“Sex Sells”
The phrase “sex sells” was said to me recently by someone in nightlife. I won’t get too detailed about the conversation itself, because I do not want to vague-book in a passive aggressive way. We talked the issue out. But it nevertheless was a very frank conversation on a topic that often gets swept under the rug, because — in my view — it is often a blunt, faux pas admission that someone white and muscled gay man of a certain height, muscular build, and age will draw in more attention.
This essay is a difficult one for me to post. I hemmed and hawed over it after writing it last night. It is an issue that’s weighed heavily on me for a long time.
The conversation was about my business and about my marketing, and how I should change it. I don’t pose shirtless on posters. I don’t hire models for artwork. The reasons are layered and nuanced. I’ve said it enough on social media: I’m insecure about my body. Using someone else’s likeness to promote my own events, however, only worsens that position; It’s very much like saying I’m not hot enough to represent my own brand. When I began getting popular, several in a gay clique I had belonged to had predictable reactions: “Why you Saul?” “Who are you to have your face on things?”
I reacted predictably. I got defensive. I put my face on everything. It’s been on everything for more than a year now. And while I continued to feel the scrutiny from certain holier-than-thou types, I simultaneously was intimidating my primary community and fan-base: gay nerds. People whose bodies, ages, skin colors, and social behaviors often fall outside mainstream norms of this sex we’re supposedly all selling.
I’ve been considered by many as an accepting member of the local LGBTQ community, someone who does not judge by superficial qualities. But among the Gaymers, I began feeling that some saw me as a Regina George; A glossy, commercialized brand with a curated image. Some of them fawn, and they’ve expressed to me their feelings that I have an unattainable appearance. And some of them still wonder if that image extends to who I choose to be around.
So I’ve been getting it from both ends, and decidedly not in the good way.
“Community figure” is the best descriptor I have for what I do. I’m not popular enough to be an influencer, celebrity, or true public figure. I’m not a drag queen. But the job does understandably require wielding influence in order to attract people to a venue. And I think that on its own — having almost nothing to do with how I look or who my friends are — creates somewhat of a sense that I live on some pedestal of sex and prettiness, and unlimited options with elitist men, their perfect bodies, and great sexual scenarios. And that’s where the glossy side of the equation comes from.
I don’t say it because I’m proud of it or wanted it. I wanted popularity, yes. I frankly mostly wanted to fit in the San Francisco gay community, or any community, gay or otherwise, which I felt did not respect, admire, or desire me unless I positioned myself in a way that demanded it. I roll into parties dressed outrageously because I want everyone to know it’s me they should be talking to. It is, in ways, just a gimmick in another line of defense mechanisms.
I hope it’s becoming clear that I come from an insecure past. I had a good childhood, don’t get me wrong, but let’s look through one specific lens of it… for the purposes of this post: I wore ill-fitting clothes over a misshapen body, and my middle parted hair didn’t earn me a lot of friends. Neither did an overtly bitchy personality I used to oddly try to cover up that I was gay. While in the closet, I met older men on the Internet as one of the only ways to address my self-esteem issues. It was messy and dangerous.
So whatever blossom you see me as now: thank you. I mean it. But I’m not an “A Gay,” I don’t gym all the time. I don’t go to those parties. And, here’s my point from the outset: I do not look up to those people. Don’t get me wrong, I am vain. I want to be pretty. I like other pretty people. I want to be desired. But I ultimately identify with the outcasts, the weird ones, the goths, the freaks, the nerds. They make me feel safe. They remind me of a time when that’s only who my friends were.
I don’t like making posts like these anymore, and not because I don’t ardently believe in the subject matter. I do. But I’m in a precarious position as a community figure whose income is now almost wholly reliant on attendance and drink sales. It is a hard truth, and I feel deeply vulnerable putting it out there in those words.
And framing this essay as I have thus far… it basically reinforces an “us” vs. “them” in a narrative I don’t even want to suggest, but there it is anyway: muscled, mainstream men versus everyone else. I really want both groups to desire my parties and feel welcome at them, and if I can stand to make it happen, I would rather live in my own identity, outside of these boxes of cliques we put ourselves in. I know it’s a “no duh,” but maybe it’s okay to be attractive and a huge nerd.
So if you read this post and later see sexual suggestiveness or attractive men in my marketing down the line, please don’t come back to this post and say “but I thought you said,” because I’m saying right here there is space for all of us.
But with “sex sells,” I remain firmly against a place where a specific sort of wax dolphin of a man who rates an event, its attendees, or the images used to promote it by a level of hotness. To me it is a sort of nasty side of our community that will persist long after I lose my looks and influence, when I am old, gray, overweight, and dead. The sort of guy who says “no fats, no fems, no Asians” is to me the same one who rates an event poster or bar itself by the level of hotness that he believes he is worthy of in his life… and it’s a message that permeates to him, and all of us, from pretty much every facet of influence and input that we consume.
I think change on this front, or any other, will never happen unless people are brave enough to step into the conversation, and to take on roles of influence, and be voices for that change.
So I’m standing here hoping to be one of those voices. And I will continue to try to temper my message.
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