Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on February 17, 2015

The gym scene in South Beach may not be as gay as it once was, but it's still cool.

For those who've never heard of it, Equinox is a high-end "luxury" gym that prides itself on being a cutting edge, overtly friendly, one-stop shop for those wanting to knock their bods back into shape.

Alas, it's also pretty much the only gym left in sunny, gay South Beach. There's Crunch, but less said about that the better.

It wasn't always like this. For one thing, gay South Beach used to be, well, actually gay. When I bought my first closet-size condo (to avoid some of the worst of New York's winters), there were five body-building gyms within walking distance. David Barton, Iron Works, etc. None offered yoga, or aerobics, or any of those other silly lifestyle classes.

And all were pretty much gay, as was the neighborhood. South Beach had once been a quiet Cuban enclave with lots of Hasidic Jews. Until gay men discovered it in the late '80s and helped set off round after round of gentrification that is still going on, eventually transmuting all the old Orthodox synagogues into new condos along the way.

The gay muscle queens would walk, often hand in hand, to their favorite gyms in the morning to work out, just as the Orthodox men in their fur-lined hats would walk toward their shuls to pray at sunset.

More than a few of them were impossibly beefed up totally ripped to the tits on steroids that helped counter the effects of the new HIV cocktails that were unbelievably, suddenly returning them to life.

But all that is gone. This Equinox is pretty straight as far as I can tell. Even the cute trainers with the tight butts are straight. And yet, like South Beach itself, it's still strangely laid-back and tolerant, in a way that few communities can match. Certainly not Greenwich Village or Dupont Circle, both of which I'd lived in for decades.

One of the things Equinox does to maintain its hip, upscale yuppie cred is roll out MTV-style videos at all their gyms they're supposedly edgy but more often plain perplexing with the theme "Equinox made me do it."

For instance, last week I noticed the newest offering on the big video board at the entrance. First, a masked muscle-builder gets spray painted (I said "perplexing"). Then a lovely young woman starts shaving her head. A bearded man cradles a stone baby fountain with water coming out instead of pee. And for the finale, a striking blond long-haired model struts and pouts for the camera before taking off her coat to reveal her ... bare, flat, manly chest.

Originally posted here:

Op-ed: The Genderqueer Heroes at Equinox Get It

Category: Hasidic
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