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feel great. Besides, I find there’s an inverse cor
relation between someone being gorgeous and
being a nice, interesting person.”
The link between how one feels about one
self inside and how one carries oneself on the
outside is strong.
“I didn’t perceive myself as attractive until I
came out at the age of 25,” Patrick says. “Until
1 gave in to my own attraction to men, I sub
consciously rejected approaches from both
women and men. I thought I must be asexual.”
When Patrick finally admitted his own
desires, he began to attract others to him and,
even though he is quite shy and isn’t built like
a Frontiers Model/Escort, he is never wanting
for dates. Perspective is the key.
Milo, a 55-year-old bear, agrees. Heavy his
whole adult life, Milo had grown accustomed
to feeling invisible among other gay men.
“Like that song from the musical Chicago,”
he says. “Mister Cellophane should have been
my name...’cause you can look right through
me, walk right by me, and never know I’m
there.”
All that changed when he went to his first
bear party: “I hadn’t even put down my casse
role dish when, out of nowhere, men were
practically knocking over the table to get to
me. It was so unexpected, so shocking.”
Yet even during those times when he felt
invisible, Milo had the wherewithal to value
himself.
“Those people who ignored me—I figured
they were the losers, not me,” he explains.
"Sure, I suffered from low self-esteem, not
because of my body image but because my fam
ily was so horribly homophobic.”
Milo and Patrick touch on a provocative
point. Does the gay male obsession with beauty
and perfection derive from our childhood feel
ings that our attractions are wrong and shame
fol? Do we feel we have to be built like Super
man to live in a straight man’s world? Perhaps.
I know I’ve often felt that it wasn’t enough to
be as good as straight guys in whatever I did—I
had to be better.
“Oh, lighten up,
Mary,” says my
friend Gary when 1
share my pro
found insight
Born-again
with him at a
bodybuilder
recent gay event.
Wayne
Hughes
, for one, leave Hughes and Hills’ house
inspired. Perhaps the mature, spiritually
evolved person can accept his body the way
it is...but if it’s in my power to change it, hell,
I still want arms the size of my thighs.
I consult the Just Out classified ads for a
personal trainer. Now, I’m a firm believer in
the adage “If you want what someone has, do
what they do,” so when I see the photo of the
trim-waisted, broad-shouldered Sean Parries, I
don’t hesitate to call. I’m ready to do what it
takes to build a hard body. What Parries says,
however, stops me dead in my tracks.
“The core thing, Marc, is that people yearn
to connect,” he says.
When asked what that’s got to do with
beefing up biceps, the smooth voice on the
other end of the line says softly: “Strengthen
ing the body is a form of healing, and to do
that you’ve got to listen to your body. And to
listen to your body you’ve got to slow down. It’s
amazing what your body will say when you give
it a chance.”
Parries took his own advice two years ago
and decided that in order to share his holistic
approach to health, his clients needed to be in
an atmosphere that created that mentality, not
in some noisy gym. So he built a workout stu
dio in his own home.
“Someone calls me looking for a hard body,
that’s fine,” he says, reading my mind. “But
they’re going to get so much more, Marc.”
Parries uses my name frequently in the con
versation, and I’m comforted by it and the gen
tle way in which he teaches his clients to repri
oritize: “What we all must learn is that people
are perfect the way they are today.”
I hear myself heave a sigh of relief and
think, “Only in Portland, Oregon, could you
find a personal trainer who says, ‘People are
perfect the way they are today? ”
Now that’s something you won’t find in the
back of Frontiers magazine.
“But don’t you think there’s all this pressure
among gay men to be gorgeous?” I ask. (Gary’s
a former Los Angeleno; I figured he’d under
stand.)
“Puh-leeze! Take a look around...” he says
with a sweeping gesture at a roomful of perfect
ly ordinary-looking men. “If these guys are feel
ing any pressure to be gorgeous, darling, they’re
doing a damn good job not succumbing to it.
You want to know pressure? Go to a bar in
West Hollywood where everyone looks like a
friggin’ Calvin Klein model and then let’s talk
about pressure.”
He’s right, in a way. I’ve found that most
North westerners pride themselves on being
more substantive than our neighbors to the
south—as if the rain and gloom automatically
make us more serious.
5 percent body fat (“you need a flashlight and a
hand mirror to find it”) actually causes him to
catch colds more frequently than most. But for
Hughes, who used to back out of a room, it’s
worth it to have “an ass you can bend metal
on.”
“You can’t deny the vanity factor,” he adds,
“but it’s more than that.”
The confidence he and Hills have devel
oped, for instance. Both report feeling safer, no
longer intimidated by straight men.
“I can camp it up all 1 want, and what’s one
of these soft, tiny straight boys going to do
about it? ’Cause they know 1 could rip their
heads off and crap down their throats,” Hughes
brags.
Now c’mon, guys, admit it:
Who among us wouldn’t
love to feel that way?
Let’s get physical
n exception is Wayne Hughes, who does
have a body that could turn heads at a
SoCal circuit party—and he has been
routinely and openly criticized for it.
“Once," he crows, “someone actually
came up to me in the'gym and said, ‘What
are you working out for like that? This isn’t
LA?”
I suppose it’s easy to call the daily three-
hour workout of Hughes and his partner,
Danny Hills, obsessive and shallow, and
Hughes is quick to agree.
“Deep down, I’m superficial,” he says with
a wink.
But for this dynamic duo—Hills being
the more slender, Boy Wonder type to
Hughes’ beefy Batman—self-acceptance
comes from the outside in, rather than the
inside out.
“I know what it’s like to be fat,” says
Hughes, who has only sported his buff
build for three years, giving hope to us all.
“I was heading towards 40, and I realized I
was built like an avocado.”
He admits that the three-hour regi
men, combined with a Spartan diet, is
extreme to the point that his having only
Personal trainer
Sean Parries
Please Note: Some of the names of those
interviewed have been changed to protect
their privacy. (Sorry, boys, that means you
can’t get the phone number of the guy with
the big cock.)
■ MARC A cito and his partner own
Fastsigns in Tigard. He draws the
comic strip “The Boys Next Door’’
and says he would go to the gym
more often if it had a better
selection of cakes and pies.
\ *
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