Best Gay Erotica 2013 by Richard Labonté

Author:Richard Labonté
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press Start
Published: 2013-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

BIGCHEST: CONFESSIONS OF A TIT MAN

Larry Duplechan

I’m pretty sure it all started with Steve Reeves. For the benefit of people younger than myself (and lately, that seems to include just about everybody), Steve Reeves was sort of the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the 1950s and ’60s—only back in those days, success in professional bodybuilding could be parlayed into a career in action/adventure movies but not into the governorship of California. By 1950, Reeves had won all of the major bodybuilding contests then in existence (well, both of them: it was Mr. America, Mr. Universe, and that was it). In the early’50s, he appeared as sort of beefcake window dressing in a couple of biggish Hollywood movies (I seem to recall seeing him lifting Jane Powell with one hand); and in 1958 he sojourned to Italy where he starred in the title role of Hercules. The sequel, Hercules Unchained, followed in 1959.

By the late 1960s, by which time I was a boy on the cusp of my teen years, both of Steve Reeves’s Hercules movies (in addition to his other post-Hercules flicks such as Romulus and Remus and The Last Days of Pompeii—all of them Italian-made sword-and-sandal epics so, well, Herculean, that I still think of them as “Hercules movies”) were staples of afternoon and late-night television, at least in the greater Los Angeles area. Back in the day, KCOP-Channel 9’s “Million Dollar Movie” showed the same movie every day at 4:00 P.M. for five consecutive days, Monday through Friday—which is why I can still recite The Pajama Game (Doris Day and John Raitt) nearly word-forword, song-for-song; and why Hercules starring Steve Reeves is etched upon my brain as indelibly as the Pledge of Allegiance.

As with any beautiful thing, words cannot do justice to the beauty of Steve Reeves in his heyday. He was square-jawed and boyishly handsome (even with the close-cropped beard he wore in his Hercules movies), with a head of thick, wavy dark hair. At just over six feet tall and weighing 215 pounds, Reeves sported one version of the perfect physique: a twenty-nine-inch waist, manta-ray lats flaring up to impossibly wide shoulders, and a fifty-two-inch chest. That’s right—a fifty-two-inch chest. As a boy, I found that chest absolutely fascinating; not only the superhuman breadth and depth of Reeves’s rib cage, but especially the twin mounds of chest muscle for which I had, at that time, no proper name. They bulged when Steve crossed his massive arms and bounced heavily when he ran. I don’t know if I or my brother Lloyd (two and a half years younger than myself, and a Hercules fan himself—though not in quite the same way I was), first coined the term, but at some point we began referring to Steve Reeves’s impressive set of chest muscles as “bigchest” (one word, accent on the first syllable). As in, “Wow, did you see his bigchest move when he killed that hydra?”

By that point (the age of eleven or twelve), I knew, and on some level accepted the fact, that I liked to look at other boys and good-looking, athletic grown men.

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