[“You don’t know true freedom until you don’t want what they want you to want. Coming from white trash has advantages people with money don’t seem to understand. For years I’ve watched friends whose parents are doctors and bankers live in fear (even while rebelling) that they’re not good enough, not achieving enough, not clean enough, and especially not thin enough. The quest for socially-acceptable body fat ratio has never been discussed in my family, too consumed with bill collectors and police reports and how the judge will react.
When I escaped rural poverty for life in Philadelphia I was still a kid, skinny and conventionally cute, and I made friends with guys my age who were turning tricks for quick cash. My first boyfriend in the city was a coke dealer who kept me out of the skin trade, kept me in parties, kept me high and frantic. When he went to prison, I was lucky enough to fall into friendship with a group of vegans and macrobiotic spiritualists. For ten years my life revolved around eating well, animal rights, paganism; it was a beautiful ten years.
When I started working at Giovanni’s Room, the queer bookstore in Philadelphia, my diet became more vegetarian than vegan, and I started to gain weight. There was plenty of talk about this from customers, and especially my faggot friends who warned, “You better be careful, you’re getting FAT!” One regular customer who had a crush on me came into the store drunk one evening to stroke my cheek and tell me, “If you lost forty pounds you’d be my ideal!” And I said, “Oh really? How much do you weigh?” He beat his chest, “I’M A HUNDRED SIXTY POUNDS OF PURE MUSCLE!” I nodded and said, “Well, if YOU lost a hundred sixty pounds you’d be MY ideal!” He didn’t get it, standing there drunk and confused in his self-centered fantasy, as though I should have been grateful that he told me the secret to winning the trophy of his big hard cock.
They didn’t seem to understand that I didn’t care, and never had cared about my looks. And what they also didn’t seem to register was that there are a lot of faggots who love fat men. And there are precious few of us fat faggots to go around. While my friends were warning me to be careful, lest I lose love, they were missing the simple fact that love is for everyone! At the bookstore, the guys buying the fat porn like Bulk Male and all the other blubber-zines were starting to give me the glad eye. Hmm, it was something new, and I felt adventurous and titillated.
Suddenly, and I mean suddenly, my dance card was very full—being a self-assured fat gay man made me an overnight rock star! Now men bake me endless chocolate cupcakes, make me peanut butter cream sushi, and prepare my favorite deep fried vegan ham and noodles dishes. They indulge me, I indulge them—full, fully loved. Food and sex over long blissful nights have plucked my fat flower from the massive bouquet of cultural shame and released me in ways I never knew when I was thinner and with men who were obsessed with thinness.
There are faggots I know who are only attracted to the fat Elvis, and you feel the soft purr as they talk about His chubby neck and breasts. Some people get angry when debating how long Elvis was fat, furiously whittling it down to six months as though the dead are anything but thin. Let me assure you that a photograph of the fat Elvis will not evaporate from your wall in six months. Yes, you can jerk off to it for the rest of your life, I give you my word!
Existing simultaneously outside queer and straight norms is liberating, and constantly exciting in ways I had never anticipated. The tedious, predictable world behind us, we have it our way—and I mean that sexually as well as politically! Outside the respectable domain, the vantage of an unjust world is always clearest.”]
— CaConrad, from Going to zero to sexy on high-caloric queer overdrive, from why are faggots so afraid of faggots? flaming challenges to masculinity, objectification, and the desire to conform, edited by mattilda bernstein sycamore
