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Gorilla Suit: My Adventures in Bodybuilding
by Bob Paris

Bob Paris, a successful and popular bodybuilder in the mid-1980s (he won Mr. America and Mr. Universe titles), tells a poignant story of being a small-town nobody and then training his way to fame and, well, not fortune, but a nice living as a professional bodybuilder. But there was a price to pay: success in bodybuilding requires ever-greater quantities of drugs and abnormal physical development, and Paris didn't want to do that to himself. He also came out and lived openly as a gay man, shattering the illusion that bodybuilding's promoters try to build of an exclusively heterosexual world filled with musclemen and the women who can't resist them. Gorilla Suit is an enlightening, insider's look at the small but fascinating business of getting huge.

Bob Paris became famous as the first openly gay Mr. Universe and grew even more famous when he and Rob Jackson, his lover at the time, published Straight from the Heart, a memoir of their life together. Paris has now gone solo with Gorilla Suit. A cross between a personal memoir and a cultural history of bodybuilding, Gorilla Suit details Paris's desire to radically change his body, what that meant to him as a gay man living in a homophobic culture, and his decision to leave the sport once he discovered how seductive its destructive qualities were. Gorilla Suit is not an emotionally wrought literary memoir, or even a tell-all exposé; rather, it is a well-written, perceptive, and ultimately joyful story of a gay man's discovery of what it means to love his body.

Bob Paris Books