Pat Manuel’s Buff Butch Brings ‘Gorilla Gym’ to Life

Today, February 02, Pat Manuel opened the first Gorilla Gym for his company, Buff Butch. Buff Butch is an organization dedicated to helping the gender non-conforming community to reach their fitness potential. The website serves as a guide to fitness, with videos, tutorials, and articles about working out and nutrition. The purpose of the ‘Gorilla Gym’ is to help the gender non-conforming by removing the stress of typical gym. The gym is in a garage. It has the basic things that a gym needs, a few weights, medicine balls, and space (both inside the garage and outside). There are a few people in attendance at the opening, ready to workout and dressed in their basketball shorts and tees.

We are constantly at war with standards of normative society: whom we can love, how we look, how we identify and move through the world as masculine-of-center folx. Our community is engaged in an ever-present battle to break free from and challenge the mainstream. Our queer acts of resistance are waged in various forms and media, but what about shaping a narrative for our physical bodies? How do we craft an image that outwardly projects our internal gender identities? The fitness industry reflects and perpetuates the images we see on TV and in magazines narrow binaristic presentations of how ‘proper’ men and women should look. – Pat Manuel (Buff Butch)

Pat begins to instruct the attendees on warming up. Jumping Jacks. High Knees. Squats. Push Ups. Pat loads the weights on the bar. Some attendees use sand bags to squat, while others use the bar.  The gorilla gym is busy with movement. Pat helps each person, individually, to correct their posture. “It’s all about maintaining your form… practicing proper form” Pat says. Pat Manuel is a boxer; one of the premier fighters in the world. Pat has won five national amateur boxing championships, victories representing team USA at international tournaments and finished their amateur boxing career by participating in the historic first women’s olympic team boxing trials. Mentored under renowned strength & conditioning coaches and sports physical therapists, Pat wishes to use their knowledge to aid the masculine of center community in navigating the training field. It is their goal to level the playing field by allowing all people access to systematic strength training programs.