This would be the best sunset I’d ever seen if it weren’t for the asses. There are three of them in front of me, huddled together, blocking my view. These are asses sculpted at Equinox. They’re antiseptically muscular, almost identical, the product of competitive gym routines and stark calorie deficits. I scan the rest of the shore. There are so many asses on this beach. One is luscious. One is concave. The ass of an old man is sagging—in a way, its own kind of sunset. There are the pear-shaped asses of the few women on the beach. An ass with a tattoo of the word ‘brat’ in the same font as the album. The hairy ass of Jordan Firstman, who is also here this week, presumably to escape the Los Angeles wildfires. Most of the asses, though, look exactly like the three in front of me. These asses are the loci of perfection. These asses are my cross to bear.
I’m on Playa Zipolite, Mexico’s only nude beach. Zipolite, once a relatively well-kept secret, has become a hot destination for a class of gay men who seem to live in a perpetual state of luxuriating. About a two hour drive away from the nearest airport with only one paved road, Zipolite is a small town of whirring vespas and crashing waves, where, for a $5 breakfast, you can have exquisite fruit and watery coffee. In the 1970s, a bunch of European backpackers who came to this former fishing village for a solar eclipse became enchanted by the town’s physical beauty, stuck around, and eventually built restaurants and hotels. Many of them were hippies, encouraging nudity, recreational drugs, and a general spirit of bohemia that promoted tourism without jeopardizing Zipolite’s status as an off-the-grid oasis. This drew the type of gay Americans who preferred the beach’s easy anonymity relative to hierarchy-obsessed destinations like Fire Island, Puerto Vallarta, Cancún, and my current place of residence, Provincetown. As of the past few years though, Zipolite is moving in the direction of these other places, becoming another highly Instagrammable setting for optimization-pilled lotus eaters. Nightclubs are opening up. The gargantuan new hotels look like resorts. And the bodies on the beach are ready for their close-up.
My trip to Zipolite is financed by a fellowship I received to write an essay collection about “queer spaces” around the world, for which I promised to dig beyond the bitchiness that animates my writing—and my existence—and find something nice to say about, as I put it in my proposal, “the peculiar, transcendent joy that surges through all these spaces.” An opportunist, I knew this was the sanguine kind of language that would win over a grant committee. But, as I wrote the proposal red-eyed and at the eleventh hour from my parents’ cluttered kitchen table, there was a part of me that believed it. If I traveled widely enough and wrote well enough, I could eat, pray, love my way out of the cynicism that has afflicted me since birth.
So far, I’m uninspired. The beach is dotted with laptop screens open to Outlook emails and client invoices. Most of the guys vacationing in Zipolite are bankrolled by remote corporate jobs with cushy wages and flexible hours that—I’m guessing—have a net negative impact on humanity. Butt-naked men clatter on their keyboards in between bellini sips. They multitask productivity and pleasure. A few of these men—I’ve discovered while conducting my slack-jawed online investigations—are actual influencers, but all seem to be living their lives according to the logic of Instagram. They’ve sculpted their bodies not just for one another’s admiration, but because they have an online image to maintain. I sit upright on my towel and watch for about twenty-five minutes as one, tapping away on his phone, takes, selects, edits, and uploads a selfie. He carries this process out with the fervor of a debate kid and the precision of a surgeon. I find the account of one of the three asses blocking my sunset view. He’s posted a shirtless mirror selfie to his story, fat-free and muscle-laden, and captioned it: Ugh, so much food and no gym for two weeks. This picture is followed by seven other shirtless ones. Obviously, the phenomenon I’m describing is not just a gay thing: most of us have somehow agreed that curating an online image is a worthwhile use of time, even a path to personal fulfillment. But gay men have demonstrated an uncanny knack for this braggadocious enterprise. I often feel in gay spaces that Instagram has become like a toxic vapor diffused through the air, making everyone suffocate on superficiality.
It was on Instagram that I first encountered the type of guys who will be my beach brethren for the next week. I was 14 and blissfully, embarrassingly unaware when I hit follow and felt the twin pangs of inspiration and envy. They were hot and they were happy, these gay men a decade older than me for whom perfection was not a concept but a fact. I composed my Christmas lists from the products featured in their paid partnerships. I listened to their coming-out stories on YouTube. I jerked off to them a lot. By 18, I had their shirtless photos saved to a folder in my phone that I opened whenever I felt the need to eat. By 21, they leapt out of my phone and I led them to their table at the overpriced burger restaurant I worked at during my first summer in Provincetown. Their eyes glazed over me, as if they were robots and I was an input they hadn’t been programmed to compute. I tried to hook up with them. When that failed, I tried to befriend them, almost as an anthropological effort, but what I encountered was a certain tribalism — a practically fascist escalation of the word “homosexual,” emphasis on homo, meaning “for the same.” I worked during the day at the local newspaper, where I published short personal essays about them, my forced lyricism barely concealing my bitterness. Now here they were, in another country on this beach with no cell reception and a tide so strong it claims an average of 50 lives a year, blocking my view.
Among the asses on this beach, there’s also mine. It’s a nice ass. I hate every other aspect of my body: my height, my weight, my narrow shoulders, my toddler-like belly, my areolas which jut far out from my nipples like the rings of Saturn. But I feel about my ass the way Kris feels about Kim: that’s my favorite daughter right there, my breadwinner, my prized piggy. Even during the two years I starved my body, my ass remained bulbous and fat, a lone rose growing out of frozen ground. It’s my source of strength, the reason I can lift heavier than I look like I can. My ass embodies the foremost principle of modernist architecture, that form must meet function. I take some solace in this thought, but not enough to eclipse the shame I feel that, even after two plane rides and a three-hour taxi ride down a bunch of dirt roads, standing on a beach where beauty meets deadliness, looking at a sunset that symbolizes our profound impermanence, I’m still thinking about the same trivial stuff: the perfection of other bodies and the consolation prize of my glorious shitmaker. Even in paradise, I am full of envy and resentment.
***
In Zipolite, I’m suffering another bout of insomnia. I spend a few agonizing hours making an earnest effort to sleep, trying out different positions, finding comfort in none of them. My friend Isabel is dead asleep next to me. She’s come to Mexico with me under the auspices of serving as a translator—she’s fluent in Spanish—but it turns out there’s no need because almost everyone we’ve met so far is a native English speaker. Still, I’m glad to have her here. She makes me feel more at ease. I love her with the intuitive affection particular to adolescent friendships. In high school, we would shower together, one of us under the warm stream of water, the other shivering as we waited our turn. One time during this ritual, as I smoothed conditioner through my hair, she asked if I wanted to feel her boobs. I slid my hand under them and let them rest there, like tchotchkes on a shelf. “They’re so heavy,” I said in genuine shock, wondering how half the world carried these things around at all times.
I worry that my increasingly agitated tossing and turning will wake Isabel up so finally I surrender to the inevitable and I give up on sleep and the possibility of a brighter tomorrow. I open the sliding glass door and crawl into the hammock on the porch of our Airbnb. I cram my headphones into my ears and listen to Phoebe Bridgers. I eat an entire bag of Doritos. There’s a beachfront nightclub across the street, still going strong at 3AM, playing a bad remix of “Bulletproof” by La Roux. A strobe light points from the outdoor dancefloor and into the night sky. It’s jerking around in maniacal, elliptical motions. “I feel you, girl,” I whisper to it. Then, I wonder about all the light pollution it’s causing.
Mostly, though, I spend the night cathecting onto the Instagram profile of a hot gay guy I went to college with. As it happens, he’s also on a beach vacation right now, and he’s posted a photo of his sinewy body splayed out on a huge rock. There’s a big smile on his face. I interpret this, of course, as gloating. As the night turns into the bleary early morning, and as the nightclub finally closes at 6AM, I look at this picture compulsively. I screenshot it and zoom in so far that it becomes meaningless pixels. I zoom back out. I shove another fistful of Doritos into my mouth.
At the risk of sounding censorial, I wonder if the world really needs another half-naked photo of someone who looks the way this guy does. The celebration of this kind of body will always carry with it the corollary of denigrating bodies that do not look just like it. Structuralism holds that the meaning of one word is created by its opposite: we can only understand what “evil” is if we know what “good” is, we know what a “winner” is because we know what a “loser” is. Our ideas about bodies and beauty follow this same comparative logic. We can tell who’s hot because we can tell who’s ugly. Body positivity has been ushered in as a universal concept, something everyone should possess, from the thin to the fat, the traditionally ugly to the conventionally attractive. But it seems to me that it needs to be more severely apportioned than this. Achieving body positivity will require not just uplifting certain types of bodies—it’ll mean deplatforming others. In other words, if some people are to feel less shame, other people need to feel more of it.
When she wakes up a few hours later, I run this idea by Isabel. She blinks at me. “Not that body positivity is the hill I want to die on or anything,” I say to her. And this is true. Body positivity, like almost every other subsect of identity politics, has proven impotent in the past few years. Meghan Trainor, once the bard of ‘big is beautiful,’ now looks like me during my year of restricting and purging, but with a wig on. “I look so hungry / But I look so good,” Lady Gaga sings on her 2025 song “Perfect Celebrity.” “You say she’s anorexic / She kind of likes when people say it,” Charli sings on 2024’s “Mean girls.” And as I jog to these songs on a practically empty stomach, I feel empowered. All of this isn’t a reaction against body positivity, but a natural conclusion to body positivity’s insistence that looks are of paramount importance. As Jia Tolentino wrote about the body positivity movement in her 2019 essay collection Trick Mirror, “We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture tried to do the opposite—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.”
In reply, Isabel tells me about her years as a college athlete and her childhood playing soccer, how this shaped her relationship to her body. She thinks more about how her body feels and what it can do, rather than about how her body looks. “Most of the time, I feel pretty neutral about my body,” she says. I blink at her. She may as well have told me she met God.
***
One of the draws of Zipolite is the cruising. A part of the beach—euphemistically dubbed “Playa del Amor”—is a hidden cove, accessible only by a steep and winding staircase over a ragged cliff. “Best cruising spot in the world,” this guy once told me in Provincetown, a huge grin on his face. It is, to hand it to him, uncanny how the geography lends itself to clandestine fucking. Within the cove, there is an even smaller spit of land, shrouded on either side by two huge rocks. The ocean water laps up just enough to wash away all the bodily fluids. The sound of crashing waves mixes with the sound of clapping cheeks. The smell of low tide blends with the smell of poppers.
After the sun fully sets, men head into the shadows to find one another. Isabel and I watch from the main part of Playa del Amor, sipping on Coronas and pouring them lightly in each other’s hair—we read somewhere it would make us blonder. We’re hanging out with Sam, a handsome British backpacker we met the other night who told us he’s bisexual, but he knows he wants to end up with a woman because, as he said, “I just feel more connection to them.” I can’t decide if this is feminist or homophobic. We chat, but mostly we’re all transfixed by the cruising spot just a couple dozen feet away, the contortions of the silhouettes, the echoes of grunts and moans. It feels like a particularly riveting show on Animal Planet. As in nature, there’s a pecking order: it’s predictably grim to see which men find themselves in the thick of action, and which men quickly return to the open stretch of the beach, rejected.
“Maybe you wanna go over there?” Isabel asks me. I don’t. There’s my aforementioned hatred of my body—and I’ve never weighed more than I do right now. This is a confusing situation for me. I have body dysmorphia: not the kind you shout about once or twice through the curtain at the Brandy Melville dressing room, the kind you go to an intensive outpatient program for. Body dysmorphic disorder involves significant visual processing deficits, meaning that sufferers often see what’s not there. A small pimple might look to them like a firetruck, a bump in the nose that’s barely perceptible to anyone else will look to the sufferer like Owen Wilson’s. Even when I weighed 109 pounds and was, according to my doctor, “lethally underweight,” I looked in the mirror and thought I looked like Bruce Bogtrotter, the obese kid who eats the entire chocolate cake in Matilda. Right now, I weigh 164 pounds—more than a healthy recovery’s amount of weight—and I see pretty much the same thing in the mirror. This makes me feel schizophrenic; at the very least, my perception of reality is frayed. Probably, I conclude, I am just a bit chubby, in a way that could be adorable, suggesting resolute youth. It could even be desirable to some people, though definitely not to these guys.
The mirror hasn’t been a reliable measure of how my body looks, but other gay men’s reactions to it have. I’ve been big and small, and I’ve seen my desirability rise and fall in inverse relation to the number on the scale. There was the time I was 18 and a guy—the first truly hot guy I ever hooked up with, chiseled and pristine—asked me repeatedly how much I weighed as he fucked me. “112 pounds!” I chanted until he came. (Last year, this same guy came up on my TikTok For You Page: he’d sustained a back injury while working out, fallen into a depression, and hadn’t left the house in months, having gained over a hundred pounds. The TikTok, filmed in bed, shot from just below his double chin, was a maudlin, self-flagellating screed on how hard it had been to lose his Adonis physique. As I watched it, I felt tickled by karma, then ashamed at my glee.) In gay clubs, I’ve been the belle of the ball, had my pick of the litter, flounced from one man’s lips to another’s. I’ve also been routinely skipped over, hurled back in time to middle-school gym class. I’ve often imagined myself as a magnet, sometimes exerting an attractive force, sometimes a repulsive one. I know that none of this is unique to me. Every woman and gay man has similar stories of being appraised, sized up, whittled down—stories about how very much appearance matters. I’m perturbed, though, by how, amongst gay men, appearance might not just determine if you’re gonna get laid at the end of the night, but if you’ll be invited out in the first place. I’ve never been to Fire Island—it exceeds my pain threshold—but I’ve heard that, absent of many bars and clubs, house parties are the nightlife venues and invites are discretionary, doled out to the hot, the fit, the masculine. The Instagram posts I’ve seen of Fire Island photo dumps corroborate this: groups of identically handsome friends huddled together on white sand beaches or gathered around a kitchen island in some midcentury modern rental house. The whole island looks like some insidious Eden, so photogenic it’s suspect. Who, I wonder, doesn’t get invited to the party, doesn’t even get invited onto the ferry?
Looking around, Zipolite is not much different. The groups of men lining the shore—three guys here, seven men over there—seem to have self-sorted by appearance, body type (lithe twinks, steroid queens, etcetera), even haircut and preferred sunglass shape. There’s nothing so horrendously wrong with this at the end of the day—it is, in the grand scheme of things, small potatoes—and I’m certainly not in the business of telling other people who to be friends with, preferring myself the company of other neurotic elitists. Nor do I want to suck on the pacifier of my own hurt feelings forever, pretending that I’m the only person on this beach who feels bad, hoarding all the insecurity for myself. It’s probably not vanity motivating the disciplined diets and HIIT workouts of these sculpturesque men as much as it status anxiety. The man I observed posting a selfie was alert and severe, as if under some kind of yoke. “It’s a bunch of wounded people wounding each other,” the trans cultural critic Natalie Wynn said of the so-called LGBTQ community. The perfect bodies I’m seeing on this beach are, more than anything, reactions to one another. No one ever really opts into an arms race.
What, you might be wondering by now, am I even doing here? I’m being such a curmudgeon—surely there are plenty of beaches in Mexico that would inspire less of my ire. Why go to Zipolite? Why, for that matter, live in Provincetown, a gay town beset with many of the same issues? There are a few answers to that question. Underneath my callus of cynicism, I am fundamentally an optimist, always deluded into thinking things will be better this time around. I’ll find community, become more than an onlooker, feel part of the scene, one of the guys. But an even more honest answer is that I’m drawn to the cutthroat nastiness of it all. I love being in a pressure cooker: the hot to the touch intensity, how hyperaware everyone becomes of one another, the possibility of triumph. The same part of me that in high school was thrilled by competition and award ceremonies and SATs and the college admissions process lights up in the gay bar, on the dancefloor, and here in Zipolite. I’ve always felt most alive when I’m trying to prove my worth.
***
Are you bored yet? I am! I’ve written this essay before. Countless times, actually: always circling the drain of body fascism and the politics of desire. The first personal essay I ever published, during my sophomore year of college, was about Instagays and how gay boys growing up nowadays won’t be hard pressed to see themselves represented online and in mainstream media, but almost all these representations will be of impossibly fit men, leaving them with the same message: you better shape up, kid. In the essay, I focused on one Instafamous gay couple in particular, two beautiful and muscular Ivy League graduates who have since broken up. At the time, one of them was enrolled at Stanford Business School, and the editor-in-chief of The Harvard Crimson and I received an email signed by dozens of his classmates requesting that the essay be taken down. “The article is an attack on two people,” the email alleged. I was accused of “bullying,” a word I don’t think people should use after high school. The email included a patronizing postscript from the email’s main author: “P.S. I sincerely hope that all three of us will, over the course of our lives, have the experiences and find the people that make us feel whole, and that make us believe in our own self-worth. I can’t possibly believe that exercises in dismissal and rejection of other people will get us there.” The main claim of the email, though, was that my essay lacked journalistic integrity, and was merely the product of my petty envy.
As a rule of thumb, I don’t put much credence in the moral compasses of the type of cash fiends who attend top-tier business schools. One is better off going to the hardware store for milk. But the Stanford Business School students were right when they claimed that the essay was a product of envy—as much of my modest oeuvre of writing has been. Why, though, is envy automatically dismissed as petty? Why can’t envy be a legitimate perspective to write from, a worthwhile critical stance on the world? Why can’t envy, and the polemicism it ignites, be a productive way to engage with one’s community?
In Ugly Feelings, the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai writes that envy has been pathologized as reflective of an ill and deficient ego, rather than treated for what it is: a critical engagement with social inequality. When someone is envious, this is understood as a sign that there’s some wrong with them—that, say, the envious person lacks an intrinsic sense of self-worth—and not as a sign that there’s something wrong with the society that roused the envy in the first place. Envy has likewise been subject to much moralizing: it is shameful to be envious, one ought to be contrite for such a feeling and edify themself out of it. Ngai argues that this pathologization and moralization has stripped envy of its political usefulness—envy is, very often, something the “disempowered feel about the powerful”—and its critical power, the way it might allow one to swim against the tide of acculturation.
Ngai traces the ways that envy has also been feminized since Freud, who wrote that the feeling was characteristic of the aberrant and “diseased” selfhood of women and gay men. Rather than repudiating Freud, Ngai reconfigures his claims, showing how feminized subjects might leverage envy as a mode of resistance. Implicit in my envy of other gay men’s bodies is that I recognize them “as culturally desirable and invested with a certain degree of power.” I’ve been acculturated—by Instagram, by shows like Heated Rivalry and Fellow Travelers, by pornography, by Grindr and dating apps, by the pecking order in gay clubs—to admire and desire these bodies, to want to have them, to want to be like them. Envy transforms this unthinking desire into a discerning opposition. It allows me to articulate what I have been trained to desire as something oppressive. In other words, envy creates critical distance between me and my desires, the same remove one needs to get a good angle of reflection and question the order of things. And so envy, which usually entails attacking and spoiling the idealized object so as to render it “something no longer desirable,” can lead us to readjust our value systems. With my envy, I problematize where others acquiesce. Sometimes, it’s useful to be a shit stirrer.
A gay man who expresses frustration with the whole gay scene—who says that there’s something fascistic about the organization of desire and hierarchization of bodies in gay spaces, who, at the risk of sounding shrill, calls all of this unfair—will often be ridiculed as a “bitter queen.” The accusation here is that this guy’s ugly feelings are “a static sign of deficiency,” as Ngai writes, an innate disposition that begins and ends with their own wounded psyche. But every one of us is a bitter queen, at different points in time, to some extent or another. There is always going to be someone hotter than us, smarter, funnier, taller. There is always going to be someone to envy. Gay male culture is assumed to be structured around our similar love for the same object—what we have in common is our same-sex desire. But is that really all there is to it? Surprised as you may be this by this, I have many gay male friends. We’ve never discussed our mutual affinity for penis with one another. We have occasionally discussed the crushes we have, hot dude celebrities, our taste in men, but rarely is this taste similar or even overlapping, a commonality that links us. Like women—whose bonds are only reducible to a shared attraction for men in movies that fail the Bechdel test—I’d say what we have in common is something more like sorority, sisterhood, with all the feelings of intimacy and warmth and obligation those words imply, but also all the rivalry and resentment and envy, too. In Group Psychology, an exploration of how group dynamics influence individual psychology, Freud argues that envy is an inevitable factor in group formation. Intense feelings—even the ugly ones—are proof of belonging. And so I’m here in Zipolite, and I live in Provincetown, and I continue to be a bitter queen in gay spaces, not in spite of my ugly feelings, but because of them.
***
On our last night in town, Sam invites Isabel and me to dinner with a group of people he’s befriended at his hotel. We show up, and are greeted by Sam and three straight couples. A big table has been set up on the beach, scattered with tea candles and wine glasses. I sit next to a Swiss girl who tells me, in stiffly perfect English, that she doesn’t eat processed food. Then she explains, for twenty minutes, how chocolate is made. “Uh-huh,” I say. Underneath the table, I dig my fingernails into Isabel’s thigh. Everyone picks at the whole fried fish at the center of the table—it’s dead, obviously, but I think I can see a pleading expression in its milky eye. At the other end of the table, there’s an older couple, in their mid-forties, and they ask me what the cruising spot is like. “Do you think people would be okay if we fooled around over there?” the man asks me, rubbing his wife’s back. “We’ve always wanted an experience like that.” Isabel and I leave before dessert is served.
We have a drink at a mezcaleria on our way back to the Airbnb. It’s a small shack on the beach, and the bartender makes us frozen drinks with muddled strawberries and hibiscus petals. They are delicious. “If you like your drinks,” she says, “Maybe you could post about us on Instagram?” She points to a sign behind the bar that displays the bar’s username.
I’ve barely slept a wink all week, and I know that tonight will be no different. I tuck Isabel into bed, and speak to her in a baby voice that she hates. “I wuv you,” I say. I go back out to the hammock and try to read, but my brain stopped working on night three of no sleep. I open up Instagram where I learn that Max Emerson—by some accounts, the “original” Instagay who has over a million followers—has broken up with his boyfriend due to tumult caused by the LA wildfires. I remember, in high school, reading an interview Emerson did with NBC for a piece on the connection between Instagram and disordered eating among gay men, in which he claimed “the reality is that posts with diverse bodies don’t get as much engagement.” He added, “If you’re not selling a fantasy at first, you’re not going to get the platform.” I feel bad for him that he broke up with his boyfriend. I also feel bad for my adolescent self, that I read that article, that I even knew who this random man was in the first place.
I have this one very blessed friend, David. He is Hemsworth-brother handsome: 6’5”, blonde and blue-eyed, with an unobjectionably attractive face. From hearty Midwestern stock, he would have an amazing body even if he didn’t work out, but he does, and so he looks, at 41-years-old, not dissimilar from a Marvel superhero. David is a deeply kind person, thoughtful and caring, and, if hotness could be redistributed like wealth, I’m sure he’d give up some of his share. He often reminds me that it’s not his fault he was born into the body he was born into, that he did not rig the womb so that he’d end up looking as good as he does in a speedo. Just like gay people, hot people were born this way. David, who is wise and not on Instagram, often gets impatient with my bitterness—with many gay men’s bitterness—about Instagays flaunting their perfect bodies. “People hate because of how these hot guys make them feel bad about themselves,” David says.
Well, yes, exactly. Though, I’m not sure if the real target of all this loathing is these individual gay men themselves. I think it’s the ideal they seem to exemplify. “The ideal or good object envied and phantasmatically attacked is attacked precisely because it is idealized and good—as if the real source of antagonism is less the object than idealization itself,” Ngai writes. In other words, this loathing—this bitterness—is ideological rather than interpersonal. No one else’s body can make you feel badly about your own, not really. But the status accorded to someone else’s body can be a sorry reminder of the status accorded to your own. And that can feel very bad indeed. It’s a naive question—bathos all the way down—but I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask it: What if we were to stop posting so many reminders, drowning each other in them? What if we eased the lid off the pressure cooker, just a little bit?
I scroll through more Instagram posts: cooking content, writers I look up to, my friend’s mom, who saw a Broadway musical tonight. “Treat yourself,” she instructs me and her other followers. I lie on the hammock, stupidly tired, sick of Phoebe Bridgers and clean out of Doritos. I watch as the strobe light yet again flings itself around in the sky, back and forth in a self-flagellating way. I listen to the Kylie Minogue song they’re playing at the club and, at 2AM, either out of hope or nihilism, I decide to go over there. I brush my teeth and put some mousse in my curls and throw on my huarache sandals. Outside, I get patted down by the bouncer and pay the $10 cover. I can feel the bass through the door. Inside, there are only two other people. I’m not attracted to either of them. I can tell they’re not attracted to me. I order a paloma, gulp it down, and then leave.