Working It Out 

When I was in high school, before Donna Summer even had a record deal, my friends and I wandered through our existence reading, writing, and painting to the sounds of Donovan and Leonard Cohen. We were longhair intellectuals. Fearless and buoyed by our own self-righteousness, we fought to maneuver funds from new gymnasium equipment to improve our pathetic library collection. We were loathed by our peers and befriended by our teachers.

The idea of training with weights was laughable. What a waste of time! How self-indulgent and narcissistic could you be? Besides, the results were monstrous. And, of course, everyone believed that one day those gorgeous bulges would deflate to messy masses of fat.

Many years later, after a bout with hepatitis B, I was alarmingly thin and yellow. I was finished pretending I wanted anything other than another man in my arms at night. And, yes, I could finally admit it—I love muscles! Who, after all, did I think I was kidding for all those years? I was the kid who would swipe Charles Atlas advertisements from the back pages of Esquire magazine, while waiting for a haircut, to squirrel away in my closet. Later, under the sheets, I would drool over their ragged edges, a flashlight ruining all that expensive dentistry in an attempt to keep both hands free. A confusing concoction of envy and lust for an adolescent boy.

But how was I going to ensnare a beefy boy with my skinny ass? If I wanted a man with muscles, I reasoned, I'd have to get some of my own.

As a fat adolescent, I had tried to curb my appetite and do some weight training just to keep from going completely to hell. The dusty reminders of my lack of discipline still lay in my parents' basement. But this was different. This was going to be my last chance. I was all of twenty-eight years old. If I did not stick to it this time, I would be hopelessly out of shape forever, capable of attracting only myopic octogenarians, never to know the thrill of rock hard flesh against my own.

So I marched off to Fourteenth Street in New York City to buy two twenty-five pound dumbbells. I tossed them around in my Chelsea studio apartment, imagining I was giving Arnold a run for the money.

From these humble beginnings I found I could train regularly. More importantly, once others noticed, my passion was confirmed. Several years later, after abandoning my insecurity about joining a gym and becoming a regular at Gold's, I was obsessed, confident, and proud of my new physique. I wasn't going to win the Mr. America title, but I could appear in a bikini without embarrassment.

Self-indulgent? Narcissistic? Sure. But, I reasoned, it was like working on a sculpture that would never be done. A work-in-progress. Besides, I had always been timid and insecure. Now, I was self-assured. Vain, surely, but not conceited or arrogant. I had never thrown a punch in my life, but at least now I looked as though it might hurt if I did. This was good.

Then on February 23, I996, I became ill with meningitis and the world I had fashioned started to unravel. Complications from the disease caused my blood to clot. Two occlusions settled in the arteries leading to my right hand. In the weeks following my hospital stay, I was weak, pathetically thin, scarred, chemically dependent, and unable to sleep—but I was alive. And there was more. The clots were gone, but over the next two months the fingers on my right hand curled and blackened like charred wood. Gangrene. In May they had to go. I was now living proof of the hazard of placing too much value in personal appearance. My elegant hand, a marvel of design and function, had been replaced with a blunt spade.

Today, this pathetic appendage resembles a sightless desert mole, but it once was as gruesome as something out of a Vincent Price movie. It's amazing to me, looking back, that I agreed to have the nasty thing photographed before the amputation.

My friend Mark I. Chester runs a Tuesday evening gay men's sketch group. For years I have been both a model and one of the artists. Mark is a fine photographer, whose milieu is anything left-of-center. His sexually charged photographs are at once alarming and provocative. He approached me about the possibility of documenting in black and white what had happened to me. And, incredibly, I said yes.

Often misinterpreted, the photographs that resulted are viewed by some as an objectification. Critics are repulsed by what they see as my blatant exploitation. To my mind, the value of documentary photography depends heavily on context and intention, so these pictures seem no more exploitative than the Life photographs of war-torn Vietnam or photos by Diane Arbus. But it's not my point here to defend them. What's more intriguing to me is my view of the whole process then, and my reaction to seeing the photographs now.

During the shoot, I was mystified by Mark's regular departures to compose himself. My feelings of denial were so strong that I couldn't imagine he could be so moved by what he saw. I tried to remain affable and cheerful, my vanity and cooperative spirit overpowering any thought of how I would ultimately react to seeing a frank reflection of how I appeared to the rest of the world.

To this day, I am unable to look at any of those pictures, except those in which my right hand is obscured. In fact, any picture taken before my illness or since, that includes a view of my hands, is difficult for me to look at. None is on display anywhere in my house or office. Although my hand is healed, I avoid looking at it, even in a mirror. Pictures taken prior to I996 fill me with a sense of longing and loss. The pictures taken by Mark are, for me, the stuff that nightmares are made of. Current pictures are hard to look at, like bravely smiling images of a friend or relative who has died. My eye is drawn to the hands. I never see anything else.

So what do I do, now that I feel well again? In the days following my release from the hospital, I was pleased to be alive and breathing fresh air. But as I recovered more of my life the way I remembered it, I realized it could never be as it was. What was I going to do, now that it appeared I would be unable to train as I once did? I had put too much stock in the way I looked to toss all that aside, simply because it might now be even harder to do.

After three months (and twenty pounds) I went back to the gym to see if I could reverse the direction my saggy butt was heading in. I was, after all, still vain, gay, and single. Surprisingly, there were many exercises I could manage, given what was left of my right hand and the fact that, even after the amputation, I still had a wrist. After several designs and many months, my prosthetist and I came up with a device that helped me to pull weights towards me, thus allowing me to increase the poundage and number of repetitions for each exercise, and to train all body parts again.

Okay, I can't do just what I did in January of '96. I will certainly never enter a physique competition. And I will forever look with envy at the big boys in the gym. For me, the value now is in the trying. The standard isn't the same, but the point is identical. The push to see what I can accomplish, how I can mold myself with stubborn determination, hasn't changed.

Two years later, I still shy away from photographers. But when I put on my rubber hand, and a pair of worn jeans, and walk around the streets of San Francisco, I can still turn the heads of handsome men. It's probably the body I refuse to let grow old gracefully, but it could be the goatee. I like it. I'm keeping both, just in case.

Steven Sickles currently works for a studio in Hollywood. He is a writer and painter. His story continues in “I’m Ready for My Closeup”

Editor's note: This essay originally appeared in BENT: A Journal of CripGay Voices.