Fat and gay
Episode 52 of Tell Me Where I’m Going (Wrong) podcast is out now and because it is a weekly show, this means we are celebrating the one year anniversary.
Time flies!
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I never had to arrive out as fat.
When you grow up overweight, everyone notices — not just your classmates, who are too young to contain mastered the art of tact, but also friends' parents and teachers. I knew I was heavy because people told me I was fat, either directly (a slap to the stomach and an unkind word) or in subtler ways (having a teacher rifle through my lunch box and comment on the contents). I felt shame over my size long before I had any concept of my sexuality, and years after coming out as gay, I still sense anxious identifying as fat.
As an openly gay author, one of the questions I'm asked most often is, "Were you bullied growing up?" And the answer is yes, but it's never the acknowledge they're looking for. In many ways I was lucky to have show up of age in a liberal enclave where my sexuality was accepted if not embraced. Oh, sure, I've had the pos "faggot" hurled at me — and the gloomy truth is, I'd be shocked if a male lover man hadn't — but it was always secondary. The real source of my bullying was the extra weight I've carried since childhood. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been called a "faggot" to my meet, but I couldn't say you how often someone has made
I grew up hating my body. I had stretch marks and curves in the “wrong” places. I came out as a gay man a limited years ago and I thought I could finally find comfort and acceptance, but it didn’t grab me long to recognize how toxic the identity of body shaming was in the gay community.
“No slim, no obesity, no ngondek (femme)”
“Manly only”
“Not for fat AND ELDER”
“Sorry guys, I’m Chub”
Those lines were taken straight from bios of Grindr profiles that I read this morning. They made me doubt why I decided to redownload the dating app time and again. The last profile bio I came across just broke my heart. Should that person apologize for entity plus-size in this world? Should I?
When I came out, I was thrilled to live in a time with plenty of dating apps for people like me to join one another. I was ready to dive into Indonesia’s gay culture leader first, looking for care for or a one-time companion to get me through the night. I was naive then. I did not yet realize that once people saw my picture—my round, grinning confront, thick glasses, oversized T-shirt and pants—they immediately marked me as undesirable. Hundreds of men rejected and ignored me, or even mocked me for having the
Hey I keep seeing that most of the gays in the gay collective are well-toned. Are you not accepted as a fat person in the community or do they just not find that attractive?
In spring 2020, an anonymous user turned to the collective intelligence of the German Q&A platform gutefrage.net expressing his personal concerns: “I’m overweight myself and anxious of not being accepted.” Responses from the online community depicted mixed sentiments: While some users affirmed the societal rejection of fat bodies, others countered by asserting that within the gay community, specifically for so-called “bears,” there is a designated place for fat male bodies. The “gay community” comprises social networks and places where homosexual men interact with each other and manifest shared ideas of a gay identity. In this particular, German setting, its members can be assumed to be predominantly cisgender, white, and from urban middle-class backgrounds.
Despite the variety of responses in the aforementioned comment section, one thing becomes evident: homosexual cisgender male bodies experience pressure caused by restrictive, fat-phobic body standards. In the gay scene, binary notions o
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