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 by 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 here. An ass with a tattoo of the word ‘brat’ in the same font as the album. The hairy ass of Jordan Firstman, who’s 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 legal nude beach. Located along the Southern coast of Oaxaca, Zipolite is a two-hour drive from the nearest airport. There’s only one paved road in town and a living-room-sized grocery store. Five dollars buys a breakfast of exquisite fruit and watery coffee. Vespas buzz up and down the dirt roads and there’s a sizable dog population, all of them napping under the sun like they’re blissed out canine Quaaludes. For decades, Zipolite was a well-kept secret, a lowkey getaway for smelly European backpackers and the type of gay people who preferred the beach’s easy anonymity relative to scene-y, hierarchy-obsessed destinations like Fire Island, Puerto Vallarta, Mykonos, Palm Springs, 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 an optimization-pilled class of gay men who seem to live in a perpetual state of luxuriating. 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.” I knew this was the kind of hopeful language that would win over a grant committee. I had already spent a good chunk of my early twenties in queer spaces—really, gay spaces, populated so uniformly by men that, whenever I got back to my hometown, I’d frequently exclaim to my parents, “There are women here!”—and I’d experienced very little transcendence in any of them. I found, instead, that these spaces made me deflated and self-conscious, so unlike the wildly overconfident teenager I’d been. Elbow to elbow with other gay men, I felt alienated from them and desperate for their approval. Mostly, in these spaces, I felt ugly. Naturally, I kept returning to them. But, as I wrote the proposal, red-eyed at the eleventh hour from my parents’ cluttered kitchen counter, there was a part of me that believed I could eat-pray-love my way into the transcendence I was so lushly describing.
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, jobs which—I’m guessing—have a net negative impact on humanity. Butt-naked men clatter on their keyboards in between bellini sips. A few of these men, I’ve discovered while conducting my slack-jawed online investigations, are actual influencers, but they 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 to broadcast their assets online. I sit upright on my towel and watch for about twenty minutes as one, tapping away on his phone, takes, selects, edits, and uploads a selfie 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 impossibly muscular, and captioned it: Ugh, so much food and no gym for two weeks.
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. My straight friends also take pains to package their vacations, rooftop bar nights, and beach bodies. But the gay men I know are much more skilled at this braggadocious enterprise. As in the past, when Susan Sontag dubbed gay aestheticism one of the “pioneering forces of modern sensibility,” gay guys are talented curators—it’s just that, in the twenty-first century, we’ve abandoned art and culture for personal branding. There’s the millennial look: crew cut, saturated photos, travel itineraries, tight-fit clothing, boyfriend twin. And the Gen-Z one: silver hoops, beater, Brooklyn apartment with fake Akari lamps, big friend group with matching body type. It’s different packaging, same product. The subtext in either case is: Do you want me or want to be me? The blurring between identification and desire has always been part and parcel of homosexuality, but it seems to me that it is particularly well-suited to social media platforms, which exploit this double valence of attention. Comparison and lust will both compel you to look at all of the perfect people on your phone, and then to look some more.
It was on Instagram, anyway, that I first encountered the type of guys who will be my beach brethren for the next week in Zipolite. 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 upscale burger restaurant I worked at during my first summer in Provincetown. Their eyes glazed over me, as if they were robots and I—with my shoulder-length hair, unshaped body, and geometric eyeglasses—was an input they hadn’t been programmed to compute. I watched as many of them removed the bun from their $24 burger and ate just the meat. 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. I was an adult, and they were no longer people to look up to, holograms of my sunny future, but evidence that that future had failed to materialize. And now, in Zipolite, here they are again, on this beach with limited cell reception and a tide so strong it claims an average of 50 lives a year, blocking my view.
I should mention that, 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 that 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 you’d think. 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 crap: the perfection of other bodies and the consolation prize of my shitmaker. In paradise, I envy.
***
And, in paradise, I can’t sleep. Since high school, I’ve suffered episodes of insomnia. I spend a few agonizing hours making an earnest effort at slumber, trying out different positions, finding comfort in none of them. My friend Isabel is dead asleep next to me. She’s come to Zipolite under the auspices of serving as a translator—she’s fluent in Spanish—but it turns out there’s no need since almost everyone we’ve met so far is a native English speaker. I love Isabel 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. Once during this ritual, as I smoothed conditioner through my hair, she asked if I wanted to feel her boobs. I slid my hands 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, so I finally surrender to the inevitable and give up on sleep. I open the sliding glass door and crawl into the hammock on the porch of our Airbnb. There’s a beachfront nightclub across the street, still going strong at 3AM, playing a bad remix of “Bulletproof” by La Roux. I cram my headphones into my ears and listen to Phoebe Bridgers. I eat an entire bag of Doritos. I watch as a strobe light on the club’s roof jerks around the night sky.
Mostly, 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 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 so that I can zoom in as close as possible, so close that it becomes meaningless pixels. I zoom back out. I shove another fistful of Doritos into my mouth.
My Instagram is always flooded with this kind of thing. I now know what too many of my college classmates look like with half their clothes off. More to the point, I know what my thin and fit college classmates look like with half their clothes off, as this is the class of people who feel empowered to post such pictures. Influencers earn actual money for this kind of peacocking, but the rest of us stand to gain too, even if it’s just social capital. As I lay in the hammock, I wonder why this boy posted the picture: perhaps it was a subliminal wish to accrue more social capital, maybe he just liked it, or maybe he hates himself, too, and needed a quick hit of validation to get to sleep at night. I don’t think it matters why. The picture is here now, and it beckons: Look how good I look. He has only three thousand followers, is not an influencer, and this photo probably does not matter beyond this dark night of my soul.
And yet, at the risk of sounding censorial, I wonder if the world really needs another half-naked photo of someone flaunting their idealized body. The world is already flooded with them. For a long time, these images have been produced by top-down institutions: Hollywood, magazines, fashion brands. But now, everywhere you look, your peers are producing them, too. 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 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 fit 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.
Not that body positivity is a hill I want to die on. 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 xcx 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.”
When Isabel wakes up a few hours later, I run all this by her. She blinks at me. Then, she 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 than about how it 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. I’ve very occasionally glimpsed this kind of freedom—in Zipolite, dunking in and out of the water like a little kid, feeling the current rip at me, I’m pure sensation. Cold, warm, buoyant, carried. Yesterday, lying on my towel, wonderfully tipsy from a frozen strawberry daiquiri, I closed my eyes and looked up at the sun and dropped down from my head into my crisping skin. “I read somewhere that being on the beach literally makes you stupider,” Isabel had said to me as I rested my head on the small of her back. “Because it brings you into homeostasis and so all your survival instincts chill out.” I smiled, believing this idea fully. The only other time I’ve felt this bodily ease was when I was nineteen and took Molly at a nightclub in Berlin. I felt an overwhelming amount of love, which I expressed by burying my face in the armpit of a tall, shirtless Australian man for hours. I melted into him, my face slick with his sweat. But, with the exception of these moments of rapture, which have been contingent on drugs and alcohol, the relationship I’ve had to my body as an adult has been defined by low-grade torture.
***
The day after I got into college, I made a silent vow to myself to stop eating. Though I’ve learned through years of therapy that there are all sorts of biological, psychological, and chemical reasons for this—genes I inherited, serotonin imbalances, a wrinkle in my childhood—at the time, the impulse to stop eating was simple and pragmatic: I wanted to hook up in college. It felt all-important that men desire me, and I dreamed of having a boyfriend. The route to all of this, I knew, was thinness. I’d learned from Instagram influencers what the ideal gay guy looks like. He may be jacked or slender but in each case he has done away with his body fat. “Anorexia has often been described as a ‘reading disorder,’ brought on by uncritical consumption of texts that present thinness as the ideal,” Rachel Aviv writes in Strangers to Ourselves. Reading disorder seems like a misnomer though because it implies a lack of comprehension, as opposed to an overabundance of it—anorexia is what happens when someone gets the message loud and clear, when they’ve become overwhelmed with the knowledge that the ‘right’ body can bring you respect, power, love.
My hunch was right: at my thinnest I was also at my most desirable, rewarded with social approval, sex, and a boyfriend. He was proof of my worthiness—six years older than me, a law student who also worked as a personal trainer, with broad shoulders and shaggy brown hair. He was a marvel of efficiency, a man unburdened by introspection and insecurity. He ate huge bowls of cottage cheese and stacks of grilled chicken breasts completely unseasoned. In college, he’d been friends with one of the Instagram influencers I’d followed while I was in high school. Dating him felt like making the team, which, in hindsight, was the main reason I liked him.
By the end of my freshman year, I was beginning to call my anorexia for what it was, and I slowly confided in friends about it. My confessions sounded, to my ears alone, like bragging: I considered the disorder to be some sort of ascetic achievement, proof of my discipline and my commitment to an idealized self, which I suppose is part of the logic of the disorder itself. I was not, by any measure, winning. I was tired and cold all the time, shivering even in the August heat. I could not focus on my schoolwork. Whenever I had to eat more than raw vegetables, like at a friend’s pasta-laden birthday dinner, I’d come back to my dorm and use the tail end of my toothbrush to throw up in the dirty toilet of the hallway bathroom. But, even with that, hunger felt like nobility. Calorie restriction had become a compulsion, a way of life I found both miserable and irresistible.
Recovery was slow and unmiraculous, but it came with a host of internal rewards: energy, concentration, and the time to think about other things. It came with external losses, too: a breakup because, as he put it, I no longer looked the same; fewer and fewer compliments with each pound gained; a lower rung on the marketplace of gay male sexual viability. I would never say this to someone in the midst of an eating disorder, but each case—restriction, recovery—was a trade-off.
Many anorexics also suffer from body dysmorphia, and so, even when I was, according to my doctor, “lethally underweight,” I looked in the mirror and saw Bruce Bogtrotter, the obese kid who eats the entire chocolate cake in Matilda. Six years later, 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’m just a bit chubby, in a way that could be adorable, redolent of cherubic youth. It might even be desirable to some people, though definitely not to the type of gay guys who act like barons of the sexual marketplace. Where the mirror has been an unreliable indicator of my looks, the way other gay men treat me has been a useful barometer. In gay clubs, I’ve been the bell 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. These experiences have correlated with the number on the scale. Here in Zipolite—with my blonde hair and my too small speedo perennially slipping off my pudgy body—I look not unlike the Coppertone girl. And most of the eyes scanning the beach for a new friend or fling pass over me.
***
These appraising eyes are a big part of Zipolite’s draw. A section 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, and 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 of 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.
Every woman and gay man has stories of being appraised, sized up, whittled down—stories about how very much appearance matters. These stories are so ubiquitous as to have become banal. I’m perturbed, though, by how, amongst gay men, appearance might not just determine if you’re going to 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 friends have reported that, in the absence 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 a midcentury modern Airbnb. There is something creepy about the immaculacy of this social landscape. Who, I wonder, doesn’t get invited to the party, doesn’t even get invited onto the island?
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 too easy to dismiss the disciplined diets and HIIT workouts of all these sculpturesque men as sheer vanity. That’s part of it, I’m sure, but this merciless ouroboros is fueled—just as much, if not more—by 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 has 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.
***
There are other beaches I could have gone to in Mexico, ones that would have inspired less of this acerbity. Why go to Zipolite? Why, for that matter, live in Provincetown, which, during the summer at least, is beset with many of the same issues? There are a few answers to these questions. 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. Moreover, I’m perennially horny: even when chubby, I have a better chance of getting my back blown out in Zipolite than in Aruba. But the most honest answer is that I’m actually 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. It’s a masochistic kind of pleasure. The same part of me that, in high school, was turbocharged by competition and award ceremonies and SATs and the college admissions process lights up in the gay bar, on the dance floor, and here in Zipolite. I’ve always felt most alive when I’m trying to prove my worth.
The flip side of this competitive streak is that I’m a terribly envious person. 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 feelings are petty. 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 taken as a sign that there’s something 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 which roused the envy in the first place. Ngai argues that this pathologization 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 conformity.
She also traces the ways that envy has been feminized since Freud, who wrote that the feeling was characteristic of the “diseased” selfhood of women and gay men. Rather than repudiating Freud, Ngai shows how feminized subjects might leverage envy as a mode of resistance to prescribed desires. 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 trained—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 introduces friction, turning this unthinking desire into discerning opposition. It reveals that there’s often something ugly underlying our value systems: think of Lily Bart’s envy of the wealthy in The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton’s trenchant takedown of America’s class system. With my envy, I problematize where others acquiesce. Sometimes, it’s useful to be a shit stirrer.
Every one of us is a bitter queen, at different points in time, to some extent or another. There will always be someone hotter than us, smarter, funnier, taller. There will always be someone to envy. Gay male culture is assumed to be structured around our same-sex desire. But is that really all there is to it? 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 or sisterhood, with all the feelings of intimacy and warmth and trust those words imply, but also all the rivalry and resentment and envy, too. In Group 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.
***
Intellectualizing these unpleasant feelings does not make them any less unpleasant however. The burned hand teaches best, but it’s also still a burned hand. It would be so much easier, of course, not to envy, to have a frictionless relationship with everything I’ve been trained to desire. In an essay for The Cut last summer, “We’ve Reached Peak Gay Sluttiness,” Stephen Phillips-Horst coined the term “optimized hedonism” to describe a milieu of gay men who have structured their lives around maximizing their sexual pleasure and social status, which, in the gay world, are mutually reinforcing. Many of my gay male friends have dismissed this social scene as insipid and the people within it as stupid. They’ve told me these men stop seeming attractive to them once they open their mouths. Superficiality, they say, is a turn-off. This isn’t the case for me though. If anything, what I’m attracted to is this superficiality. It’s not just the smooth bodies I envy and desire, but the smooth brains, too, the absence of complexity. I’d love to be the kind of gay guy who is sincerely interested in working out six days a week, having an Instagrammable friend group, wearing whatever is considered hot, pursuing the types of things that are most readily rewarded—as opposed to being the kind of gay guy whose sincere interest lies in writing an essay about all of these things. It seems easier, I mean, to be the kind of person who picks things up and puts them down, rather than being the kind of person who is always picking things apart.
The 2023 film Rotting in the Sun, filmed and set in Zipolite, dramatizes this dichotomy. Sebastián Silva, the film’s writer and director, plays a version of himself, a broke filmmaker who hasn’t had a success in a decade (Silva won the Sundance Directing Award for 2013’s Crystal Fairy & the Magic Cactus starring Michael Cera). He’s living out his days in Mexico City, where he rails ketamine in the early afternoon and contemplates suicide at all hours of the day. In lieu of that fatal act, one of his friends suggests he take a trip to Zipolite. (When Silva says he’s never heard of the town, his friend responds, “What kind of faggot are you?”) He goes, packing the Romanian existentialist Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born as a beach read. As everyone else in Zipolite plays grab-ass, he records voice memos of lines from the book that resonate with him: “Resign yourself to decay at all times. That is your fate.”
Then, he meets Jordan Firstman, also playing a version of himself. Firstman is Silva’s polar opposite: a vapid influencer who glides merrily along the surface of life. He is sincerely interested in the internet’s attention economy and in Zipolite’s erotic economy. The film makes use of Firstman’s actual social media presence—we watch Silva recoil with horror at Firstman’s TikTok impersonation of “banana bread’s publicist” informing banana bread they’ve won Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. At a technoparty on the beach, the two come to a head, Silva committed to his sullenness, Firstman to his superficiality. “Suicide is for fucking fags,” Firstman yells before slapping Silva across the face. The film, among other things, is about the differences between being an artist and being an influencer: one cursed with thoughts, the other blessed with a lack of them. In Rotting in the Sun, Firstman is indeed happier than Silva, more successful, too. “I like life,” he says. When Silva returns home from the trip, he has a Zoom meeting with HBO executives, who turn down three of his pitches. Realizing the door is about to be closed on him and desperate for money, he tells them he recently met Jordan Firstman and might collaborate on a project with him. They perk up at this. Silva resigns himself to an epoch in which success comes to the Jordan Firstmans of the world. He calls up Firstman to begin work on their collaboration. The show they’re going to make is called You Are Me. It’s about Instagram.
***
There’s this lie I tell myself, that I’m playing the long game. My body is so-so, but I have my education, my mind, my writing. These guys on the beach have approval, but one day I’ll have acclaim. Having good abs and visible delts can sometimes be a pathway to more solid forms of power, as is the case with Instagram influencers or the plethora of blandly untalented men who have nonetheless become Hollywood stars. But most of the time, a gym body is a local currency, worthless beyond the gay club and Grindr grid. And it only depreciates in value: a trope of gay literature is the faded beauty, the middle-aged man who, having rested on his good looks for his twenties and thirties, finds that, once gray-haired and soft-bellied, he has no other recourse to acquiring a good life for himself. He’s not particularly employable, hasn’t nurtured meaningful friendships, never did the hard work of developing a self-image beyond the one in the mirror. I tell myself my investments have been in a more universal currency, one that will carry me across domains and decades.
This is a palliative self-delusion. It’s soothing, but it does nothing to get to the root of comparison and competition so central to these environs. If anything, it entrenches these dynamics further: these guys think they’re better than me, and I think I’m above their philistine little rubric. My narrative does not free me from the rat race. Not to mention it’s entirely possible I’ll end up a huge flop.
And even if I were to achieve great professional success, I doubt this would make me any less desperate for sexual validation. Many of the gay men I know who have illustrious careers seem to still care about the photo-readiness of their bodies, just now with the purchasing power to make it happen. They sink funds into personal trainers, Barry’s memberships, someone who can stick a needle into their face to freeze it or fill it. I recall, once, in Provincetown, watching a Netflix executive producer suck gel from a packet like a kid with a Go-Gurt. This, he explained, was a “meal substitute.” I’d just watched him eat lunch. At a Fourth of July party in a bayside mansion, amongst the crowd of six-foot-two Instagays, I spotted a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whom I’d idolized in college. He was making unsuccessful attempts at flirtation with every tall, brawny man in sight. It came to me like a gut punch: he was fawning over them. When I caught a glimpse of him again an hour later, he was standing in a corner with his hands in the pockets of his white skinny jeans, looking dejected.
I suspect many little gay boys, while growing up, picked up on the message beat into little girls that their self-worth amounts to their ability to attract men’s sexual attention. Which is to say, you can get all the approval and acclaim and success in the world, and this kind will still be the only one that matters to you. Maybe this is why I keep coming back to these spaces. Acceptance within them feels like the final say.
***
On our last night in Zipolite, Sam, the bi backpacker, 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. There is a young, terrifyingly blue-eyed couple, a tall and beautiful couple from New Zealand, and a couple in their mid-forties who are flush with second youth. A big table has been set up on the beach, scattered with tea candles and short-stemmed wine glasses. I sit next to the blue-eyed girl, who I learn is from Switzerland, and she 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 there’s a pleading expression in its eye. At the other end of the table, the woman in her mid-40s asks me, the only gay guy here, what the cruising spot is like. “Do you think people would be cool if we fooled around over there?” her husband chimes in. “We’ve always wanted an experience like that.”
“No,” I say to him flatly. “I do not think people would be cool with that.”
They both recoil, offended that I haven’t given them, a conjugal man and woman, the green light to a gay space. As critical as I feel of these spaces, I feel even more protective of them. In Provincetown, bachelorette parties, straight weddings, and nuclear families have become a regular facet of the tourist population. And though, in an official sense, this is obviously their right, I often find myself astonished by how entitled people feel to what is not theirs. On Provincetown’s Commercial Street one July night, a drunk bride-to-be, her sash askew, came up to me and wordlessly pulled on one of my blonde curls like it was a slinky in a gift shop. “You’re adorable,” she cooed at me.
My sweet father, a delightful straight man in New Balance sneakers and Cosco jeans, has come up with a term for these people: “gay gawkers.” In 2022, the Boston Globe ran an op-ed about the “hetrification” of Provincetown. Straight people come in and kick their feet up on the table, often “destroying spaces for the LGBTQ+ people who created them in the first place,” the article claimed. “Hetrification” is a portmanteau of “hetero” and “gentrification,” an unfortunate play on words—I’d be hesitant to claim that straight people simply passing through a gay town is anywhere near as destructive as wealthy, white people buying up land and literally displacing poor residents of color. The slight, with “hetrification,” has more to do with vibes than material resources. But still, it’s corrosive: “Hetrification, unlike gentrification, is an appropriation not just of space, but of culture,” the Globe article states.
I think often of a line from Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar, an essay collection about queer spaces: “Inclusivity might not mean everybody. It could indicate the rest of us.” Spaces like Fire Island, Provincetown, and Zipolite ought to be more inclusive, but the question is whom to include. It’s worth asking why straight people feel so entitled to queer spaces, but why so many queer people don’t feel this same way. Creating an environment that is inclusive of all queer people will mean “thinking from the point of view of the most vulnerable, after years of [gay spaces] rewarding the alphas in the room,” Atherton Lin writes. Just as much, it’ll mean no longer appeasing the gay gawkers. The nineties activist group Queer Nation, formed during the height of the AIDS crisis, once published “rules of conduct for straight people” who visited gay clubs. The seventh and final rule was, simply, “Go Fuck Yourself.”
This sense of indignation is a strand of queerness immune to appropriation. People will always want the honey and skip over the vinegar. I’ve spent time in Cape Cod towns besides Provincetown, and, while I’ve had fun in them—swam in salt ponds and ate lobster rolls and sailed on boats and sat on porches while drinking glasses of rosé the same color as the early evening sky—I haven’t ever felt anything about these towns. Pleasure alone won’t let you sink your teeth into the world. My negative feelings about queer spaces—those negative feelings are precious to me. They keep me biting down.
Isabel and I leave the dinner just as dessert is being served. “Oh, the cake is chocolate,” I hear the Swiss girl say. On our way back to the Airbnb, we have a drink at a mezcaleria. It’s a small shack on the beach, and the bartender makes us cocktails with muddled strawberries and hibiscus petals. They are delicious. As we pay our bill and are about to leave, she stops us. “If you liked your drinks,” she says, “Maybe you could post about us on Instagram?” She points to a sign behind her that displays the bar’s username.
I’ve barely slept a wink all week, and I know that tonight will be no different. I go back out to the hammock and try to read, but my brain stopped working on my third night of no sleep. I open up Instagram, where I learn that Max Emerson—by some measures, the original Instagay who has over a million followers—has broken up with his boyfriend over 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 that “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 guy was in the first place.
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 the sky. 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 mousse in my curls and throw on my huarache sandals. Outside the club, 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 leave.