Gay gym closes its doors

The FitX Gym, most recently located in the ACON headquarters, closed its doors for the final time in December, ending a 28-year run servicing the gay and lesbian community.

According to FitX trainer and president, Ingrid Cullen, while the sense of community remains valuable to its members, there was just not enough interest to keep a gay-specific gym going.

The whole gay and lesbian culture has changed. Because it’s so much more accepted there’s not as great a need for people to have somewhere safe to come, which was what FitX started off as.

The gym, originally known as Fitness Express, once catered to people of all ages; now the average member was over 40, she said.

An important function of the gym was to cater for HIV-positive people in the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

As a volunteer fitness trainer in 1993, Cullen developed the gym’s successful Positive Access Program, which helped members return to work and re-engage with their community.

Because there was such a stigma, and people looked very ill, they didn’t want to be seen in public, Cullen said.

While most current members would be able to fit into other places, Cullen said she was disappointed that up to 20 members would be unlikely to be accepted at a commercial gym.

It’s about levels of support, they’ve got multiple special needs because of being HIV-positive or mental health issues; in most commercial gyms there is not a high level of staff-to-member ratio.

ACON’s Healthy-Life Plus Program has taken over some of the Positive Access Program’s functions that FitX once provided.

While the gym was once known for its fundraiser dinners and stalls at dance parties, the banning of stalls in recent years has left the gym reliant on support from the AIDS Trust of Australia and from ACON, which Cullen praised for providing the gym with a rent-free home.