The gay fascination with muscle guys

I’m a female muscle growth writer, which surprises a few guys, and I often get very bizarre comments like “Wow, I thought only men were into this!”

By far, the single question that annoyed me the most is, “Why do you think more men are into muscle men than women?”

There’s no way I can answer that question without acknowledging an absolutely outrageous premise, like “do you still like to beat children?” So many women like muscular men, or find them sexy, and so many gay men think visible veins are icky.

But hey, don’t listen to me, listen to science. Not a day goes by some behaviorist institute puts forward the idea that as a whole, women have a sexual preference for muscular men, and muscular males are more likely to have lots of previous female sexual partners than non-muscular brethren. Wow, now there’s some shocking results. Who did the survey, the Institute for Figuring Out Really Obvious Things? I guess science has dedicated itself to proving that High School actually happened.

But it is undeniable that the muscular male physique is seen as a fundamentally gay interest. This has led some to believe that there’s something hard-wired about loving muscle for gay men, or something about women that leads them to not like it – an idea that I reject. Rather, the current gay love of all things muscle is mutable and non-biological and had its basis on historical and cultural factors that are actually very recent.

When my mother was growing up in Brooklyn in the sixties and seventies, she knew a lot of gay men, and all of them, she said, were thin, harmless “fairies” that were bad at sports. There may be an element of stereotype in this, and it is one person’s subjective experience, and there may be class and regional factors in play, but it is true that the emphasis in gay culture was not on muscle. Prior to the 1980s, the most famous figures associated with homosexuality were Andy Warhol and David Bowie (who once famously said that he was a “closeted heterosexual”).

Good physiques have been valued since Ancient Greece, but the beginning of the modern gay fascination with muscle men starts in the 1980s with AIDS. It’s impossible to compare the horrifying devastation AIDS had on gay communities, especially before modern drugs were able to make AIDS something less than a total death sentence. AIDS is a wasting disease, and being muscular and built says, “hey, I’m healthy.” That’s when we start to see the gay fixation on bodybuilding. Gay gyms were not new to the 1980s, but their prominence and central role in gay culture was new, and the new desire for size and strength dovetailed nicely with traditional Western ideas about the male appearance.