Epistemology of the Locker Room: A Queer Glance at the Physical Culture Archive

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Notes

1. Nico Lang, ‘Top Gun and the End of the Homoerotic Action Movie’, Consequence of Sound, May 14, 2016, https://consequenceofsound.net/2016/05/top-gun-and-the-end-of-the-homoerotic-action-movie/.

2. José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts’, Women and Performance 8, no. 2 (1996), 5–16.

3. Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence’, 6.

4. Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence’, 9.

5. Simon Ofield, ‘Cruising the Archive’, Journal of Visual Culture 4, no.3 (2005), 351–64 (362 and 353).

6. Melissa Blanco Borelli, She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 27.

7. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 40–41.

8. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 3.

9. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 8, emphasis in original.

10. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 72.

11. Michael P. Brown, Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe (London: Routledge, 2000), 2–3.

12. Brown, Closet Space, 56.

13. Danielle Bobker, ‘Coming Out: Closet Rhetoric and Media Publics’, History of the Present 5, no. 1 (2015), 31–64 (34).

14. Bobker, ‘Coming Out’, 38.

15. Ofield, ‘Cruising the Archive’, 362.

16. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 138.

17. Danielle Clarke, ‘Finding the Subject: Queering the Archive’, Feminist Theory 5, no. 1 (2004), 79–83 (79).

18. Daniel Victor, ‘“Access Hollywood” Reminds Trump: “The Tape is Very Real”’, New York Times, November 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/us/politics/donald-trump-tape.html.

19. Timothy Jon Curry, ‘Fraternal Bonding in the Locker Room: A Profeminist Analysis of Talk about Competition and Women’, Sociology of Sport Journal 8, no. 2 (1991), 119–35 (133), see also Elizabeth Cavalier, ‘Men at Sport: Gay Men’s Experiences of the Sport Workplace’, Journal of Homosexuality 58, no. 5 (2011), 626–646; Donn Short, ‘The Informal Regulation of Gender: Fear and Loathing in the Locker Room’, Journal of Gender Studies 16, no. 2 (2007), 183–186; M.R. Gregory, ‘Inside the locker room: male homosociability in the advertising industry’, Gender Work and Organization 16, no. 3 (2009), 323–47; and Gordon Waitt, ‘Gay Games: Performing “community” out from the closet of the locker room’, Social & Cultural Geography 4, no. 2 (2003), 167–183.

20. Curry, ‘Fraternal Bonding’, 133.

21. Meredith G.F. Worthen’, ‘Blaming the Jocks and the Greeks?: Exploring Collegiate Athletes’ and Fraternity/Sorority Members’ Attitudes Toward LGBT Individuals’, Journal of College Student Development 55, no. 2 (2014), 168–195 (185), see also Gordon Waitt, ‘Gay Games: Performing “community” out from the closet of the locker room’, Social & Cultural Geography 4,no. 2 (2003), 167–183.

22. Cavalier, ‘Men at Sport’, 639.

23. Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 145.

24. Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity, 146.

25. Ibid.

26. Erick Alvarez, Muscle Boys: Gay Gym Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 247–74; Michael Reece and Brian Dodge, ‘Exploring the physical, mental and social well-being of gay and bisexual men who cruise for sex on a college campus’, Journal of Homosexuality 46, no. 1–2 (2004), 111–136; Michael Reece and Brian Dodge, ‘Exploring indicators of sexual compulsivity among men who cruise for sex on campus’, Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity 11, no. 3 (2004), 87–113; Brett Beemyn, ‘The Geography of Same-Sex Desire: Cruising Men in Washington, DC in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Left History 9, no. 2 (2004), 141–159.

27. John Donald Gustav-Wrathall, Take the Young Stranger by the Hand: Same-Sex Relations and the YMCA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 15.

28. Alvarez, Muscle Boys, 260.

29. Jane Ward, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

30. Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity, 199.

31. Gary Stonehouse, ‘Hustle, Loyalty, Erect: WWE superstar John Cena confesses he got an “accidental boner” while wrestling’, The Sun, June 17, 2019, https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/wwe/9289540/wwe-john-cena-erection/.

32. Broderick D.V. Chow, ‘Sculpting Masculinities in 19th- and 20th-Century Physical Culture: The Practiced Life of Stanley Rothwell’, TDR: The Drama Review 63, no. 2 (2019), 34–56 (39).

33. Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 77.

34. John D. Fair, Mr. America: The Tragic History of a Bodybuilding Icon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 9–10, 25–27, 129, 136.

35. Dimitris Liokaftos, A Geneaology of Male Bodybuilding: From Classical to Freaky (London: Routledge, 2018), 74–77.

36. Budd, The Sculpture Machine, 71.

37. See Jennifer Smith Maguire, Fit for Consumption: Sociology and the Business of Fitness (London: Routledge, 2007); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

38. Tim Benzie (2000): ‘Judy Garland at the Gym – gay magazines and gay bodybuilding’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2000), 159–70; David K. Johnson, ‘Physique Pioneers: the Politics of 1960s Gay Consumer Culture’, Journal of Social History 43, no. 4 (2010), 867–92; David K. Johnson, Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

39. F. Valentine Hooven, Beefcake (Cologne: Taschen, 2002), 72.

40. Kenneth R. Krauss, Male Beauty: Postwar Masculinity in Theater, Film, and Physique Magazines (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 210–213.

41. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 9.

42. See John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 57.

43. Alan M. Klein, Little Big Men: Bodybuilding Subculture and Gender Construction (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 197; 202.

44. Arnold Schwarzenegger with Douglas Kent Hall, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder (London: Little, Brown, 1979), 41.

45. Schwarzenegger, Education, 42.

46. Ibid.

47. Ellexis Boyle, ‘Marketing muscular masculinity in Arnold: the education of a bodybuilder’, Journal of Gender Studies 19, no. 2 (2010), 153–166.

48. Schwarzenegger, Education, 42.

49. Bud Clifton, Muscle Boy (New York: Ace Books), Kindle Edition, back cover.

50. Clifton, Muscle Boy, loc. 1086.

51. Clifton, Muscle Boy, loc. 2088.

52. Clifton, Muscle Boy, back cover.

53. Clifton, Muscle Boy, loc. 363, emphasis added.

54. Clifton, Muscle Boy, loc. 38.

55. Richard T. Kelly, ‘David Stacton: The Method Man’, The Guardian, January 26, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/26/david-stacton-method-man.

56. Clifton, Muscle Boy, loc. 962.

57. Clifton, Muscle Boy, loc. 1827.

58. Johnson, Buying Gay.

59. George Hackenschmidt, The Way of Live in Health and Physical Fitness (London: Athletic Publications, 1908), 108.

60. George Hackenschmidt, The Russian Lion (Unpublished Manuscript), The George Hackenschmidt Collection, H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, University of Texas at Austin.

61. Hackenschmidt, The Way to Live, 116.

62. Hackenschmidt, The Way to Live, 109.

63. In my 2015 article, ‘A Professional Body: Remembering, Repeating, and Working Out Masculinities in Fin-de-Siècle Physical Culture’, Performance Research 20, no. 5 (2015), 30–41, I note that The Way to Live is full of repetitive, quantitative data – recordings of Hackenschmidt’s weight, measurements, and matches fought.

64. Kathy Acker, ‘Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body’, in Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker (eds), The Last Sex: Feminism and Outlaw Bodies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 20–28 (22).

65. Acker, ‘Against Ordinary Language’, 25.

66. Acker, ‘Against Ordinary Language’, 26.

67. I expand at length on the ‘Bodybuilder’s Journey’ narrative in ‘Sculpting Masculinities’ (2019).

68. Primary sources in this final section are drawn from the Abbye ‘Pudgy’ and Les Stockton Papers, H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, University of Texas at Austin.

69. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

70. Evening Outlook, June 12, 1959, qtd. in Tolga Ozyurtcu, ‘Flex Marks the Spot: Histories of Muscle Beach’, PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2014, 62.

71. Ozyurtcu, ‘Flex Marks the Spot’, 53.

72. Evening Outlook, qtd. in Ozyurtcu, ‘Flex Marks the Spot’, 62.

73. Harold Zinkin (with Bonnie Hearn), Remembering Muscle Beach (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 1999), 33.

74. Zinkin, Remembering Muscle Beach, 14.

75. Pudgy Stockton, recorded interview. Courtesy of Stark Center.

76. Stockton, interview.

77. Jan Todd, ‘The Legacy of Pudgy Stockton’, Iron Game History 2, no. 1 (1992), 5–7 (6).

78. Todd, ‘Pudgy Stockton’, 6.

79. Anja Kanngieser, ‘ … And … and … and … The Transversal Politics of Performative Encounters’, Deleuze Studies 6, no. 2 (2012), 265–290.

80. See, for instance, Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

81. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The There and Then of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.