What An Onsen Full Of Naked Men Taught One Gay Man

Last April, I travelled to Japan for the first time, and somewhere between planning train routes, figuring out how not to offend anybody at sushi counters, and carrying an emergency supply of Pocari Sweat like it was holy water, I was told by the local coordinator that visiting an onsen would be part of the itinerary.

For anybody unfamiliar, an onsen is a traditional Japanese bathhouse built around natural hot springs. It also comes with one very important rule: everybody enters completely naked.

I remember reacting with the fake confidence gay men often develop in situations where we are quietly panicking. 

“Oh yeah, of course,” I said, as though communal nudity was something I dealt with every Thursday. 

But the closer we got to the onsen, the more aware I became of my own body in the deeply irritating way modern life has trained many of us to become. Suddenly I was thinking about whether I should have gone to the gym more consistently before the trip. Whether I looked bloated after three straight days of ramen. Whether removing all my clothes in front of strangers was really the cultural exchange experience I was emotionally prepared for. 

And then I entered the bathhouse. 

The first thing that struck me was how ordinary everybody looked. 

An elderly man sat quietly washing his hair. Two college students were discussing convenience store snacks. Somebody walked into the outdoor bath balancing a tiny towel on his head, looking completely at home in his own body. 

Nobody seemed busy looking at anybody else. 

I had spent enough years around men, especially gay men, to know that bodies rarely enter rooms quietly. 

Nobody Tells You This About Gay Culture

Stylish parties. Good music. Attractive people. Holidays where everybody somehow owns better linen shirts than you. And honestly, some of that stereotype exists for a reason. Gay culture can be joyful, funny and deeply social in ways that feel liberating, especially if you spent years growing up hiding parts of yourself. 

But nobody really tells you how visual it can become too. 

You notice it slowly at first. The way compliments almost always begin with appearance. Somebody looks fit. Somebody has “glowed up”. Somebody suddenly becomes the centre of attention after losing weight or growing a beard. One friend gets into Pilates and suddenly the entire group starts discussing posture like a panel of magazine editors. 

And then there are the apps. 

Some men upload one blurry gym mirror selfie and receive enough attention to develop the confidence levels of a minor royal. Everybody else spends half an hour deciding which photograph makes them look the most casually attractive while pretending they “just picked something random”. 

A gay friend once told me that opening Grindr before bed is emotionally similar to checking exam results. I laughed for a full minute before realising he was absolutely right. 

The Gym Is Never Just About The Gym

The funny thing is that most gay men are also very self-aware about all of this. We joke about it constantly because humour is usually easier than honesty. 

Everybody claims they are “going to the gym for mental health” while also quietly hoping an ex sees their Instagram story at some point. Entire friend groups suddenly start sending each other fat-loss reels. Somebody practically moves into the gym after a breakup. Somebody else suddenly stops eating rice at dinner for a month. 

And yet beneath all the ridiculousness, there is usually something more emotional sitting underneath. 

A lot of queer men grow up feeling awkward around masculinity long before they fully understand sexuality. You become aware very early of which boys seem naturally confident and which ones are trying harder to fit in. Many queer men spend years monitoring themselves in small ways. Their voice, mannerisms, body language, and how masculine they seem in certain rooms. After a while, looking masculine and feeling accepted can start to feel like the same thing. 

So when adulthood finally offers validation, especially physical validation, it can feel powerful in ways that are difficult to explain to people outside the community. 

I know men who genuinely became more confident after getting fitter, not because they suddenly turned vain, but because they finally felt visible. For some, building muscle changed the way people responded to them socially. Others only started dating confidently after losing weight because they had spent years assuming nobody would want them otherwise. 

Those feelings are real. Which is why conversations around appearance inside queer culture are rarely as shallow as they look from the outside. 

Looking back, what struck me most about the onsen was not the nudity. It was how little anybody seemed interested in being noticed. The room was full of bodies of every age and shape, but nobody appeared to be comparing, competing or trying to stand out. For somebody used to spending time in spaces where men are constantly managing how they come across, that felt oddly refreshing. 

Somewhere Along The Way, Men Became Brands

At some point over the last decade, masculinity became incredibly curated. Men are now expected to be attractive, emotionally intelligent, successful and effortlessly well-maintained all at once. 

Even pop culture reflects this shift. 

Watch early seasons of Friends now and you notice something almost immediately: the men looked normal. Matt LeBlanc looked like a charming actor you could realistically meet at a coffee shop, not somebody preparing for a shirtless Marvel scene. Even Brad Pitt showing up in a Thanksgiving episode as the “hot guy” feels surprisingly low-pressure by today’s standards. 

Compare that with the current superhero era, where actors seem contractually obligated to lose all connection with carbohydrates before filming starts. When Kumail Nanjiani revealed his transformation for Eternals, the internet spent weeks discussing his body like it was a global event. The reaction was not just admiration. It was also collective disbelief at how extreme male transformation had quietly become normalised. 

And social media has made everything more intense. Holidays are no longer holidays. They are photographs waiting to happen. Workouts become content. Even vulnerability arrives carefully packaged now. Everybody is healing beautifully online. 

Meanwhile, in real life, most people are just tired. 

Masculinity Still Comes With Rules

One of the stranger contradictions inside queer culture is that even spaces built around self-expression still reward fairly traditional ideas of masculinity. 

Spend enough time on dating apps and you start noticing the same patterns repeatedly. “Masc only.” “Straight-acting.” “Gym fit.” Everybody insists these are just preferences, which is fair, but preferences repeated often enough eventually start revealing larger social patterns. 

Meanwhile, femininity in men still gets treated differently. Sometimes it becomes the joke. Sometimes it gets dismissed entirely. Sometimes people celebrate it publicly while quietly rewarding something else socially. 

And this tension creates a very specific kind of exhaustion. 

A lot of gay men spend years trying to become comfortable with themselves, only to walk into adult queer culture and discover an entirely new set of expectations waiting there too. Look good, but not like you are trying too hard. Be confident, but relaxed about it. Stay attractive, stay interesting, stay socially relevant. 

Preferably while also pretending none of this affects you emotionally. 

Which is probably why the onsen in Japan stayed with me. 

Not because I walked out of the bathhouse suddenly transformed into a deeply evolved man with perfect self-esteem. Life unfortunately does not work that quickly. It stayed with me because, for a couple of hours, I was in a room where nobody seemed busy managing how they looked or came across to other people.