I think the gay issue is a red herring. It's male physique appreciation, men in underwear - in all its guises and eras it has, and will continue to have, a sizeable gay following. The only time this becomes a problem is when a gay dude will assume everyone follows it for sexual reasons and, conversely, when straight guys try to deny the gay element and homoerotic aspect.
Ultimately if you know where you lie on this issue, it's not an issue.
The biggest problem is that the physiques look like shit. Gone is any art, anything remotely admirable or interesting, there is nothing left to appreciate. Gyno is rife. Huge, bloated guts are the norm. Frames that have long since been able to carry all the fake muscles with any elegance and have simply given up. The rampant use of oil. The male-stripper type routines with gyrating and lustful stares.
The thing has become a joke. It's interesting in the way a car crash is interesting but long fucking gone are the kind of physiques (Reeves, Zane, Nubret , Arnold et al) that one - well, me anyway - would actually like to attain.
Why do you think this is?
In my opinion, a bodybuilding -- ie the quest for the ideal body -- competition is always doomed to turn out this way. Competing on looks alone is a degenerate activity because it separates, or attempts to separate, form and function. People pretend as if the two aren't related, and then go about trying to maximize one whatever the cost to the other. (By the way you see this happen in reverse all the time: executives who value their career so highly they sacrifice all "form" and become detestable slimeballs).
Bodybuilding has its origin in the same place everything else does -- the impulse to excellence, power, and strength. For most of human history, big muscles signified strength. This culminated in the 60s/70s with the "golden era" of bodybuilding, a time when men like Arnold walked around looking like gods and few knew any better. Today, these physiques are more likely to arouse suspicion of drug use than garner admiration.
The illusion is gone, but bodybuilding competitions still linger on. This is all somewhat beside my point though. It's clear a competition focused on looks values big muscles because they signify strength. But the reality is that these bodybuilders are not strong. And they can't be if they dedicate their lives to a competition of looks. This is because strength goes beyond looks. Who do we really admire? The man who is strong! Look at the movie 300, for example. This movie depicts warriors who had great physiques and
honest physiques which accurately reflected their abilities. These men didn't care about how they looked, they cared about being badass warriors and their physiques merely
followed suit in their pursuit of this excellent ideal.
A man who dedicates his life to looking good will never be as admirable as a man who dedicates his life to
being good.
Even within the bodybuilding world, you can observe the same thing. We admire ronnie coleman because he has a more honest physique than, for example, phil heath. He looks like he can move a shitload of weight, and he can! It's true phil doesn't look quite as good, but he doesn't really look all that much worse. Nonetheless, people shit on him all day because of his "fake muscle" and refuse to give him even 1/100th the respect they give to ronnie. The point is that, even here in the land of drug megadosing, we still value a physique inasmuch as it signifies real strength of some sort.
Bodybuilding competitions place the value on the signifier (big muscles) rather than the signified (strength). Sooner or later people are always going to catch on and realize the whole thing is a sham. The only people who will still be left standing are the gays who can still be fooled on some sort of instinctual level (just like men are still fooled on an instinctual level by big fake tits and asses).
