The Original Headless Torso?
Four weeks into my search for a San Diego mystery man...
— 1 .
I’ve spent the past four weeks trying to find the headless man from See Me Get Big, a website that no longer exists and might not be findable at all. I don’t mean Error 404 page-not-found. I don’t mean archived either. I’m talking permanently deleted.
I can now say with 100% confidence it wasn’t snapshotted by the Internet Archive or the Wayback Machine. I’ve run dozens of searches, using every research trick I’ve picked up making documentaries, but still nothing.
The majority of search hits I’ve been getting have been for San Diego entertainment and restaurant pages, along with the most straight porn I’ve seen since my dial-up modem days. Guess who’s forgotten that the Internet in the early 2000s was just one big red-light district until Google Search came along.
But one specific website has kept reappearing across multiple searches of mine: a fitness site called abcbodybuilding.com. And going through definitely brought back some memories. The forum layouts and glitchy emojis, usernames that gave me déjà vu strong enough that I wondered if I’d visited the site myself back in the 2000s, like The Incredible Bulk, TheArmbender, and BIG_POPPA_PUMP.
The Wayback Machine had been preserving abcbodybuilding.com in patchy snapshots from 2001 onward. Some of these snapshots are complete, others are like digital Swiss cheese. Some links work, others don’t. Images and whole sections of the site fail to load.
I haven’t found the guy who ran See Me Get Big or links to his site yet. There’s a member website directory, but only the first page is viewable: the page with sites that start with A. This seems like the place where a link to See Me Get Big would most likely appear, but I can’t access the S section.
Still, this is the strongest lead I’ve had so far. Multiple search hits took me here, to a community of people in the same digital milieu as the San Diego guy. It’s been giving me “the feeling”—which, after all these years of documentary work, is something I know to follow.
There are too many web pages for me to realistically search, but I have found the real name of the guy who owned and ran abcbodybuilding.com, along with some of the names of its mods. Next step is to find them and contact them if they are still alive.
— 2.
“Esteeme a horse, according to his pace
But loose no wagers on a wilde goose chase”
“The Mother’s Blessing” by Nicholas Breto, 1602
While procrastinating on this search last week, I learned that a wild goose chase doesn’t involve actual geese, not in the literal sense at least.
The origin of this idiom is a lot older than I thought, from a horse race that took place during the Elizabethan Era, that would start with a single rider racing out into open country alone. Then, one by one, the other riders would attempt to follow the first rider’s exact route. The second chases the first, third chases the second, and so on.
(I’ve seen enough British period dramas to assume this was all at full gallop, with clown-white face makeup and the frilliest of collars, topped off by sensational red wigs.)
Like geese flying in V-formation, each rider is locked into the path of whoever is racing ahead, and like the game of telephone, the trail distorts a little with every rider who follows it. By the time you realize the route makes no fucking sense, you're already too deep into the wilderness to do anything but keep going.
A pretty accurate description of what it feels like to search for a man I never met, whose name I never knew, and whose face I’ve never seen. But this morning it also reminded me of how the brain rewrites our memories over time, quietly swapping the real ones for false ones that feel like real memories, without us ever knowing.
Four weeks ago I asked if anyone remembered a website called See Me Get Big, a body transformation site I stumbled onto as a closeted teenager around 1999 or 2000, after clicking Google's new I Feel Lucky button in the family computer room.
How it featured a man in his 20s or early 30s who was documenting his weightlifting progress in headless torso photos and journal entries. How, after realizing what I had landed on, I had one ear cocked towards the closed door, listening for any footsteps in the hallway while the screen loaded one line at a time, cursor hovering over the back button so I could frantically click it if I heard the door handle jostle.
I told you he was gay, that he lived in San Diego, lifted in his backyard, and sewed his own underwear and swimwear for the photos he posted.
Now that I'm deeper into this, those details have started to feel a bit slippery. Most of these details came from a blog post I wrote about this guy back in 2008 for Xtra. But I was working from eight-year-old memories then, and twenty-six-year-old memories now. The details in the 2008 post might be distorted or false memories. And my claim that "he was gay" might just be wishful thinking from my teenage self, calcified into something that feels like fact.
At the moment, I can’t prove that he was gay. I can’t prove that he’s from San Diego. Nor can I prove that his website even existed.
On the bright side, I had a dream a couple nights ago that BIG_POPPA_PUMP and I were getting spray tans side by side. He had Colonel Sanders's face on Schwarzenegger's body. Flexing, always flexing, he turned to me and asked if I'd validated my parking. I told him I hadn't, and now he’s ghosting me.
— 3.
Beyond Substack and the Wayback Machine, I’ve been searching on Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.
Some good news: someone replied to one of those posts to tell me that they remember See Me Get Big too.
I immediately followed up with John, who didn’t remember much about him specifically, but was sure he’d seen See Me Get Big’s workout posts on Tumblr. Tumblr didn’t launch until 2008, which complicates the timeline. Could the San Diego man have kept posting for eight years straight? That would be some serious dedication. Could someone have re-uploaded his photos to Tumblr years later? Maybe. Or maybe John’s memory has stitched the old site together with something newer. Or he could be thinking of an entirely different headless torso.
Still, the social media response to this story was pretty encouraging:
Meanwhile, I posted to r/AskGaybrosOver30 on Reddit. Then on r/sandiego, where someone shared—you guessed it—links to 2000s-era straight porn sites, and this user came ready with some hard truths:
I mean u/anothercar isn’t wrong either. I’m trying to find a guy who posted shirtless photos of himself in his underwear 25 years ago. More interestingly, to me at least, this was the closest anyone came to asking me why I was searching for See Me Get Big.
I realized through this process that the more I search, the more I muddy the search itself:
Contamination loop? Or maybe I’ve started to build a hall of mirrors.
I also emailed the Lambda Archives of San Diego, which holds thousands of digitized queer periodicals from the era. Their archivist, Gabrielle, searched the collection and wrote me back in less than two hours. She searched in their databases as well as LGBTQ archival collections across the United States, but nothing came up. She didn’t close the door fully though:
We have another local LGBTQ newspaper Buzz (also named San Diego Circuits and The Bottom Line at different points in its existence) that is not digitized but overlaps with that time period. It would be like searching for a needle in a haystack unfortunately.
Disappointing, yes, but even dead ends are helpful because they begin to show you where the edges are.
Still, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t admit that doubt has started to creep in. Between Reddit and my own social channels, these posts were seen by close to 70,000 people. I could continue to create posts that cumulatively get hundreds of thousands of views, but unless this reaches him or someone he knows, I’m just a man becoming very good at creating content about not finding someone.
— 4.
So I have a theory about Mr. See Me Get Big. That in 1999 or 2000, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, he may have been one of the very first online fitness influencers.
I also believe that long before smartphones or social media popularized this kind of content, he was an early pioneer of the “headless torso” profile shot—which has grown into a defining visual convention for gay life online in the decades since. I would like to talk to him about what he helped start, and how he feels about what it’s become.
I have some wild geese to tend to. If you remember See Me Get Big, knew anyone in San Diego who was doing something like this online, or were part of early bodybuilding forums in that era, I’d love to hear from you.
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