It only takes a scroll through Grindr to see that a select few body types reign supreme relating to gay men: from oiled, glistening torsos to slim, hairless bodies, it seems our definitions of ‘beauty’ are fairly rigid inside our so called ‘community’. Ideals could have modified and expanded over the previous couple of a long time, but ultimately little has shifted – and research shows that it’s having an actual effect on each our mental and our physical health.

Crucially, there’s historical context to those standards. Our desire for muscularity will be traced back to the heyday of ‘physique culture’, which blossomed within the Fifties and Sixties when censors cracked down on gay porn. With no X-rated mags to be found, gay men in quest of bare flesh turned to bodybuilding magazines, a few of which – most notably Physique Pictorial and Beefcake – became gay media staples in their very own right, transforming on a regular basis muscle men into objects of desire.

This fixation with physique only grew over time. Artists like David Hockney preserved the essence of physique culture through homoerotic paintings; Tom of Finland ramped up the aesthetic exponentially, creating explicit artwork featuring giant-dicked policemen fucking on the streets. His aim? To queer the notion that gay men were inherently feminine, something that was – and still is – weaponised against us.

Finland’s subversion of hyper-masculinity cemented a radical legacy which lives on today not only in museums and books, but in addition in gay porn scenes featuring similarly Adonis-like men. The ‘jock’ isn’t the one archetype of gay male desire nevertheless it’s considered one of only a few, and this narrow scope of gay beauty is doing us damage. An often-cited 2007 survey found 42% of all men with eating disorders within the UK were gay despite us making up around 5% of the male population, whereas LGBTQ+ people of all genders were more more likely to binge and abuse laxatives – which arguably ties into our increased rates of mental illness.

It’s not only body image, either; 2016’s #GayMediaSoWhite hashtag illustrated an enormous lack of diversity in gay media which looked as if it would explain the racism, femme-shaming and body-shaming so prevalent on LGBTQ+ dating apps.

Gay and Lesbian Studies professor Gregory Woods agrees that there’s a fetishisation of hyper-masculine bodies within the gay community, but says he’s unsure that it could possibly be linked back to physique culture. “I assume it’s still, partly, a response against negative stereotypes of campness, which seem especially common within the context of college bullying,” he theorises. “We go to the gym and switch ourselves into the tattooed hulks (or hunks?) our bullies wouldn’t have dared to bully.”

It is sensible that we could possibly be running from stereotypes by bulking up our bodies, and even by appropriating masculine aesthetics just like the handlebar moustache or the skinhead (each famously popular amoung gay men within the 70s and 80s). But loads of men project this pressure to ‘man up’ and expect it of potential partners. They plaster their dating bios with demands like ‘don’t be camp’ or ‘be a person!’ and, in turn, insinuate that campness is bad. But that is unfaithful; not only is camp a political weapon, it’s way of being that was openly embraced by loads of the pioneers that fought most vigorously for the rights LGBTQ+ folk we enjoy today.

We live in a misogynistic world which stigmatises and regulates femininity, and this reality is stamped throughout gay beauty standards. I do know this through my very own experiences of curating dating profiles: I’ve learned to delete the photos of me in a full face of glitter and conceal pictures of my body at its heaviest. I once heard a friend say that fat gay men are “outcasts”, and it made me cringe – it appeared like the form of passé Sex and the City quote designed to have Woke Charlotte foaming on the mouth. But over time it’s come to feel upsettingly accurate; even a BBC3 documentary dedicated to gay body image featured the experiences of precisely no fat gay men. This erasure only strengthened the emotions already whirling through my mind: that we’re anomalous or, worse, unwanted.

When it comes to what is desirable, it’s helpful to look into gay apps and their language of ‘tribes’. These are the narrow boxes that delineate the boundaries of our desires: there’s the ‘twink’, young, hairless and recently celebrated by The Recent York Times in a controversial, largely tone deaf op-ed (Gay Twitter collectively pointed that it’s literally all the time been the ‘age of the twink’ in our community); then there’s the ‘bear’ and the ‘cub’, each categories which insinuate it’s okay to be plus-size when you also occur to be hairy.

The aforementioned ‘jock’ continues to be arguably the most well-liked category, but the choices for anyone that doesn’t fit these boxes are limited. The porn industry is exemplary of those limitations: people of color might get fetishised by problematic porn labels like ‘Ebony’ and ‘Asian’, whereas trans men remain largely invisible in porn (although studios like Pink & White and stars like Buck Angel rally against this). For context, porn is the one category wherein trans women have been historically over-represented in equally problematic ways – the web category ‘Shemale’ is proof of this.

Arguably, none of those subcategories are as culturally dominant because the palatable white gay norm, established when advertisers earmarked gay men and lesbians as a lucrative market as early as thirty years ago. Sitcoms like Will & Grace centred ‘aspirational’ white, middle-class men, whereas Queer Eye – the unique, not the heartwrenching remake – positioned us as fairy godmothers willing to makeover hapless straight blokes in return for superficial acceptance. Corporations engaged in ‘pinkwashing’ – offering us the bare minimum and rinsing us for money in return. In the identical way that firms play on the insecurities of ladies to flog them eating regimen pills, our beauty standards were narrowed in order that we’d spend to maintain up appearances.

Woods describes these standards as a “taxation”. “Being compelled to look good – perfect body, perfect haircut, perfect taste in clothes – is a form of cultural taxation just like the pink pound itself, which numerous us seem cravenly willing to pay in exchange for straight people’s acceptance.” In truth, if we follow the Queer Eye logic that straight men overwhelmingly accept us once they need to look more like us, we’re actually forced to overcompensate.

It’s also value highlighting that the deal with health wasn’t just driven by a desire to sell us gym memberships and supplements. Within the context of the AIDS epidemic, it was also politically-charged. The illness and its homophobic coverage still loomed large over mainstream media, and I’ve talked to men prior to now that feel it shaped beauty standards – that there was a pressure to look physically fit and healthy versus skinny and frail with a purpose to attract partners. Some even say that hairlessness was particularly desirable, a strategy to display a body freed from lesions. These are oral histories, but they’re valid – especially given the generation of voices and testimonies the epidemic took from us.

Issues around gay male masculinity and femininity have gone underexplored, however the pressure to suit into rigid beauty standards is collectively punishing us. I remember being scarred after I was jokingly told that fat and female gay men were particularly marginalised, and for years I internalised the concept I could possibly be too fat or too queer to be desirable. I policed my masculinity and abused my body, drowning it with alcohol and using food limitation tactics to shape it into something more conventionally attractive.

Unfortunately, research indicates that too lots of us are still doing the identical. But gay beauty standards grow to be easier to disentangle if you realise that they’re rigid for a reason: because they’re largely a byproduct of capitalism, discrimination and internalised homophobia. We’ve been packaged and sold as fairy godmothers, pretty boys and muscle men, but there must be room for those of us who don’t fit those stereotypes. All of us walk through life otherwise, but ultimately we is usually a community; the more we dismantle and disrupt archetypes of gay beauty, the more we will strengthen the ties that bond us.