And at the time I was 18 and thought I was hot shit so it felt like a smack in the face. "Part of me wanted to smack that guy into the next decade but the other half of me wanted to cry. His journey began as a result of criticism he received from a casual hookup, who said when he took his top off for sex that " just thought be more toned.” The resulting anguish set Brandon on a near-obsessive gym craze. 'Being a brown boy it’s been engraved in me that I will always come second to a blond twink or a muscly Clapham gay stereotype.”īrandon is a 23-year-old London gay man who has spent the last couple of years relentlessly and methodically transforming his body from twink physique into muscular temple. ' For Kush, the predominant images and aesthetic values of gay culture have weighed heavily on his self-esteem. When I speak to Kush, a 27-year-old musician and employee of a boutique fitness studio, he offers up this perspective on the gay male glo-up: "I find it intriguing that for a community where we constantly say we celebrate being different, we have slowly all moulded in to the same. If I was out in public and I saw men with bodies I wanted - which were always muscular, toned, big, everything I had never allowed myself to be when I had spent years making myself thin and tiny - I would become horribly sad."
I fell into a depression over it," he says. I just felt I had lost control over it and I felt wrong. "When I overcame my disordered eating, which took a long time, I started to hate my body even more. He describes a childhood where he was "bullied for being ugly and camp and girly", and the subsequent disordered eating and body shame that continued into his adult life. It does nothing to disrupt existing hegemonies of beauty – ones that are fuelled by and propped up by racism and ableism – nor does it dismantle the system that rewards conformity."ĭavid, a gay academic in his late 20s, had always had a difficult relationship with his body pre muscle glo-up. "The reality is that glo-up is the most shallow kind of wellbeing phenomenon. As summarised in this paragraph from a recent psychology paper, "research that gay men are at greater risk than heterosexual men for developing eating disorders and have a higher incidence of drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction, and body image related anxiety." The science tells us what many of us anecdotally and instinctively already know to be true. But whatever its origins, our cultural fixation on the perfect body continues to endure and impact our collective psyche in a number of harmful ways. Not simple adherence to vanity, but a complex, hypervigilant relation to image and masculinity, from a community who were so often picked apart for failing to successfully conform to both.
Now it exists as a pervasive cultural artefact. The rise in muscle-gay aesthetic is often understood as a collectively traumatic response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, a body - and a body politic - developed as evidence of health, as a rage against the literal waning of a community. Our unhealthy, all-consuming gay-male veneration of aesthetic hypermasculinity - of impossibly rippling torsos and sub 10% body fat composition - has been the subject of much investigation and theory. It does nothing to disrupt existing hegemonies of beauty - ones that are fuelled by and propped up by racism and ableism - nor does it dismantle the system that rewards conformity.
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In many ways, glo-up culture has co-opted the tropes of the body positivity and fat-acceptance movements, with its toxic philosophy often cloaked in the language of taking action to 'love the skin you're in!' But the reality is that glo-up is the most shallow kind of wellbeing phenomenon. Why? Because it frames our shallow fixation with aesthetics - and extreme aesthetic transformation - as wellness. There's a reason why so many glo-up anecdotes inevitably reference school bullies. Between early years of a society-mandated closet, school bullying, and a position at the bottom of the high school food chain - the best revenge would be the acculturation of hotness and social capital.
It comes as no surprise then that gay men are so invested in the cocooning phenomenon of the glo-up.