During the pandemic, I created a podcast called Big Calf. The idea of the show was to tell stories about what it’s like to grow up when you’re a fat kid. Stories about life as a young fat person are complicated, funny, traumatizing, bizarre, tender and unexpected — in other words, they expand far beyond the stereotypes associated with youth and fatness and attempt to remind people that, actually, being fat is not the worst thing you can possibly be, even when you’re young and it feels like it is.
Similar to many creative endeavors throughout the course of my life, I stopped making the podcast when I started working too much, then didn’t pick it back up again because my depression started lying to me about the value of my ideas. After reaching a critically low point sometime in the last year, I’ve started to climb out of that hole and slowly inch away from the lying sack of shit-chemicals that swirl around in my juicy pink brain. I haven’t picked the podcast back up (yet), but maybe I’ll get there — until then, check out the Big Calf season preview if you’re curious.
But I digress, as is my right as homosexual on my first day of Pride month.
One of the stories we told on Big Calf was about growing up fat and queer — more specifically, how my experience as a fat kid ultimately deterred me from really digging into the Gay Thoughts™ until adulthood. My entire childhood, adolescence, and even some of my adulthood was defined by defending myself for being fat. I was mercilessly bullied as a child for my weight — walking into school every day felt like a tiny, anxiety-inducing war in the larger battle to remind me that me and my body were different.
Imagine being this gay and not knowing it.
Like many fat kids who experience this kind of socially acceptable trauma (certain monstrous adults in my life cosigned the sentiments of their children or students, not to mention the endless scourge of anti-fat sentiment I absorbed from television and movies), I responded by trying to make myself as small as possible, a behavior I carried with me into adulthood. I’m not talking about losing weight, either: I’m talking about a decades-long concerted effort to remove any traces of my personhood from public view, lest anyone notice me and point out that I was, in fact, fat. I think of the process like a copper oxidation of the soul — the shiny, strange penny of a person I was combined with the air around me until I was dull and dirty and no one could really make out what I actually looked like.
All of that considered, it’s no surprise that I didn’t figure out that I was gay until I was 33. It wasn’t until my late 20s that I started unpacking my relationship to my body, writing about it until I figured out that maybe, just maybe, being fat wasn’t the obscene affliction I’d always believed it to be. I started dressing in a way that felt expressive instead of corrective, looked at myself in the mirror more and, shockingly, wasn’t as mad at what I saw.
In my early 30s, the majority of my internalized fatphobia had dissipated, and I also created some changes in my personal and professional life that made the idea of at least trying to be a more expansive version of myself seem not only possible, but positive. It was only then I realized that perhaps maybe the “wrong” thing I’d been feeling in my life wasn’t just about my body. It occurred to me that perhaps the reason I’d never taken the time to really explore my sexuality was because I used most of my energy to think about how I’d explain myself for being fat.
My compulsory heterosexuality wasn’t because I grew up in an overly conservative environment or was too afraid to be gay — I simply had zero bandwidth to navigate anything other than fatness, and my abject terror at the thought of being called something even worse than fat made me run as fast as I could from the very essence of who I was. Being called fat was painful enough — being called a fat dyke (which I sometimes was, by bullies who likely have no idea that in addition to being shitheads, they were also prophets) was too much to bear.
Blessedly, much of my current life extends far beyond what my child self thought was possible. The fatness others decreed would offer me nothing but a life of failure and isolation has brought me community and professional success, and has also guided me to cultivate both emotional intelligence, empathy and my voice. The queerness I unknowingly fought for so long to grind into a fine dust has been collected, rehydrated, and restored into something of a homosexual concrete, galvanizing my very spirit and giving me a solid foundation from which to build. Everything I used to be afraid of — being fat, being gay, being myself — are now the unequivocal superpowers I try to tap when I’m feeling uncertain and small. The best things about me turned out to be exactly what everyone else convinced me to believe were the worst. If that’s not a reason to say happy fucking Pride, I don’t know what is.
Gay Thoughts™
In honor of June and the Gay Thoughts™:
Read this gorgeous essay from Chala June in Conde Nast Traveler, all about finding chosen family on a trip to Costa Rica.
Enjoy this stunning photo essay in them about Trans Prom at the Capitol. The kids are, in fact, alright.
Let Emma Specter’s Vogue review of The Ultimatum: Queer Love wash over you in a gentle wave of gay chaos.
Buy these Timberland sandals (I have them in black) which are, to me, aggressively homosexual but also by far the comfiest sandals I’ve ever worn.
You are inspiring. As I read this, I wondered how you were telling my story. The difference is, you are brave and developed those parts into beautiful pieces of you. I have yet to do this. I might try now. Thank you for writing and sharing.
This is so lovely, thank you for sharing it.