I love the gym. Its the place I go at the end of my day where I expend the last bit of energy I have and it never fails to leave me on a high when I'm finished. It has given me a focus and discipline like few things have ever given me before at times when I sorely needed it. It has done wonders to my own self-confidence and body image and given me more social confidence, and not to mention helped get me laid more than I thought I would ever get. So what the fuck is there to dislike about something that has given me so many positive things? Trust me, a lot.

A little backstory will probably help you understand. I first stepped foot in a gym the summer before my freshman year of high school to start lifting for football. We had our own gym at our school for football, and the whole mentality was to simply get bigger and stronger. There was very little attention paid to dieting or body composition. As long as you were getting bigger and stronger, it didn't matter if all that muscle was covered under pads of fat. I went from a pretty normal 5' 11", 175 pounds at the beginning of my freshman year to 5' 11", 195 by the end of that football season in November. I got a lot stronger and put on muscle, but some of what I gained was also fat. That freshman season I was one of only 4 freshman to be a varsity backup, and practicing with the big boys showed me that I needed to get even bigger and even stronger if I wanted a permanent spot. So my sophomore year I gained another 15 pounds or so, and became a regular sub on the varsity team as well as a starter on JV. All during the off-season I was determined to finally get a starting spot my junior year, and by the beginning of 2-a-days I was at my lifetime heaviest of 245 pounds. I got a starting spot on varsity, and I was actually one of the lightest guys on our defensive line.

Coincidentally right around that time I was at my heaviest was the same time I had come to finally admit to myself I was gay. This was the beginning of a long bout of depression that would sink me pretty damn low. I started looking at gay porn on the internet and all the stars were attractive and in really good shape. I secretly got my hands on a DNA Magazine copy and that magazine is probably the worst offender for pushing the idea of "if you don't look like our perfectly sculpted white models you aren't shit in the gay world". As a closeted, angry, confused, gay 17 year old, I fell for this message of perfection as a measure of worth, and fell for it hard. I still to this day have the picture of the guy who finally made me feel so bad about the way my body looked that I decided to make a change. I decided that I didn't care about anything else, just that I wanted to get that body and hopefully that would gain me acceptance somewhere, anywhere. I started that very night, and for the next nine months of my life I became obsessed with exercising and lifting and getting that toned muscular body that that dude in the magazine had. Like I mentioned before, the fact that I was depressed during that time helped me immensely in reaching my goal. The discipline required with all the exercise and dieting and lifting gave me a sense of purpose where I had none. I craved the dopamine high that you get at the end of a workout because it was the only thing that made me feel happy and alive anymore. I would often go for miles-long runs in July and August in the middle of the afternoon when the heat and humidity were brutal as a way of self-punishment for letting myself get like I was. Looking back in self-reflection, it was a terribly unhealthy relationship. Yet it all paid off (or so I thought) in the end when I had slimmed back down to 175 and had gained a respectably toned and defined body. I got so many compliments and it was a way to make myself stand out for something positive when I thought that was impossible because I was a closeted fag.

For reasons that are too long to go into here, my life took a pretty dramatic turn for the better the second half of my senior year of high school, and I had much more to live for than simply trying to attain a physical standard. Throughout college, I was still very much into working out but I had gained a relatively more balanced approach (though admittedly I still did it for sex as my primary motivator). My college gym was pretty much all straight guys, so there was no sexual competition for each other. They were competing to try to get the girls, not each other (this is key to remember for the next part). The environment there was very much non-sexualized, and it had more of a feeling of a frat house where everyone was chill, so to speak.

Fast forward to when I moved into the city this past summer, and started working out at a gym in the heart of The Gayborhood. This gym has a long history of being "the gay gym", which isn't a surprise considering its right in the gay hood. I joined because it was relatively close to my apartment and I was curious as to what this whole gay gym thing meant. I stepped foot inside for the first time on a hot July evening, and dear lord it was the closest thing to both heaven and hell. It was filled with so many sexy, young gay guys wearing cut-up shirts and tanks barely covering their perfectly sculpted bodies. Lots of guys had abs and every muscle popped under their 8% body fat. I was in good shape too, but I always had a beefy muscular build. I've never had overly defined abs (nor do I care about getting them) and my body fat % has certainly never been single digit. All those old feelings of insecurity came rushing back. This gym is one of the few places where gay men rule and overshadow the straight people in it. Women (even very attractive ones) hardly get any attention, and the muscular, attractive gay men are held up as the ideal, even to the straight guys. The insecurity and sexual tension in that place is so palpable you can smell it in the air. Never have I been to a gym where 95% of the people are in such good shape, yet they can't seem to realize what they have. It all just seems like one giant competition to fuck each other, and the gym is an avenue to do that. When you really think about it, that's all gay culture really is: a giant competition for sex. Most of the guys I see during the week at the gym are the same ones who I see at Woody's and Voyuer and Boxers, etc. on Friday and Saturday nights. What happens in the locker room there is a blog entry unto itself.

Yet through all the negatives that I just wrote about it, I still love it. It's a place where, as a gay man, I feel like I'm the one with the power and, in a weird way, influence, that is just impossible in a world dominated by straight people. I love looking at sexy guys on a constant basis and striving to better my own body to better compete in the giant fuck-fest of urban gay culture. The fact that this place sets the bar so high has pushed me to levels I never thought I'd get to. There is also a certain sense of camaraderie and feeling of belonging that you get when you finally have a space where your "own kind" dominate.

I guess the key is to not get completely lost in it all. TBD.....