The perfected gym body has become a universally recognized icon in contemporary gay male society, and the internalization of this body image has had a widespread impact upon how many gay men feel about themselves. As a psychotherapist with a predominantly gay male clientele working out of Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, I often hear clients talk about body image, the gym, and being "buff," and how their image of their own body affects their self esteem, their sense of well-being and of fitting in to the gay scene. The intense interest in and, at times, obsession with this body image warrants examination, both in terms of its potential impact the individual's sense of emotional and psychological balance and upon the gay men's community as a whole.
For at least the past twenty years gay men have been flocking to gyms, working out and bulking up. But for all the physical and psychological advantages of keeping fit, the pressure to have a "gym body" can cause psychic distress for many men. Working out can become an unhealthy obsession that's facilitated by a distorted body image, regardless of any initially healthy reason behind the interest in fitness. Today, a significant number of gay men are using to gain a degree of muscle impossible without this chemical assistance; and they become huge. Even so, there are some men who never seem to be satisfied with how big they become.
Bob Bergeron, is a New York psychotherapist who works with gay men who use steroids. Bergeron has found that individuals who abuse steroids almost always suffer from a distorted body image. They often feel that even after several years of using mega-doses of steroids, they still don't experience satisfaction in the way their body looks, or in the size of their muscles. And once they stop a cycle of steroids, they feel their body has dramatically reduced in size, and that their workouts aren't as powerful as when they were taking steroids. Some are so obsessed with getting bigger that when they are done with one cycle of steroids, they begin another one immediately.
One danger of using illicit steroids is the lack of quality control in the purity of the drugs.(Physicians may prescribed steroids under some circumstances, but most people purchase them illicitly from personal trainers or dealers.) Some varieties can produce labile emotional states that are quite powerful, and this may occur even when the steroids were prescribed by a physician. For individuals with mental or emotional disorders, the use of steroids often creates or exacerbates mood swings, which result in a person feeling depressed and/or anxious and manic. One of the most common reactions is "roid rage," in which a person suddenly flies into an inexplicable and intense rage. And yet, as I've discovered with several of my patients, people on steroids often don't make the connection between "unexplainable" mood swings and steroid use.
It is typically after experiencing a negative physical or psychological reaction to steroids that a man seeks psychotherapy. Bergeron finds a "harm reduction" approach to be useful in therapy with men who use steroids. Rather than trying to convince a person to stop using steroids, he helps the patient figure out what he physically and psychologically gets from them. That way, he can start to develop strategies for replacing the steroids with something else in his life.
For as long as I have seen gay men as psychotherapy clients, they've worried about not being able to find a man who will love them. But currently almost every time I hear this worry, it's accompanied by the rationale that what keeps one unhappily single is being too heavy, too thin, too old or not having a gym body. I have worked with grossly overweight men with severe eating disorders who sought therapy to help them understand their difficulties with their weight. I've also worked with men whose bodies were lean yet who were still obsessed about losing more body fat, obsessed that they weren't getting results from all that time at the gym, or that their percentage of body fat was more than 10%. These men have such distorted views of their bodies that they feel fat or out of shape because they're still as buff as the men who populate gay men's periodicals. Some of these men who have perfectly good bodies and low body fat, present themselves in ways reminiscent of anorexic girls or young women. They have completely distorted views of their bodies, always think of themselves as fat; many have eating disorders.
It wold be simplistic to equate this current fashion for lean, gym bodies with "body fascism," as some gay social critics have called it. There are numerous complexities involved with the focus many gay men have on bodybuilding. In the 70s, many gay men were slim. There were a few very well built and muscled men, but they were a minority. As HIV ravaged the gay community in the 80s, people with AIDS wasted away frequently looked gravely ill. It's no coincidence that the interest in pumping up by gay men began during the early days of the epidemic, at least in part as a response to what was happening in our community. In an effort to stem AIDS-related weight loss and wasting, physicians began to prescribe steroids, testosterone and human growth hormones. The onset of combination antiviral drugs brought countless PWAs back from the brink of death. Weight training in combination with these drugs made it possible for men who had once been gaunt or even cadaverous to develop into imposing hunks.
In addition to the medical reasons for keeping fit, a pumped up body also became a symbol of health. A lot of uninfected gay men go to the gym, and keep fit as a way of underscoring the fact that they are not ill. It has also become the standard for being physically attractive and sexually desirable. Getting pumped can be a tangible way for gay men to regain control of their bodies and feel strong and powerful in the face of a health emergency as well as a sometimes hostile society. For the ever-growing numbers of long-term HIV-positive survivors, the ability to do strenuous aerobic exercise, lift weights and bulk up is a potent and visceral way to remind people that they are not ill. Many people living with HIV experience a sense of emotional as well as physical well-being as a result of regularly exercising and seeing their bodes respond to time spent at the gym.
Still, there remain the large numbers of gay men who use the current standards of fitness and body image to put themselves
down, and feel that they'll never measure up or be found attractive enough to be boyfriend or partner material. Upon
exploration, these feelings of inferiority, of being less valuable than other men because of not being built up, often turn out to
be rooted in internalized homophobia. One man expressed such feelings as follows:
"I was always a skinny kid who felt different for not being athletic and knowing that I was queer. Even though, I have no
desire to bulk up, I still feel different today, as if I am not properly queer since even now that I am fully out, have accepted
my homosexuality and built a life as a gay man I don't even feel that I fit into gay society since I do not have, do not want to
have and don't want a partner who has a gym body."
A current client who sought treatment for his profound depression uses his workouts as a gauge for how he feels about himself. At first I thought this sounded appropriate. But as we explored the specifics of his exercise patterns, he described needing to be able to do three hours of intense cardio-vascular exercise at least five times a week prior to doing about an hour with weights. Upon learning this, I suggested that perhaps his patterns of exercise were symptomatic of deeper psychic constructions. His inability to return to the gym was an understandable indicator that the first antidepressant he was prescribed was not helping ameliorate his depressive symptoms, and I urged him to tell his psychopharmacologist this in order to try a different antidepressant. Once he was able to resume working out and his recovery from depression was secure, we began to look at the meaning and purpose of such vigorous workouts, and discovered that his use of exercise was a defensive structure that kept him from meeting other men for friendships or dating, both things he professed to want, but by which he was admittedly terrified.
Exercise, fitness and being "buff" have a high currency in contemporary American culture at large, and in gay male culture in particular. Some gay men feel exhilarated by the changes they have been able to achieve in their looks and sense of themselves by regularly exercising. Others, however, feel tyrannized by pressures to conform to the current style of gym culture and the cult of the body that dominates urban gay America. While acknowledging the value of this aspect of gay culture for both health and self-esteem, we need to come to terms with its downside when the culture of the body is pushed to an extreme.
Key Words: homosexuality, gay men, fitness, gyms, steroids, body image