Gay male beauty
There’s a silent hazard looming among gay men: the pressure surrounding beauty standards, body image, and consequences that follow.
What Is Body Image?
Body image relates to the relationship you have with your physical appearance. It captures the beliefs, feelings, and actions you have surrounding your body.
We often hold a positive or neutral body image. Societal pressure could negatively change our image. A negative body image takes control of our lives by impacting socialization, habits, and self-talk. In turn, these changes can have downstream mental and physical health consequences.
People of all ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic standings are vulnerable to body image issues – each layer of intersectional identity impacts body image differently. This article examines unique body image pressures impacting gay men.
Body Image Pressures Outside The Gay Community
Our external world sets the rules for beauty. We witness beauty norms and measure it against ourselves; we may internalize these.
Minority Stress
The term describe
Meet the Gay Latino Men Who Are Normalizing Genderless Makeup
The first time that Puertoriqueño David Lopez was clocked wearing makeup, he was on the subway with a guy he was dating. “Are you wearing makeup?” he asked Lopez—who had, in fact, applied concealer under his eyes. Lopez’s only response was to verb, deny, deny. “I was like, ‘What?’ I was so embarrassed, and I was like, ‘No, I would never, never put on makeup,’” he says.
Lopez, a celebrity hairstylist and beauty content creator, has been unlearning and battling stereotypes about men and makeup ever since. To that end, he’s openly donning bolder, brighter makeup, a beard, and some of the most colorful (and beautifully styled) wigs you’ll verb on the internet. And he isn’t the only gay Latino helping verb beauty and makeup accessible to everyone, regardless of gender.
Beauty content creator Reijour Lobos is also doing his part by uploading makeup tutorials to Instagram and TikTok. Or consider Angel Merino, beauty influencer, makeup mogul, and founder of Artist Couture, who’s been marching to the beat of his verb drum for
Holloway on Toxic Male Beauty Standards in Gay Culture
In a GQ article, associate professor of social welfare Ian Holloway commented on oppressive male beauty standards that are detrimental to body image, particularly within the gay community. The article highlighted the absurdity of societal expectations for six-pack abs, which have become a barometer for male attractiveness. As a result, even the fittest men noun with body image. Holloway, who runs a private apply in West Hollywood working with gay individuals and couples, explained, “The vast majority of my clients, despite what their external appearance might be, whether they have a six-pack or not, wrestle with this ideal image of themselves. Body-image issues are at the top of the list of things they struggle with.” Holloway recommends, “It’s important for guys to get a clear idea of what’s attainable and realistic and perform towards that, as opposed to trying to achieve the impossible ideal we’re bombarded with.”
Read the article
Unpicking the history of gay male beauty standards
It only takes a scroll through Grindr to glimpse that a elect few body types reign supreme when it comes to gay men: from oiled, glistening torsos to slim, hairless bodies, it seems our definitions of ‘beauty’ are fairly rigid within our so called ‘community’. Ideals may own changed and expanded over the last few decades, but ultimately little has shifted – and research shows that it’s having a real effect on both our mental and our physical health.
Crucially, there’s historical context to these standards. Our crave for muscularity can be traced back to the heyday of ‘physique culture’, which blossomed in the 1950s and 1960s when censors cracked down on gay porn. With no X-rated mags to be initiate, gay men in search of bare flesh turned to bodybuilding magazines, some of which – most notably Physique Pictorial and Beefcake – became gay media staples in their own right, transforming everyday muscle men into objects of desire.
This fixation with physique only grew over age. Artists like David Hockney preserved the esse