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I Worship at the Altar of His Body
There’s nothing quite like injecting steroids into your ass to make you really question your life choices.
In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association recognized muscle dysmorphia in its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, classifying it as a subtype of body dysmorphia, another obsessive mental disorder. I wrote about my own self-diagnosed battles with muscle dysmorphia three years later, having come upon the definition on some random day on the internet.
I’m always trying to figure out, as I’ve been asked numerous times, what the hell is wrong with me. That is, why I feel a certain way about things or about myself. The search for the answer yielded “muscle dysmorphia,” a chronic sense of muscular inadequacy. Gay men are particularly susceptible to muscle dysmorphia and steroid use for any number of reasons: internalized heterosexism; internalized beauty standards; homophobic bullying; long-term effects of the AIDS epidemic, both physical and psychological; and just the constant pressure (and competition) to be seen, to be wanted, to be fucked.
Though I was a chubby little gay kid, I had a secret love all my own. The first time I saw bodybuilding on television, I was shocked that it was a real thing. Beautiful, jacked men, all oiled up in tiny briefs, posing and flexing next to one another on a stage? What gay sorcery is this? Like, point me to the genius faggot who came up with the idea to call this a sport so I can vigorously shake his hand.
Later I discovered that faggot would most likely be noted heterosexual Eugen Sandow, often credited as the “father of modern bodybuilding” (and all-around daddy) in whose image the statue for the most prestigious title in bodybuilding, Mr. Olympia, is modeled. The statue itself is known as the Sandow, and among its winners is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who won the title seven times before becoming an international movie star.
Idolatry of the male physique goes back to at least the ancient Greeks, the first muscle kweens in civilized history. The Greeks created an ideal that Sandow intentionally followed for himself, down to the exact measurements, and that subsequent generations have imitated and surpassed, reaching levels of musculature through rigorous dieting, advanced training techniques, and a sometimes lethal combination of drugs. All this, to achieve a statue in Sandow’s name and likeness—or just to appear statue-like. Sandow founded the first bodybuilding mag, Physical Culture, in 1898 and presented the first bodybuilding show in 1901. The event was a respectable affair, with Sandow serving as a judge alongside Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
That bodybuilding has such staunchly heterosexual roots came as a big old shock to me, but it didn’t take long for the queer eye to find the straight guy. Popular in the ’40s through the ’60s, physique or beefcake magazines featuring oiled-up Adonises wearing next to nothing and executing Grecian poses were marketed to, and often created by, gay men. This all under the respectable guise of being magazines about health and fitness. Actually, if there’s any faggot’s hand that needs a good shaking, it’s Bob Mizer’s. If Sandow is the father of bodybuilding, Mizer is the daddy of bodybuilding photography.
A 2016 New Yorker profile referred to him as “a tireless collector of physical specimens.” Same. Mizer photographed more than ten thousand men, including a young Schwarzenegger, many appearing in the pages of Physique Pictorial, which he founded in 1951. Physique Pictorial was considered basically the first gay magazine. He took the premise of Sandow’s Physical Culture but freed his models from rigid bodybuilding poses against boring backdrops. Instead, he turned them into glorious pinups in Greco-Roman settings, adorned in tiny posing outfits allegedly sewn by his mother.
Mizer sold homoerotic imagery as wholesome entertainment, but that gay sorcery wasn’t fooling everybody. In 1954, a Los Angeles court found him guilty of selling “indecent literature,” with his wrestling photos described as “scenes of brutality and torture.” Mizer’s studio was raided, and he was arrested and sentenced to two months in jail, but following an appeal, the judgment was overturned the following year. Physique Pictorial also included homoerotic art by the likes of Tom of Finland, whose drawings of buff, rough tradesmen in blue-collar jobs came to embody a certain gay aesthetic. The lines between bodybuilding and homosexuality continued to blur.
Mizer didn’t limit his lens to bodybuilders alone, including hustlers and porn stars, as well as future Hollywood stars like Tab Hunter, himself a closeted gay. “Homosexuality was the standard way of life among the rugged Greek warriors,” Mizer wrote in a 1960 issue of Physique Pictorial. “Bodybuilding, and the creation of a rugged powerful body, will almost always remove the stigma of ‘sissy’ from a young man.” This tacit understanding or relationship between bodybuilding culture and gay culture, remains something of an open secret today.
Bodybuilding is also incredibly expensive, and though it has a level of popularity, its following can’t match that of other sports, where star athletes get lucrative seven- and eight-figure deals for product endorsements. Bodybuilding is very much a sport of passion, not profit, so the truly dedicated often turn to other means of financial support, and gay men are their primary patrons. Whether it’s escort work, stripping, or go-going; appearing in muscle-play videos or porn; or more modern avenues like OnlyFans, there’s always a market for beautiful, muscular men, and the audience is almost exclusively gay men. Another popular source of spare income is paid muscle worship, where a bodybuilder poses, maybe naked, maybe not, for an adoring fan, who shells out hundreds if not thousands of dollars for the pleasure of their company.
I’ve not only considered paying for this but have also been solicited for those very services. Honestly, the way my love life is going, paying for escorts or bodybuilders to worship sounds much easier than dating. Hell, I’d be paying for it now if I had the dollars. Skipping the pain and heartbreak and relentless disappointment of hookup apps and cutting straight to the best part, my favorite part, feeling up on some titties? That’s a no-brainer.
As for being on the other side of those titties, I will say I’ve enjoyed the times I’ve been worshipped, but I’m just not personally comfortable with the idea of selling my body, not with the centuries of ownership of Black bodies at my back, not to mention the fetishization and exploitation of the Black male body. That, and I really don’t like being touched by strangers unless they’re providing me with a raging hard-on—it’s a fair trade.
But I digress. Despite this symbiosis between faggots and bodybuilding, the sport is fueled by testosterone, both naturally occurring and injected, which in turn fuels a Darwinian fixation on being an “alpha,” a he-man among men, top dog, the biggest dick swingin’ in these parts of the wood, or what have you. Masculinity is a god, and these alphas mold themselves in his image. This religious devotion to masculinity can then result in the rejection of anything that might deflate the appearance of their pumped-up, rippling manliness in the eyes of their fellow gym acolytes.
And the rejection of anything that may whiff of, oh, I don’t know, being a faggot. So even while stoking homoerotic fervor and benefiting from those pink dollars, some bodybuilders adopt a homophobic stance. Perhaps they doth protest too much, but you’d think dudes who flaunt their ass cheeks in public might have a bit more security in their manhood. Or then again, maybe not. Bodybuilding is all about the beauty of the human body, so does coveting and complimenting the beauty of another man immediately spark within some men a fear of their own homosexuality? Does devoting so much time and money to one’s physical appearance somehow undermine the very rigid definition of what makes a man? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say, “Duh.”
But the definition of manliness, while rigid, does change, however slightly, from generation to generation. I feel we’re living in a true golden age of the male peacock.
When Bob Mizer was taking his beefcake photos, he was trying to recapture the beauty of men that had been celebrated by the ancient Greeks and then taken up again by those lewd and lascivious Renaissance artists who carved all those sculpted male buttocks and painted those chiseled male torsos. When, then, did men stop being beautiful? Even when Eugen Sandow stripped down to his banana leaf in yet another attempt at re-creating the Grecian ideal centuries after the Renaissance, was he considered beautiful? Or was his body just an achievement to be marveled at but not sexually desired by anyone? Certainly not other men. Of course, women didn’t have sexual desires back then, at least none acknowledged by society.
Sandow’s physique was so impressive, though, that he was the subject of several short films at the dawn of this new technology. Film awakened a new type of sexuality, one more overt, larger than life, and in glorious black and white. Into this brave, horny new world tangoed Rudolph Valentino, the first male beauty icon of the twentieth century. Though no Sandow, Valentino appeared working out shirtless in publicity stills and bared his chest in the 1924 film Monsieur Beaucaire. Though women loved him, men reviled Valentino, thinking him effeminate. Men were more apt to be inspired by the far less handsome—but more traditionally masculine—swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks.
Decades later, the image of a male movie star, nipples out, inspires mass swooning. We now have superhero films and actors getting into super-heroic shape. As soon as anyone is announced for a new high-flying cinematic adventure, the countdown begins for the first glimpses of the newly buff beefcake. Actors regularly graduate to a new level of stardom thanks in part to these transformations. Yes, it’s part of the gig, doing stunts and executing elaborate fight choreography, but there are also the aesthetics to consider. Superheroes, in their tight-fitting, muscle-bulging costumes and dramatic capework, have been making little boys gay for decades, so much so that famed stick-in-the-mud Dr. Fredric Wertham wrote a book about it, Seduction of the Innocent, in 1954.
In it, Wertham claims that comic books have a corrupting influence on children and that Batman condoned homosexuality since he and Robin were clearly lovers. Anyone who has seen Joel Schumacher’s 1997 queer shlock masterpiece Batman & Robin, or Saturday Night Live’s still-hilarious Robert Smigel cartoon The Ambiguously Gay Duo, knows Wertham wasn’t too far off. Meanwhile, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a veritable hunk factory, churning out buff Chris after buff Chris to lead blockbuster after blockbuster, so by this point if anyone showed up with less than a six-pack, they might as well get off the fucking soundstage.
Though women have had to deal with an entire century of being objectified on film, the degree to which men are now exposed to this same kind of objectification, which still pales in comparison to their female counterparts, creates the same kind of insecurity for both the star and the audience that consumes his beauty. Former teen heartthrob Zac Efron sent heads turning and wrists pounding when he got super-jacked for the otherwise unwatchable Baywatch movie. Since then, he’s been very clear that he never wants to be that ripped again, calling the shape he got into “unrealistic” and that he didn’t want to “glamorize” it.
Kumail Nanjiani, known previously as a comic actor, got seriously jacked for 2021’s The Eternals, and his Instagram photos of his transformation went viral. He later told GQ that he found that talking about his body made him “less and less comfortable.” Because it’s as if now that’s all people can think of when they look at him. Still, that was part of his original intent. He wanted to change the way Hollywood looked at him, a brown-skinned South Asian man.
While Nanjiani didn’t even have any shirtless scenes in Eternals, sadly, and while director Chloé Zhao hadn’t asked him to get ripped as fuck, he still found it necessary to do so. He wanted to get jacked both for his character and what he, Nanjiani, represented. “If I’m playing the first South Asian superhero, I want to look like someone who can take on Thor or Captain America, or any of those people,” Nanjiani said. His Eternals character is also a Bollywood star, and having grown up with those movies and those jacked heroes, Nanjiani wanted to feel “believable” and “powerful” in the role.
Still, he was wary of the sort of masculinity associated with his type of physique and how his body inspires aggression in the “Do you even lift, bro?” kind of man. “A lot of times we are taught to be useful by using physical strength…in an aggressive, competitive way,” Nanjiani continued. “And that’s what the male ideal has been. Dominating. Defeating. Crushing. Killing. Destroying. That’s what being jacked is.”
The thing with this whole alpha male concept, however, is that it also correlates to gay sexual proclivities: as in a relationship between an alpha and a beta, a dom (dominant) and a sub (submissive). Being a homosexual doesn’t preclude one from being an alpha, especially since gay men are equally, if not even more, susceptible to the intoxicating musk of masculinity. But it’s kinda hilarious that in their attempts to further distance themselves from anything remotely gay, these so-called alphas are further playing into gay stereotypes.
I understand all too well the conflicting emotions Nanjiani expressed. Especially being a minority and wanting to be viewed or treated differently, and how that suddenly happens when you look a certain way, but then a whole new set of troubles arises. And the old troubles don’t go away; they simply get bigger and louder. I often feel invisible in the gay community. It’s why I avoid gay bars or clubs, as any sort of traditionally “safe space” feels anything but for me. And while I hate the apps, there’s a certain safety in knowing that I can find men who are attracted to me. As RuPaul has warned queen after queen not to do, I began relying on that body-ody-ody.
The more I worked out, the more attention I got; the more attention I got, the more I worked out. I wanted to be unignorable, to never feel invisible again. But that’s not how it works. I realized soon enough that it didn’t matter how “hot” I was or thought I was—I would never be attractive to everyone, for whatever reason. So I decided that I should work out for myself, not for other men. They would never fully appreciate the work I put in, but I would. I would know the hours spent in the gym, the constant aches and pains, the sacrifices, the indulgences, the means I would justify for the ends. And if I did drink the bodybuilding Kool-Aid, which is hopefully laced with human growth hormone, I would need a better reason than simply getting laid. Though, let me be as clear and queer as possible, the getting-laid part was also pretty damn cool.
But for me, bodybuilding went deeper than sexual desire, which, again, super cool. I started collecting action figures when I was very young. I would fondle their hard, plastic torsos, getting aroused by having them display their strength against one another. When I say “as queer as possible,” I’m not kidding, kids. I’ve had a pretty definite sense of who I am from about the age of four or five, when I first came to America and fell in love with the men on American Gladiators and pro wrestling. My family happened to love the then WWF, now the WWE, after the World Wildlife Fund came for its coins. One of my first memories of America is the Ultimate Warrior versus Hulk Hogan at WrestleMania VI on April 1, 1990. At four years old, I had been in the country since only January. And there I was, gay.
I loved the Ultimate Warrior, thinking him far more attractive than the bloated-looking Hulk Hogan. When the Ultimate Warrior hoisted all 250 pounds of Hulkamania above his head, my tiny heart skipped a beat. God bless America. I thought this desire was wrong, even then, but my family, Hulkamaniacs some of them, enjoyed the spectacle, too. So my rabid attention was okay. Sanctioned fandom, even though they didn’t know about my underlying lust.
From there I became fascinated with musculature and everywhere I could find it: superheroes in comic books, bodybuilding on TV and in magazines, workout shows on weekday mornings. The happiest times of my youth were the very special episodes, very special to me, in which a teen heartthrob hunk would doff his shirt, to the whoops and hollers of the audience. Joey Lawrence, an early childhood crush, had his shirt “accidentally” ripped off by a young Brittany Murphy (may she rest) on the short-lived NBC sitcom Almost Home, his voluminous pecs leaving both Brittany and me in awe. And then there was Mario Lopez, the hunky AC Slater from Saved by the Bell, who curls his massive biceps in the opening credits. God, that man could fill out a wrestling singlet. Still can, and I still would.
I liked to draw, and my main subjects were the X-Men, girls in pretty gowns, and, more and more as I grew older, jacked dudes. Some of them were versions of me. I studied anatomy books and how-to books on comic book drawing and developed a real ability to render the male human body in all its beauty. Could never quite get hands down, though. On shopping trips with my mom, I would sneak off in the grocery store checkout line or at the mall bookstore to pore over the pages of bodybuilding rags like Muscular Development, Flex, and Muscle & Fitness. Once I was in high school and old enough to buy them on my own, I cut out the most appealing men and hid them in various shoeboxes under my bed. I shed a tear when I had to throw away all my men when I went to college. But by then there was the internet, and I never needed a shoebox again.
I had CDs and external hard drives full of muscular men archived for my future perusal, if such a time ever came. And it rarely did. I liked to collect—no, hoard, definitely hoard—images and videos of rippling physiques. I say “hoard” because I would have devoured the entire internet if I could have, so insatiable was my appetite for muscle and the men who possessed it. “A tireless collector of physical specimens.”
Maybe I believed if I collected enough of these men, I could fill the void inside me that wanted to both possess them in the flesh and look like them in my own flesh. So when I started seriously bodybuilding, it was with these two goals in mind: possession and transformation. For a time, both were equally intoxicating and addictive, but possession inevitably lost its novelty.
There are two cycles in bodybuilding: bulking and cutting. In one, you ostensibly get to stuff your face, with varying parameters, and in the other, you ostensibly starve yourself, again, with varying parameters. I’ve never competed in a bodybuilding show, though the urge has been there since I was a kid drooling over MuscleSport USA on cable on Saturday afternoons. I’ve only bulked and cut on my own terms, in my quest to attain my ideal physique. I find both cycles difficult and enjoyable. When I’m bulking, I worry about eating enough, and I get anxiety just by looking at a plate of food because I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish it. And if I end up getting too fat, a “dirty bulk,” my self-esteem plummets as my waistline balloons.
After I tore my ACL and gained forty pounds, I had to come to a different relationship with my body, which had never betrayed me and had done most of what I had asked. To its detriment. But I was also more determined than ever to get back into shape, no matter the cost. So I decided to finally do steroids. It felt like an inevitable decision. Steroids, like all drugs, had a dangerous stigma around them when I was growing up. They were something that “winners” didn’t do, that is, until we found out that a particular winner failed a piss test. Still, steroids felt like something you did in the competitive arena, but back then I didn’t realize how competitive being gay could be. Or how many gay men do or have done steroids, just casually.
My decision to start stickin’, however, came from my own perception of my body image. The muscle dysmorphia. I knew I was getting older and that my testosterone levels would start to decrease, making it harder to build and maintain muscle. I knew I had gone through a pretty big surgery and wasn’t losing weight as fast as I would’ve liked, and I knew that I wanted to achieve the physical ideal that had always haunted and taunted me for years, and time felt like a gift. I tore my ACL during the pandemic, when the rug had been pulled out from under the entire world, so why not just do the damn drugs? What did I have to lose?
Well, a lot, potentially, but tomorrow wasn’t guaranteed and I wanted what I wanted. And I already had some steroids in storage. I had originally gotten them right before the pandemic, when 2020 was going to be MY YEAR! I was going to finally compete in a bodybuilding show, checking that lifelong dream off the list, and I serendipitously found a connection when I fucked this muscle daddy personal trainer. While he was riding my dick, he commented how I would look better with more muscle. I didn’t take it personally—I felt the same way—but it did make me not want to see him again. But then we got to talking about steroids and he said he could get me some, so, of course, I had to see the motherfucker again. After sitting through some convoluted tale about how he took edibles and crashed his car into a pole and now he was riding a bike, this daddy gave me a vial of tren (trenbolone), one of the most powerful steroids on the market, and a vial of testosterone, to be taken together. It cost $200. He showed me how to inject myself and sent me on my way.
I only did the cycle for three weeks before the world shut down, but in that time, my right shoulder looked slightly deformed from the drugs. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but I kept doing it until the gyms closed, and when they did, I put the rest of the roids away until I would be ready to lift again. Then my accident happened, working out in the park, not at the gym, with no weights involved. To think fucking nature would be my undoing.
After I had my surgery and had gone through physical rehab, I was still overweight but even more determined to get from the worst shape of my life to the best. With some more research and asking around, mostly other gays who did steroids, I dug out my old vials and shot them up, one on the left side, one on the right, alternating between my ass and my thighs. The shoulders were more of a last resort, with the first two body parts being preferred, or so I gathered. I know I’ll never get used to shooting myself with a needle; it’s one of the reasons I’ve never done heroin—that and Mom prefers uppers—but I could imagine doing this for the rest of my life, or at least until I stopped lifting.
Roid rage is a real thing, but when you’re already filled with rage, it’s hard to tell the difference. My rage is actually one of the main reasons I work out. Lifting heavy things helps me channel my rage into something less destructive than, say, throwing my phone into my TV set, breaking both. Which I did once…at least once. In fact, I was working out my rage when I tore my ACL. Some boy on the apps had disappointed me by whatever-who-cares and I was thrusting myself up into the air with extra force while doing jump squats. On wet grass. On my third rep I landed incorrectly, heard a pop, and long story short, I’ll never be able to drop it like it’s hot again. But for years I dealt with rejection, and the attendant rage, by simply working out harder. To be unignorable, unrejectable. Yes, I was working out mostly for myself, but never just for myself. I still valued the attention I received from other men. And I still felt like that fat kid drawing muscular men alone in my room. I never felt enough.
When I worked out and my hard-won results were admired, I didn’t feel so inadequate. Ironically, working out made me more calm, not more aggressive. There was a level of Zen-like enlightenment I could reach during workouts, a sense of inner peace I rarely found outside of doing shrooms. Even on steroids, when my aggression might go a bit unchecked, I can still find peace. Do I sometimes want to hurl a dumbbell into a mirror if someone is hogging a machine I need? Sure, I’m only human. But I don’t, and that’s what matters. I wouldn’t dare defile such a sacred place.
The gym is sometimes referred to humorously as gay church, and not just because you have men sucking each other in private stalls (the Catholic church be wildin’). And I do go there to pray. My own form of prayer, to commune with my inner spirit. The gym is my one true safe space. I never feel any sort of fixation on becoming an alpha male, even when I know (to my great self-satisfaction) that I’m bigger and stronger than most of the guys in my gym, because I also know that I am a faggot. Like, more likely than not, at any given point while at the gym, I’m blasting “The Schuyler Sisters” from Hamilton. I don’t even like Hamilton that much, but it’s three big-voiced Broadway gals belting “WORK!” at me. I’m not trying to out-butch anyone, henny.
While I don’t feel the need to prove my masculinity, being bigger and stronger than everyone else makes me feel safer being a faggot. Like many an effeminate overweight boy, I suffered my fair share of bullying, though I’ve never indulged in the fantasy of beating up my old tormentors, mostly because I’m just not a violent person, and no one laid a hand on my gentle, tubby behind. But simply passing through the world as a gay man, I’m emboldened by my own physical presence, this armor forged from countless hours in the gym. My body, then, is an instrument of attraction and deflection. Because of my stature, I can’t imagine toxically masc bros wanting to step to me. Still, I’m all too aware of the ongoing danger of violence.
Black men are already perceived to be larger and stronger than white men, and thus are perceived as posing a greater threat, according to a 2017 study published by the American Psychological Association. While that may be great for my sex life, it puts my actual life in danger should a police officer consider me a greater threat than I am, as too many Black men have had to find out too often in this country. My body can at once make me feel safe and make me a target. With this bias already in place, if I got into a fight—and again, never have been—that I didn’t start but had every intention of finishing, I could shoulder the totality of the blame for the altercation. It’s easier to just walk away from some dick being a dick, especially since I have nothing to prove.
After my first full cycle in 2022, the side effects felt worth it for the results. I had successfully resculpted my body in the image I desired, better than I had looked before, but once I did, I only wanted more. To be bigger, to be more ripped. But bodybuilding, if you’re serious about it, is a full-time occupation, and though it may look like an individual sport, there’s a team of people behind most competitive bodybuilders. At the very least a coach and a bodywork specialist to work out the kinks and pains from destroying your joints and muscles on a regular basis. To get the way I want to look, I can’t do it alone; I can’t do it naturally. But what are the limits?
Bodybuilding has never been about health, just the appearance of superhuman physicality, and that is often pursued through the least healthy methods. Yet for men of any sexual orientation, the draw of all that rippling muscle is too strong to ignore. The last few years have been more concerned with “aesthetics”—conditioning, “shredz,” etc.—over sheer size, but that movement was itself inspired by the death of a Russian-born Australian bodybuilder, Aziz Shavershian, aka Zyzz.
Starting with a series of YouTube videos in 2007, Zyzz became the poster boy of the aesthetics subculture that started in Australia but would spread like overdeveloped lats through social media. He claimed he started bodybuilding to impress girls, that he would look at pictures of shredded bodybuilders and tell himself that one day he would look like them. Except for the girls part, I had a similar origin story, having stared longingly at the divine muscles of mortal men with the aspiration that one day I, too, would look like that. Zyzz also described transcending the approval of women and relishing the “skin-tearing pumps” from working out and the unparalleled accomplishment of setting a goal, achieving it, and then outdoing oneself. Much like Zyzz, I soon found a joy and a passion in bodybuilding that superseded any attention I got from boys. That pump is as good as any high, but all highs can be destructive, even in the guise of health.
Though Zyzz denied using steroids—it’s an open yet still dirty secret in bodybuilding that pretty much everyone uses them, at least when it comes to those achieving certain performance levels—his brother was arrested in July 2011 for possession of anabolic steroids. A month later, Zyzz was dead. He suffered a heart attack in a sauna while on vacation, an autopsy later revealing he had an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. He was twenty-two. With his death, however, Zyzz became a martyr for the cult of bodybuilding, and for years following his death, young men repeated his hair, his wardrobe, and, increasingly, his mantra of aesthetics. His name is still invoked in Instagram posts and on tank tops, the Narcissus myth made legend.
Zyzz was hardly the first or the last bodybuilder to die in the pursuit of their passion. There has been a spate of deaths in the bodybuilding community documented in the last few years, among all genders, that’s gone mostly overlooked because bodybuilding straddles the line between sport and art without being accepted by either. Only in 2022 did The Washington Post run a story on the deadly methods used to achieve impossible physiques, with a report that investigated the deaths of more than two dozen bodybuilders, shedding light on an industry rife with illegal drugs and a mentality of “get big or die trying” enabled by coaches, bodybuilding judges, and the athletes themselves.
That article really made me rethink whether I wanted to compete, because I know how I am. If I’m going to compete, I’m going to fucking win. But as an ambivalent hypochondriac, I often fear the worst when it comes to my health, but don’t really care much to pursue whatever that might be. All those descriptions of beautiful bodies collapsing at their peak made me question but not stop my own steroid use. I believe in moderate, responsible drug use; I always have.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, however, does not, and its war on drugs has been a massive failure as folks are still out here getting addicted to and dying from various drugs. Not to mention the violence associated with the illicit drug trade. Congress passed the Anabolic Steroids Control Act of 1990 and redoubled its efforts in 2014 with the Designer (ooooh!) Anabolic Steroid Control Act. Prohibition has never and will never work. Regulation, however, proves far more effective in keeping people safe. It’s the same with alcohol, or cocaine, or steroids. It’s a victory if people aren’t whipping up bathtub gin or formulating their own steroid compounds, because prohibiting a drug won’t stop anyone from creating their own or seeking other illicit methods, which often prove more dangerous than the drugs themselves.
Steroids are necessary to keep up with the extreme bodies currently prevalent in the sport, and it’s this extremity that keeps bodybuilding from going more mainstream. The bodies of today are insane compared to the so-called classic era of bodybuilding, when it was at its height in popularity—the ’70s. Bodybuilding’s zenith was the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, following Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, and other classic-era icons such as Franco Columbu, Mike Katz, and Serge Nubret on their roads to the 1975 Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia competitions. The doc normalized bodybuilding, which up to that point had been even more niche than it is today; helped birth the fitness industry; and made a star out of Schwarzenegger, who held the record for most Mr. Olympia wins until Lee Haney won his eighth consecutive title in 1991.
By the ’90s, bodybuilding had grown less popular, but the bodies had grown much more impressive. In 1990, WWF mastermind and male-flesh peddler extraordinaire Vince McMahon launched the World Bodybuilding Federation (WBF), which attempted to merge bodybuilding with the gimmickry of professional wrestling. Things went downhill fast when the following year the WBF instituted a strict steroids testing policy, a result of a roid scandal that roiled the WWF. While pro wrestling is one of the most homoerotic forms of popular entertainment ever, it’s the mix of theatricality and physicality that leads to that popularity and transcends the otherwise gay-ass grabbing of crotches, swiveling of hips, hoisting of half-naked men, and glorification of male bodies.
Bodybuilding is just folks standing around posing. It’s not terribly interesting to watch, no matter how good a poser a bodybuilder is or how great a body they have. It’s not truly accepted as a sport because it’s subjective, whereas sports are objective. There are rules, there are points, there is strategy, there is something people can grab onto that holds their attention and rouses their spirits. Bodybuilding will never do that. Therefore, even the “best” bodybuilder in the world, the winner of Mr. Olympia, earns only $400,000. LeBron James makes literally over a hundred times more than that, and he actually puts his body through less trauma.
Though Ferrigno went on to star in The Incredible Hulk on television, bodybuilding has never produced another star like Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger used bodybuilding to become a star, but most bodybuilders are in it for the passion of it. Muscle is addicting, feeling strong and powerful is addicting, but the long-term effects can be debilitating. Ronnie Coleman, considered along with Schwarzenegger one of the greatest bodybuilders of all time, punished his body with eight-hundred-pound squats and five-hundred-pound bench presses, resulting in several surgeries that left him unable to walk unassisted. Still, he has no regrets save for the bad surgeries. He blames the surgeries for his debilitated condition, and he continues to work out. But at least Coleman made it to the latter half of his life, as opposed to someone like Dallas McCarver, who died of cardiac arrest at twenty-six. There’s only one Arnold Schwarzenegger, but there are dozens of bodybuilders whose stories end far more tragically, in violence, in drug abuse, in death. So why do it?
Well, why do anything? Passion. Sure, bodybuilding sometimes makes me feel bad about myself, but so does literally everything. That’s the world we live in, one of constantly feeling like shit. But bodybuilding also makes me feel good about myself…sometimes…most times. Though I may scrutinize every inch of my body, at the end of the day, I love being able to work to realize a childhood dream of who I wanted to be, how I wanted to look. It doesn’t make me more of a man, but it does make me feel more myself. And there’s the immediacy of it as well.
I can work for years to achieve a goal and never realize it. As a writer, I often feel as if I exist in a void, writing words someone, maybe, is reading somewhere, but I usually never know what those words do to them, how they make them feel, what my impact has been on them, if any. What have I accomplished with those words that will disappear from memory with the next words, or the next show, or movie, or the myriad other distractions pulling at us every moment of every day? With bodybuilding, I know that if I adjust my diet, change my macros, increase my cardio, take my steroids, I will achieve my goal. I can see that achievement in the mirror, week by week, sometimes day by day.
Bodybuilding is the ultimate allegory for how life should be: If you put in the work, you reap the results. But that’s not how life works, not always, not often. Life disappoints. Still, the mirror can be a source of affirmation. And with the limited time one has to be a bodybuilder, age and beauty ephemeral as they are, there’s also an urgency. Especially for those who don’t intend to live into old age, who are determined to get as big as possible, regardless of the costs. That’s a version of romantic fatalism that I just can’t fuck with—and I love romantic fatalism. Sure, I can understand wholly devoting one’s life to an ideal—it’s what artists do—but to sacrifice one’s life for an ideal is just unnecessary. Art doesn’t need to destroy. There should be limits.
I’ve seen bodybuilders who quit the sport altogether and stop using steroids and advise others never to use them. They look like shrunken versions of themselves but profess to be happy, finally happy. There seems to be a lot of misery in bodybuilding, a lot of mental health issues that often go undiscussed because of the sport’s culture. Suffering is part of the game. Suffer and don’t bitch; don’t be a pussy. No pain, no gain.
I’ve noticed that attitude slowly changing as bodybuilders and fitness professionals take to Instagram to open up about their struggles with depression, suicidal ideation, and drug use—and steroid use has been linked to further substance abuse. It’s heartening to see all these gym bros getting in touch with their feelings.
But at the same time, it’s been heartbreaking to see others in the bodybuilding community targeting trans people, as seems to be the modus operandi of the conservative movement in America, to which bodybuilders tend to overwhelmingly belong.
You’d think the bodybuilding community would realize they have some things in common with the trans community, as everyone involved wants to manifest their ideal body. Often with the implementation of hormones. Yet bodybuilders, particularly those in America, where steroids are illegal, have been begrudging of and mocking toward trans people, and trans youth, for their access to testosterone, the baseline steroid for gym bros universal.
Part of this is the general animus conservative America holds against the trans community, which anyone not deafened by a right-wing echo chamber knows is just a distraction technique by conservatives to avoid actually taking care of their constituents. Instead, trans people are a threat to our children, they’re a threat to the social order, they’re an affront to god and nature, etc., etc. These sentiments trickle down into the bodybuilding community, where loves of steroids and guns go hand in hand and masculinity reaches peak toxicity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been following a bodybuilder on Instagram, scrolling through his posts, chasing a boner, and I run into an AK-47 or claims of the 2020 election being stolen. Boner sufficiently killed.
As much as I love bodybuilding, I can’t ever feel a part of its community because of these vestiges of homophobia, transphobia, and conservatism. There are plenty of gay men who willingly buy into, or simply ignore, these tenets to satiate that all-consuming hunger for muscle, one that, like mine, probably gestated in their youth. That hunger can be maddening; it can be delirious, rhapsodic, even. These muscle kweens might feel, as I often do, that they have more in common with the bodybuilding community than the gay community.
But, again, I also find commonality between the bodybuilding community and the gay community, not to mention a symbiosis. Hell, AIDS patients used to supply bodybuilders with human growth hormone because HGH helped mitigate the wasting effects of the disease. With that kind of history—as well as the history of financial support and sustained enthusiasm for the sport amid waning desire from everyone else—you’d think bodybuilders would be more considerate of the queer community, but you could say the same for America at large. Of all the things minority groups have given to America—the economy that dominates the world, the culture that seduces it—some would prefer to focus on what minorities have taken or changed or somehow denied them.
Bodybuilders are often stereotyped as meatheads or bullies, stereotypes that persist because they’re kind of true. Picking on trans kids, who are still kids, because they get legal testosterone is the epitome of being a bully—targeting, regardless of one’s feelings about the trans community, the most vulnerable people in our society. Blindly following along with rhetoric instead of actively questioning it is meathead behavior.
And yet, there’s so much knowledge involved in being a bodybuilder, stuff I’m still struggling to wrap my head around. It’s a shame, really, that bodybuilding gets such a bad rap when there are so many positive stories that come from it as well.
On social media, those who have struggled with their mental health often reveal that when they were at their lowest, bodybuilding was the only constant in their lives, and by staying committed to it, they managed to turn their lives around and, in turn, inspire others. I hate inspiring others, but bodybuilding has definitely been a life raft for me in the choppiest of waters. It’s helped pull me out of funks, it’s given me a better sense of self, it’s gotten me laid a lot. The steroid use and the muscle dysmorphia are, to me, just a part of the deal. Not everyone will understand or agree with that, but it’s not for everyone. It’s for me. And it’s no one else’s business, really.
Autonomy over one’s body, after all, should be a sacred right. Whether that means transitioning or terminating a pregnancy or sticking some testosterone in your ass cheeks three times a week. And the government should make it easier, and thus safer, to do those things, instead of making it harder, further endangering people’s lives. And if that’s not a compelling enough argument, one could always hit Uncle Sam with that tried and true rebuttal, “You’re not our fucking dad!” Works every time.