Rod Roddick RIP

Colt poster boy Rod Roddick died August 18 of a heart attack in Penn Station. What a shitty place to die. He was 33 years old.

Speculation is that the steroid cocktail he was on brought this on, and I have to agree. After doing some research on the web at fan sites and the like, apparently he had been having medical issues for quite some time, having been hospitalized recently.

His stats, from Smutjunkies.com (Height: 5'11" Weight: 270 lbs. Chest: 58" Waist: 34" Arms: 22" Quads: 33" Bodyfat: 6%) clearly indicate that he was morbidly out of proportion. And before you ask, yes it’s completely possible to get too big.

Steroids and men

When I worked in hospital public relations we once did a story about our poison-control hotline, sponsored by our college of pharmacy, where I got to meet the director. This would be the late 80’s…and even then, the first thing out of his mouth was the problem with steroids. Back then, as the muscle culture emerged, the problem was personifying itself amongst high-school aged jocks who wanted to get all big and buff, thinking it would make them more competitive on and off the field. What of course also went unsaid was that it would make them “hot.”

The director talked in-depth about the issues involved. His primary concern was that many of these kids were still growing and steroid use can and did screw with the normal human growth chemistry. When you pump yourself full of steroids (and there are lots of different types) you body stops making the normal ones. So if you juice up on Testosterone, real or synthetic, your body stops making it. Just take a look at any of the massive porn stars and ask yourself “pumpkin, what happened to your nuts?”

From DrugInfonet.com
Question: I have just started taking Testosterone for training purpose. On the drug there is some serious warnings. However searching on the web I can only find positive comments and different problems that Testosterone can help for. What are realy the pros and cons?
Answer: Testerone is a steroid and is generally an anabolic steroid, producing greater muscle strength and endurance. But, there is a potential cost. Moods may become more irritable and some patients experience uncontrollable outbreaks or violence episodes, occasionally depression. Breast formation and hair loss is common and is usually irreversible. Liver toxicity leading to liver failure (some would say a risk of liver cancer) is also present depending on dosage and other drugs. Once the testerone is stopped, the muscle growth and extra strength will go away , so the supplements must be continued to maintain its advantage. Occasional patients experience testicular atrophy and inability to get an erection. This usually abates with distcontinuation of the drug. In general, it can be a very toxic drug with only temporary benefits-not a drug that any physician would advocate for training which should give you pause.

Further risks start with the fact that ALL steroids are illegal. Period. So, whoever you are getting them from is a drug dealer. And, like all illegal drugs, the quality of the drugs is always suspect. Anyone can duplicate the labels and bottles and fill it up with shit they cooked up in a birdbath in Joliet.

And lets talk about needles for a second. Exactly where do you plan to get the hypodermics you need to inject yourself, since unless you are diabetic and have a script from your MD, you have to obtain these illegally as well. Do you know all the requirements of not just injection procedure, but the use and care of needles? Not only do you open yourself up to all sorts of injection-site related issues like infection, but now you also open yourself up to the risk of exposure to Hep and HIV.

Chicken / Egg

I go to the gym, and I admit completely, it’s to get big and beautiful so I can attract big and beautiful guys. This, Gentle Readers, is the coin of the gay realm. Ok, yes, not entirely the ideal reasoning, but in my mind I look at it this way: I could sure as shit waste my time on something that isn’t going to benefit me at all in the long run, like golf. At least the gym is fairly healthy and between cardio and weight training, if I stick it out, I will gain a better package to carry my soul around in. There, I said it, my disclaimer.

But just to keep the focus on the porn star aspect, lets examine the issues. When I worked in marketing at a radio station they cooked up a clever tag line to promote the station-branded merchandise we sold “creating a need…and then filling it.”

So did Rod Roddick do the juice to sell himself to Colt, or did he do it to keep himself in the Colt stable of men? Was he already a user before he got there, or did he start when he saw the benefits, and then could not stop? Did he feel the hot breath of someone bigger, more beautiful, younger, better hung and feel the need to reach for the needle? The answers to these questions went with him when he keeled over and licked the terrazzo at Penn Station.

Ironically, Rod identified himself at straight, and most (but not all) of his work was solo video or print, albeit for an exclusively gay audience. So if we take this on face value, he was a straight body builder showing off his stuff for gay men. That alone could generate enough content for an entire website, but further than that, he clearly tapped into a gay hot point.

Gay men and muscle worship.

We are OBSESSED with this, and while I sense some of the issues involved, I’d like to talk about a few that I can illuminate.

The muscle culture emerged in the straight world in the 80’s. I blame the yuppies, but that’s a different argument. Prior to this, and this is a vast overstatement but I believe it to be true, gay men didn’t as a group, go to the gym. A handsome face and average body was enough to get you laid, anything else (drugs, money, power, a nice ass) was just fringe.

Yes, you can look at Tom of Finland and other erotica and see the roots of muscle worship, but it was just that, worship…from afar. There was a gulf that separated us from the icons, the muscle gods. Then, suddenly we had the convergence of several seismic social shifts, like an earthquake where one plate rides up over the other.

1) Porn on video
2) The "Fitness Culture"
3) Gay mainstreaming

What’s a gay man without his porn? Let’s just skip all the socio-psychobabble about pornography; it’s a mainstay of the gay world…because we can. Prior to the 80s, you had to go to tatty little theaters or smutty news stands to get your porn fix. And god forbid someone saw you! Not only that, but I imagine it was pretty difficult for the closeted gay guy in Dubuque IA to FIND a copy of Honcho or some other skin mag. And so, until the web put the skin mags in jeopardy, those were your choices, aside from real skin-to-skin action in rest stops and parks.

Then suddenly, you could waltz into the video store, or order via mail, porn on video. With the explosive growth of VCRs in the 80s, the porn industry followed the money and instead of producing films, that you could really onle “sell” once; suddenly you could sell the same thing over and over…forever! It’s nearly impossible to find actual porn theaters showing gay porn on film these days, they have been completely out done. And so, if you needed to get off, the answer was suddenly available at the end of your sticky remote.

The porn floodgates opened and suddenly gay men were confronted with the “gay ideal” 24/7. By choice or by accident, the onslaught of images left the bars, porn theaters, gay rags and skin mags, and walked into our the privacy of our own homes. And not only did we crave them, we craved the idea.

And then, somewhere along the line, we jumped the gap between wanted to fuck them to wanting to be them.

Jane Fonda, God love her, unleashed a fitness craze on the straight word that was a tsunami. She told the average white female that she too could have the “hardbody” she saw plastered all over the women’s magazines, TV and film. Just a little effort on your side ladies and you too could have an ass you could bounce a quarter off of.

We know that women have been fighting this battle for millennia and I have nothing to add to that discussion. But suddenly, fitness came to the fore and gyms popped up in every strip mall and you had to make appointments at the Y. Yes, gyms existed and men went to them before this, I’m not discounting that. However, we have to look at the numbers and admit that it was a very VERY finite group, mostly musclehead body builders, boxers and “jocks” of one stripe or another.

But suddenly gyms became a growth industry, and like outposts of Benetton and the rash of comedy clubs in the 80’s there was profit to be made catering to this wave of popular culture. Just follow the money.

The third rail here is the mainstreaming of gay culture. In brief, we left the clubs and baths and started popping up all over the place. We weren’t just florists and hairdressers anymore, and we started to command a higher profile. Part of this was the emergence of disco and the dance club culture that, like every other gay influence, the straight world hijacked, but more than that, it was a time of change and conflict. Women had their time in the streets in the 70’s looking for their due rights, and gay men and women had already tapped into the revolt as far back as 1969 with the Stonewall Riots. Like every other "minority" group, our time had / has come.

And as we leaked out of the closets all over the place, we reinvented ourselves, and the person we wanted to be didn’t have a limp wrist or a lisp. Paul Lynde was out and Tom Sellick was in. Vast numbers of men who had lived in the shadows and fringes of the world decided to take the leap, and they wanted it all. They wanted the fun, but they also didn’t want to give up their previously enjoyed ‘hetero-privileged” existence. We wanted to "pass."

And so we migrated from gay bars to the gym. We were going to be “gay” but we were also going to be “gay MEN.” We were going to walk down the street and be big and buff macho ideals, as ruff and tuff as any masculine straight man. For once, it was the gay world co-opting a straight ideal. We were going to the gym, damnit!

And so, a market niche emerged; gay man and muscle worship. You could pick your side, there were spaced to be filled all over the place. You could crave the ideal and get your fix any number of ways: live, video, print or suddenly on-line. Or you could take your fat ass to the gym and be worshipped. You cold grunt and groan and flex to your heart’s content. Trainers and drugs followed fast on your heels. Anybody anywhere could find a book or magazine and a bench press and be “fit.” But of course, “fitness’ wasn’t the ideal. We still drank and smoked and coked our asses off, al la circuit parties. But whereas the privilege to take your shirt off on the dance floor had been restricted to the "few", now it was admitting the "many." The ante had been upped and being gay men, we overdid it. We hypertroped into a whole other universe.

And this brings us back to poor dead Rod Roddick. An ass you cold crack nuts with and arms like the bumper of a Mack truck, this man was HUGE! And he’s not the only one, (Colt has a stable full) I can name at least a dozen other porn stars who are clearly juiced up beyond all reason.

Nobody forced that needle into his ass, or dragged him to the gym. And while he may have been working out some personal shit with his chosen path, the gay world rolled the carpet out for him.

And so, I must ask the question: how many other gay men will kill themselves to be beautiful?

Just for Shits

Rod actualy wrote a fitness column for a website. It's a sad sad tribule to illusion. In the time it took me to write this column they have snatched it. Thankfully I grabbed it and have posted it to my personal site. Read it here

Websources for this article WARNING ADULT CONTENT

Lucas Blog

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