Pretty, masculine powerhouse

Montreal-born butch cutie Mike Ruiz (below) is a glamorous multitasker. What else would you call a man who has transformed himself from a successful model/actor into a celebrity photographer who straddles the worlds of queer activism and reality-TV superstardom? Ruiz is not afraid to try anything, so it’s no surprise that this part-time motivational speaker and full-time photographer decided to self-publish Pretty Masculine, a photo book full of glossy gorgeous men. Proceeds from sales of the book will go to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

“GMHC is the oldest HIV/AIDS organization in the world, really, and they do so much amazing work,” he explains. “I had started working with them on a peripheral level a
couple of years ago and became aware of the amazing stuff they do. It was an obvious choice to make them the benefactor of the book.”

As with the rest of his hectic professional life, Ruiz doesn’t limit his philanthropy to just one cause. “I spread it around a little bit, too,” he explains, referencing his fundraising for homeless queer youth at the Ali Forney Center via an original line of T-shirts based on his photos. “I do research to identify where the most money is going directly to certain programs and not being filtered through a bunch of people first. There came a point in my life in the past three or four years that I felt really grateful for things and wanted to pay it forward,” he says. “It’s so easy to incorporate a philanthropic angle to anything that you do. Why not do it?”

Pretty Masculine has been Ruiz’s most successful self-produced project to date and has received such a good response that he has been invited to several cities as part of a book tour. The accomplishment has relied heavily on the power of word of mouth and social media. “Every time I introduce elements to my work like merchandising, they do moderately well,” Ruiz says. “I do everything grassroots; I produce and sell it all myself through my website.”

Part of the book’s success can certainly be attributed to the unbelievably built men featured in its pages that make Tom of Finland fantasies a buff and bronzed reality. For Ruiz, finding these godlike men is easy. “They’re everywhere you look. You just gotta rub your eyes and they appear,” he laughs. “It’s not that difficult. I just left Gold’s Gym in Hollywood, and every other guy could have been a candidate for this book. I literally asked people at the gym and that’s how it started. Then I asked friends if they knew fitness guys, and they’d provide names, and there was also a big fitness modelling agency that saw the images I was producing.”

The photos in the book juxtapose hyper-masculine men with softer, more feminine elements, including photos of guys with touches of smoky eyeliner, soft flower petals and vines clinging to their well-oiled frames. The work reflects the style Ruiz has used to photograph celebrities like Adam Lambert, Nicki Minaj and Lance Bass. “Whenever I shoot, I like to portray things out of context,” he says. “I didn’t want to do just another homoerotic book or anything gratuitous. I really wanted to do something super-stylized and G-rated because I knew I wanted it to benefit an organization like GMHC and there would be bureaucracy if I did anything too racy.”

“What I find sexy is exactly everything that’s in that book: leaving just a little to the imagination while juxtaposing a bit of both masculine and feminine. Like a little makeup on a guy, but more rock and roll, less drag,” Ruiz explains. “What I was doing is trying to deconstruct the image of masculinity. I came up with the book’s title after I’d compiled a bunch of images. They were pretty varied in approach, but the common thread is that they were all very polished, stylized and pretty.”

The success of the book builds on Ruiz’s other endeavours, including regular appearances on reality television. He has appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race, My Life on the D-List, American and Canadian versions of Next Top Model and most recently, The A-List: New York.

“Everything I do creatively is related to pop culture somehow,” he says. “It’s just a different medium, a different form of expression. Especially on A-List, which was the most challenging for a lot of reasons because they had certain expectations of me. I had a very specific goal in mind when I chose to do it and that was to buck the whole format. And I did it successfully. It’s kind of an experiment. I don’t even realize what is motivating me until I do it all. I just want to give everything a try and have no regrets when I go.”

Pretty Masculine and limited-edition
prints are available at mikeruiz.com.

Andrew Robertson is a fab writer who loves his boys both pretty and masculine.