Tag: Sistine Chapel

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.

 

The Old Rugged Cross

As an adult, it has always amused me that historically gay men (or men who were attracted to other men) inevitably became/were artists, and just as inevitably were commissioned to sculpt and paint and create religious art to adorn Catholic cathedrals and the palaces of the church hierarchy. I loved that they used their art and their patron’s money to create images of beautiful men in various stages of undress or nudity, but since it was within the context of a religious scene, it was okay. Even the crucifix inevitably shows Jesus in nothing more than a modesty loincloth, with his lean muscular frame carved lovingly to look beautiful and sexy. The eroticism of classic religious art, that competing duality of religious fervor and sexual ecstasy (look at depictions of the Ecstasy of St. Teresa sometime, if you want to see some straight up erotic imagery; I’ve always wanted to use “The Ecstasy of St. Teresa” as a title sometime), confused me as a child–it wasn’t until much later that I realized most classic and Renaissance religious art could be easily be categorized as “Revenge of the Homosexuals on a Repressive Institution”–but it also interested me. When I was a kid hungering for erotic masculine images, I could never go wrong with religious art.

I mean, this is on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel:

And don’t even get me started on depictions of St. Sebastian.

I love that they sculpted his pubic hair onto that last statue. Nice authenticity!

Someday I may write about St. Sebastian…or a boarding school named after him, which would be nice imagery for a queer crime/horror y/a set at such a place.

There was also a lot of homoerotic art in depictions of Greek and Roman mythology–the Laöcoön statue is one; and any depictions of Hercules/Heracles, Achilles, Apollo, etc.

And we’ll talk about Ganymede another time.

I was raised as a Christian, of the Church of Christ brand of Protestantism–and a hard, cruel, you’re-going-to-burn-in-hell-for-believing-anything-else faith it is indeed. I can’t speak to what that denomination is like outside of the South, or even Alabama for that matter–I did notice that the version in Kansas wasn’t nearly as hard or unforgiving; but still pretty unforgiving, in comparison to other sects–but I do know that where I am from, the Church of Christ is hard, rough, and sees a lot of stuff as sin. (Southern Churches of Christ are also very argumentative–which hardly seems Christian, does it? Members are always getting up in arms about something and wind up going to another congregation, sometimes having to move churches more than once.

And when I was about eight or nine, my grandmother bought me a copy of The Children’s Bible, which was filled with illustrations (amazing how all those Middle Eastern Israelites were white, and even some had blond hair and blue eyes)…and maybe (probably) it wasn’t the intent of the publisher, but there was some seriously homoerotic imagery in the book. About ten years ago I was thinking about The Children’s Bible and wondering whatever happened to my copy…and remembering some of the illustrations in it, I thought no, you can’t be remembering that correctly and so I went on eBay and bought a used copy.

And when it arrived, my memories were actually correct.

I mean, look at the muscles on Goliath. That image was burned indelibly into my brain, and it’s entirely possible my appreciation of muscles comes from….The Children’s Bible.

Perish the thought!

Grooming!

Indoctrination!

And of course, my favorite story in the book was David and Jonathan.

I mean, look at how they drew David!

I mean, it may not be Michelangelo, but damn.

(I also love that a Bronze Age Middle Eastern Jew somehow had pearly white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight.)

Though David has awesome legs in both depictions, seriously.

When I was a kid, I’d always reread the David and Jonathan story (can’t imagine why it was my favorite…). I wanted a best friend like David–I always saw myself as Jonathan, the supporting player, the way I always did–gorgeous and charismatic and beautiful and beloved of God. I would think about the story and while I was too young and innocent to conceive of it as anything other than friendship–the same way I thought of the “friendship” between Achilles and Patroclus in tales of the Trojan War–when I got older, whenever I thought about the story I wondered about how deep that friendship between Prince Jonathan and David son of Jesse was. Why include the story at all? It really doesn’t add a whole lot to the tale of David’s life, and did it really matter for King Saul to have a son who was David’s friend and great love? Jonathan dies–not even the Bible was immune from bury your gays–and David mourned him with a great grief that seemed a bit more than “my best bro died.” I wanted to write the story myself, despite my lack of historical knowledge of the period or even when it was actually set, but I wanted to write about their love, their falling in love–and let’s face it, God didn’t really seem to have a lot of problems with their relationship, did he? He didn’t come to David and tell him to stop giving it to Jonathan; God didn’t curse the two of them or punish Israel for it; and yes, Jonathan is eventually killed…but even then God doesn’t come to David and say, did you not read Leviticus? I could hardly let you go on fucking him forever, you know.

So, I guess I am supposed to read it literally and just think they were best friends and loved each other as brothers. Yeah, no. There’s absolutely no reason for this story to be included in the David story in the Bible; none, unless of course there’s a kernal of truth in the story (don’t come for me, I’ve never bothered to find out if the Bible’s Old Testament kings of Israel were real people; I do know that real people turned up in the Old Testament that existed in history–Babylonians and Assyrians, for example, as well as Egyptians)but the mystery for me of why this story was included, why it was included if its merely legend or why was it included if they were real is the real question. There’s no moral lesson to be learned from the story of their friendship; their love and loyalty to each other was an issue for Jonathan because his friend’s greatest enemy was Jonathan’s own father, a king anointed by God–despite God capriciously turning His back on Saul for really such an insignificant reason that it really just boiled down to God just liked David better; I always felt sorry for Saul–how much would it suck to lose God’s favor for no good reason? Just because God found someone He liked better? (And considering the things God forgave David for, or just overlooked, really makes the hard turn away from Saul that much more petty and bitchy.)

God’s kind of an asshole in the Old Testament, frankly.

But yes, I’d love to write this story sometime. (Because I don’t have enough else to do, right?) I’d also want to write it from Jonathan’s perspective, although the death would be hard to do (Madeline Miller managed it with Song of Achilles quite beautifully) story-wise; but is the kind of challenge I love. Maybe someday, and maybe writing it will help me in my constant and never-ending life quest to come to terms with the religious grooming drilled into my brain as a child. I even have a great title for it, too.

I also have a novel in mind revolving around Michelangelo’s statue of David, too; maybe I could combine research and do them at the same time. THAT would be a challenge, would it not?