November 25, 1996
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November 25, 1996 |
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"No fats or fems" gym culture as patriarchic oppression
Some gay men's dance bars in San Diego offer reduced admission prices to patrons who produce a gym membership card at the door. Besides the fact that this is a way of actually upping the admission price (by getting you to buy a gym membership as well) and probably represents a corporate profit-sharing arrangement between the bars and gyms, it's also yet another way of enforcing the code of gay gym culture. Make no mistake, this code is every bit as oppressive, discriminatory, and destructive as any homophobic code of conduct. In fact, it is homophobic, as well as sexist, racist, classist, ableist, weightist, and looksist. It tells us that we have to look a certain way (young, muscled, white--if you're of color, the whiter looking the better; if you're white, the more skin cancerous a tan you have the better), that we should pay to look this way, and, even more insidious, that everyone knows that the most attractive men look like this.
No wonder eating disorders have reached epidemic proportions among gay men. After a while we start believing that certain body types unquestionably are the most attractive and desirable, as if we were born finding these particular body types attractive and desirable, not conditioned to feel this way. When we're confronted with the fact that different people might have different--and changing--criteria of attractiveness (and that these criteria are often culturally specific), these differences are often dismissed as unrepresentative or unworthy of representation.
Despite the strong connections in the US between the early gay political movement, on the one hand, and feminism and socialism on the other, gay culture today shows little evidence of having learnt much from feminism. Didn't the decades of feminist protest against beauty pageants make any impression on gay men? How many gay men have read Fat is a Feminist Issue? Whatever happened to the feminist critiques of patriarchy's structures of acceptable masculinity? Whatever happened to the recognition that these structures limit and hurt men as much as they hurt women? Why do so many gay men today seem so eager to uncritically embrace these problematic gender roles? Are we ignorant of history? Are we too young to know (if true, this is a reflection of the pathetic state of formal education in the US, and of the criminal lack of initiative we take in educating ourselves)? Are we apolitical? Are we just misogynistic? Are we victims of a coercive gay commercial culture? Are we caught between what we feel we should be and what we secretly want to be? Do we know the difference? Is there a difference? There are spaces for alternative models of gay desire and desirability: chubby chasers, bears, daddies, drag queens, radical faeries. Transgender politics challenge everyone to think about the arbitrary and also coercive nature of binary gender roles. But these politics, desires, and subjectivities are marginalized (and often pathologized) in contemporary gay culture. Have you noticed how Chi Chi Larue is an object of comedy when he appears in drag in his porn movies? That the drag characters in gay porn movies are never presented as objects of desire? Even the gay leather scene, which often prides itself on not kowtowing to the bland singularity of mainstream gay tastes and images, has joined in this femphobic rhetoric of uncritical masculinity and manliness. When it comes to older gay men, sex seems to be the big taboo as far as mainstream gay culture is concerned. How many gay films (not just porn movies, but gay films of any kind) have you seen that represent gay men over 60 as sexual, in sexual situations, and in explicit sex scenes (depictions of older gay men as predatory "trolls" don't count)? Mainstream gay male culture here needs to get a clue.
Ian Barnard is an associate professor of English at San Diego State University. He has lectured often on gender studies and queer studies. Barnard is originally from Johannesburg. Notes:
*Gay photos from the 1950s often posed as "athletic" and "straight" (photo 1, © Jim Peron);
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Ian Barnard thinks the "healthy" look has nothing to do with health, but everything to do with discrimination and homophobia
Gay male gym culture today has nothing to do with looking or feeling healthy; it has everything to do with prescribing the goal of gay beauty, or of desperately trying to conform to this prescription. And it's a crucial part of creating a narrow norm of gay male attractiveness and desirability (mainstream gay porn movies, magazines, and newspapers also make their contributions, of course). God forbid that you should be fat.
This gym code is homophobic and sexist because it embodies a completely uncritical acceptance of hegemonic definitions of gender roles, of what it means to be male, and of the criteria for acceptable masculinity (as exemplified in the common gay classified ads that proudly proclaim their author as "straight acting"and demonize "fats and fems").
The situation is the same in South Africa. Gay male femphobia is as rampant as it is in the US. Gay male gym culture is as hegemonic in South Africa as it is in the US. And the warning in personal ads is as threatening: "no fats or fems" and then "no chancers" so that the message is clear: "You must be straight-looking" and above all "straight-acting"