I’m not a particularly vain person. This is possibly because I don’t usually notice other people’s appearance either. It doesn’t register to me as significant until I discover whether or not they have a brain isn’t instantly tiresome (so many are). If their appearance isn’t important, my head reasons, why would my own be?

Except, of course, for the vast majority of humanity - a primarily visual and basically not at all telepathic species -appearances are huge. People judge books and pretty much every other fucking thing by their covers. Especially the fucking things. That’s where the trouble lies for people like me, who really somewhat keenly want to be a fucking thing.

I’ve said it many times on BZ - I’m no Adonis... more if a Caliban, really, to keep with the motif and because I don’t actually have live snakes instead of hair. I don’t rate, I never have in my whole life. I mean, I suppose I’m not hideous - I don’t curdle fresh milk when I pass by or anything - but I find mirrors a little too honest to stand and look at them.

From time to time some guy or another will comment to me that I’m ‘cute’ or ‘handsome’ or (inexplicably) ‘hot’, which I hold up as proof that there’s no accounting for taste - but I also know what constitutes a smokingly attractive man in a broad and generally agreed-upon sense, and I’m not it.

Lots of men, and particularly as we age, face some degree of appearance-angst. The muscle tone starts to slip, the pecs aren’t as full as they were, the calves aren’t quite as rounded, you can’t really bounce a quarter off that ass anymore. The skin looks a little drawn. The hairline has crept back a little, perhaps, the eyebrows aren’t so dark, there’s a hint of silver in the beard.  There are a couple of crinkles in the corner of the eyes that won’t go away. Each thing in itself is a small matter, but taken together... and worse, stood up against a bathhouse wall next to a 24-year-old jock with a head full of jet-black hair... they add up to potential self-dissastisfaction.

 I point out signs of aging, but it’s by no means limited to that - in our body-hyper-conscious gay world, how often does a young man suffer in silent misery because he has an extra ten pounds around his belly, or lacks a confident jawline, or just wasn’t genetically “gifted” in all the ways that mark a member of The Beautiful People?

Sometimes I pause just a tad too long in front of the mirror, and then I touch my face and start to wonder: What would it be like if I could have this changed? It’s not completely out of the realm of physics... What if I had just - reasonable changes made, an angle changed, some mass rearranged, so that what is unhandsome looked attractive? What would happen then?

I have the kind of visual imagination that allows me to see that result in front of my inner eye, and then I realize that it might work... but the person I’m looking at isn’t someone I know. So if that face were on me, who would I be? My mom wouldn’t recognize me or feel the same as she would around regular homely old me.

Okay, I think, well, then, what if it’s nothing so drastic? What about just knocking that pesky gray out of my hair and getting it back to its normal color - fortunately, I’ve still got a head full of it...that, at least, is in my favor, right?

Ah, but it’s just the same as bodybuilding, trying to keep a specific appearance going against the irascible forces of entropy: If the balloon has a hole in it, it will inevitably deflate unless you keep pumping forever. And you can’t keep pumping forever.

So, back to solutions with the greatest possible duration, up to and including permanent changes. Hey, I know about body mods. I’ve had a steel bar straight through the meat of my cockhead for, like, 13 years now, and it’s not going anywhere. Some, wide-eyed and gesturing NopeNopeNope, might think that puh-lenty Illustrative of a step too far to change the way one sees oneself, or the way others see you; I can’t say, because I got my ampallang piercing for completely unrelated reasons.

Has it drawn interest to me? Possibly. Has it drawn interest to my cock? Fuck yes, it has...the one place I don’t want men all over me, goddammit. Has it changed the way other guys perceive me - has it made them more interested in me sexually? Who knows? They don’t even find out about it until they see me naked, and I don’t share cock pics.

 I keep meaning to start working out on a regular basis, to reverse the damage done to my physique by AIDS six years ago, and the ravages of ART since then. I’m gradually slimming back down. Then I pass by the mirror and it says to me, “What for? I mean, look at you! You’re no prettier than you ever were, you’re never going to be hott, and even if by some modern plastic surgery miracle it were possible to turn you pretty, Quasimodo, why do you need a pretty face when all they want from you is your warm, wet ass?”

The silvery motherfucker makes a sharp argument, but I still, still find myself wishing I could walk through the bathhouse and know that the confidence I project with my buck-naked body isn’t just me obliviously embarrassing myself.

 I think there must be something nice about being attractive, and knowing that other people lust after you. I’ll never know that feeling, I suppose. But I do wonder how far anyone else would go to get that... and if it would be worth it.