Home > Work > Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity
1 " The world does not need a ‘gay Elvis’, for the original, with his black leather suit, pomaded pompadour, come-fuck-me eyes and radiant narcissism, was quite queer enough "
― Mark Simpson , Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity
2 " Sex is the theory; porn is the practice. "
3 " Spiderman and Superman were closeted bodybuilders: they wore bodysuits that decently covered their flesh and masks that disguised their identity; their lives were rigidly divided between body-less bourgeois respectability and muscular super-hero fantasy; they led a 'double-life' that no one knew about and were never to be seen at the gym. "
4 " bodybuilding has come to be seen as a means by which boys can turn desire into identification. "
5 " He-Man wins the day and thrusts his sword into the air, shouting, 'I HAVE THE POWER!!' as white lightning squirts out of its tip. "
6 " And so we find Fussell living alone in a flat unfurnished except for an exercise machine and 'A cardboard cut-out of Arnold with loin cloth and sword as Conan the Barbarian'. Thus the heterosexual bodybuilder's relationship to homosexuality is revealed as a sad kind of insubstantial shadow of it, a kind of mourning, a ghostly kind of love. "
7 " Not permitted to desire another man's penis, the bodybuilder phallicizes that which he is permitted to desire: his own body. "
8 " The huge veins on his neck throb with the exertion and rush of it all and his whole body flexes and pumps like one enormous, grotesque organ. "
9 " The breathtaking gall, and the astonishing achievement, of films like Commando is that men's bodybuilding – the obsessive interest of men in men's bodies – and the appropriation of gay macho drag by heterosexual men became both a reassertion of the masculine body's 'natural' superiority over the female and a disavowal of homosexuality. "
10 " The more exaggerated the musculature, the more it had to explain and justify itself in mounds of dead bodies. "
11 " every time men try to grasp something consolingly, sturdily, essentially masculine, it all too easily transforms into its opposite. "
