Take Selfies, It’s Good for You
Vanity is self-care.
I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written primarily for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.
This isn’t a Q&A—it’s me sharing my own advice on sex, dating, and connection.
I struggle with body dysmorphia. If you're gay, you probably do, too.
Every time I post a half-naked selfie, someone on the internet calls me "thirsty." Does one have to be desperate for attention to enjoy how they look? If this is "thirst," I assume we all share it—a global, universal need for validation. I don't know anyone wired with enough confidence to bop through life without occasional boosts.
Here’s the truth: with most people I meet, I think their body is better than mine. I still see my body as it was some years ago when I was newly HIV-positive. The drugs gave me weird fat deposits on my shoulders, face, and belly. My skin broke out. I hated the drugs and stopped taking them in San Francisco—it was a very dark time in my life.
Many years have passed since then. I left San Francisco, moved to Los Angeles, restarted my HIV meds, and my doctor switched me to a better drug. Today, I'm healthy with an undetectable viral load.
I still have selfies from that San Francisco time, and they don't look good. I was lonely, depressed, skinny, and chronically sick. I was a sex worker in a strange city, without a stable living situation and with few friends. I wasn't doing anything special or interesting, but I was in San Francisco, and I told myself that was enough. Living in an iconic city was, in my view, worth all the day-to-day struggles. Then life took me to L.A., which was better. L.A. got me to a better place. Then the drugs started.
Starting a drug habit when you're already HIV-positive and not on medication is a bad idea, and I got sick quickly. I lost a lot of weight. When I realised I needed to make a change, I went to the Los Angeles LGBT Centre and talked to some nice people there. They understood my concerns about the meds, but they also stressed in no ambiguous terms what my outlook was: if I stayed off meds, eventually my disease would progress to AIDS, and it would be hard to come back from that. With their support, I got back into HIV care and have been taking my meds diligently ever since.
Wellness is a shifting, elusive thing that everyone must define for themselves. Seeking wellness means more than going to a doctor when you're sick. Wellness is taking time to find the parts of yourself that need love. I've always had body image issues, and I think these issues have been exacerbated by many things: HIV, medication, drugs, and much else. Wellness for me now means fitness and drug moderation, and every now and then, I have to take a selfie as a visual marker of where I am and how I’m doing.
My idea of wellness is far from perfect, but it works for me right now. To feel better about myself and minimise my anxiety, I go to the gym almost every day and work hard to have a body I like to show off. Yes, I am seeking validation, but seeking validation beats the alternative—hating my body and avoiding people because of it.
I take selfies for myself. Learning how to take them is an ongoing struggle. I'm learning to study myself in the mirror, what angles to get, how to smile, what facial expressions I like, and how to position myself. The art of taking selfies is so complicated, mainly because it seems so easy for some people. And maybe that's the truth of it: it looks easy. I don't know how long some Instagram gays spend getting the perfect image. I know I'm not willing to devote more time to it than I currently do, which isn't much. I'm never going to be famous for my selfies.
But I am empowered by them and moved by them, moved by the progress they record, and by the proof they offer—that I’m, in fact, not a skinny, drug-addled, lost little boy anymore, staring blankly into an iPhone camera with a sunken, strained, scared-looking face. At least in the photos I see, I see a man who has grown up a bit, who made it out. My photos tell me I’m doing okay. That record is one of survival and slow, daily, steady growth, and that feels like survival to me.
I do want to be someone who is proud of their body; I want to own and enjoy this vessel I have to go about my life in. So here’s what I think: own your thirst. Honour it. It’s human. It’s humane. It’s okay. If you want to show off, show off. If you want an ego stroke, seek it. There are a lot of people out there who blast social media as a place where superficial imagism destroys people's perception of reality, and it surely is. But it's several rungs up the social ladder from that hidden, retreating, lonely version of life I tasted in drugs, and that I know is always out there, never far away, never out of reach. Progress pics keep me reminded and committed, accountable to myself.
My suspicion is that, for many Instagram gays, beneath the perceived sham of their sexy, glamorous, ego-stroking profiles are, in fact, real people like me with rough histories, and this simply might be how they record how far they’ve come from their own dark sides. I get that. I feel that.
Vanity can be self-care. The next time you like how you look, take a selfie to help you remember that feeling, so that the next time you're down, you can thumb to a picture on your phone and remind yourself that you'll get back there. You'll make it.
Love, Beastly