"The concern of gay men with how our bodies look often gets labeled a fixation, an obsession or, most glibly, an expression of narcissism."

"What’s less frequently acknowledged are the forces of insecurity and anxiety driving that obsession. For gay men of all ages, types, statuses and lifestyles, body image remains such a fraught, weird, private, painful subject that, even among friends who talk about everything, it’s often off limits for discussion. Officially, we’re all supposed to look fantastic while not caring. Get caught peering in the mirror too closely and you’ll be called vain; fail to look closely enough and you risk an even harsher judgment.... For decades, the body image that gay men craved, although it morphed as tastes evolved, was predicated on monitoring straight male culture, identifying whatever the heterosexual world had decided was masculine or sexy at that moment and then tailoring, editing and selectively italicizing it.... Turning your appearance into a calculatedly self-aware physical performance of straight masculinity, with a flourish or two of ironic detailing, gave gay men some autonomy and subverted straight culture by reinventing it as something gay, a look one could wear as a costume that might be visible only to the like-minded...."

Writes Mark Harris, in "Gay Men Have Long Been Obsessed With Their Muscles. Now Everyone Is. In Hollywood, on Instagram and beyond, the male-on-male gaze still decides what’s hot and what’s not" (NYT)(full access link, because this is a long and surprisingly substantial article (with a nice "a collection of gay-coded photographs of male physiques over the years")).