The summer I started working out was also the same summer I came out.
After two years of college, confusion, and ill-fated crushes, I had come to accept my same-sex desire and proudly began identifying myself as gay. No doubt, my foray into weightlifting was spurred on by the impossibly ripped bodies found in the homoerotic photography of David Morgan, Herb Ritts, and Tom Bianchi.
Those muscular male bodies more marble than men: how I wanted to embrace them. So I chiseled away at my amorphous self until a hard, toned, well-articulated body emerged.
And yet, more than mere narcissism drove my bodybuilding obsession.
I came out during the heyday of ACT UP and Queer Nation. AIDS had already decimated the gay, Latino, and African-American communities, and a lethal combination of government inaction and pharmaceutical greed only threatened to increase the body count. Groups like ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and Queer Nation sought to remedy the situation, exercising political muscle by staging brilliant and media-grabbing acts of civil disobedience.
Faced with a world hell-bent on my extinction, building lean muscle mass seemed like the most natural thing to do. Working out was a way of affirming, to myself and to the world, that my queer body was of value. I vowed to care for this body, even if the culture around me didn’t seem all that interested in caring for me. Interestingly, as I attended to my own body, I also began to attend to others. As I counted reps and packed on pounds, I began to imagine what it might be like to inhabit other bodies, bodies less fortunate than mine. I became increasingly aware of the institutionalized and systematic violence visited upon female, nonwhite, ill, and/or elderly bodies. For me, going to the gym went hand in hand with a growing political consciousness.
This past week I found myself thinking back to that first summer in the gym as I watched Milk, Gus Van Sant’s tour de force film on the life of Harvey Milk, the nation’s first openly gay elected official. I am usually not given to praising straight-identified actors playing gay roles— I mean, would it have killed Van Sant and the film to have cast just one openly gay actor in a leading role? After all, Milk himself intoned,
If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.
If Van Sant couldn’t find any open homos in homophobic Hollywood, he could have at least nationally campaigned for one; at the casting call, he could have borrowed Milk’s favorite opener:
My name is Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you.
— but Sean Penn really does deliver a spot-on performance, exemplifying just how powerful an act it can be to imaginatively inhabit a life not one’s own. Milk himself possessed an amazing ability to identify with and bring together people from vastly different backgrounds. He cobbled together a queer coalition of lesbians and gays, seniors and Teamsters, women and minorities of different creeds and colors.
At one point in the film, the homophobic and homicidal Dan White (played by Josh Brolin) speaks disapprovingly of the blatant display of scantily clad bodies during San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Parade. But Milk understood that it was just this sort of naked display of bodies that makes such marches politically effective. The crowd scenes in the film, especially those taken from archival footage, demonstrate the powerful presence any one body can muster, especially when it forms solidarity with other bodies. I couldn’t help but remember my first Gay Pride Parade— that long, beautiful, queer tapestry shimmering with every possible body type: the muscle boys, the drag queens, the radical fairies, the leather dykes and daddies; the schoolteachers, the union workers, the politicians; the gay Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, African Americans, transgender persons of every ethnicity; triathletes, cyclists, swimmers, soccer, volleyball and rugby players; Catholics, Lutherans, Unitarians; LGBT seniors, Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays…. I was fascinated by the seemingly endless parade of possibilities, the myriad ways a body could just be in this world.
At the film’s end, I found myself crying as the candle-lit procession of bodies bore silent witness that, despite Milk’s assassination,
Hope will never be silent.
Watching Milk did indeed give me hope, even as I despaired at the audacity of a President-elect who speaks of hope, but still invites the voice of bigotry to speak at his inauguration. Many have commented on hearing an uncanny echo of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. in Obama’s speeches. But when Obama told the crowd in Grant Park,
But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to— it belongs to you.
I could also hear Harvey Milk reminding the crowd the day of his victory:
It’s not my victory, it’s yours and yours and yours. If a gay can win, it means there is hope that the system can work for all minorities if we fight.
Whether or not Obama is able to bring about the change we so desperately need, I still have faith in the movement he represents— that gloriously diverse multitude that elected him. Or, to quote Milk:
So as we turn the calendar and return to the gym after our long hiatus, I invite everyone to meditate on Milk, the US’s and hope.
For years, in my quest for a more muscular, ripped body, I had tried every diet in the book, or at least in book form— Fit for Life, The Atkins Diet, The Zone— in all their high carb, low fat; low carb, high fat; high protein, low protein, no protein permutations. I also had tried every supplement hailed as the new cure-all, from creatine to fish oil. Had someone told me that sacrificing puppies at midnight during the winter solstice would assure me washboard abs and bulging biceps, I have no doubt my neighborhood would have been decked with flyers every Christmas begging,
Have your seen my dog?
Back then, I am ashamed to say, I was credulous of any diet with even the thinnest veneer of science. The very deconstructive tools acquired in college that should have made me suspicious of the specious claims put forth by these smarmy authors only made me all the more eager to believe any half-baked book that began by exposing the hidden, morally-bankrupt motives lurking behind mainstream science, medical opinion, and the nefarious FDA. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that the best way to avoid scrutiny of one’s diet plan or supplement was to point a contemptuous finger at someone else.
But after years of counting carbs, calories and grams of fat, I stopped. I stopped not because these diets didn’t work. They had, in fact, worked all too well. You could see the veins in my stomach and I looked great in a Speedo— no small feat. Of course, I wasn’t as muscular as I wanted, opting to look “ripped” as opposed to “bulging.” In my naiveté, I hadn’t realized that steroids were the fastest way to attain both a ripped and a muscular physique. Had I known that, I probably would have gone on the Testosterone Diet, as well.
No, I stopped out of sheer exhaustion.
As it happened, my moratorium on dieting coincided with another change of habit: I decided to fulfill my childhood fantasy of becoming a gymnast. Granted, I had already missed my chance at becoming the next Mary Lou Retton, but learning how to do a back flip sure sounded fun, so I started taking adult gymnastics classes. While my past eating habits had given me a sleek figure, I found that my old diets could not possibly support my changing metabolism as I learned to perform back tucks, scissor kicks, and front handsprings. To keep up, I started eating more generously. Not only did I stop regulating my food intake so obsessively, but I also stopped judging my fitness level based on what I saw in the mirror. Instead, I judged my progress based on how well I performed on the floor or the pommel horse.
My foray into gymnastics, however, didn’t completely quell my obsession with food. My more generous eating habits erased those visible veins in my stomach, triggering all sorts of paranoid anxieties about what I should or should not ingest, how much, and how often.
What the hell is a balanced diet, anyway?
I remember lamenting to our own Jamie Dreyer. Jamie advised me to listen to my body instead of every diet guru who came along. But I insisted I couldn’t hear my body, the residual din of all those books with their promises of a fitter frame drowning out any other voice.
Fortunately, Jamie strong-armed me into training for an Olympic distance triathlon. Under the heavy demands of training, my body began to speak up. I found myself craving— yes, craving— fruits and vegetables. Chocolate, the only food I had ever considered worth craving, no longer presented itself as the existential crisis of freewill that it once was. Rather, my ingestion of sweets and meats began to moderate itself, my eating habits becoming more attuned to the contingencies of rest and physical exertion.
The triathlon also disabused me of the notion that shape or size provides, in any way, a reliable indication of health or fitness. Over the four months of intense training, my physical appearance didn’t change all that much; I certainly didn’t attain those washboard abs with popping veins that so many fitness magazines tout as the hallmark of health. But I was stronger, more energized, happier. Moreover, many of my fellow triathletes sported bodies that our present culture would probably pathologize as overweight, perhaps, even obese. But these would-be obese bodies kicked ass on land and in water. These were not obese bodies; they were ample ones.
But if body size has little to do with health and performance, why does the rhetoric of obesity hold such sway in our national consciousness? And how is it that the same voices that tell us obesity threatens our body politic are also the same voices that present us with emaciated and/or steroided bodies as the pinnacles of health?
My sense is that the war on obesity dovetails with another, undeclared, but nonetheless devastating war on other bodies deemed equally undesirable and disposable. First, the terms obese and fat are not gender-neutral; they glom most insistently and perhaps most damagingly onto female bodies. The ugly epithet man-boobs used to disparage undesirable weight gain in men only punctuates the thinly disguised, if it is disguised at all, misogyny that accompanies most attributions of fatness. Second, the overweight or obese body is more than likely also the working poor body, whose food choices and activity levels are greatly circumscribed by economic realities. Organic food and state-of-the-art gyms do not come cheap, thinness being not just a badge of health but also a sign of status in today’s culture. Whipping up fears of becoming fat is a great way to sell the upwardly mobile every possible diet book, pill, pharmaceutical, and/or surgical procedure imaginable. Finally, fat serves as a whitewashed sign for the nonwhite. It is no coincidence that the very few Hollywood bodies described as curvaceous, voluptuous, or, as is au courant, bootylicious happen to also be nonwhite. (And you know we as a society are in trouble when Beyonce and J-Lo qualify as curvy and full-figured.) That is why I cringe whenever I hear seemingly well-intentioned fitness enthusiasts talk disparagingly about “being fat”: a war on obesity can’t help but also be a war on women, the working class, and people of color.
Another disturbing aspect of the war on obesity is how blatantly and unapologetically fat (female/poor/nonwhite) bodies are held up for public scrutiny, allowing everybody else (which is to say, any body intent on distancing itself from those abject bodies) to make authorial claims about them. How irresistible, how imperative to map damning narratives onto those fraught, fat bodies:
Clearly, they can’t help but binge on fast-food. How else did they get so fat? It’s kinda their own fault, tho’, right? They could have always made a healthier choice.
Figured as both compulsive and free-willed, the obese body, denied any authority to speak for itself, becomes a receptacle for all our anxieties around health, illness, class, gender and race. Obese (female/poor/nonwhite) bodies bear the brunt of our contempt.
What is even more distressing is how ubiquitous this contempt is. We at Blog Further are just as guilty of reproducing it as anybody else. Take, for instance, Robin Follet’s most recent post entitled Gobble Gobble Gobble. An otherwise generous writer intimately acquainted with the plight of marginalized lives and realities, Follet starts off his post ranting against crass consumerism, only to turn his attack against gluttony— an unremarkable (in that this significant shift in thought goes unmarked) and unfortunate rhetorical move that inevitably misleads him to place the blame for our nation’s oil and shopping addiction squarely at the feet of fat people:
Here’s what we’ve told ourselves: gluttony is good. There’s only so much, and we’re going to get as much as we can. Well, we have, and now we’re fat— literally and metaphorically.
I have no doubt Follet would be mortified by my present critique, that he would be filled with shame and remorse if he thought for one second that his remarks might come across as even remotely thoughtless or contemptuous to someone for whom “fatness” or “obesity” was a complex, contentious question, rather than a sterile, moralizing fact. Far from exposing any personality flaw or intellectual shortcoming, Follet’s rhetorical slip demonstrates just how insidious the rhetoric of obesity is. Our present culture offers us only the thinnest of heuristics for thinking about our bodies: Thin equals health equals wealth equals power. Faced with such a drop dead elegant theory, what kind of cognitive courage must one muster to put forth even the humblest of counter narratives?
Thankfully, the past decade or so has seen the emergence of an ample body of literature capable of generating sustainable, inclusive alternatives to the war on obesity. Personally, I have found Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “Epidemics of the Will” as well as her book of poetry Fat Art, Thin Art incredibly helpful in thinking through these issues. Another promising development— pointed out to me by one of our more astute readers— is the Health At Every Size (HAES) Movement. According to Linda Bacon, professor of nutrition and biology at City College of San Francisco and author of Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight,
the war on obesity has taken its toll. Extensive ‘collateral damage’ has resulted: Food and body preoccupation, self-hatred, eating disorders, discrimination, poor health… Few of us are at peace with our bodies, whether because we’re fat or because we fear becoming fat.
Calling Health At Every Size “the new peace movement,” Bacon summarizes the philosophy of HAES:
Very simply, it acknowledges that good health can best be realized independent from considerations of size. It supports people— of all sizes— in addressing health directly by adopting healthy behaviors.
Bacon does not replicate the ugly formula by which growing “waists” become synonymous with growing “waste.” Rather, her research and writing on HAES are part and parcel of her work on sustainable agriculture.
As a movement, HAES boasts a host of exciting scholars, researchers, organizations and journals. In addition to Bacon’s book, I have already added the following to my Amazon Wish List (hint, hint):
Big Fat Lies: The Truth about Your Weight and Your Health by Glenn A. Gaesser
Fat!So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologize For Your Size by Marilyn Wann
Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic by J. Eric Oliver
The Obesity Myth: Why American’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health by Paul Campos
Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity by Kathleen Lebesco
For those interested in becoming more involved in the HAES movement, check out the Association for Size Diversity and Health as well as The Body Positive, a non-profit organization committed to promoting HAES principles among children and teens. The Body Positive has a great DVD series entitled BodyTalk in which teens and preteens talk about their bodies, their anxieties, their coping strategies, and their personal successes. If only we fitness professionals and sports enthusiasts could be as eloquent and smart as these young adults:
I was talking with some colleagues about the present fight over same-sex marriage, when someone in the group commented,
I think it’s silly. All this fighting over a word.
Now I have every reason to believe that this individual believes in civil rights— for women, for lesbians and gays, for transgender people, for people of color. And yet she thought both sides of the debate were silly for fighting over the word marriage. I found her naïveté troubling in no small part because her chosen profession was the study and teaching of literature and language.
My colleagues’ infelicitous remark rests on the fallacy that marriage is merely a word, an arbitrary symbol that just happens to refer to the union between a man and woman. Such thinking leads many seemingly well-intentioned people to wrongly suppose that civil union is just as good as marriage— as if one could easily substitute one term for another. But when it comes to marriage, a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet.
The word marriage does not merely name or represent a social contract; it enacts that contract, shaping how we live and how we think, how we organize our households and how we pay our taxes. It constructs and maintains a whole host of social, economic, and political conditions and institutions, and grants a whole host of civil rights— from the most public to the most personal. Marriage doesn’t describe a reality; it creates one.
The same is true of civil unions; the only problem is, civil unions construct a set of “separate but equal” institutions and conditions, a shadow world that parallels marriage but never attains the full protection, security, and equality that marriage grants. History has taught us the discrimination inherent in separate but equal. And it is no coincidence that the same rhetoric used against the emancipation of slaves in the 1850s and interracial marriage in 1960s (the rhetoric of states’ rights and Biblical verse) is now being used against same-sex marriage today. For all the important and real differences between oppression based on race and that based on sexual orientation, the rhetoric of bigotry has a frightening continuity.
But if rhetoric oppresses, it also frees. In a recent post on Male Pattern Fitness, our favorite fitness crush Andrew Heffernan speaks eloquently about his rhetorical relations:
Rhetoric has become a nasty word of late, but my Dad’s car had a bumper sticker on it that said “Support Your Local Rhetorician!” when I was growing up. I’m a Shakespeare junkie. My mother’s a published author several times over. My sister writes for the bloody New York Times Magazine, for Pete’s sake. I’m all about rhetoric.
Heffernan understands the power of words, especially when it comes to exercise and nutrition. Ever notice that fitness magazines recycle the same information issue after issue. That is because, according to Heffernan,
Exercise is exercise, folks, and good eating is good eating. Boy howdy, we love to parse the details, but it’s actually a fairly simple formula, and you’re either implementing that formula or you’re not. What gets us going— what starts a fad, a trend, a craze, a revolution— is context. The messenger. The rhetoric.
Remember the political pundits who dismissed Obama’s eloquence as empty rhetoric? Heffernan reminds us that rhetoric is never empty. The words we use shape the world around us. Obama’s historic election is testament to that.
And just as words shape our world, so they shape our bodies. In Heffernan’s words, “what good coaches (and good fitness writers and DVD makers and cobblers and wheelwrights) offer us is not more facts but more strategies. More ways to make the simple and widely-known facts work for us.”
More than dumbbells and Swiss balls, words are our best exercise equipment. Whether we are a nature-boy Training Barefoot or “a pudgy unicorn ambling east on Santa Monica Blvd. near La Brea,” whether we are sharing More Marvelous Mantras or “curses uttered in the dying moments of a race,” we at Blog Further have sought to exercise rhetoric, to add to the number of rhetorical apparatuses and strategies for thinking about health and fitness. With each post, we hope to redefine, to reframe our relation to exercise, a project of accretion in our attempt to include new experiences, new abilities, new strategies. Thank you for taking part in that redefinition!
This was the slogan an advertising friend suggested when I was marketing myself as a personal trainer over a decade ago. At the time, I was tickled pink by the proposition’s cheeky coyness, its self-assured solicitation.
But after the passage of Prop 8 in California this week, as well as similar anti-gay measures in Arizona and Florida, I imagine many a gay and lesbian trainer are muttering something like these words, but in dead earnest, as they count reps and spot dumbbells for those clients who either loudly (or silently) supported these hateful propositions or looked on indifferently at their passage— not to mention those media moguls who, under the guise of “covering all sides of the issue,” gave ample air-time to the ravings of any bigot with a big checkbook. I have no doubt that these clients would be shocked to discover the hostile feelings their trainers secretly harbor towards them, one of privilege’s perks being the delusion that one is universally loved by the disenfranchised.
Fortunately, there are still plenty of humane heterosexuals we at Further Fitness would be happy and honored to train. Comedian, and one-time college soccer player, Jon Stewart is first among them. On the night before the election, Stewart bent it like Beckham on behalf of gay rights with this brilliant bit:
So, to all the Sonja Eddings Browns and Marvin Perkins out there, remember these words the next time you need your gay (or gay-friendly) trainer to lift that impossibly heavy, bone-crushing weight off your caving chest:
YOUR GAY TRAINER HATES YOU!
[Update: “if you like your injustice tinged with a little irony,” check out this from last night’s The Daily Show.]
Allen Durgin is the editor of Blog Further. He invites Jon Stewart to train with Further Fitness (free of charge) anytime he wants. Seriously, Jon: give us a call. We’ll have you doing bicycle kicks again in no time.
Tonight, to celebrate Halloween, my friend Jamie and I plan on carving pumpkins, cooking dinner, and watching that cult-classic Donnie Darko. For those of you unfamiliar with the film, Donnie Darko— in addition to being a brilliant period piece set in Northern Virginia of the late 80s (the sequence set to Tear for Fears’ “Head over Heels” can’t be praised enough)— tells the story of an adolescent boy coming to grips with his own untimely death.
I mention the movie because I have been thinking alot about the relation between death, dying and fitness. My sense is that most popular publications on health and fitness steer clear of any discussion about illness and dying, as if death and disease constituted fitness’ other. The cover model’s lean, fit body, advertised as disease-free, sanitized, antiseptic seems haunted by another body– one unseen because unacceptable– one that is diseased, dirty, and fecund. My unease with this dualism between the fit body and the ill one probably stems from the accidents of my own life. At fifteen, I watched my brother-in-law, a fit man of 20, lay dying on the living room couch after his back cancer returned and metastasized. When I reached twenty myself, I came out into a gay community both decimated and galvanized by AIDS. (An interesting exercise: read Donnie Darko as a queer commentary on youth and AIDS). And as I now approach middle age, I find myself all the more familiar with the strange vicissitudes of chronic and life-threatening ailments, both in myself and in my family and friends.
So, “I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad” that popular discussions around fitness in America, while choke-full of information on how to live healthy, has very little to say about how to die healthy. After all, dying is one of fittest things a body can do. To pit one’s fitness routine against mortality seems a mere exercise in madness, desperately projecting one’s anxieties around potency, illness and death onto other bodies deemed “unhealthy” and “unfit.” What I love about Donnie Darko, besides its willingness to take serious the rage, vulnerability, and lucidity of queer youths in particular, and young adults in general, is its implicit message that there are healthy ways to die. (Another text to read alongside Donnie Darko in this regard is Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.)
So, in the spirit of Día de los Muertos, I invite readers this week to share their thoughts on how to bring death, dying and illness into more interesting, non-dualistic relations with health and fitness. What books, articles, films, music, video and websites have you found particularly helpful to think with? What delicious treats have you collected in your bag of tricks?
