Big Gay Pals The troubles and triumphs of fat gay men.

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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/08/jason_whitesel_s_fat_gay_men_reviewed.html



For a group of people bonded over a shared stigma, the gay community does an awful lot of stigmatizing itself. All those maxims about pride and self-acceptance can obscure the fact that the world of gay men is a cruelly stratified place. Muscly, toned men perch atop the hierarchy, with twinks—thin, hair-free, boyish men—just below them. Then come the bears, those gruff, hirsute fellows who are traditionally masculine in every way except the one. Then, at the bottom of the ladder, lies the rest—those gays with too much fat to cut it at the top, and not enough furry virility to make it in the middle. Behold: the fat gay men.

In his lively (and fabulously titled) Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Politics of Stigma, Jason Whitesel, a gender studies professor at Pace University, attempts to rescue these guys from the bottom of the homosexual heap, to decidedly mixed results. Billed as an ethnographic study, Fat Gay Men is as much a semi-comic romp as it is an academic treatise. It’s also more than a little sad. The fat gay men described in Fat Gay Men are tired of being ostracized by their communities—so they decide to ostracize themselves instead. In an attempt to escape the stigma of corpulence, fat gay men wear it as a badge of honor. These efforts lead to some great parties and, apparently, some great sex. But reading about them also leaves you with a sharp sense of melancholy.

Whitesel’s book focuses primarily on Girth and Mirth, a nationwide social club of fat men who hang out with each other to dodge the stressful expectations of the larger gay community. One passage tracking different men’s paths to Girth and Mirth is startlingly moving. One man joined the day he was diagnosed with HIV; another stumbled across an ad for the club while looking for a suicide hotline number. Not every Girth and Mirther, of course, emerged from such dire straits; some merely wanted to socialize without fretting about their bodies. Many—perhaps most; here, Whitesel plays irritatingly coy—just want to have sex.

[chervilant]

1. When I lost a significant amount of weight

and had a "normal" (read socio-acceptable) body, I discovered that men no longer made initial "eye contact" with my abdomen. Rather, they looked at my breasts, then my face. I found this both disconcerting, and demeaning.

I think fat prejudice cuts across all {arbitrary} social demarcations. We humans are our own worst enemies, as Walt Kelly's Pogo so sagely observed.

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2. I'll relate my experience - this is purely anecdotal, and my own opinions

so please disregard if you find any of these thoughts offensive or untrue.

It was a lot easier to hook up when I was younger - I was fresh and I never had a weight problem. And cute, if I do say so myself, lol. Lots of guys wanted me.

As I aged, however, I did slowly gain - so there was a double whammy: middle-aged and overweight (slightly). I decided about three years ago to get back into shape, knowing that my body would naturally look older because I WAS older - thicker in the middle, overall a more droopy form, wrinkles here and there. At the same time, body fat is almost never flattering when it shows up on your body frame. So while you may look older, looking older AND fat is double unattractive.

Anyway, long story short, three years later my BMI is 20.4 and I get a lot more eye play now than I have in years. More irritating is how many women seem to go out of their way to flirt with me - I am 100% totally gay, have a less-than-zero interest in women. But the overall sense I get is I'm on the right track, lol.

As to fatness, most members of my family have weight problems - from overweight to morbidly obese. Yet, I love them - I do not stigmatize fatness if for no other reason than to do so would in some sense stigmatize my own family. At the same time, I can NOT accept it as a healthy state of being.