Body shaming and body obsession in the gay community

When I was a teenager, I never paid particular attention to my insecurities. I knew they were there but I didn’t pay them too much attention: too thin, too much hair, too feminine? It didn’t matter, I sidetracked them in the corner because there were more important things in my head to dedicate myself to. With the first experiences in the gay community the ladder of important things started to shake: the direct confrontation with a thousand bodies, similar or as different as possible from mine, started to trigger all those micro-doubts that I had learned to ignore.

This is also why in the gay world, often and willingly, the body seems to have a central value: representation in the media, from movies to TV series, has always promoted an image of a sculpted physique, flanked by spectacularized sexual performances and placed at the center of our narration (yes, Queer as Folk I mean you!).

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The beauty standards are not just about gay men, but the obsession with a perfect and defined body, to the point of touching toxicity, has a particular look within the community: according to a survey by the gay magazine Attitude in 2017, at least 84% of gay men said they felt the pressure of having “a beautiful body”.

To get an idea, just enter the most named, clicked, and hated app by the LGBTQ + community: mr * and mr *, Grindr. Grindr is on paper a dating app like any other, but with a special touch of body shaming. It is that platform where the fine line between personal preference and free discrimination becomes imperceptible: “no fat”, “no bald”, “no bass”, “no hair”, “no” hairless “,” only fit and healthy people “. Being fit and healthy seems to translate exclusively into a sculpted and defined physique, maintaining a careful selection of photos in the window, as if we were all * about to tread a walkway.

But Grindr is also a bit of a temple of toxic machismo: it seems urgent to demand men who are first of all “real males”, with a more or less explicit ridicule of anyone who goes off the gender rails. In addition to the perfect body, it is good not to be feminine (“missed women” as some like to say), but rather “serious and resolute” people. There is also room for a good dose of fetishization of the black community and an almost maniacal importance towards the greatness of the member, almost as if the display of the goods is perfectly proportionate to the value of the user.

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Like to think about the environment LGBTQ+ as a place of acceptance and welcome, as far as possible free from the preconceptions of society, but gay men do not shy away from that patriarchal culture that has educated us from an early age: toxic masculinity, the claim to respect a precise image of strong man, virile, and as masculine as possible. Whatever it means to be “masculine” in 2021.

Outside and within the LGBTQ + community, a queer kid seems to have to meet these standards from multiple angles: because if that model of the toxic male is already a burden, let alone when it collides with a reality that society educates us to consider defective and weak. The stereotype of the feminine and delicate gay man amplifies shame and embarrassment for those who have grown up considering femininity as something weak and inferior, even worse if on the part of a man. Male gaze seems to define us in every context, where every move and action lives according to the male gaze, respecting what a man has taught us to define attractive. Even when another man is wanted.

How to get around? Mainstream body positivity invites you to love your body regardless. But accepting yourself isn’t a duty and it doesn’t happen in a snap of your fingers, especially when you’re already learning to welcome with multiple sides of yourself, which also involve sexual orientation and gender identity. 27 years later and still with an account Grindr, my advice is to surround yourself with people who know how to detach themselves from this mind-set. Respect and take care of your body, but not indulge retrograde and toxic thoughts according to the approval of others. But above all we try not to fall back into those traps that we have learned to consider universal but which continue to undermine our right to be in the world, preventing us from truly emancipating ourselves. Outside and inside the community LGBTQ+.

via GIPHY