Tag: Metroflex

Muscles

Ah, the gay obsession with muscular bodies. It goes way back into the past; the Greeks always showed men in their art to illustrate perfection—gods and heroes—as muscular and lean and physically proportioned. The emergence of gay artists during the Renaissance sparked a revival of an ideal male form since they took most of their inspiration from the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome (which essentially plagiarized almost everything of Greek culture). Leonardo and Michelangelo and other great artists, regardless of sexual orientation, always somehow got away with depicting nudes etc in art by using Biblical or other mythological sources; the influence of queer artists can be seen in every cathedral in Europe—look for the nudes. (I’ve always loved that Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with hot male nudes depicting Bible scenes.)

And of course, Michelangelo’s David set a standard for male physical beauty for centuries.

I often wonder how much cultural and societal influences impact our own tastes. I’ve often mentioned how I don’t have a type; people always assumed I did, but I never have. I appreciate men I find beautiful, of course, but just because I find aesthetic beauty in someone has never meant I wanted to fuck them. I’ve always been attracted to all different types. My attraction to bears, for example, I know comes from a childhood obsession with professional wrestlers (which will be addressed in another entry, about the evolution of professional wrestlers’ bodies). Anyway, if we are perpetually bombarded images and told this is what is attractive, do we change our tastes?

I’m not going to lie: I have always liked muscles—but they aren’t necessary; no one has to have a perfectly sculpted body with high vascularity for me to find that person attractive. Perfect male physiques have become so ubiquitous now, with OnlyFans and reels and videos and TikToks and so forth; I think it’s great these young men have find a way to make money from their looks, and more power to them…but the more I see those perfect bodies the more humdrum and alike they all start to look, like The Stepford Hunks (which would also make a good title for a satirical story or novel sometime).

And muscles serve mainly as visuals for fucking, anyway.

The year I turned thirty-three was really the pivotal time, a turning point, in my life.

I was thirty-three and still single, and the only gay relationships I’d had at that point weren’t really relationships; they were, actually, borderline abusive and only served to convince me all the more that I was destined to be alone and miserable–that maybe I was actually better off alone. It was time to make changes…the only thing I had control over was myself–I couldn’t make my job better, I couldn’t improve my finances, and if I was weird-looking in the face, I couldn’t do anything about that either. I was losing my hair and I basically thought you’re too old to find a partner now, so you’re just going to be alone for the rest of your life, so make the most of it.

The first thing I looked at was my physical self. I wasn’t in shape and hadn’t been since I stop cheerleading in college. That was something I could change (I also identified several other areas in which I could change–including my attitude, and started working on those), and so I decided I was going to live healthier. I was getting older (laughable now) and I knew the longer I waited, the harder it would be to change my physical self (as I am finding out now for sure). I had joined gyms before but had never stuck with it more than a week or so, paying them for a membership I didn’t use for at least a year before I could quit–which was also a bad financial decision.

So, rather than joining a gym, I decided to be smarter. I got out the Abs of Steel tape I’d bought and never used (it was still shrink-wrapped) and told myself, okay, if you do this workout three times a week and do push-ups with it, and can do that every week until New Year’s, then I will go ahead and invest in joining a gym again. Any exercise was better than none, three times a week was better than two, twice better than once, and once better than none at all. I wrote that in sharpie on a note card and taped it to my bathroom mirror so I had to see it every time I went in there. I changed the way I ate (simplifying my diet to “nothing with three or more grams of fat per serving”, started drinking skim milk, using fat-free everything and eating more salads and vegetables and turkey sandwiches. I had dropped from 210 pounds in August to 170–and the change was not only dramatic (forty pounds is a lot to lose in slightly less than four months) physically but also emotionally.

And so, I joined a gym.

It was a new, gay gym in Tampa at the time, Metroflex, and it was convenient because it was on my way to work. I could take the work uniform with me, workout, shower, change and head to work. It was very convenient, and I worked out three days a week: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. My trainer, whose name I forget now, was really good and thorough–he explained things, which was something I’d never ever, not even when I was an athlete back in high school, really understood about working out. And…I started getting into the weeds by reading diet and exercise books.

One thing I did notice, though, as I was losing weight was how differently people treated me. I’d never really paid much attention to it before, other than the way guys in bars would avert their eyes when ours met–which I just took to mean as blech gross why are you even here–and it was hard to get a bartender’s attention. I stayed out of bars when I was doing that first diet-and-exercise change that fall, and when I went back I stopped drinking alcohol, sticking to water but eventually going back to Bud Lite, but once I started going again after the weight loss…I never had to wait for a drink because as soon as I walked up to the bar, the bartender was right there. People smiled at me a lot more. I got treated treated better in restaurants and stores by the staff–even passengers at the airport were friendlier and nicer than they used to be.

I found that to be very interesting from a sociological point of view; a little experiment in human behavior, if you will. Other things started happening, too, all of which was very much a boost to my fragile ego.

And thought about writing an essay called Looks Don’t Matter and Other Lies.

I also liked the attention. I liked being flirted with and bought drinks in gay bars. I loved being treated better, but at the same time I had to be careful. I have some obsessive tendencies–part of the faulty brain wiring–and my tendency to judge myself very harshly was a dangerous combination that led to some really unhealthy habits with food and eating–I often will skip eating without a second thought, and often when I travel I forget to eat, and get sick. I also don’t see myself in the mirror the way I actually look; body dysmorphia. I always worried I was overweight, and I also wanted to get bigger–you see how those two positions are diametrically opposed to each other–but it was all a part of the whole parcel of self-examination and evaluation with the intent to make positive change.

But as my life began to change and improve with my new approach to life (I was also writing again), I attributed a lot of it to the changes wrought by my exercise devotion. I was so much happier, had so much more energy, and felt better overall. I also met and fell in love with my life partner…and realized several things: I did not want to work in the heterosexual world anymore nor did I want to spend a lot of time in it; and the best thing for me to do, the thing that made the most sense, was to become a personal trainer to help other people reset their lives and take a holistic approach to working out—mind, body, spirit—that would be more effective, and also I could charge enough per hour being a trainer that I could do it part time and spend the rest of the day writing.

I was a good trainer, too.

So, that’s what I did. I also started writing a fitness column for the local gay paper, and for other national glossies. It wasn’t the kind of writing I wanted to be doing, but getting a clip file was important for writers starting out back then, and I stayed committed to my own workouts, even after I stopped working as a trainer.

I can also happily say that since I left the travel agency here in New Orleans in 1997, I’ve never worked in a hetero business ever again.

Injuries and getting older have messed up my working out since about 2011, but I am hoping that once I get past this rehab of my arm I will be able to do regular, harder workouts again and get back into better shape.

 

Round and Round

So, I did it. I went to the gym yesterday for the first time in months, and God knows when the last time I went without a trainer appointment. I am very proud of myself for taking this first step, and I have to remember to stay motivated. It felt fantastic. I’d forgotten how great endorphins feel. I went in, and did some stretches before heading to the weight machines. I went all the back to my origins (something I seem to be doing a lot this year), and started doing my work outs the way I did when I first got back in shape way back in 1995: a full body workout (chest, back, shoulders, biceps, triceps, leg press, and calf raises, then abs and cardio) and did low weights, tried to not overdo it, and only did one set of 15 on everything. I will go up to two sets of everything on the fourth workout; three sets on the seventh, and up the weights on the tenth, and then on every fourth thereafter. I am not concerned about gaining size; this is more of a cardiovascular than strength workout. Maybe by the summer I might change to something more muscle building, but any workout with weights is going to gain some size. I’d like to hit my goal weight of 200 by July; we shall see. I also am not certain what that is going to do to my build, to be honest. But I can adapt…and posting publicly about this is also going to shame me into being more consistent.

And this morning I still feel good; I can tell I exercised, but am not sore. Yay! SO lovely to know I am doing it right. It’s hard to believe that it’s been so long since I learned about the body and how to exercise properly. I wonder–yes, I just googled my old gym in Tampa; it closed in 2003 and was still owned by the same person when it closed as when it opened. Good ole Metroflex and Alan. When I wrote Murder in the Rue Dauphine I based the gym Chanse worked out at on Metroflex; I even named the manager Alan. I’d completely forgotten about that until just now….

We watched I, Tonya last night and really enjoyed it. I have a lot of thoughts about it, but I’m going to let them digest for a few days before I post about it. The cast is excellent, and I think the movie is, too.

I have lots I want to get done on this holiday Monday; I am making an excursion to Metairie, and have lots of writing to do, and lots of editing, and tons of emails to anwer and get caught up on.

The Short Story Project continues. Yesterday I read the first story in Sue Grafton’s Kinsey and Me, “Between the Sheets”:

I squinted at the woman sitting across the desk from me. I could have sworn she’d just told me there was a dead man in her daughter’s bed, which seemed like a strange thing to say, accompanied, as it was, by a pleasant smile and carefully modulated tone. Maybe I’d misunderstood.

It was nine o’clock in the morning, some ordinary day of the week. I was, I confess, hungover–a rare occurrence in my life. I do not drink often or much, but the night before I’d been at a birthday party for my landlord, Henry Pitts, who’d just turned eighty-two. Apparently the celebration had gotten out of hand because here I was, feeling fuzzy-headed and faintly nauseated, trying to look like an especially smart and capable private investigator, which is what I am when I’m in good form.

My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m thirty-two years olds, divorced, a licensed P.I., running my own agency in a town ninety-five miles north of Los Angeles. The woman had told me her name was Emily Culpepper and that much made sense. She was very small, one of those women who at any age will be thought “cute,” God forbid. She had short dark hair and a sweet face and she looked like a perfect suburban housewife. She was wearing a pale blue blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a heather-colored Shetland sweater with grosgrain ribbon down the front, a heather tweed skirt, hose, and Capezios with a dainty heel, I guessed her to be roughly my age.

“Between the Sheets’ is a delight, if for no other reason than the fact that it’s actually a traditional mystery story; one that is solved by viewing the crime scene, interviewing people, and observing the clues left behind by the killer and making deductions. This is particularly fun because the Kinsey novels are hardboiled style private eye novels, tough with sparse prose and told from Kinsey’s slightly cynical, world-weary point of view. This short story, still in that voice, though, has several moments os humor, and could easily have been an Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason story, or an Agatha Christie–although Christie’s short stories always seemed to me to border on the noir side.

The other story I read was “Barn Burning” from The Collected Stories of William Faulkner, an enormous volume I’ve only occasionally dipped into:

The store in which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of  cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish–this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little but of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy (our enemy, he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and him both! He;s my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word yet:

“But what proof have you, Mr. Harris?”

Faulkner is one of my all-time favorite writers; his “A Rose for Emily” is one of the greatest short stories ever written–if not the greatest–and both Sanctuary and The Sound and the Fury are works of art most writers can only aspire to. There’s no sentimentality in Faulkner, at least not to me; he doesn’t romanticize poverty, he doesn’t romanticize the rural Southern experience, nor does he write about heroic figures. He writes about damaged and flawed human beings, and while his work is called “Southern Gothic,” I’m not sure if gothic is the right word. For me at least the descriptor gothic conjures up an entirely different image and style of story and writing. Reading Faulkner reminds me of home, reminds me of relatives and summers spent in rural Alabama, of orange-meat watermelons and fireflies and  four o’clocks and screen doors and ticks on dogs and red dirt and big red Coca-Cola coolers with a bottle opener on the side. “Barn Burning” is told from the perspective of a young boy, Colonel Sartoris Snopes, and opens with his father being found not guilty, for lack of evidence, of burning the Harris barn after a dispute about a loose hog; but despite the lack of evidence the Snopes family is banished from the county and sent on their way to the next sharecropping farm, where things go bad yet again, but this time Sarty can’t let it happen. It’s about learning the difference between right and wrong, and learning that sometimes loyalty to blood simply because of blood isn’t enough. It’s a terrific story, with great imagery and beautiful language use, and yes, reminded me of my long love affair with Faulkner’s work. He’s not easy to read by any means; but so worth the effort.

And now,  back to the spice mines.

tumblr_o5h18dblnH1uzn77yo1_540