Both in its appreciation and its uptake by gay men, who provided crucial material and fanatic support to a budding culture and industry, the proliferation of bodybuilding is clearly indebted to the homoerotic appeal. And yet, despite its debt, bodybuilding culture as a whole has been at best skeptical of and worst hostile to the specter of homosexuality with which it is associated. For instance, while they enjoyed the financial benefits of a captive gay male audience, many distributors of beefcake magazines were less than enthused about their homosexual circulation. Bernarr Macfadden, who founded Physical Culture in 1899, disdained the limp-wristed deviants who had co-opted his enthusiastic support of bodybuilding for sexual ends. Writing in The Virile Powers of Superb Manhood, he railed against “the shoals of painted, perfumed, kohl-eyed, lisping, mincing youths that at night swarm on Broadway . . . ogling every man that passes” and who had, much to his loathing, begun to enjoy his magazine.
Despite his venomous attacks on homosexuality, Macfadden was arrested in 1907 on charges of distributing obscene material—a crime for which he was found guilty. Throughout his trial, Macfadden stressed the strictly asexual and educational intent of the images he published, claiming that any immoral or improper use of his magazines was not his responsibility. As the literary scholar Greg Mullins notes, Macfadden attempted to draw a distinction between appropriate and inappropriate ways of looking: namely, between identifying with and desiring the muscular male body. While, in practice, these are contiguous or even identical modes of looking, of coveting or admiration, homophobia and the threat of criminal reproach made it necessary to invent such a distinction—to assert, in short, that bodybuilding was anything but gay.
Accordingly, bodybuilding required a lengthy—and still ongoing—process of what media scholar Niall Richardson calls “forced heterosexualization”: a visible distancing of the sport from the gay community it came into being alongside and through. In order to cultivate respectability, proponents strived to present bodybuilding not as the preoccupation of sexual deviants but as a marker of heterosexual masculinity in its own right. In developing the official IFBB competition guidelines, the Weider brothers endeavored to de-eroticize the pageantry of bodybuilding and develop a heterosexual mode of gazing at and displaying the nearly nude male body. They enforced strict rules about what male bodybuilders were permitted to pose wearing—banning thongs or revealing G-strings from competition stages—and forbid the use of any accessories during posing routines. Moreover, the rise to prominence of bodybuilders like Schwarzenegger who flaunted their heterosexuality helped give the field an aspirational, straight face that put to bed suspicions about the sexuality of the sport.