in the gay word, but it seemed in the past there were more choices, more leeway about what was considered a gay stud. Today only one very precise body type is acceptable - one that few gay men have or can achieve."
Some people say beauty is beauty - live with it. "There is a hierarchy of beauty," the late Michael Callen, activist, author, singer and flirt, said shortly before he died in 1994. "It is naïve or foolish to think that everyone has to be included in the aristocracy."
But the trouble is - how many gay kids fit that ideal? Or feel they ever will? How many gay kids are just the opposite, struggling through identity issues like being skinny, or socially awkward, or whatever? What does the image of the pumped-up pretty white boy - plastered all over our magazines, our advertising, our literature, and our erotica - say to the non-white or skinny gay kid, looking to find a place in a community that seems to have no place for people who look like him?
And it's not just the young. Several of my older [read, 35+] friends declined to accompany me to the big dances at the Stonewall 25 celebrations in New York last June. "But there will be lots of hot boys there," I protested, urging one friend to join me on board the U.S.S. Intrepid. "Precisely," he said, and I understood.
And yet, if it's oppressive, am I a part of that oppression by tearing out Mr. Gay Hotlanta and hanging him on my wall? How about when I choose a hunky blonde 20yo to go home with, instead of the more ordinary Joe closer to my own age?
Callen argued that taste is just a fact of emotion - it doesn't have to be "correct," and sexual taste "ought to be off-limits to charges of political incorrectness."
Our problem now, though, is that "Marky Mark and his kind" have become the only ideal, and it's an ideal that's become less and less attainable for most men. When we have such high standards of beauty, are we just running ourselves down? Are we oppressing ourselves as a community?
All this hysteria over buff perfection is making gay life a meaner place. On a recent night out in New York, for example, I and my friends outside a trendy club waiting for the "guards" to determine whether we were attractive enough to be let inside. The fact that we were [eventually] chosen over others in line produced an odd, artificial sense of triumph, as if we were somehow "better" because we had been deemed, by the powers that be, more "attractive" than the others.
Then there's the private sex parties that send scouts out to clubs, instructing that invitations to the after-hours sex fest be distributed only to the cute boys - that is, the boys who come closest to the ideal. Even some safe-sex party throwers like the OBoys! in Los Angeles, who by all accounts have made tremendous headway in helping a plague-weary population overcome sex negativity, have restrictions based o looks for attendance. At a Creating Change conference, Marshall OBoy! attempted to defend his group's policy of exclusion. "I like good-looking men and can't get hard around people who aren't," he said. "If you don't like what we do, why not start your own group?" As reported, the audience booed.
The OBoys! are blatant in their exclusion. But de facto discrimination occurs was well, in the advertising and media coverage that promotes the burgeoning gay party circuit. The message is clear: If you don't look like these bous, you can't come. And if you try, you'll fail.
Of course, obsession with beauty isn't new. There have always been ideals of beauty, and most people could never conform to them, says author and video reviewer Michael Bronski. "To be fair, we should blame it on the Italian Renaissance and not Mandate Magazine."
Bronski says he shouldn't feel guilty about his sexual taste; he should just recognize the implications such a policy might have on others. "The minute someone points out something where we should be more culturally sensitive, there's this cry of "political correctness'," he says. "People see it as an attack on them, a loss for them. But nobody's saying you can't find Marky Mark and his kind attractive."
But there's a problem: Despite being attractive, Marky mark and his kind aren't always available. So the more we find Marky Mark and his kind attractive, the less many of us have sex at all. And when we do, it's always the same, and we miss man kinds of pleasure. "the image is so clean and ultimately so safe and non-threatening that it doesn't allow for us to explore our sexuality, to see what the limits of our fantasies might be," says Bronski.
That's especially ironic within th egay community, whose movement began with a mission of sexual liberation.
It wasn't always like this. A friend, edging 50, tells me about his youth in the 1960s and '70s. He tells tales of long, sweaty nights of dancing, the scent of many men, one after another. He speaks about bondage, drag, urinals, college boys, police officers, and sex on the side of the road.
"There was so uch," he says, "such a variety." In the men, in the activities, in the way orgasms were achieved. "That's what it was all about: pushing our limits, sampling from the whole buffet, picking and choosing, taking chances."
Signorile adds, "Before, there were al lsorts of body types. Now there is only one."
"We've created a standard where eventually we all have to fail," says Victor D'Lugin, a political philosophy prefessor at University of Hartford. "We set up this system that's planned for us to fail. We are going to get old. Two summers in Provincetown, then it's over."
Bronski, Signorile, and D'Lugin agree that an overbaring gay ideal has been created lately - in gay porin, in advertising, an din th eclubs. "The image is muscular and very white and very young and very clean," says D'Lugin.
But it's even more specific than that. Young and buff are a given. The image is also smooth and hairless. "Hair means experience," Signorile speculates, "and experience means AIDS. So everyone feels this pressure to shave their bodies."
D'Lugin believes people want atotally conformist "healthy" look so people will think they don't have HIV. "That very cleanliness seems to imply there are certain limits with what one would do with that body," he says.
In 1970, my 50yo friend tells me, young gays were bent on liberating a population enslaved by a pervasive fear of sex. Nowadays, because of AIDS, young gay men seem more scared of sex than their straight counterparts [not exactly logical, since safer sex could virtually eliminate HIV transmission, but it's still the case.] And the way they avoid sex is to focus completely on the ideal, giving attitude to anyone who deviates from it - "No Pecs, No Sex" means "No Sex" which means "No AIDS."
Too simple a connection? Maybe just glaringly obvious. For as AIDS became more and more entrenched over the last decade, the ideal became more and more youthfully "healthy." Or at least healthy-appearing. "As our commitment to health and fitness got bigger and bigger, our images changed," Signorile says. "I do think tha tthe coming of AIDS changed the ideal, with people wanting to look the opposite of being unhealthy. It's trying to recapture a youth, an innocence."
Some of that attempt comes through in another way: which specific body parts are now prioritized in the erotic pecking order. That infamous slogan "No Pecs, No Sex" [an ad for NYC's David Barton Gym] is not just a reflection of gay men's increasingly body-conscious outlook, as a recent New York Times piece opined. It's also a clear refocusing of our sexual attention.
"I don't hear people talking about baskets and buns anymore," D'Lugin says. "We accentuate those areas that are sensous but not sexual - pecs, biceps, triceps, nipples, washboard stomachs. You can manipulate these areas without really having sex. At least baskets and buns deliver. Nipples do not deliver. They're suppose to be foreplay."
"It's an unwillingness to be directly sexual, to refer directly to what it is you want, a shying away from saying 'i want to ahve sex with you'," says Scott O'Hara, who publishes Steam magazine and is also a porn star. D'Lugin agrees. "As we become more fearful of sex, we show off more of our bodies, but in a redirection of energy. Instead of suckng and fucking, we're pumping. It's a way of having your body exposed, but in a safe way. In the 1960s and the 1970s, there wasn't this flaunting, this display, of the body. You took off your shirt in a bar, to be sure, but it wasn't on the dance floor. It was in the back room for sex."
But Doug Sadownick, an authour who conducts sexuality workshops for gay men, wonders if it's just about AIDS. He thinks our obsession with beauty could come as much from our own hurt and pain as any outside influence.
"The first thing that usually comes up [in my workshop] is a quiet and secret sense of hurt. The hurt over never being able to love completely, or having sexual relations when we want them - lots of profound disappointment over the way life has turned out." After a youth of rejection, we want to finally become one of Signorile's "hordes of shirtless, pumped-up men" - practically indistinguishable form each other, fitting in so completely that we end up rendering ourselves invisible.
What could be safer?
Signorile uses the term "bady facism" to describe the current hierarchy of beauty. And while that is clearly part of a wider obsession of beauty and yout h in th eculture at large, Signorile says, "it is much begger in the gay community than in the straight world." He explains, "I think it's part of the whole cultural experience we have. I think it's because we were all insecure, we all feel inferiour. One way we deal with that is to set up hierarcies of beauty. Gay men are made to feel effeminate, and that's seen as being bad. One way to feel superiour is to overcompensate in being macho."
Just as it seems the perfected ideal has become all-pervasive, there are signs that some are rebelling against it. For example, Signorile notes, "On America Online there's now a category [of electronic personal ads] that says 'Shaved Need Not Apply."
Porn star O'Hara agrees that th eimagery will cahnge again, moving away from the unattainable ideal and back to a more realistic - and multifaceted - depiction. "Body hair and other signs of maturity are becoming more fashionable," he says. Erotica based solely on idealized looks, he contends, results in a "homogeneity of product that is boring and insipid."
Whether the image may also become less white is not clear. The inherent racism in the prevailing ideal of gay male beauty is obvious: few porn films have mixed-race casts and advertising on gay magazines and for the party circuit rarely features hunky non-white men. "Once in a while [filmmakers] will fetishize something like Latin gangs," Signorile says, "but they completely miss the range." So nonwhites of whatever body type feel excluded, except as erotic fetishes or occasional exotic diversions.
"We need ot empower people who don't feel attractive," Signorile says. "I'm not saying that for vast numbers of people the club and party scene is not fun, is not great. But those who don't fit in need to see other images. Lots of people odn't see themselves in what they see of gay culture. The range of what's attractive needs to be expanded, or because it's a good thing we should do, but because the range really is broader."
"Ultimately this hierachy of beauty, and our participation in it, is wrong," D'Lugin says. "Socially, politically, ethically wrong. But ultimately why it's wrong is that we've limited our own sexual freedom. [People] are missing out on some potentially great sex, and the opportunity to discover their own sexual limits," D'Lugin says.
The ad for David Barton Gym says "No Pecs, No Sex." But that misses the main point: is our obsession with "Marky Mark and his kind" making all of us - including the buff boys - sexually unfulfilled?
- William J. Mann
