Deep in the recesses of my memory there are images and recollections which I cannot locate to a specific time in my life, but whose significance is undeniable. I am sitting in a bathtub, still small enough that I can float without touching the sides. I am playing games with a washcloth. Watching it ripple as I drag it underwater, noticing that some movements come easy to it, and others drag, enjoying the feel of the fabric against my skin.
How old was I? I cannot know. But that solitary time in the bath placed me in a world apart. I conducted experiments. I imagined adventures. I had solipsistic fantasies. Perhaps, I thought, I am the only real person, and everyone else is secretly a robot. Or later, once I discovered that the washcloth was pleasurable when rubbed against my genitals, I wondered whether I was the only person in the world to have this experience. There was no one in my life to talk to about these things, no one safe to ask, so I was left alone in my wondering. And I projected that loneliness out onto the world as a fantasy of radical solitude.
We learn to desire in part by seeing the desirable. Among homosexuals, the experience of learning to desire is complicated by the fact that we are ourselves an instance of the thing which we desire. And so our desire holds within itself a twofoldness: it can be either aspirational or unitive. It can either wish to become the desired thing, or to join with it, or both.
For me, the awakening of desire was associated with a few forbidden landmarks within my childhood universe. One was the bath time I’ve just mentioned. Another was the home gym equipment infomercials I would watch in secret while my parents were out.
My mother would often take us to Barnes and Noble on week nights to read, and sometimes I would pass through the magazine aisle and catch sight of the men’s physique magazines there. I was fascinated by the huge men on the covers. I wanted those big muscles! But when I expressed tentative admiration to my mother or sister, I was met with disgust. I learned that I was not supposed to desire what I desired.
Once, while using the bathroom, I found a photographic guide to various sex positions someone had left behind in one of the stalls. I was terrified and fascinated, and I paged through it, desperate to see what men looked like naked. When I left the bathroom, my mother could tell I had had an intense experience and grilled it out of me. She told me the person who had left the book was a “pervert” who had wanted a little boy like me to find it. Thus my innocent curiosity was transformed into profound shame. Implicitly, on account of my desires I became a “pervert” as well, and learned that my curiosity about men’s bodies and sexuality was evil.
This was, in a way, my introduction to the Christian concept of “the flesh”. I was taught to be ashamed of my body’s wants and aspirations. I was told that the bodybuilders I admired were grotesque and ugly. That “jocks” were not good people. That physical vanity is sinful. And over time I added to this the Christian pedagogy of self-renunciation, according to which care for the self involves the abnegation of one’s sexual desires and the renunciation of bodily strength.
“For the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh. And these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.” (Galatians 5:17)
The problem, which I confronted more and more desperately as I entered adolescence, was that, like it or not, my body was always with me. And, however well my environment had formed me to be an obedient and pious Christian, my body was not subject to that pedagogy. It knew nothing of the Cross, the Commandments, or sin. So an opposition was set up within me between myself, which is to say my religiously informed ego, and my the body I “happened” to inhabit.
In high school we read excerpts from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson and I remember being gripped by this passage:
“I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature)
That image summarized what I wished for myself. The desires of the flesh never seemed to abate, and they were hateful to me. If only I could cast off my body and become a transparent eyeball, a pure spirit floating in the ether of intellect and truth, unbound and free to be what I wanted, without the impediments of the flesh! Then I would be truly and wholly myself.
What was lost in all of this, what I repressed and pummeled into the recesses of my unconscious mind, was the simple and beautiful fact of my desires. The scholastics define beauty as quod visum placet—that which, being seen, pleases. And, though I could not see it at the time, my desires were very beautiful. Hateful though it was to my religious ego, my desires pleased me, inexorably, fervently, and with an inescapable regularity.
Behind the curtain of shame I allowed myself moments of enjoyment and sexual fantasy. I secretly built myself a pull-up bar out of some spare conduit. I took some solid blocks of metal from my dad’s workshop and attempted to exercise with them. I yearned after the growing biceps of my athletic classmates, torn between envy and sexual longing, unsure what the desire meant and terribly unequipped to make sense of it. I would masturbate to yearbook photos of the wrestling team, wishing I could be one of them, but also wanting each of them desperately.
As I developed intellectually, I attempted to work out my desires as if they were a problem to be solved. I looked for the pathological root, and I found it in the twofoldness I mentioned above. Because my sexual longings were often also aspirational longings, I supposed that my homosexuality was simply the fetishization of a masculine ideal that I felt was unavailable to me. I did not play sports. I didn’t understand them, and therefore found them alienating. My father was largely absent. So I blamed him for my lack of a conventionally “masculine” childhood, and hence my sexuality.
When I was twenty I had an awakening. I had read my way through the history of philosophy and my evangelical Christian worldview was falling apart. In the midst of this I started corresponding with a friend from school. We became close. He was, alas, in every way an embodiment of the thing my desires tended toward. He had been the runningback of his high school football team. He was someone I admired, but also desired. Together we decided to convert from the evangelicalism of our youth and become Roman Catholics.
Early in the relationship, I had tremendous hopes that my friend was the solution to my sexual pathology. He taught me how to lift weights. We would work out together. I bought myself a football hoping he would teach me to throw it. We spent a lot of time together. He loved poetry and philosophy like I did. He had a beautiful soul. If anyone could fix me, I thought, it was him.
The sad irony is that, in a way, my friend awakened something beautiful within me. Something I could not accept the beauty of. He brought out those parts of my bodily desires that aspired to grow and yearned for union. And for a time, tortured and confused though I was, I did grow. I felt a bit more myself. I had glimmers of belonging and a sense of companionship I had not experienced before.
But, of course, all of this was predicated on a false hope: the hope that my religious conversion and my friendship would eliminate my bodily desires. Eliminated they were not. If anything, they intensified. When, eventually, my friend cut off contact with me because he felt our relationship had too much of a romantic subtext, I was devastated. It meant that my great hope of being fixed had failed, but even worse it meant that the vulnerability I had achieved with him was now a source of shame. I was too gay for him. I could no longer trust my desire to be close to other people, to open up, to love. I started having panic attacks when I went to the gym, and stopped lifting weights. The shame was too much. It was unbearable. The part of me that had enjoyed a brief awakening was shut down. I deadened myself emotionally and dove headfirst into religious zealotry.
Recently I’ve been rereading Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Thinking alongside Heidegger has always been an enriching experience for me, and this time is no different. One of the things he does is to point out how much of the western philosophical tradition is predicated on the implicit devaluation of our own day to day, embodied, experience of the world. From Plato onward, the body is treated as either a mere coat worn by the soul, or as a prison that obscures Truth and leads us to sin. The real “me”, what is highest and most real in human nature, is elsewhere. It resides in the mind, detached from the body, and the body is seen as incidental, and is often treated with overt hostility.
What Heidegger helps us see, if we are open to it, is that the sort of analysis that prioritizes intellect and “spirit” over embodied experience is always secondary to that embodied experience, and is often merely a deficient way of speaking about that experience, one that conceals aspects of it we may be uncomfortable with. Nietzsche says that man, in his quest for disembodied Truth, is asleep, “hanging in dreams, as it were, on the back of a tiger.” The tiger—the passions and desires, the unconscious physicality of the human animal—is, more often than we would like to admit, what drives us. It gives us a sense of beauty. It brings us joy and sadness. It animates us.
By the time I was in my late twenties, the sarcophagus of my religious zeal had started to develop cracks. One summer, after giving my desires a little bit more room to breathe, I decided to join a gym and started lifting weights again. After a couple of weeks, I found that I couldn’t handle the physical feelings (the shame, the sexuality, the sheer embodiedness of it) that came along with the experience, and so I withdrew from it again. It was only once my religious faith had died of its own accord that the stirrings began again.
By 2019 I had all but lost faith in Christianity. I was exhausted from years of self-loathing. I was tired of trying to reconcile the absurd mythological architecture of Catholicism with the reality of the world I lived in. And, after all those years of repression, my bodily desires had still never gone away. I dreaded (and yet enjoyed) the summer months, when men would walk around in shorts with bare arms. At night I would secretly read online forum discussions between gay men about various life topics. I read Garrard Conley’s A Boy Erased and recognized myself in it. Some part of me was yearning to understand my desires again, and not pathologically but with a newfound empathy.
That summer I took a solo trip to Switzerland. It was the ten year anniversary of my decision to become Catholic, which had coincided with a summer abroad spent in Switzerland and Germany. While I was there I made a pilgrimage to the tomb of a bishop I admired. It felt like the close of a chapter in my life.
I was terribly out of shape, but I hiked and spent my days walking and exploring. The nostalgia of the trip and the physicality of the experience awakened something in me. I caught sight of myself in a hotel mirror, and noticed that I had beefy forearms. And an idea sprouted within me, miraculously free of shame: I wanted to get into shape again. I wanted to be fit.
When I got home I went to the Home Depot on 23rd street in Manhattan and bought myself a full length mirror. For the first time in nearly a decade I wanted to attend to my body, to observe it. I wanted to grow. This newfound acceptance of one of my core bodily desires coincided with the acceptance of the other. I decided to accept that I was gay and start dating, for the first time in my life. I was open to growth. I wanted to try.
What followed was a period of intense personal and physical growth. I became a regular at the gym. I found a boyfriend. We moved in together. I discovered gay spaces, made gay friends, and allowed myself, for the first time in my life, to want what I wanted and to delight in the beauty of it.
As time passed and I grew accustomed to my new life, echoes of my old shame kept coming back. A lot of it was occasioned by social media and the inescapable self-comparison that comes from watching endless photos of perfect bodies living apparently perfect lives. I would go to gay spaces with my boyfriend and be haunted by a sense of shame, physical inadequacy, and lack of belonging. I still looked at myself in the mirror and felt sadness. I wasn’t fit enough. I was too fat. I didn’t have the body that I wanted. I struggled with self-loathing and a sense of worthlessness. I did not believe that people had good reason to care about me, and found it hard to trust others’ affections.
Time passed. I continued on my fitness journey. I worked with one therapist, and then another. And as my body changed and grew, I started to get more attention. I was more often the figure occupying that space of twofold desire in the gaze of other men. This experience was overwhelming to me, and confusing.
About a year and a half ago I had a breakthrough with my therapist, specifically related to the experience of physical presence. What he helped me see was how much my intellectual detachment and analytical tendencies were preventing me from being present in my own life, and standing in the way of the self-acceptance I so desperately longed for.1 He taught me to be aware of my body, aware of the physicality of my feelings, of my groundedness in the present, in my own flesh. As someone who had spent decades taking flight from my physical embodiedness into intellectual fantasy worlds, developing the habit of self-presence was slowly but profoundly transformative. I became less anxious; my tendency toward aggressive self-judgment lessened. It got easier, in general, to just be me.
I remember vividly one night in Provincetown, at Gifford House. I spent an extended period chatting with a competitive bodybuilder and his partner at a bar. We did more than chat. It was wonderful. On the way home my boyfriend and I stopped on a park bench and I wept. I was so overwhelmed with gratitude at the experience of being seen and wanted, after so many years hating myself and loathing my body. It was an instance of validation that I could not write off. For once, I felt worthy.
There is, of course, a superficiality to this experience of being wanted. Part of me is duly cynical about it, knowing that if I snapped back into my body of a decade ago, I would no longer be given the time of day by many of these people. So it goes. But the best part of it is the fact that I get to enjoy my body. When I go to the gym, I get to feel the resistance of the weights, struggle against them, and relish the pump that comes after. Some days I look in the mirror and am proud of myself for having grown so much. I’m excited to continue working on myself, inside and out. After so many years of shame and despair, I’m excited to learn and grow.
In the past year I finally let go one of one of my big remaining interior shames. I admitted that I wanted to get “big”. Even now this is hard for me to type because of the residue of shame—I wanted to get into amateur bodybuilding. Not to compete, not to win any awards, but just for myself—as a gift, as a process, as an act of joy. It’s a piece of self-acceptance I didn’t think I would ever arrive at.
I’ll close by returning once more to the twofoldness of homosexual desire I discussed at the start. One of the things that has been remarkable to me in the past few years is the way desire runs in both directions between the poles of that ambiguity. Sometimes aspiration reveals sexual longing. But sometimes, in sexual longing, we end up discovering an admiration that can teach us more about ourselves and our desires.
There are a few big examples of this for me. The first was a gay porn actor who goes by the name Derek Bolt. I don’t remember how I first came across him, but I liked his videos and somehow discovered his twitter account. Lo and behold, the man had a personality. And a normal career. He’s an architect, he’s married, and he does competitive bodybuilding on the side. The discovery was eye-opening to me. It transformed the sexual desire into something else. I found myself, to my astonishment, feeling personal admiration for someone I had mentally written off as just another guy play-acting at sexual fantasies. I admired his freedom, and sincerity, and (to put it simply) the fact that he was huge but not a heterosexual paragon of toxic masculinity.
Another example, and I mention it because he was the occasion2 of this essay, was a fellow I discovered on Twitter during the pandemic. He ran an Only Fans account under a false name, which was a combination of sex videos and the longterm record of his physical growth. I watched some of his videos and moved on, but then later stumbled upon his real twitter account, under his real name (Ben Weil). A researcher who does advocacy work for queer people and is into gender and sexuality studies! He likes Foucault?! Is it the same guy? It was.
Again, as with Derek Bolt, the sexual fantasy was shattered and replaced by admiration and delight at the discovery of what exists in the world as a possibility. It was the first time I’d encountered someone who was pronouncedly queer, progressive, and invested in the same sorts of intellectual pursuits I loved. But most of all he was a gym freak and (unlike so many male fitness influencers) not toxic about it at all, but open, thoughtful, and sincere.
Social media, pornography, and the slough of body images that pass before our eyes online—it can all be toxic, demoralizing, and harmful. It can set up impossible ideals, it can deceive, and it can lead us to hate ourselves, to resent the physical limitations and quirks of our own bodies. But sometimes it can be a way of throwing light on possibilities in ourselves we did not know existed.
The example of strangers helped to teach that little kid who once stole glances at the magazine covers in Barnes in Noble what it means to be OK with his body, its desires, and the beauty of it all. And for that I am very thankful.
I’ve written more about this here:
