We live in a misogynistic world which stigmatises and regulates femininity, and this reality is stamped all over gay beauty standards. But this is untrue not only is camp a political weapon, it’s way of being that was openly embraced by plenty of the pioneers that fought most vigorously for the rights LGBTQ+ folk we enjoy today. They plaster their dating bios with demands like ‘don’t be camp’ or ‘be a man!’ and, in turn, insinuate that campness is bad. But plenty of men project this pressure to ‘man up’ and expect it of potential partners. It makes sense that we could be running from stereotypes by bulking up our bodies, or even by appropriating masculine aesthetics like the handlebar moustache or the skinhead (both famously popular amoung gay men in the 70s and 80s).
“We go to the gym and turn ourselves into the tattooed hulks (or hunks?) our bullies wouldn’t have dared to bully.” “I guess it’s still, in part, a reaction against negative stereotypes of campness, which seem especially common in the context of school bullying,” he theorises. Gay and Lesbian Studies professor Gregory Woods agrees that there’s a fetishisation of hyper-masculine bodies in the gay community, but says he’s unsure that it can be linked back to physique culture. It’s not just body image, either 2016’s #GayMediaSoWhite hashtag illustrated a huge lack of diversity in gay media which seemed to explain the racism, femme-shaming and body-shaming so prevalent on LGBTQ+ dating apps. An often-cited 2007 survey found 42% of all men with eating disorders in the UK were gay despite us making up around 5% of the male population, whereas LGBTQ+ people of all genders were more likely to binge and abuse laxatives – which arguably ties into our increased rates of mental illness. The ‘jock’ isn’t the only archetype of gay male desire but it’s one of very few, and this narrow scope of gay beauty is doing us damage. His aim? To queer the notion that gay men were inherently feminine, something that was – and still is – weaponised against us.įinland’s subversion of hyper-masculinity cemented a radical legacy which lives on today not just in museums and books, but also in gay porn scenes featuring similarly Adonis-like men. Artists like David Hockney preserved the essence of physique culture through homoerotic paintings Tom of Finland ramped up the aesthetic exponentially, creating explicit artwork featuring giant-dicked policemen fucking on the streets. This fixation with physique only grew over time. With no X-rated mags to be found, gay men in search of bare flesh turned to bodybuilding magazines, some of which – most notably Physique Pictorial and Beefcake – became gay media staples in their own right, transforming everyday muscle men into objects of desire.
Our desire for muscularity can be traced back to the heyday of ‘physique culture’, which blossomed in the 1950s and 1960s when censors cracked down on gay porn. Ideals may have changed and expanded over the last few decades, but ultimately little has shifted – and research shows that it’s having a real effect on both our mental and our physical health.Ĭrucially, there’s historical context to these standards. It only takes a scroll through Grindr to see that a select few body types reign supreme when it comes to gay men: from oiled, glistening torsos to slim, hairless bodies, it seems our definitions of ‘beauty’ are fairly rigid within our so called ‘community’.