Review of Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life.
In this entertaining but superficial read, Michelangelo Signorile assails the gay circuit's obsession with the body. The hectoring passion is there, but the analysis mostly isn't.
LIFE OUTSIDE: THE SIGNORILE REPORT on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life fulfills the first rule of contemporary publishing�to entertain. Michelangelo Signorile knows what sells�sex�and he knows how to tell a popular tale with great panache.
In this, his third book, he tackles the gay "circuit parties" with all of the exploitative sense of a local newscast during a sweeps month. Readers of his column in OUT magazine will find the arguments familiar. He maintains that the sex, drug, and steroid world of overpumped gymbos, his "cult of masculinity," defines what it is to be a gay man today. His logic is that even though only a small percent of the total, perhaps tens of thousands, are part of the circuit, the buff image has become so ubiquitous that it has become defining. And, to Signorile, that is bad. We have to change.
He sees the gay press and its ads as playing a major role in promulgating this image. But in fact the press runs of the gay media are so tiny, both locally and nationally, that the vast majority of gays never see them, let alone read them on a regular basis. He blithely ignores the far greater impact of mainstream advertising and its increasingly homoerotic content.
He also assumes that a new stereotype drives out the old, when it fact it is merely added to the mix. It is the media which fixates on the "new," while much of society continues along with the old, only slowly and partially incorporating elements of the new.
Like the voyeurism of tabloid TV, Signorile lingers luridly on the circuit, giving us page after page of glistening pecs and drugged frenzy. He gives short shift to the positive alternative. Simple page count is one indication, about a 2:1 ratio. So is where he evidently spent his time. It appears that evil is, as always, more fascinating than good. Thus we read a detailing of seemingly every hour he spent at a White Party in Palm Springs, while the second part of the book lacks a similar weekend accounting of life among what he would have us become.
A book often says as much about its author as it does about its subject. Signorile's world view is shaped by the gay ghetto of Chelsea. He has been at the fringe of the circuit and one suspects that in his heart of hearts he would like to be among its stars. But the reality of advancing years, genes, and marriage deny him the possibility.
So he speaks with the voice of a convert, always the most fervent of opponents. He has tasted the sin and by doing so claims righteous rejection of it. If Larry Kramer was a Jeremiah of AIDS in castigating the community, Signorile is a Jeremiah lite. His denunciation is that of a kid with his nose pressed against the window of the party to which he was not invited. It is one of pique, not righteous indignation.
Signorile pities "the lonely old queen" and notes that "a proclivity for rejection is indicative of deep unhappiness." Yet he is not willing to make the same judgment of gymboids whose self-abusive behavior likely stems from those same deep seated feelings of inadequacy. Perhaps because he identifies with one and not the other, he is unwilling to view them with the same degree of objectivity.
He is amazed to discover that there is gay life outside of the ghetto. But, like many Manhattanites who gaze across the Hudson, his discovery is shallow, of short duration, and without a great sense of local context. He is a jet set anthropologist who stops in for a speaking engagement and in a day or two thinks he has come to understand the locals.
Signorile largely ignores what to this reader would have been fascinating questions to explore: a look at the psychological and societal underpinnings of anorexia/bulimia, the straight counterpart the gymboid syndrome most closely resembles, the surge of homoerotic content in mainstream media, the extent to which gymboids are the attempt of a generation to create its own differentiation.
Or the premise that growth of the party circuit was in part a result of the war mentality (where moral/sexual standards are loosened) of fighting AIDS. But what then is the impact of the "armistice" of protease? Wouldn't that logically lead to the decline of the circuit?
Signorile writes with great force and conviction. Were the argument decide solely on the craft of his words he would win hands down. But the contest isn't so simple. Ideas do count for something, and so does proof of assertions. By those measures his book is far less convincing.
It is perhaps best to approach much of it as closer to fiction
rather than scholarship. Still, despite its significant flaws, it
is essentially a kind hearted book, and a great, fun read. Enjoy
it, but don't take it too seriously.