How Eating Disorders Are Consuming Gay Men

Fact:
1. Well over 1 million U.S. gay men suffer from severely depressed body image.
2. According to Reuter's Health (2002), 34% of all gay men suffer from anorexia or bulimia.
3. 52% of gay men feel gay culture includes an oppressive emphasis on youth, beauty, and particularly muscle, reports researcher Michelangelo Signorile.
4. More gay men are abusing steroids, irrevocably damaging their health, simply to look more muscular.

That urban, gay men are largely preoccupied with physical appearance - particularly muscle mass and definition - is no surprise; but that gay-owned and -geared businesses are (unknowingly or deliberately) using this to stack up the pink dollars is both shocking and saddening.

This obsession with muscle (sometimes referred to as "bigorexia") has swollen dangerously in urban gay neighborhoods, and seems to spawn from a disdain for effeminacy, a celebration of rigid extremes (muscleman or drag-queen), and yes, consumerism - and this is where many allegedly pro-gay businesses are at fault...and where many of them also have the opportunity to make a difference.

Take, for example, a gay-centric fitness gym right here in Manhattan where this writer once worked as a personal trainer. Let's pretend this establishment is called "Results." Instead of using amenities, location, and incentives to entice new gay customers, this gym advertises with the images of men - who've obviously pumped iron and drugs - boasting bodybuilding magazine-like chemical-made muscles. The message is clear: "You're gay and this is what you should look like, but you don't, so join our gym." This "gay" gym even encouraged its personal trainers - the "experts" upon whom it is incumbent to emphasize health over aesthetics - to wear skin-tight, uber-revealing spandex uniform shirts. The same gym also turned a blind eye to steroid use among its trainers and floor staff.

Bob Bergeron, LCSW, a gay man and Chelsea-based psychotherapist in Manhattan, has made a practice of exclusively treating gay men with body image and steroid problems. He says the most important issue in combating this new, gay epidemic is to teach gay men, "do not compare your body to others." Yet our central (ostensibly) "health" facilities (among countless other businesses) reinforce the exact opposite.

According to The Center for Disease Control, there are about 441,380 cases of AIDS among gay men since 1981. That means that half-a-million more gay men suffer from severely debilitating body image disorders than suffer from AIDS! Does this not constitute an epidemic?

Bottom line: would we stand for it if gay businesses saturated our cities with advertisements and innuendos that exacerbated the AIDS epidemic? I don't think so. Yet, we take no note of the same businesses perpetuating the gay Adonis ideal - the new, gay epidemic - which afflicts more than twice as many gay men.

It's time for a change, and it is incumbent upon gay-owned and -geared businesses - which subsist, no...thrive on pink dollars - to do their part to help cure the plague. This writer understands that sex sells, but wouldn't it be nice to see a poster for "Effects" that boasted a trainer's knowledge instead of his anabolically-induced musculature? This contagion is laying siege to our communities and we must begin combating it now. We are not our bodies, and the sooner our gay, entrepreneurial luminaries subscribe to this, the better we'll all be.