Male Celebs with a taste for beefcake

A while ago I wrote an article about female celebs with a taste for beefcake, a list dominated by the stellar personality of Mae West to the point where I wrote the article and even I can’t remember who else was on it. After writing that piece I feel like kicking myself for not including many, many others that I've learned about since then, the biggest name being fifties blonde bombshell/sex symbol Jayne Mansfield, who married bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.

In any case, I thought it’d be amusing to do the converse, an article that was the flip-side version of that one, with male celebs into muscular ladies.


Gregory Hines


Greg Hines was one of the greatest tap dancers in history, and was also a friend of bodybuilding: he would often be seen in the audience of exhibitions. The woman he was engaged to marry at the time of his death was a female bodybuilder, Negrita Jayde.

Jean-Claude van Damme

Who knew that the Muscles from Brussels was a fanboy for female bodybuilders? Apparently, as a weedy teen in Belgium with cokebottle-thick glasses, Jean Claude used to read all the fitness magazines and had a gigantic crush on Gladys “The Tigress” Portugues, one of the stars of PUMPING IRON II: THE WOMEN. With his usual go-getter spirit, when JC first moved to LA as a virtual unknown and penniless nobody, he found out where Gladys was having a photo shoot and tried to woo and win her over…a scenario that sounds like the plot of a B-romantic comedy.

Jean-Claude is someone I have a great deal of sympathy for, which is surprising because in all honesty I’ve never seen one of his movies from start to finish. Except for maybe some of Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks’s pictures or the occasional Western, I’ve never liked action movies, and certainly not the “I’m tougher than you” violent and revenge-themed sort that van Damme made in the late 1980s. Van Damme reminds me of a late-period Steve Reeves, forgotten because Hollywood no longer made the kind of movies he was famous for and totally unable to reinvent himself.

R. Crumb

Underground cartoonist R. Crumb seemed to be a professional deviant weirdo, but one of the biggest cartoons of his was “What to do With a Strong Girl.” Incidentally, if you haven’t seen the R. CRUMB biopic movie, do yourself a favor and see it: it’s easily the funniest and weirdest movie ever. The film’s sense of humor can be summarized with the movie’s opening line: “When I was eight years old, I found I was sexually attracted to Minnie Mouse.”

Alex Daoud

The mayor of Miami Beach during the heady “Scarface” and "Miami Vice" cocaine cowboy days in the eighties when everything Miami was cool. Alex Daoud was a former boxer, a big tough and flamboyant guy that was not only corrupt as hell and associated with organized crime, but also laughably obvious about it, yet who somehow oversaw Miami Beach’s explosion and renaissance into a world-class destination and was easily one of the city’s best mayors. I can think of very few people universally beloved by both elderly Jews and European clubbers.

Somehow, Alex Daoud comes off as much more likeable and interesting than any squeaky-clean do-gooder or political white knight, because here was a man that knew how to TCB. And he was totally into female muscle girls, which makes his book tour all the more surreal, as everywhere he went, he was flanked on either side by foxy female bodybuilders.