Gorilla Suit: My Adventures in Bodybuilding (edition 1997)

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0312168551, Hardcover)

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.