Time for This Gym Rat to Break Free From the Pack

When I left London to live in Los Angeles two years ago, some of my snobbier British friends said that I might as well abandon any internal life of the mind, as the city famously had more gyms than libraries. That was perfectly OK by me. I replied that my internal life was quite big enough to look after itself, and, besides, it was not as though I had never been in a gym before. Indeed, by British standards I had been quite the model of fitness: Regular weekly workouts had been a feature of my life for the past decade, and like any good European, I wasn’t about to get some stupid phobic guilt complex if I missed a week here and there once I settled in L.A.

I was wrong, of course. By the time one of those supportive friends came to visit me recently, the city had woven its spell and I was well along the way to becoming a total slave to the gym rhythm. Her weeklong stay meant that my time had to be spent in ways other than pounding the treadmill, which, although secretly a relief, did bring out in me that terrible sense of fear that my body was instantly going south. By the time I dropped her at the airport, such was the feeling of loss of corporeal control that I imagined that bits of my body were actually falling off through neglect and decay as I walked along the street.

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So I’ve decided, after a week of too much wine, sensual appreciation of food, and far too much good conversation, that I am going to reassess my supposed need for the Perfect Body. I will admit that the L.A. gym thing has defeated me.

I was going that way for some time. Having entered into the spirit of it all, I had taken out memberships to two gyms. One is rather small and unpretentious and has the great virtue of being a stone’s throw from my apartment in Hollywood. This means that I can go there largely unseen first thing in the morning, straight from waking up and before my face has properly settled into position. It’s a relatively unswanky place, and you don’t get the impression that the members are all coming off some conveyor belt.

The other one is a huge, mostly gay workout factory in the heart of West Hollywood. Only a fool would go there without already having had some sort of preparatory workout at home, as 90% of the bodies on show are, at least on the face of it, glistening, golden and ripped to within an inch of their lives. These belong to the guys who believe that their bodies are temples, at which others should worship as regularly as possible. On a particularly bad day, this place has a certain Stepford-like quality in its uniformity.

But both gyms have much in common, chiefly an atmosphere of righteousness and virtue. This is good work we are doing here, the people around seem to be saying; we are fighting the good fight. A trainer at one of them wears a sweatshirt with the slogan “Fitness is freedom” on her back. (“Freedom from what, exactly?” you say as you complete the ninth curl of the morning.) The contorted faces of human gerbils, tethered to frightening black step machines, were those of prisoners undergoing voluntary torture. I found myself silently shouting, “You fools! Don’t you realize that never have you been less free? Don’t you realize that you’re imprisoned by your own muscles?”

I think everybody I know now goes to a gym. Most young urban professionals would probably consider this to be a totally unexceptional claim, especially in L.A., which, one sometimes feels, tends to regard itself as having actually invented the human body. But I’m from maybe the last generation that sees such activity as somewhat specialized and certainly not a necessity. There is a basic cultural difference between the American and European attitude to the body. Here, it is seen as a machine, almost independent of the brain, that needs to be kept well-oiled, rather like a car, whereas Europeans see the two as much more sensually connected, the physical being a total expression of the mental. Here, the disconnection between the two means that the cars may run faster but the drivers sometimes seem completely AWOL: The fruitcakes and the general weirdness that one encounters in L.A. life give lie to the idea that a sound body automatically means a sound mind.

As a gay man, the pressure to keep in shape in L.A. is, I’d say, at least half as great again. Big pecs are today what the thick mustache was to gay guys in the ‘70s: indispensable. The gay world can be outrageously body-obsessed, and the guy who doesn’t do some sort of exercise, in West Hollywood at least, runs the risk of being treated like he’s mentally impaired (Silver Lake is, I believe, more forgiving). All my gay friends visit gyms with the devotion of Catholics attending daily Mass; such is their dedication that almost anything else could be sacrificed, any social engagement overturned or any friend flaked on rather than a workout missed.

There’s no doubt that the gym is just as much a part of gay social life as the bar or dance club. And as with these institutions, it is treated deadly seriously. Rather like watching porn, it only works if laughter is banned. You know you are in a gay gym because the locker room is so quiet. In straighter establishments, there will probably be a fair amount of joshing around and sporty banter. At my West Hollywood gym, such is the sexual tension and anticipation that it is as silent as an L.A. library reading room.

The current prevalence of the largely homoerotic male image in all aspects of the media promises to keep these gyms full for a few years to come. This is the model we now have to live up to, and, as we sweat away at our torture of choice, it’s one that is hammered home relentlessly on those monitors overhead, always tuned silently to MTV or VH1, with their endless parade of the desirable and the ineffably bland. The flickering images seem to suggest that if we keep going, day in, day out, we too will look like this; we will finally arrive at the plateau of perfection. And of course this is the big cheat: It never ends and there is no winning post.

The visit from my British friend had reinforced my dawning reevaluation. The actual crunch came (no pun intended) when, during a particularly heavy session, I looked around and saw all these miserable faces etched with stress and frustration. Despite the happy clappy smiles of the trainers and staff, these people were not having a good time. And amid the hunky specimens treating the floor as a catwalk were the less joyful examples of gymhood. Bodies which from a distance looked 25 years old on closer inspection revealed themselves to be nearer 40: tight, cosmetically enhanced and almost visibly protesting against their owners.

I realized then that if some bright spark invented a pill that ensured that within a week you would look good naked, the gyms would empty. The Road to Health and Fitness is the supposed higher motive, but like all higher motives, it essentially masks the real one, and for the poor gym slave that is simply to look good and be sexually in the game. I want these things too, of course. But for the time being at least, I’m willing to fall back on the old-fashioned notion that sexiness comes from a twinkle in the eye and how you hold a glass of fine wine.