Good Vibrations Magazine

Every June when Pride Month rolls around and all my queer friends gear up to do the Dyke Marches and Gay Pride Parades, I watch the bustle of activity and the swelling awareness of the power of making ourselves visible. I wonder if will we ever have a size-acceptance movement that is capable of the kind of fighting power that the GLBT movement has been able to mobilize?

I wonder this not just because fat people and queer people have a lot in common, including a continuing need to fight against medicalization, marginalization, and a social order that is all too ready to attack us on any number of levels. I wonder this because fat people and queer people (and many of us who are both) also share a heritage of shame that comes both from without and within, and it is this heritage of shame that continues, I believe, to all but immobilize the size acceptance movement.

What does this have to do with sex? Quite a bit, actually. Our culture’s fear of the body, as opposed to its love of reason and the mind, has generated a lot of shame about bodies in general, and about the excesses of which bodies are capable in particular. Not too long ago, admitting to any sexual appetites at all was shameful almost by definition. Admitting to excessive or deviant sexual appetites was even more so, enough to paralyze people’s souls and lives, enough to drive people to alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide. The shame and shame-induced fears that go along with being too much about our bodies and our sexuality — too openly sexual, too openly non-heterosexual, too openly kinky — are still with us and do still claim some of our brothers and sisters lives and livelihoods, both through suicide and self-destructive behavior as well as through homophobic and sex-phobic individuals and institutions.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of the queer liberation movement (and of sex-and queer-positive activism) has been that the notions of excessive and deviant sexuality have been challenged repeatedly, defanged through the process of publicly confronting shame with the simple everyday realities and humanity of queer and sex-positive lives. It hasn’t eradicated homophobia or sexphobia any more than 50-plus years of civil rights work has ended racism. But it has made things better for millions of people and given them tools with which to fight back. Liberating sexuality is a struggle still very much in progress, but it has at least begun.

Our culture’s fear of the body and its excesses has generated a very similar situation for fat people… but without the quasi-happy ending. I sometimes wonder if the shame that has been lifted from much of the normal human spectrum of sexual expression hasn’t just shifted location from the genitals to the hips, belly, butt, and thighs. When it comes to fatness and the cultural fascism about what constitutes a good or perfect body, the cultural compulsion toward controlling our excessive, deviant, unruly bodies has only intensified since the year that the brave Stonewall queens catapulted queer liberation forward. Our shame over our excessive bodies, our deviant, ugly, too-big bodies, and our fear of becoming (more) so, funnels over 40 billion dollars a year into the weight-loss industry. Into multinational pharmaceutical companies searching for the magic pill that will make us all skinny and perfect, into cellulite creams and fat farm vacations and the pockets of all the other anorexia-pushers. More insidiously, this shame funnels our energy, our time, and our love into body hatred and self-hatred, pushing fat people into social isolation, silencing our voices and experiences, closeting us.

Every time I see a fat person who is afraid to eat in public or shop for food for fear that he or she will be chastised by some nosy stranger, I can’t help but imagine a gay person who is afraid to talk about his or her domestic life in public for fear that coming out will mean censure. Every time I hear “Fat bitch!” on the street, I hear “Faggot!” and “Fuckin’ dyke!” When I hear about a fat child being taken away from her parents by the State, I also hear the stories of the children of queer parents being taken away into so-called protective custody. When a fat friend tells me about going to job interview after job interview and getting turned down in spite of excellent qualifications, I hear echoes of nelly queens and butch dykes — the ones who can’t pass — going through the same thing… no reason ever given, you’re just not quite right for the job. When the National Traffic Safety Administration says that they won’t force automakers to build cars with seat belts that fit a wider range of body sizes and that if fat people can’t find a car with a seatbelt that will go around them, they’re just out of luck, I hear state employment commissions saying that they can’t force employers to provide the option of domestic partner health benefits. And if someone has a life partner to whom they don’t happen to be legally married, they’re just out of luck and are going to have to buy those benefits out of pocket. And every time I hear someone despair of ever finding a lover because they’re fat, I can almost see the cover of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well Of Loneliness: holding the certitude that “being different means being doomed to being alone” is often a sadly self-fulfilling prophecy. What perpetuates all of this is the heritage of shame that goes along with being fat. What insures its future is that the shame is internalized deeply enough that many people don’t realize they even have the option or the wherewithal to fight it.

But wait, I hear you say, being fat is not the same as being queer: you can’t do anything about your sexuality, but you can go on a diet! Well, you could force yourself to simply ignore your sexual orientation, too, and do your Christian duty and marry someone of the opposite sex, procreate like a good little hetero, and not have to put up with all the fuss and bother of being different into the bargain. Lots of people do it. What’s your problem?

Simply put, the issue is not whether or not it is possible to not be queer, or not be fat. The issue is that people are queer, and they are fat. Things can change, I won’t challenge that — people’s sexuality can change, and so can their weight. But we have actual current realities to deal with here, and part of that reality is the fact that queer people and fat people both exist, and queer people and fat people both deserve to be treated a damned sight better than we are. It’s really pretty simple.

And this brings me back to my original issue — the fact that despite the formation of NAAFA, the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance, back in 1969, the civil and social condition of fat people is light-years behind that of GLBT folks. I would like to suggest that there are two big reasons behind this, and two big things we can all do to push for the increased acceptance of all types of bodies of all sizes of large, small, and in-between.

Unashamed Visibility

It’s funny how someone as big as I am can become invisible without even trying. It’s even stranger how all the fat people in the USA — and according to the US Government, that’s about 93 million people — can be invisible, too. We are negated, unrepresented, and even when we are made visible, it’s usually not as fat people but as dieters, or people who are trying to become not fat.

Very few fat people exist in the world as fat people, unapologetic and unabashed, not trying to pass for anything else, not trying to change themselves to fit the world’s notions of what they should be. A lot of fat people suffer from what I call Oprah Syndrome, constantly obsessing about how they are trying so hard to not be fat by dieting, constantly working out. Incessantly berating themselves for their fatness and praising other people for their thinness in a constant apologetic effort to try to pass as thin. Very few fat people are willing to self-identify as fat. The shame of fatness is too steep for most people to willingly take that on. It’s not so unlike the way in which it used to be very rare to find someone who would willingly identify as homosexual… the price, both in terms of external homophobic reactions and internal shame and humiliation, was just too high.

What changed this situation for the queer community is the same thing that can change this situation for the fat community: a groundswell of unashamed visibility. Being unapologetic is a wonderful tool. Being unafraid to call yourself a fat person, or a queer person, means that you remove the weapon from your would-be attackers hands and appropriate it for yourself. Insisting that you be heard as a fat person, not as a fat-person-who-is-on-a-diet-so-it’s-okay-because-I’m-playing-by-the-rules, is vital, whether you are in the grocery store, on the beach, at the library, or talking to a prospective employer. You’ll find that there is a lot less shame involved than you think when you’re simply being matter-of-fact. It just is what it is. Let other people figure out how to cope with you for a change.

Get Sexy

A crucial part of unashamed visibility is being visible as a sexual being. Our culture has made a fetish out of sexuality, sexual desirability, and proving yourself as a sexual entity. Fat people, as I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, are often shut out entirely (or almost entirely) from the sexual arena. We’re assumed to be sexless, undesirable, lonely, and unlovable. But let me remind you that according to the government, there are 93 million fat people in this country, and let me further remind you that wherever you have 93 million people, there are going to be more than oh, say, four or five of them who fuck. Perhaps you might even be one of them.

So, our culture may fetishize sexuality, but I say that’s fine by me. Fat people are sexy people, and hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. If you’re a fat person who is also a sexual person, don’t hide that part of yourself. Don’t shy away from public displays of affection. When your coworkers are chatting about sex, join in. If you feel the urge to dress up and wear something sexy or revealing, wear it. Educate yourself about sexuality. Read some books or stories about fat and sexuality, like Big Big Love or Zaftig: Well Rounded Erotica, or better yet, write some. Go to the beach and wear a bikini — grab some friends and do it en masse. Write letters to the magazines you read asking them why there aren’t more pictures of sexy fat people in them. Tell them you’d buy ten subscriptions for your friends if only there were more sexy fat people in the magazine. Volunteer to do sex education — people need to see fat people who know about sex and talk about it! Go to a BBW bash, a Bear convergence, or the conference of the National Organization of Lesbians of Size. Go out dancing, take a lover, buy some sex toys, invent the Camryn Manheim love doll, whatever. If you can back up your fat sexiness with some dollars, so much the better, and remember that supporting businesses owned by fat and fat-positive people helps build the community.

But most of all, and this you can do even if you don’t have money, don’t have much time, don’t have a partner, or don’t have whatever: you can love being a sexual being. You can be enthusiastic about being sexual in and with a big body. You can learn to see the sexiness in other fat people (and maybe even in yourself). Refusing to be a sexual second-class citizen goes a long way toward insuring that you won’t be a second-class citizen in other aspects of your life.

Making it plain that you won’t be desexed just because you live in a culture that is uncomfortable with bodies and their appetites, excesses, and desires is a deep, deep rebellion. When we live in a society that wants to hold our bodies, our appetites, and our sexuality under its repressive siege, making love is making war. It’s an important — even crucial — thing to insist upon if we are to be given respect in a culture that often equates respectability with proof of sexiness and sexuality. And while fat bodies and fat sexuality may not be at the top of the charts right now, there is strength in numbers, and we already have the numbers — we just need to be sexual and visible. Grab your latex armor, kids, and get ready to rumble. After all, good sex is what human rights should be: honest-to-goodness one size fits all.