How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [31]
The company has consistently maintained that their audience for the sexy catalog is college students and older people. The state of Illinois tried to ban it, and many conservative commentators have mused that pictures of nude youths seemed a strange strategy for selling clothes. The catalog, like that of Victoria’s Secret, is one of America’s soft-porn standards. When the A&F Quarterly was cancelled in December 2003, it made national news and inspired a lot of sighs from horny gay and straight Americans alike. Andrew, a gay blogger from Minneapolis, made it the lead in his daily journal.
The party is over for y’all who sit home on Saturday night jackin’ it to Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues. They will be discontinuing it after pressure from fundamental prudes. I can’t say I’m disappointed myself, but I do empathize with my gay compadres who will have to settle for XY magazine in order to fulfill those twink fantasies.
I visited an Abercrombie store in a Los Angeles mall around the time the catalog was discontinued. Dewy seminude posters looking like Queer Eye versions of Hitler youth still graced its walls. The store was packed with straight young men and women buying up expensive fake-vintage T-shirts and jeans. Many of them were young, macho teenagers who probably use the word “gay” to mean lame. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell them that their A&F wardrobe was shaped by a homosexual aesthetic.
Body Beautiful: Six-Pack Abs, Gay Gymrats, and Straight Boys
In Terrence McNally’s 1991 play Lips Together Teeth Apart, two straight couples vacation on Fire Island in a house that had belonged to the brother of a main character, Sally, now deceased. The female guest, Chloe, spends most of her time watching nearly naked gay men on the beach through binoc ulars. “You are so fucking hot, honey!” she says to a handsome boy she’s been stalking. Then she turns to Sally and asks why gay men are so much buffer than their straight counterparts. “[You] have to ask yourself: don’t straight men have eyes? Don’t they occasionally look at themselves in the mirror? God knows, they expect us to.”
Homosexual men have shown the way toward a new wave of fitness worship. Working out at the gym, which previously had been a strength issue for straight guys, has now become more about aesthetics. The current emphasis on masculine abdomens and butts is a direct contribution of gay male culture, which has indirectly benefited straight women. Women are now being encouraged to objectify men’s bodies in the same way that men have “rated” female bodies over the years. The gay culture’s tendency to fetishize the male body has influenced straight female tastes. Everything now is all about pecs, six-packs, and toned butts. (Note the bizarre scene in the Julia Roberts movie Runaway Bride, where the ninety-year-old grandmother says of Richard Gere’s character, “I like his tight buns!”)
As usual, the fitness scene has witnessed the straight-to-gay-to-straight cycle. When it comes to the sculpting of straight male bodies, there has been a direct line from the post-World War II bodybuilders such as Charles Atlas and Jack LaLanne, to the homoerotic muscle magazines of the 1950s, to the gay men of today. And now straight men want to look buff. Muscle magazines have always been considered light gay porn, and yet have also been read by heterosexual males. “In terms of impact as well as artistry,” writes Thomas Waugh in his book about eroticism in male photography before Stonewall, “the current of physique eroticism that flourished in the postwar decades is one of the great achievements of gay culture.”
The 1980s saw a surge in body awareness among gay men