A Desire for Fat
Confession: I am a gainer. This means that I am fat on purpose. Mainstream culture tells us that people don’t want to be fat. It tells us that fat is not something to be desired. According to mainstream culture, people are fat because they cannot control themselves or they are traumatized and can only deal with their pain by trying to eat it away or because, and this is the most popular reason, they are weak. I remember watching The Biggest Loser on NBC and contestants crying during the workouts, a trainer in their face, yelling at them (this is supposed to be inspirational), and the contestant sputtering out that they are weak. This is promoted as a breakthrough moment. What was the contestant’s name? I don’t remember because it happened on almost every season I watched. But that show is gone. Many contestants have gained their weight back. However, the attitude that fat is bad. Fat is not something we are supposed to want persists. There are news reports on the fat epidemic in the US. There are those late-night weight loss infomercials that are on when I can’t sleep or wake up early for work or, and this is the most upsetting, so many cooking shows on the Food Network feature recipes that are designed to keep calories down and waists slim. Fat people are supposed to feel shame, not pride. You are not supposed to want to be fat.
Let me take a moment. Let’s pause. Let me explain myself. I’m not saying that people do not seek comfort in food and maybe eat more than they originally planned. I’m not saying that trauma can’t lead to wanting to seek comfort in food. Food doesn’t judge. Food doesn’t say it’s too busy. Food doesn’t hurt. Food, fat can protect. Roxane Gay in her memoir, Hunger, talks about being sexually assaulted. She writes, “What you need to know is that my life is split in two…Thee is the before and after. Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped.” The assault happened to her when she was 12. She says, “I was broken, and to numb the pain of that brokenness, I ate and ate and ate…”.
I understand trauma survivors. I’m an abuse survivor. A sexual abuse survivor. I tell you this because I want to be clear that I am not trying to diminish or discount in any way survivors of trauma or how they deal with that trauma. I’m saying not every fat person gains weight to make themselves less desirable. For gainers fat is desirable.
Gaining has not always been easy for me. Being queer has not always been easy for me. When I started graduate school, I presented as a straight married man, who was accidentally fat. I could not discuss being gay, or being a gainer, with anyone, but those were two aspects that were fighting to not be a secret anymore. The more I actively oppressed them, the more they tried to come out in my writing.
This was most obvious in a story I wrote about a vampire. In the story, a man hears pebbles being thrown against his bedroom window one night. When he goes to the window he sees a man, recently deceased, motioning for him to join him. The men had been childhood friends, they had been in love, but the narrator chose to stay closeted and get married. He wants to go to his vampire love, who is fat like the vampires of folklore, but he still can’t bring himself to venture into the unknown. The friend visits every night for the next week. They repeat the same pattern. The narrator looks forward to seeing his friend, but then the visits stop. He wishes he had had the courage to join his friend, to have chosen this other life — one that includes a type of feeding.
The metaphor was clear to the people in my workshop: the narrator wishes he would have embraced his queerness. Here was a part of myself made public without anyone else actually knowing it or at least without anyone openly acknowledging it. If they guessed it was about me, no one said anything. I never showed that story to my wife. When she asked if she could read it, I told her it wasn’t ready.
When people have asked me how I knew I was gay after being married for nine years, I would always say I just knew. I’d leave out the part about stumbling onto a video of a man, a gainer, eating a bowl of ice cream on YouTube, rubbing his belly as it grows from the ice cream he eats. My fascination, my excitement — the feeling that something had switched over in my brain, in my very being, and I finally knew everything about myself.
When I saw that video, I knew I wanted to grow. I wanted to feel another man rub his hands over my belly, press my belly into his, I wanted to grow for him and with him. I wanted to transform. Transformation. The concept fascinated me from an early age. At nine years old, it took the form of wanting to be a vampire. I had this recurring dream that there would be a knock on the front door late at night that only I would hear. The rest of my family would sleep through it, unaware of what was transpiring not that far from them. I’d go downstairs, open the inner door, and see a vampire standing there. The orange glow of the light tucked into the overhang over the house splayed shadows across his pale face. It was always a male vampire in my dream, usually around my age or just a few years older that had come for me. Now I wanted a gainer to be the one knocking on the door to whisk me away to this new life. I told my wife I was gay. We divorced. But I still hid the gainer part of me. That was the part about which I felt the most shame.
Shame has ruled my life. It’s what kept me in the closet. It’s what made me afraid to be fat, made me keep those secrets from the people closest to me. It’s part of what has made me feel that I don’t fit in the world, a world that doesn’t necessarily want to make room for queer people or fat people, so a queer fat person is sometimes too much for some people.
Recently, I watched the new Hulu show, Shrill, starring Aidy Bryant as Annie. She writes an article for the online magazine she works for called “I am Fat.” Her mother, who throughout the show encourages Annie to lose weight, is unhappy with this information becoming public. They fight. Her mother walks away. They talk again and make up the next day.
I wrote an essay about gaining for The Rumpus. Very few non-gaining friends knew I was a gainer. I didn’t tell my family. I didn’t tell them about the essay. My mother found it. She was not happy about it.
“What will I tell my friends?” She asked.
“You don’t have to tell your friends,” I said.
This is the last conversation I had with my mother. We haven’t spoken in three years. I don’t foresee that we will ever speak again. Sometimes there is a price to being your full self. However, it’s a price I’d pay rather than feeling shame and keeping my true self a secret for the rest of my life.
There is a social connection platform for gainers. I asked on there: “…anything you want non-gainers to know about gaining?” These are some of the responses I received. The gainers asked to not be identified.
…the majority of us have real jobs, other interests, aren’t lazy, have dreams, desires etc, however we just want to do so in larger bodies. The need for body modification is seen in every culture, but in western society, our body modification is not magazine sales perfection that other modification inspires.
That it’s not exclusively a sexual thing. There’s certainly a sexual component to it, much like there’s often a sexual component to romantic love, but if it was all about getting our rocks off, I don’t think most of us would commit to it. I gain because I feel more comfortable, more confident, and more like myself in a fat body.
That, by and large, gaining isn’t about self-destruction or self-sabotage. Despite the risks and challenges, many of us try to remain as healthy as possible, see our doctor, and eat nutritious food because we love our bodies. Gaining is self-affirmation, and we very literally espouse the notion that it gives us more to love.
My queerness and my fatness are intertwined. I’d certainly still be queer if I were not fat, but I am a happy queer person, a happier person when I am fat.
