GORILLA SUIT: My Adventures in Bodybuilding.<i> By Bob Paris</i> .<i> St. Martin’s: 288 pp., $23.95</i>

The world of professional bodybuilding is rife with contradictions. Sleazy and glamorous, honest and hypocritical, it extols ultra-masculinity while indulging a bitchiness that makes squabbling divas seem tame. It may be an art form or a sport but, accepted as neither, it is in ill repute because it is spectacularly narcissistic and, however denied, homoerotic at its core. Scandals lurk behind the facade of wholesomeness demanded by its czar, Joe Weider, self-avowed “Master Blaster.” His credo on magazine mastheads commands: “. . . speak the truth, practice fidelity and honor your father and mother.” Only a witness from its heights could depict this world that fits grandly in Southern California, capital of narcissism, where, at land’s end, the exposed body is unabashedly celebrated.

Bob Paris has unquestioned credentials to be that witness. A former Mr. America and Mr. Universe, he placed ninth in the king of contests, Mr. Olympia. As the first major bodybuilder to proclaim being gay, he possesses the requisite outsider’s eye. He details his unhappy early years. He smokes, becomes drunk, inhales marijuana. His father banishes him. His beloved grandmother poignantly sews his first posing trunks; he models them for her. He drops out of school. Bodybuilding becomes his religion. Narcissists need love, too, and Paris falls in love with a man he courageously “marries.”

Paris is at his lyrical best when conveying the excitement of lifting weights. “I fought the pull of gravity . . . and disappeared inside the fight.” Even those of us who have only dabbled in bodybuilding share that thrill. While longing for sensational bodies, we hid muscle magazines under copies of Life to avoid the glare of owl-eyed clerks. We flexed before mirrors and almost wept. We sent for Charles Atlas’ course, gasping at what became of the man whose face had been sprayed with sand. We ordered a set of York Barbells and struggled to unpack them. Little muscles sprouted. No shirt was tight enough. Someone asked, “You work out?” We held our breath for what--please, God--would follow: “You look like you do.”

Dedicated, we learned the short history of competitive bodybuilding’s main stages, marveling at its humble beginnings. In school basements, a few brave men in trunks straggled before droopy sheets, the only backdrop available. One man emerged with a grandiloquent title and a tacky trophy. Sean Connery was photographed looking disconsolate after not winning in an early dingy contest. In the ‘50s, Steve Reeves as Hercules made us proud by ushering in a somewhat more elegant era, that of bodybuilder as movie star, if only in cheesy Italian epics. Not every bodybuilder of the time lucked out. Many were enticed to Italy, offered nonexistent movies. Articles in muscle magazines pleaded for donations to bring back the stranded, starry-eyed musclemen. Broke ourselves, we lamented that fate allowed terrific bodies but supplied little regard for them.

Paris ignores much of the shabby richness that makes professional bodybuilding unique. His book is too often a labor of self-love. He forgets that interest in this venture relies not primarily on him but on the exotic world he knows as a gay narcissist among narcissists. He downplays prime factors in competitive bodybuilding, narcissism and homosexuality: “myths . . . to degrade anyone who took care of his body” and who was therefore “automatically considered suspicious and narcissistic, and abracadabra, homo.” He emphasizes: “Few gay athletes are at the top of this sport. I can only think of one, besides me. . . . However, the myth that all bodybuilders were gay caused great psychic unrest among the straight men who ran the sport . . . [as] a wholesome heterosexual pastime.” He accounts for professional bodybuilding’s gay following: “It revolves around men’s bodies taken to the arguably hyper-masculine limits. . . . [T]hat appeals to some people.” But not to him. “I don’t find elite competitive bodybuilders’ bodies sexy.”

In fact, there have been at least five other top gay bodybuilders, all closeted. One became a prostitute and porn performer--and, later, a minister, until God told him to make a comeback in physique competition. Three other titlists became gay-porn models. Lesser contestants advertise in gay solicitation columns as “private trainers,” “escorts” and “models,” often euphemisms for prostitutes.

However subliminal homosexuality may be in exhibition bodybuilding, Paris’ claim of its paucity astounds. During the near-orgiastic frenzy of “pose-down,” finalists onstage match sweaty bodies, tensed biceps against tensed biceps, tensed thighs against tensed thighs. Training involves intense intimacy. While spotting, one man straddles a prone lifter to lend nominal support in handling an otherwise prohibitive weight. To add resistance to donkey raises, calf exercises, a helper mounts the buttocks of a lifter, who is bent over.

Paris evades the subject of bitchiness. Yet contest competitors resort to bizarre meanness, “psyching out” rivals, offering spurious advice, remarking on “bitch tits,” a condition caused by steroids. Titlists who become commentators evaluate contestants: “Holding water . . . needs work on his stomach . . . has no calves.”

Paris contributes his own cattiness. One bodybuilder has “zits” and a “little pee-pee.” He chides a competitor for allowing his posing to become “burlesque.” About a gay photographer, Paris thinks, “My God. . . . He’s flirting with me” and indignantly throws the “lizard’s” business card into a trash can. He rages against those who are by choice bulkier than he. They are “monsters . . . lugs . . . overbuilt caricatures . . . clanging through gruesome contortions.” On the other hand, his own goal was “to build . . . the most perfect human sculpture” possible.

Not much evidence is required to establish bodybuilding’s hard-earned narcissism, barely discussed here but amply exemplified. Bodybuilders court reflections in myriad gym mirrors, staring, awed, as quivering muscles flirt back. Dissatisfied in contests, they walk offstage, smash lesser trophies, vaunt their own qualifications. Often exploited like starlets, contenders struggle--even triumph briefly--and vanish. Younger bodies populate magazines.

Paris misses a telling metaphoric connection between muscles and elaborate gay decoration. “Hon, your muscles are as gay as my drag,” a sage queen once observed about this reviewer and modest bodybuilding practitioner. In terms of extremity, artifice and theatrical visual assault, Paris’ “gorilla suit” is not unlike sequined drag and the glittery regalia of gay leathermen. Paris does recognize that muscles convert the “wearer” into someone else and insulate psychic wounds: “[As a boy] I hated myself. . . . My limbs were in all the wrong places. . . . And I was a fag.” Later he deduces: “As long as I didn’t let the little boy believe too strongly that the suit was really him, he was okay.” Not all self-created narcissists have arrived at such wise discernment. Marilyn Monroe, Rudolph Valentino, Rita Hayworth, James Dean--those fabulous narcissists disastrously confused themselves with their creations.

Paris is much too restrained in his depiction of the phenomenon named Joe Weider, providing only a mildly scolding view of a man many may consider the Barnum and Bailey of professional bodybuilding. By the early ‘70s, Joe and brother Ben had formed an awesome empire of barbells, food supplements and glitzy physique shows. On the masthead of most of his glossy magazines, Joe placed a bust of his profile--it still appears today--atop a formidable chest he claimed was his. He promised “barn-door lats” and “coconut delts.” He sold elixirs to guarantee them. He attached his name to familiar exercises and exalted them into “Weider Principles” and, more modestly, his “legacy to the world.” A monarch, he exercised his power to exile subjects deemed disloyal, often because they had posed for a rival publisher or entered an unsanctioned contest.

Readers of Weider’s magazines predicted contest winners by gauging who received the Blaster’s blessing. A huge Austrian named Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared in every issue, endorsed every Weider product and principle and won Mr. Olympia seven times, the final time in less than top shape after having retired to make movies.

The age of drugs had arrived. A stupendous body emerged, not possible without steroids, every massive muscle clamped on, every vein etched like a tributary. Risks included death--and Paris movingly documents the death of a famous bodybuilder minutes after his posing onstage.

Paris blames freaky musclemen for the fact that competition bodybuilding is not widely respected, not “written about in the sports pages.” But try to imagine the typical sports fan rooting for a man who stands onstage demanding adulation for his shaved body, dyed tan, oiled to a glassy sheen, wearing only a strip of cloth, and you get a picture of impossibility.

Still, might bodybuilding be considered an art form that is no more narcissistic than ballet, modeling, acting? After all, it has a rich heritage. Atlas, Hercules and Michelangelo’s God and Adam are its progenitors. In paintings, martyred saints have killer abs. Christ on the cross has awesome definition. There’s poetry in bodybuilding. In magical synergy, muscles grow out of confusion, resulting from having to perform unnatural motions with heavy weights. Alerted to repeated assaults, they become larger in order to cope, achieving miraculous rhythm between breakdown and rebuilding. Responding to “muscle memory,” idle muscles once trained grow quickly. The barbell is the catalyst for recaptured “memory”--not unlike tea and madeleines in Proust’s search for lost time.

Top bodybuilders know their bodies as intimately as a painter knows hues; a writer, the nuances of metaphor. Scholars flaunt their intellect; writers, their prose; artists, their art; dancers, their leaps. Why disdain a sculpted body? Here is Paris’ terrific answer: “[Bodybuilding] is misunderstood, underappreciated . . . considered to be the realm of freaks, but it is also beautiful and can be graceful and thrilling and lifted high above the dull thud of conformity.”

At the end of his book, Paris, 35, contemplates a comeback. He may again have to take steroids and will face homophobia. Homophobia, he contends, robbed him of the Mr. Olympia title in 1985. He presents ample evidence for suspicion of ostracism. After he came out, he almost disappeared from the forefront of bodybuilding.

Paris is an inspired bodybuilder. He is still too involved with the profession to be entirely daring, still courting the Master Blaster for a product endorsement contract. When he has no more at stake--or does not care about risks--perhaps he will provide what this book does not: a truly bold depiction of his fascinating world in all its tawdry splendor.