How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [32]
Body-conscious straight men—call them hetero gymrats, metrosexuals, or post-straights—are looking better all the time because they have begun emulating the gay emphasis on building a better physique. The bar has been raised, and the women in their lives, increasingly influenced by the gay body aesthetic, expect their men to be lean, muscular, and smooth chested.
Men’s Health magazine epitomizes the confluence of straight and gay body concerns. Started by health-conscious Rodale Press (publishers of Prevention magazine) as a fitness magazine for men, its circulation has expanded from only 90,000 in 1988 to more than 1.5 million today. Although the magazine dispenses heterosexual advice and has spawned its own sex guide for straight men, Men’s Health, like Gentleman’s Quarterly (GQ), has always had a homoerotic tone to its pages, especially in its featured fitness layouts and its cover shots. Chris Haines, in a 1998 Salon article, “The Sweaty-Chested Hunky-Boy Rag That Dare Not Speak Its Readers’ Name,” dubbed Men’s Health “the straight magazine gay men love to read.” Of course, the magazine has a homoerotic feel to it—the covers, as Haines describes, feature “a new black-and-white photo of a handsome man with a perfectly chiseled (and inevitably shaved) torso in various stages of undress.” But the more important point, I think, is that the magazine is read by both gay and straight men and that everyone feels fairly comfortable about it. Bodybuilding and fitness are now pansexual ideals.
From Greenwich Village to Target: Homo Style and Pop Culture
Can a Campbell’s soup can be gay?
The tomato soup can certainly became gay by the time Andy Warhol transformed it in a series of paintings exhibited in Los Angeles in the summer of 1962. He took one of his mother’s favorite processed lunch products and made it an American pop standard. Warhol’s famous series of soup-can paintings and silk screenings are as iconic as the Mona Lisa, as are his garish portraits of American goddesses Marilyn Mon roe, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and Liz Taylor. Warhol was like a gay Norman Rockwell, taking the corny things Americans cherished and presenting them once again in a new guise.
Writing in the British Film Institute’s magazine Sight and Sound, Mike O’Pray perfectly defined how Warhol’s gay sensibility influenced American tastes:
The art critic Barbara Rose claims that Warhol was “the inventor of the lifestyle of the 60s.” He did encapsulate all its idealism, experimentalism, arrogance (even, at times, its silliness) and most of what was understood as cool. Cool is precisely the hijacking of low and marginal culture into the mainstream—borrowing from the black ghettos, from the drug world of the streets, from gay clubs, from S&M dress. Warhol was an artist operating in a tiny elite avant-garde in New York, but only Picasso in the modern period has had such universal recognition.
In studying pop culture over the last forty years, all roads lead to the bewigged Warhol, a mysterious figure who loved camp and swish and celebrity of any persuasion. His influence took many forms—films, art, fashion, and commercial products. He worshipped the rich and famous, and yet he also made the idea of celebrity accessible to everyone. His prophetic line, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” has become nearly true; it was uttered almost forty years before the glut of reality television shows such as Survivor, The Bachelor, and American Idol.
We do owe much of how we see our culture to Warhol, and yet his major contribution,