Body Politics

Not Safe For Work: Fatscapes, Dave Hickey meets BAP, and some unpolitically hot guys

As part of my search for an answer to the question, “What happened to gay media/men?” I bought a few hundred copies of OUT—a main(stream) glossy gay (and technically also lesbian, but in most issues you wouldn’t notice) magazine that started in 1992 and still (technically) exists, albeit in a state of irrelevance equivalent to, say, Logo TV, Queerty, Towleroad, DataLounge*, and, some say, (white cis) gay men.

I initially wanted to know when the magazine (or community) became so retarded—but of course it and we have always been retarded; what research can do is show us how our being retarded has changed over time. The final issue in my collection, from 2019, takes us up to a present-day—and perhaps now waning—form of stupidity. It spotlights supposedly marginalized “bodies” although how this one could fit in the margins of anything is beyond me.

*which I sometimes still frequent! The queens there had a 250+ comment thread going on my Chronicle of Higher Education article on the state of gay men in queer theory… which was 99% about Trump and trans (neither of which come up in the article!) and 1% conspiracy-crackers trying to prove that my co-author and I don’t really exist. The girls are not doing the reading.

Let me say in passing, first, I’m not clear how they/thems are a member of any community, let alone one so-often critiqued for its supposed ‘body fascism,’ but somehow gay men now have to share spaces with quirked-up fatties working through their own shit. Second, hard to resist noting that this body is indeed “vast” and “textured” like a landscape, although I’m not sure how being a landscape, rather than a person with a face, is positive representation for fat, black, etc., people—feels like one of those things that if I did it, it would be racist!

The ‘artist’ responsible for this has been, by the way, written up in HuffPo but isn’t just resting on their laurels doing Sedgwick-style fat art—they also do generic college-town coffee-shop paintings. They’re a double(stuffed) threat!

Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred FUPAs dangle, I guess, but it’s hard not to have a right-wing-shizo moment looking through a whole issue of this stuff, ranting that they/them want us to embrace ugliness (to what end???). The political insistence that showing ugliness in a particularly ugly way is somehow doing the work of inclusion runs through it, and the one traditionally attractive guy… is in an HIV medication ad.

He’s an artist!

But otherwise, even the issue’s article on a gay cruising beach frames it as a queer/trans space filled with abjectly clocky types (if they looked good, then including them would hardly be inclusive—it only counts as a politically virtuous act when its beneficiaries/objects are sad losers. Thus the great demand for Alok Vaidya Menon). It seems, frankly, too mean to show!

The great moment for lumpy tragic people getting spotlight may be over, along with Peak Wokeness. Even Lizzo is fatphobic now, and celebrity thems are perhaps trending more to post-twinky cutie Cole Escola than chunked-up Demi Lovato (who lost the weight and is back to being a woman—used to be a therapist might tell you, re: your eating disorder, that no amount of eating or not eating is going to make you not-a-woman, whatever your mom says, but these days that may be considered malpractice). So it’s probably too late anyway to get paranoid about how ‘elites want you to be unhealthy’ or whatever.

I am interested, though, in the idea that showing the right kind of bodies is ‘important’ for our ‘community’—an idea that underwrites both people publishing such woke fatscapes and the genuine body fascism behind right-wing Twitter fizeek posting.

Gay beefcake photographer Tom Bianchi sounds quite like one of the latter in his 1995 essay-photobook In Defense of Beauty, which in argument is something like Dave Hickey meets BronzeAgePervert (two guys, of course, whom I’ve written about, focusing on their shared interest in the relationship between the aesthetic and the political, and how gay their sensibility is). Only in the midst of the AIDS crisis—just before the new drug cocktail starts making HIV less than fatal—what the community needs is hot guys:

It’s hilariously camp to see these men’s physique magazine type guys next to Oscar Wilde quotes, or even introduced by a thought from Ed White, who was never, God bless, a looker (small wonder many of his stories are about paying for sex—as with Greenwell… Benderson… well, it’s a big list! At least Rechy was on the other side of the dollar, although he couldn’t write either). But note that the logic is really the same as the wokesters 30 years later—Bianchi is including a diverse range of bodies, of different races and ages (there are some POZ guys, too), to uplift viewers and shoo away worries that all gays will look like staggerers out of (or into) the death camps.

What’s appealing about this notion, in part, is that if I’m being spotlit I can say my hot—or courageously ugly—body is important to the community, charged with political if not with erotic significance. My success—my visibility—somehow helps a whole set of people imaginally connected to me. And viewer, you’re not just looking, you’re helping! Progress is taking place before—through—your very eyes.

Of course, this is putting quite a burden on our poor bodies—much as projects of sexual liberation and sexual conservatism alike put heavy (and unerotic) demands on desire, which is really too flimsy to bear them. After all, the Bianchi guys are so ‘perfect’ and ideal that they’re really as sexless as the Fear of a Black Planet-shaped lardball—I feel neither uplifted nor aroused, and certainly not ‘represented.’

That said, I do get where the wokes were coming from with their seething about how fat, misshaped, off-white etc bodies are not being represented in the gay mainstream, and must punish us for our historical neglect of them by being extra droopy and smelly in public. In 2012, the magazine had a fashion photoshoot inspired by colonial Africa, lol, which consisted entirely of one white guy wearing not even very colonial beige shit:

—“Inspired by the sophistication of the Belgian Congo, my glovewear line, Invisible Hands, is dropping soon.”

If this guy gets to play Africa, you might say, my stretchmarks should also get to be a continent!

Although, perhaps a sign of the tensions in what in retrospect was a high-point of both gay male comfort and of American liberalism, that issue also had Jean-Paul Gautier casting kooky (albeit skinny) people of color wearing stupid deconstructed clothes as indices of the coming end of gender (I’m still waiting!):

The load of signification is really too much for such fragile clothes and people—and Adam Lehrer in Compact looks incredibly stupid arguing that the shredded and underfed can reverse-wise be vessels for the un-wokening of America.

But hot people, clothed or not, are still, thank God, hot—and I only need the thinnest of semi-ironic pretexts to enjoy a thirst trap… an accessory to say this is art or fashion (Mishima doing St Sebastian; some Instathot showing off his new shirt) not just a hot guy. So, to conclude, two dudes from my archival reading whom I found memorably hot (no idea what their names or what happened to them since).