GAY AND BISEXUAL MEN have normalized body obsession to the point that eating disorders are an accepted and unnoticed way of life. We take it for granted that issues of body image and unhealthy eating habits plague heterosexual women, but we tend not to associate these problems with men in general. While insufficient research has been done on this topic as it concerns gay people, there is some evidence to suggest that gay men suffer from eating disorders at a disproportionate rate. There have been a few empirical studies to date, which I’ll discuss presently, along with a few books that touch on the topic and a documentary that focuses on gay body image.
Understanding eating disorders within the gay community requires examination on multiple fronts. Personal stories need to be told. Research needs to be put into perspective. The facts need to be absorbed into the larger context of gay identity.
Adonis Boys—A True Story Men’s worship of Adonis and his various avatars in ancient Greece and in other antique civilizations may have been snuffed out by Christianity, but the appetite for the perfect male specimen has returned with a vengeance in the modern gay world. In the dance club, at the gym, on a stroll in the park, a gay man’s gaze is always hunting for this embodiment of perfection (or its earthly simulacrum). Legend says that Narcissus died while transfixed by his own reflection; is it possible that gay culture has resurrected an extreme of vanity that’s similarly self-destructive? My story is a case study in this possibility. I survived the ordeal of being at war with my own body, and I’m lucky to have survived. I count myself as a wounded soldier in the body wars. I had an intimate encounter with anorexia nervosa. Ultimately, that ordeal lead me to question why so many gay men have a kamikaze obsession with being thin. At the time, though, my fixation was on being noticed by men—and my 22 year old, 240-pound self (at six feet tall) just wasn’t getting the glances I desired. “I only date thin guys,” I would hear—words that fell like a life sentence when they came from my latest crush as we dined. I knew then that he would never find me attractive, at least not in my current state. I excused myself and retreated to the bathroom, where a familiar ritual unfolded: Find a mirror. Lift your shirt. Gaze at the reflection in total and complete disgust. Curse your existence. Close your eyes. Wish you were thin. Get depressed. That was the ceremony I had been accustomed to practicing for many years. While I wasn’t hideously obese, I’d always been a pudgy kid. A large part of that probably had to do with my distain for athletics and sports. It wasn’t that I despised physical activity, but every time I tried, my athletic ability was measured against that of my peers. To avoid their name-calling, cackling, and physical abuse, I bowed out of all sports at a young age. I had come out of the closet at sixteen and had yet to have a boyfriend; in fact, I had barely had sex at that point. I was tired of the sense of rejection I felt every time I read a Gay.com profile that specified “No fats.” I was fed up with being digitally dismissed every time I went onto a dating site where most of the guys wanted “only slim/athletic builds.” More to the point, I was willing to do whatever it took to get my crush to love me back. And I had a mentor to help me out. Jordin and I started high school in different states. We met when I moved to Kansas and soon came out to each other. Like me, Jordin had always been overweight. The last time I saw him, though, he had magically transformed himself from a size XXL to a Small. I wanted to be in on his secret, and he promised to show me the way. I had always hated going to the gym, but Jordin assured me that this magical contraption called an “elliptical machine” existed for the sole purpose of slimming me down. The first time I mounted the bulky apparatus, I was exhausted after ten minutes. But with Jordin’s constant warnings and encouragement, the pounds began to roll off. Within a month, I was able to do an hour of cardio a day and I had lost ten pounds. I wasn’t even altering my diet much. Within three months, I was down to 200 pounds. I felt great, and rightfully so. About six months in, somewhere around the 180 mark, losing weight became an obsession. I always hated math, but numbers began to define my life. My self-worth was based entirely on the number of pounds on the scale. I was working out two to three hours a day and re-arranging my schedule to make this possible, often getting up at 5 AM for my first daily routine and not eating until 10 PM. Sometimes I would go two or three days without eating more than 1,000 calories. I kept my eye on the prize, though—converting my crush into my boyfriend! Along the way, I got lots of encouragement in the form of attention from guys. Once invisible at the clubs, my body was suddenly a hot commodity. Guys who had turned me down for dates in years past were lining up. Go-go dancers who once required dollar bills to get their attention were now phoning me. Constant comments about my thin physique, even negative ones, only fueled my obsession. The grueling workouts and constant stomach rumbling were the cost of admission to Adonis’ exclusive club—or so I reasoned. While companionship had been my original goal, I found that all the time I spent at the gym left little time for socializing. Most men—including the crush—got annoyed and bored by my incessant chatter about my diet and weight. When you starve yourself, your hunger signals eventually start to turn off, and invariably other things follow suit. The irony of it: my sex drive had dried up, seemingly burned off, along with the fat, on the elliptical machine. The one constant contact that I did have was Jordin. Several of our friends had warned us that we had turned weight loss into an unhealthy obsession. The idea that two adult men could have an eating disorder was at first unthinkable, but eventually we wore the badge of “anorexic” with pride. We dubbed ourselves the “Ana Twins” and made up T-shirts to show off the names we’d given ourselves. I was “Ana” and Jordin was “Rexia.” We wore our skin-tight shirts to a gay club in Charlotte one night to near universal accolades. Eating disorders have a way of isolating you and altering your reality. We had done a good job of segregating ourselves from most social occasions that revolved around food. While I had already lost over one third of my original body weight—and Jordin even more—no number was low enough. We set a competition to see who could get to 150 pounds first. Jordin won. He died two months into our game. His heart gave out after he went for several days without eating a morsel. Jordin was found dead in his apartment, logged onto Gay.com. I assume he was trying to find a date. There are no words to describe the difficulty of coming to terms with a friend’s untimely passing, especially one that played out in such a sequence. After I had time to process what had happened, and once I had dealt with the guilt of having been a party to this deadly game, I became curious about this disease and its effect upon gay men in general. Were eating disorders as widespread in this community as I suspected, and, if so, why weren’t we talking about it? Understanding the Irrational A 2007 study conducted at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health lends credence to the hypothesis that gay and bisexual men are at a higher risk for eating disorders than their male heterosexual peers. This is one of the only studies thus far to zero in on GLB populations and eating disorders. In the study, subjects were asked a battery of questions about their health and sexuality, including their sexual orientation and history of eating disorders. In a sample of 516 respondents, of whom 390 were gay and bisexual women and 126 were straight or bisexual men, a significant difference emerged between the two samples of men. Fully fifteen percent of the men who identified as gay or bisexual admitted to suffering from anorexia, bulimia, or binge-eating disorders at some point in their adult lives, while less than five percent of the heterosexual men did so.* The Columbia study, which was headed by Dr. Ilan H. Meyer, also tried to get at the underlying causes for this disparity between gay and heterosexual men. The obvious explanation is that the overwhelming emphasis on physical appearance and thinness in the gay community drives gay men to greater extremes of physical exercise, dieting, and in some cases eating disorders. To test this hypothesis, Meyer reasoned that gay men who are tightly woven into the gay community—as measured by membership in GLBT recreational groups and other organizations—would be most likely to internalize these norms of body image. However, he found no relationship between the tendency to have an eating disorder and integration in the gay community. Even gym membership did not predict this tendency, which may simply suggest that the norms of beauty and fitness are so ingrained in gay culture that they don’t need this kind of reinforcement. Author Tim Bergling explores the impact of these norms in his book Chasing Adonis: Gay Men & the Pursuit of Perfection (2007). Bergling interviewed over 200 men to examine how the gay subculture objectifies the male body, exploring such diverse issues as the psychodynamics of steroid use, body image disorders, Internet hook-ups, stalking, pornography, and strip clubs. There’s no single explanation for why men chase after the elusive Adonis, but Bergling’s interviews reveals some raw truths about body image and physical expectations. “I’m not fat. I’ve never been fat. Can’t imagine living life like that, especially as a gay man. I’ve seen how we treat fat guys, and it ain’t pretty,” said Brian, an accountant from Tennessee. Another interviewee was even blunter: “The gay male is obsessed with beauty and youth, and we objectify and deify muscles and looks over all else. There is no way brains will ever win out over beauty in today’s gay culture.” Offered Hawaii model John: “Working out is like a way of life for me, almost an addiction. I get depressed if I miss one workout and a panic attack if I miss more than that. Some people say I am way too obsessed, but a lot more are always telling me how much they would like to feel my chest and biceps. I listen more to that second group.” Filmmaker Travis Mathews’ Do I Look Fat? explores what he sees as the collective body ideology of the gay community in his seventy-minute documentary. The film follows the stories of seven gay men who have struggled with body image and eating disorders. It digs deep into both gay culture and straight society to examine root causes. Themes such as childhood wounding, internalized homophobia, the effects of hiv/aids on the body, and one’s history of substance abuse are among a few that the film brings out. Perhaps most importantly, the film doesn’t shy away from asking why these common histories have never been explored before. The film blends personal narratives with clinical commentary from several experts in the field of eating disorders, notably a doctor at a renowned eating disorder clinic, an art therapist, and a gay therapist who’s struggled with his own body image issues. The word “fat” becomes the focal point for how gay men shame themselves and each other. Gay culture is taken to task for its part in promulgating a “one size fits all” narrative. The men interviewed have approached body image differently. Some have suffered from anorexia and exercise obsession, while others have grappled with bulimia and binge eating. According to Dr. William Howard of Johns Hopkins University, gay men comprise an alarming 42 percent of all men with eating disorders, even though they represent less than five percent of the male population. Concludes Matthews: “The reasons behind the high numbers are complex, painful, and in part, unflattering to the community, but the alternative to facing them head on is continued isolation and shame, both of which feed our proverbial friend, the closet.” He adds that all men, both gay and straight, are reluctant to admit to an eating disorder, and thus seek help, because eating disorders have traditionally been associated exclusively with women. And there are other reasons why eating disorders among gay men have been brushed aside and ignored. A community that’s already an easy target for being labeled as morally deficient doesn’t need any more dirty laundry to be aired. GLBT people have habitually faced obstacles in getting adequate medical help. Doctors are often unaware that sexual orientation impacts wellness beyond the scope of HIV prevention. The unique health challenges faced by our community are just now starting to be recognized and discussed. In April of this year, Health and Humans Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that the Obama administration would be making new recommendations to improve the lives of GLBT people. We tend to absorb the pain that others inflict upon us. When we release it, it’s often to negative effect. Perhaps this obsessive self-policing of our bodies is an attempt to take back power from a straight society that has conditioned us to despise who we are. At a young age, we’re conditioned to believe that same-sex attraction is wrong. We capitulate to heterosexist hegemony before we’re equipped to challenge it, and then we deny ourselves true intimacy and pleasure. In chasing Adonis, we’re often just running away from our own shadow. * See: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070413160923.htm Jason Dilts, who lives in Kansas, writes a regular column, “Homo on the Range,” for Naked City, Wichita’s arts & culture magazine.
