Notes on the Gym Selfie
a current pinnacle of gay image culture
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how so many friends, lovers, crushes and strangers I follow on Instagram routinely post their gym selfies. Since almost all of them are fellow homos, gays, queers, nonbinary babies like myself, it set me to wonder about this quite contemporary phenomenon. Does the gym selfie have a specific formula or ideological meaning? Does it have a wish fulfillment built into it beyond simply Look at Me, Love Me, Want Me? That would make it no different from other images of self, per se, nor any different from non-queer image making practices. This essay is part 1 of a little digression inspired by thirsty social media images that I think conceal as much as they reveal. This week I’ll focus more on background/context. Next week on some actual examples to inspect/analyze.
It may be there is nothing uniquely gay to the gym selfie except the rehash of hateful stereotypes. Two such stereotypes go like this:
that all gay people desire (whether to have or be) big muscular (fatless) bodies;
that gay people remain pathological narcissists, hopelessly bound to the physical and therefore abnormally sex-obsessed, an old variant of the idea that queer people are foremost menacing perverts—compulsive, criminal, or worse.
Yet the gym has a history. Even a uniquely queer history. The word gymnasium is from the Greek, to work out or exercise naked. In fact, Western Philosophy proper could be said to have begun at an overpriced, trendy, upscale gym complex. Athenian socialized men (citizens, property owners, the sons of the powerful) worked out and yes did so naked. There they would fraternize, socialize, chew the fat, pontificate and so on. From such heterotopias Plato launched his academy, a word that means a building near or nestled in some nice scenic trees, a garden or grove removed from the city.
Cottagecore, anyone?
Today, we are still likely to picture the very idea of education, globally, as some form of this Arcadian archetype: colleges, universities, schools and ‘academies’ happen beside gated gardens, on well-kept grounds, over vast rolling greens. Even secluded oases can be erected inside dense metropolises, Columbia University for example. Yet imagine if we had to think of philosophy, the noble love of Wisdom, as beginning inside not an Oxford or Harvard, but an Equinox. Does that seem scandalous? (For many years I referred to Equinox as the Gay Death Star. It seemed like the most toxic elitist gay social space I could imagine. Of course, now I go to one.)
I first heard this from Ric von Schmidt. He lives in Cambridge. Ric is a blues guitarplayer. I met him one day on the green pastures of the Harvard University.
—Bob Dylan’s spoken intro to “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” from his debut album, Bob Dylan (1961)
Philosophy moves in abstract, disembodied circles in the West. It is strange to think of Plato’s gnosis, his retread of Orphic rites, his mystical geometry began amid bare flesh: while a bunch of hotties were lounging around in the buff, say, a locker room, or a San Francisco bathhouse (before they were closed). How would we have to reread Plato’s dialogues differently, which is to say, historically, given such knowledge.
Indeed, gymnasiums, Roman baths, cottages and castles, monasteries and so on are in some ways inescapable homosexual breeding grounds (pun intended) because in cultures/civilizations where the apartheid of the gender binary regime is so strictly enforced, conditions that describe almost all of Western patriarchy for the last 5-10 thousand years, you invariably create pockets of resistance. It becomes important to honor these spaces, these forgotten worlds, even though many of the noted ones submerged in the shadows of the archive seem to favor the privileged or privilege-adjacent: Cambridge, the Globe Theater, a local YMCA, Ivy League locker rooms, boarding schools, Broadway, Hollywood, Fire Island, and so on.
In almost all of these spaces past and present, the gym equals the promise and proof of surreptitious, fugitive queer life. Sometime in the 1980s, bear in mind I am no history expert or sociologist, Fitness Culture in the United States really took off. In the 90s, I grew up watching my father go to the gym, jog around a high school race track, eventually everyone else in my family went through phases of tagging along. My father brandished knee-high jogging socks, shoes that were special running shoes, and other vaguely athletic wear. He would tear t-shirts into tiny bands or strips to tie around his head, when not sporting a bandana. My mother on and off in the 80s and 90s would become taken in by this or that ubiquitous aerobics TV show: but Denise Austin was her true fitness guru. My brother bought a set of free-standing weights, dumbbells and barbells as well as a bench press. It was all stored in the basement and for a time, he would sojourn down there, a place no one really hung out, to get high, drink beer, lift weights with friends. Later, I realized he went through a phase of using steroids. There was some kind of talk about the danger of it shriveling your testicles, but I can’t remember how much of this is memory or my invention. This was right before his heavy drug use that would lead to his eventual rehab, hospitalization and schizophrenia diagnosis. But for a time, he had accomplished this impossible thing: an impressive physique. Meanwhile, I’ve always hated my body.