ABSTRACT
This chapter explores gay men, their bodies, and how they signify ideals of masculinity and health through social media image-posting platforms. The chapter argues the proliferation of “selfies” and body pictures of gay-identified men exists in a broader history of gay liberation, community response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and cultural appropriation of queer iconography that became commercialized. What does it mean that an iconic Calvin Klein ad came possessed a subtext that represented a group of same-sex attracted men, who were at one time using that body ideal to signal health status, that physical fitness connoted a body free of disease, then that body icon becomes over the course of a generation a broader ideal for performing masculinity, regardless of sexual identity. Contemporary gay masculinity and its embodiment has come to represent an enactment of male identity literacy that extends one body ideal to all men, complicating how same-sex identified men recognize one another and further challenging the performance of heterosexual male identity.
