Some men start acting like a big man on campus the moment they cross the burning sands, and Saulsberry noticed how some people began expecting his ego to grow as big as his muscles. “Inclusion in the community depends on one's ability to ‘live out’ one's sexuality through certain relational encounters and if one is not experienced as desirable, the feeling of being cut-off from the community, and even from one's identity, can be profound,” says Hovey, who believes the beauty standards of the larger society, and among gay men, also exert pressure on those who fit the standard.įor Saulsberry, going from lanky to swole felt comparable to someone joining a Black Greek-letter organization in college. Carl Hovey, a psychologist, and researcher at the Gay Therapy Center in New York. While gay men are not alone in feeling like they do not measure up to standards of beauty, feeling sexually undesirable can be uniquely alienating when one’s connection to a community is somewhat predicated on sex, says Dr. The vibe, the people that I came across, that’s really what made it change for me.” We’re boys, and they respect me and I respect them. They respect me and my lifestyle and my quirks, my gayness, my femininity, everything in the gym. I’m talking about extra-straight people and friendships that I never knew would come about from the gym. “I’ve met great people in the gym, some great friends.
“I’m a very social person, so meeting people, getting feedback from people who you might aspire to, getting advice or just saying, ‘Hey, how are you doing’ to your regulars, that’s really where the love grew,” he says. Saulsberry didn’t begin seeing changes in his physique until about three or four years into his fitness journey, and by then going to the gym had evolved into much more than working out. Saulsberry’s motivation also waned in those early years because, like many, he expected to start looking ripped after a few weeks of pumping iron.
“Because it hurt!” he says in a tone recognizable to anyone who has ever heard their muscles scream. “We had to stay physically fit -we ran, we marched, jumping jacks, that’s about it.”Ĭalisthenics hadn’t prepared Saulsberry for his first months at the gym, and it took years of starts and stops before he no longer hated lifting weights. “I was very slender and small, and lifting weights was not my forte-push-ups, I hated,” Saulsberry, 36, recalls with a laugh. That post-workout euphoria is familiar to Marcus Saulsberry, who described himself as a high school and collegiate band geek before he first started going to the gym about a dozen years ago. In the beginning, weight lifting was just a stress reliever-whenever I would go to the gym, I would just feel so much better afterward.”
“I realized that was a part of my everyday routine and something I was used to, part of my lifestyle. “When I stopped working out, I felt some type of gap in my life,” he says. He briefly stopped working out after ending his collegiate track career, but within a month, Thomas noticed the activity he once dreaded had become an essential part of his being. “It helped me improve my performance, and it also made me look better,” says Thomas, who more than 30 years later remains an avid weightlifter, and whose 50-year-old physique resembles that of a college athlete. Thomas’s aversion to bench presses and squats soon dissipated as he became a stronger defensive end, a faster 400-meter runner, and experienced other benefits of regularly being in the gym. “She told me that for all athletes, weightlifting was our P.E.” “When I saw it said ‘weightlifting’ I went to my school counselor and asked her to change it because for some reason I was intimidated,” Thomas recalls.
Despite an active childhood that included playing football and running track since fifth grade, Gerald Thomas was a bit spooked when he read his class schedule at the start of his freshman year at Elbert County Comprehensive High School in northeast Georgia.