BY MICHAEL KEARNS

The Naked Truth About Our Bodies

“To see you naked is to recall the Earth.”
Federico Garcia Lorca

“I must admit that I looked at your stomach,” a friend of mine unapologetically announced after seeing me — startlingly naked — in a workshop production of my new play. My tummy, for the record, ain't pretty; there are two gnarly scars (an imprint of a near-deadly staph infection) and a bit of newly acquired girth. Oh, and my membership to the tanning salon expired about the same year that Gene Autry died.

“I think onstage nudity is disgusting, shameful, and damaging to all things American,” said the late Shelley Winters. “But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience.”

My friend Tim Miller, celebrated for his au natural stage appearances, says, “I am as interested in what the naked body tells us as gay men now, at the last bit of my 40s, as I was when I first stripped onstage at 19.

“As we get older, I think it is even more important to stay embodied, stay present, stay naked! We need to know what life looks like, what our gay bodies look like—if we're lucky enough to get older.”

What I was attempting to do in my recent theater outing is no different than what I've tackled throughout my career: represent intimate aspects of being gay that are often not depicted on the stage (or the screen, for that matter). Since gay men of a certain age are virtually rendered invisible, especially when it comes to body identity, I invited the audience to see what the body of a man closer to 60 than to 50 actually looks like; the gay body, that is, in all its unglamorous reality.

I credit Tom Eyen (the writer of Dreamgirls, among other things, who died of AIDS in 1991) with my maiden naked voyage in the glow of the footlights. When I appeared in Eyen's The Dirtiest Show In Town in 1972, nudity in the theater was in its innovative infancy when being unclothed-unlike much of the gay theater that ensued during the following three decades—was making a statement about liberation and revolution. Keep in mind; this was less than five years after the Stonewall Riots. To be gay and naked in front of an audience was not something you could see in The Boys In The Band.

I felt the same sense of freedom 36 years after I appeared in Dirtiest Show; the sense of announcing, “This is me” by publicly claiming my gay body in an artistic setting. Yet, I was left with lingering questions about my own body and the bodies of my brothers.

What is happening with our gay bodies? That means you—you, there, looking in the mirror—what do you see?

Is your body your friend? Or an enemy? When you look at your body, are you accepting? Or are you obsessed with finding ways to redesign it?

Are you ashamed of your body? Are you embarrassed because of how you've used your body, distorted your body, neglected your body? You've heard that expression that your “body is a temple”? For many years, I treated mine more like a fast-food restaurant.

Are you proud of your body? Because of its contours and proportions or because of how you've taken care of it? Do you assess your body based on its functionality or its physicality? Has your body served you well?

Does your body provide you a ticket to untold pleasures or a free pass to unwanted pain?

When you strip down and peer into the looking glass, is the person you are on the inside reflected back at you? Do you see the bounty of experience or merely the wear-and-tear of age? Do you define yourself by memories that are imprinted on your body or by the pesky scars that decorate it? Do you sense a complex emotional interior bubbling beneath the surface of your skin or do you only see what's visible to the naked eye?

I want to sing my body electric, Uncle Walt. I want to connect the dots between my body and my soul. Federico, my brother, I want to recall the Earth when I look at myself naked. But most of all, I want to respect this extraordinary vessel that has carried me through life thus far—without getting botox.