DONT LOOK AT MY BODY 😞😞😞

On gay male body image, crumbling infrastructures of self-love, and the things you do to feel better about yourself (a la, wearing a Speedo).

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I had wanted to get a pair of KVRT STVFF briefs. I had seen several of a certain style of man wearing them, the dot on the exclamation point of toned muscles and light chest hair (never any on the back, barely any on the thighs). “DESIGNED FOR ANYONE WHO FEELS CONFIDENT IN THEIR OWN SKIN,” the brand proclaims. “REDEFINING SEXINESS,” it says. I would agree with this — Their briefs are very sexy, expressed muted earth tones or very bright citrus tones. — but I don’t necessarily think that their idea of “sexiness” is anything that novel: these are wears for toned, largely tanned but white and cisgender masculine men who do not have any fluff when seated, who do not have any sort of worry that something may leak or stain from one of the various holes of their body, that they are a person from a distant future time whose body isn’t a question to constantly wonder but instead a statement, an afterthought. This is anti-body positivity: this is what it means to be a gay man.

I didn’t buy the briefs as I couldn’t rationalize spending nearly $150 on a pair of new swimming non-shorts that I wouldn’t be able to try on and that were as much fabric as a pair of socks. Mind you: I have never worn a pair of swimming briefs (Or “Speedo’s.”) ever in my life. The only reason that I was stalking KVRT STVFF was that it related to something that I had on my 2024 goals, the brand placed as a sub-heading to a main goal: buy a pair of swimming briefs and wear them. This goal was less a fashion statement but was more a promise to myself: by summer, I would build up the confidence to be able to be almost-naked in public. This would mean exercise but it really meant that I had to be comfortable with myself, that I had to commit to the exposure therapy of being a live nude boy in public.

Ten years ago, I would have punched myself in the face. In your twenties, you are perhaps at your most confident while having what is maybe your best body, all of which creates this supercharged “I CAN CONQUER THE WORLD!!” confidence. Twenty years ago? I probably would have understood where I was coming from, in that my body was on the other side of the equation, still being formed. Stringy or skinny, I resembled the nickname of “flaco” that my Abuela called me. There was nothing to like about my body, except that I knew I was successful in evading a constant that seemed to haunt me for no reason other than ancestral trauma: being “heavy,” as this was a quiet word passed around negatively since I had a “heavy” brother and many “heavy” family members. Did I mention I was a closeted gay teen in the 2000s? This also meant I wanted to be a model, that I longed for someone to notice me, to see me as beautiful (but also give me a modeling contract and seventeen million dollars). I still want those things, in ways.

Your thirties sees all of this settle — at least in the early half. You gain a confidence in adulthood and in your skin, feeling as if you’ve solved all of your problems. Then something happens: your body starts to break down. Things start to sag, parts of you look different, bulges appear, and you generally take on new shapes. You have to change your diet and be more consistent and intentional about exercise. This can happen at any time in a person’s life but, for me, it happened around the middle of my thirties and it brought with it a sort of dissolving of confidence in the physical sense. This is less because we all have bodies that change and more because I exist in conversation with the world of gay men.

I was once what have been culturally zoned as a “twink.” Once you become not-a-twink, having undergone twink death? You are judged by very harsh zoning laws, forced by the larger homosexual police state to choose a taxonomy and stick to it. Are you hairy but thin? You are an otter. Are you leaning more muscular? You’re a twunk. Are you getting fat? A cub. Are you getting fat and hairy? Bear. Are you getting hairy and muscular? Wolf. Very fat and not as hairy? Chub. Are you none of those? You are irrelevant, in the suburbs of desire, where you must build your own forms of community and attraction. These zones may come together for the purposes of something like Pride — but these zones aren’t porous. There is a “pick a lane and stay in your lane”-ness to the gay male body that drives many like myself crazy. This taxonomy, these semiotics, are as much cultural as they are sexual: they get at preferences, as what is or isn’t “respectable” to the gay male gaze. If you don’t fit in, you have to catch that bus to the outer limits, to the land of the queer, the unsexy, the uncool and irrelevant, the feminine and useless in the world of men and their bodies.