MUSCLEMAN SEX

By Jack Fritscher

.When I figured out in the summer of 1972, I didn’t quite have one myself, I started my search for the Perfect Body. Perfect means muscles. So, I quit my job, sold everything that wouldn’t fit into my old ’65 Mustang convertible, and headed for Southern California. The Midwest was not big on bodies. California, word had it, was where the Big Boys with the Big Biceps pumped their hard tanned physiques to a well-oiled turn. I drove straight from Chicago to Venice Beach, California.

.My first afternoon, I spied Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ken Waller working out in the Muscle Bull Iron Pit next to the strand. Sun. Sand. Sweat. Muscle Strut. Good Moves. Good Looks. Other bodybuilders coming down to the Iron Pit, slowly stripping off their sweatsuits, tugging at torn cotton T-shirts ringed with heavy sweat in their deep armpits, till finally exhibited fullflash in their workout trunks. Who knows what any man’s sexual preference is. Who cares. I know mine. And I prefer guys with muscles. I like bodybuilders. And I figure any man who builds his muscles up to a showy exhibition quality states something about the way his head drives him.

.My main conclusion is that bodybuilders are no more or less “gay” than any other group of men, but what bodybuilders often are, if not genitally homosexual, is homomuscular. By that I mean to clarify that while many of these guys might not choose or prefer to get off on another guy homogenitally, they all do—to greater and lesser extents depending on their degree of intellectual sophistication and gender security—get off on other men’s muscles. Bodybuilders don’t “cruise” each other. Bodybuilders “check each other out.” That extent of muscle-to-muscle appreciation man-to-man is the essence of homomuscularity. If bodybuilders act that out sexually, then it becomes something else: musclemansex!

.The bodybuilder I eventually found was more than something else. He was a man. Male to the core. And more. He was a competition physique champion who had won every contest he entered. He was muscled. Yeah. And still more. He knew what to do with his bulk, definition, vascularity, and posing. Muscle was all connected together between his head and his dick. He knew how to play with his muscle and share it with another man who could dig it all for the real Male Celebration muscle is.

.I read his ad in one of those offbeat tabloids. He wasn’t a Muscle Hustler earning $200 for an hour’s display to a John. He was an honest-to-God homomuscular bodybuilder who worked out so hard at the gym that he liked to play with his build in the privacy of his own bedroom. He had mirrors, spotlights on dimmers, and olive oil close by. All he needed. I figured from his ad, was an appreciative playmate who wouldn’t get in the way of the muscle trip.

.I read his ad repeatedly, jerking off to it for nearly ten days before I finally wrote to him. I can almost recite his ad from memory: “BIG GUNS. Feel them: thick, BIG ARMS, muscle-bulked heavily from sweaty workouts, their huge girth sported in a T-shirt, or subtly concealed by shirt sleeves of well-washed flannel stretched across their mass, now stripped to reveal mounds of baseball biceps cabled with vascularity, and thick horseshoe triceps, growing bigger before your eyes, the pump of each successive flex further expressing the disciplined power of the life force that built them. With those Big Guns lifted high in full frontal display of arm muscle, feel them again. Feel the density of each striation as it’s gathered down into the depths of muscle armpits rich with the heavy male scent of bodybuilder muscle sweat. After a bit of smoke and a hit of popper, if you find your nose exploring the heights of those pits, if you can take that big muscular arm in one hand, and your dick in the other, and discover that between the stroking of the two that you’re cuming, then we’re both gonna have fun! I’m on my way to the gym now. If Big Guns rap-n-jackoff make you break into a sweat you can’t cool off by yourself, drop me a line.”

.Hot Muscle! This guy read muscle the way I wanted muscle. Suck/fuck sex is okay; it has its place and should be kept there; sometimes homogenital suck/fuck gets in the way of some straight forward homomuscular jerkoff. His pitch was my catch: our common ground was respect for, reverence of, and even—yeah—worship of competition bodybuilder physique muscle.

.I sent him my phone number. He called. I said: “I want to stroke your bicep and beat off.” He liked that. Later, he told me that he liked that approach, because too many guys devalue the muscle trip by reducing it to a come-on like: “I want to suck your dick, muscle man.” Dick is terrific—but as a source of back-up to the muscle presentation itself. The Bodybuilder Look is what causes the hardon. The Bodybuilder’s dick is part of that Look. A Big Bulge in the posing trunks doesn’t hurt, but it’s on a par with an excellent butt, great cabled legs, washboard abs, thick chest and back, full pex, broad shoulders, massive arms, thick neck, and well-groomed hair and moustache.

.Now I know all this is a matter of personal taste. To each his own. I can only recommend men who are bodybuilders as THE MOST FUN I’VE EVER HAD man-to-man sensually and sexually. Some guys often have a hard time just looking at Bodybuilders, because Bodybuilders inevitably display by reason of their very Look the most turned-out, assertive and aggressive qualities of the secondary male sex characteristics. Ball-busters object to men looking the classic way that men are, my dick says, s’posed to look: big, powerful, commanding in presence. They say things like: “That guy’s gross. His shoulders are too big.” Straight physique champ Bill Pearl has made bottom line retort: “No man’s shoulders can ever be too big.”

.Taking the wisdom from Pearl to the level of male sex is to say that, if a man likes playing with men in general, then any sex activity he enjoys, he might enjoy that much more with a bodybuilder. Bodybuilders tend to flesh out my dream of masculinity. That’s precisely, by the way, what makes bodybuilding so controversial in America where definitions of masculinity come and go and are at best, for the population at large, a mystery. Few Americans are willing to say, even if they have a hint these days, what American Masculinity is all about. Silence and fear on the subject are clouded by the fact that Americans might have to admit (as Europeans long have done) that any definition of masculinity is going to necessarily have to include homosexuality—that brand of male-to-male sport that celebrates the essence of masculinity without taking anything away from straights who want to celebrate the essence of heterosexuality.

.If a man is into men, then a manly bodybuilder is a cause for celebration. Of course, not every bodybuilder—just because he’s building his body—is a universal turn-on. There are types of bodybuilders who turn your ld loose, and types who don’t. Arnold Schwarzenegger claims to be straight, and I don’t care, even if he is the all-time champion bodybuilder, because Arnold lacks erotic heat. On a desert island with Arnold, I frankly would rather jerk off thinking about other bodybuilders who have the intensity and sex-heat that you see if you attend local, small bodybuilding contests rather than the big commercial extravaganzas sponsored by gym-and-supplement pushers who own some of the Big-Name Bodybuilders the way Emperors owned Gladiators.

.Relating to a bodybuilder is, despite first appearance, always a matter of quality over quantity. The biggest, by sheer bigness, is not necessarily the biggest turn-on. Symmetry and proportion count as much as size. And while sheer bulk can be as much fun as competition, some bodybuilders steer clear of the competitive aspects in the bedroom and get more into communicative muscle-to-muscle enjoyment that hits its fevered intensity without the chafing edge of competitiveness. In fact, some bodybuilders prefer to play “muscle” with men who, while not bodybuilders themselves, truly appreciate muscle and, in turn, keep themselves in shape suitable to their own body structure and look. (Thank you, Hercules!)

.That “keeping in shape” is important. A man who is a bodybuilder after all doesn’t want to fuck with a man who feels like a Baggie full of mashed potatoes. And whether a bodybuilder, or whether just a man in shape who really gets off on muscle, the advice of a seasoned Muscle Champ applies to me who tread that delicate line of trying to remain homomasculine in an increasingly sissy-clone-gay world: “A man either works out, and begins to look like a nice hot Daddy; or he doesn’t work out and just turns into everybody’s Auntie.”

.Frankly, you can’t trust a line of this bullshit, because I’m writing all this with my dick. But then, again, you’re reading with your dick, and maybe dick in this world these days is much more trustworthy than head.

.At any rate, mansex goes better with muscle!