The Price of Admission for Fat Bodies

Anyone who has lost and subsequently gained weight back can tell you that you will be treated differently in real, material ways. The difference is at once alluring and painful.

I emerged from pandemic lockdown at the heaviest I’ve ever been. At about 270 pounds, my weight is substantial on my five-foot-two frame. I knew I had reached my heaviest well before I stepped on the scale at my doctor’s office for the first time in years toward the end of 2020. Fresh deep-purple stretch marks had appeared on my belly months earlier, signposts that the inevitable had occurred: After losing eighty pounds in my twenties, by thirty-five I had gained it all back, plus forty more. I knew this would happen: Ample research shows that after significant weight loss, people gain it all back and then some.

At first, I lost weight out of sheer circumstance. During college, the bus line that took me from my inner-ring suburban campus to my downtown job was cut, so I had no choice but to incorporate a bicycle into my daily transportation. The more I biked, the easier it became. Soon, biking everywhere was consistently faster than using my city’s underfunded and unreliable bus system. On days when I had both work and school, which was most of the time, I biked thirty to forty miles a day. I grew to love the feeling of the sun and wind on my skin and the newfound feeling of independence; as a working-class young adult, I had never had a vehicle of my own in the car-dependent Midwest. Before I knew it, and without planning for it, weight started to melt off of me.

I could hardly believe it. My whole life, I had worked hard to embrace the simple fact of fat on my body. Not only was I convinced that I was physically incapable of losing weight—believe me, I had tried many times—but I had reached a point where, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to. In high school and college I had inhaled early-aughts fat-forward blogs like Feministing and Kate Harding’s classic Shapely Prose. I filled the margins of my gender studies course readings with aha moments about what it means to live in a fat feminized body and how anti-fatness is rooted in patriarchal white supremacy. I set my sights and my actions toward a world where all fat bodies would be free, my own included.

Yet none of this personal, introspective work changes what anyone who has lost and subsequently gained weight back can tell you: People and systems treat you differently based on your body size in real, material ways. The difference is at once alluring and painful.

Once I started to lose weight, my world was transformed. More clothing options than I could fathom were suddenly available to me. Chairs with arms no longer left welts on my hips and sides. Total strangers asked me out on dates in broad daylight, a far cry from the often alcohol-fueled, frequently clandestine hookups and one-night stands I was used to. By the time I started college, it had started to become relatively easy to find someone to fuck, but hardly anyone wanted to be seen showing affection to a fattie in public. Losing weight changed all that.

Friends, colleagues, and classmates marveled at my changing body. It became commonplace for people in my orbit to say things to me like “Just look at you!” or “You’re looking really . . . I dunno, healthy lately.”

Doctor’s visits not only became less stressful; they actually fed into my people-pleasing and overachieving tendencies. Both the nurse on duty and my physician showered me with affirmation upon the discovery of my dramatically reduced body weight. “Whatever you’re doing, keep it up,” I was told.

My whole life, I had worked hard to embrace the simple fact of fat on my body.

What I was doing, however, became neither sustainable nor healthy. Once I started to lose weight without intending to, the difference in how I was treated was as enraging as it was motivating. I became secretly obsessive about exercise. On top of biking everywhere, I also started going to the gym twice a day—once before work and once after. Sometimes, after biking home from my second gym visit of the day, I would go for a run in the neighborhood. When my weight loss plateaued, I panicked. I started restricting what I ate. I trained myself to take the smallest bites I could muster as slowly as possible. I told myself I was practicing “mindful eating.”

Eventually, my regimen became impossible to maintain. I injured myself repeatedly and went through multiple rounds of physical therapy. I was utterly exhausted by six or seven o’clock in the evening and rarely had the time or energy to see friends. My already-thin and fine hair turned brittle and straw-like. While I can’t pinpoint any specific moment, it finally sank in: anti-fatness had swallowed me whole. I thought of my parents and how sad they would be to see me treat myself this way.

*

My mom was fat. Really fat. She was unapologetic in her feminism and uncompromising in her bodily autonomy. Almost always the fattest person at the neighborhood swimming pool, she would glide serenely through the water in underwear and a sundress, unwilling to rein in her expansiveness with spandex. I loved coming home from a long day at the pool with her, drunk on chlorine and sunscreen. I would lie on my back in between her legs with my head resting on her belly, feeling myself rise and fall with her breath while she stroked my damp hair, a VHS tape of The Last Unicorn or Sesame Street on in the background while I dozed off.

My biological dad was bisexual, and he and my mom shared an open relationship. While he was tall and very thin, he slept with all kinds of people. He was deep into the mostly gay male leather-and-kink scene. He died when I was two, and my mom died when I was seven, so I can’t ask them about the politics of their relationship, but I know he loved fat women, and he loved fucking my mom. From hazy memories and secondhand stories shared with me over time, I have the sense that my mom—who described herself as a “heterosexual lesbian” in the days before the word queer was fully reclaimed—had won a hetero fat woman’s sexual lottery: a man who loved to fuck her as she was and didn’t care who knew about it.

And then there was Paul, the third adult of my household. Paul was openly gay and legally married to my mom and continued to raise me after my mom and dad died. While not nearly as fat as my mom, he had a noticeable belly that hung over his pants. As an actor, director, drag queen, and former dancer, he moved with confidence and precision, his belly leading the way.

For my whole life, Paul was fat. But before I was born, Paul was skinny and lithe. In order to be desired in the gay scene, he restricted food like it was his job. As the AIDS crisis unfolded without adequate systemic action, by 1990 he chose to become celibate and, subsequently, allowed himself to get fat again.

As a teenager, over dinners at our favorite Chinese buffet, he would regale me with stories about his bathhouse exploits; the first time he experienced a rim job; the hot, hot sex he had in the back rooms of leather bars; and how it all started once he got himself down to 155 pounds. The fatphobia in his life was never bemoaned—simply a fact. I asked him once if he ever resented that he had to be so restrictive with his diet in order to have the sex life he wanted to have. Without a second thought, he said, “No, never. And I’d do it again.” He was aware of the price of admission, and he willingly paid it.

When it came to being seen and desired, in Paul I saw a price to pay and a choice to make. In my mom, I saw a lucky lottery winner. Yet neither of them settled for the barriers to entry. From both of them, and from the community of weirdo friends we surrounded ourselves with, I learned the power of fat world-making.

In our house, if it felt good, we did it, and if it tasted good, we ate it: I was empowered and encouraged to trust my hunger and desires. All the while, before and after my biological parents’ deaths, Paul was transparent about his past restricted eating. He made it clear that it was a trade-off he chose to accept and faulted no one for making choices in the pursuit of pleasure. Having dated my mom before he came out as gay, he made it known that he thought she was beautiful and powerful. Every time my teachers called the house to discuss how I was made fun of for my weight yet again, he showed up at school pickup the next day with a list of parents to track down and talk to.

While he was honest with me about the lengths he had once endured in order to lose and keep off weight, he also modeled for me how to grow into—and relish—being fat. In the theater productions he directed, he regularly made casting choices that portrayed fat people as love interests and protagonists. In his drag shows, he freely performed sexy, brassy, and seductive numbers, showing me that I could be a fat femme and a sexual being at the same time. He even had signature numbers that explicitly celebrated fat and pleasure, like John Treacy Egan’s off-broadway drag anthem “Bigger Is Better” and Candye Kane’s “Two Hundred Pounds of Fun.” In the absence of my mom and the man who loved her fat body, Paul managed to be forthcoming about the privilege that came with thinness. Yet at the same time, he modeled how to build a world where fat people didn’t have to be lucky—or pay a price—to be wanted.

My fat and queer homelife was a sharp contrast to my experience out in the rest of the world. Not only was I fat, but I felt like an alien trying to make sense of the gender politics of the playground. I was the perfect target for bullies, and, as I grew into puberty, general bullying frequently became sexualized.

In our house, I was empowered and encouraged to trust my hunger and desires.

One summer, when I was about twelve, a group of boys would approach me at the skating rink and insist that their friend wanted to couple skate with me. I would look down, blurt, “No, thanks,” and hastily skate away. The line between the safety of my household and the cruelty of the outside world was clear to me, but there came a moment when I summoned the courage to believe that maybe, just maybe, this was my winning lottery ticket to be seen and desired. After weeks of my sheepish “No, thanks,” I accepted their offer. When the group of boys led me to their unsuspecting friend and told him I wanted to skate with him, his eyes grew wide and he recoiled. “Ugh, fuck all of you!” he shouted as he scrambled away from me. His friends, who had been pursuing this moment all summer long, burst into snorts and laughter.

As I swallowed hard and held back tears, I wondered how my mom and dad had possibly found each other. I also understood more deeply than ever before why there was a time in Paul’s life that his hunger to be desired usurped the pangs of hunger he endured.

At some point, my peers in school grew up enough to stop targeting me for my body. Instead, passive exclusion became the norm. Trips to the mall with friends were embarrassing—I would spend these excursions looking at accessories while friends spent the day trying on clothes I couldn’t fit into. I spent hours on Saturday afternoons in friends’ bedrooms, politely listening to their preteen relationship drama, wishing so badly to have hormone-fueled drama of my own.

With high school came my sexual debut, followed by lots of hookups with just about anyone who initiated because I considered myself lucky anytime anyone wanted to sleep with me. Sex had become easy to have, but sex with people that I actually wanted to have sex with was infrequent. I wished to be fat and unbothered like my mom and to have the agency and choice experienced by Paul and my dad. In my emerging adulthood, I craved the fat world-making they cultivated for me at home. They showed me it was possible, but I was unable to find it on my own.

*

As I reemerge in the world as a fat person once again, there is more mainstream representation of fat bodies than I ever could have imagined. Lizzo and Aidy Bryant are household names; it’s easier than ever to shop and find clothes that not only actually fit but are also well-made and ethically-sourced; fat Instagram influencers appear in my feed without me seeking them out. Fat is, dare I say, hip.

I’ve even found the elusive sweet spot I thought was impossible: I started dating my partner of thirteen years shortly before I lost weight, and he’s made it clear that through all of its shrinking and expanding, my body is seen, desired, and valued. With him, I experience my fat body, my sexual agency, and exploration at the same time. Like mother like daughter, I won my own fat-femme lottery.

Despite finding a partner that loves and desires my body in all its forms, and despite a new era of fat representation, I continue to experience the same passive exclusion I felt when I was twelve. Since I gained my weight back, strangers don’t ask me out on dates anymore. In public spaces, people look past or through me just like they used to. People in my circle, some of whom I haven’t seen in more than two years due to Covid-19, don’t blurt out, “Just look at you!” the way they did when I saw them regularly but had lost weight. I stand for ten, fifteen minutes at bars, cash in hand and ready to order a drink, while thin and willowy femmes walk up from behind me and get served first. I was honored with an award at a recent public event, during which I am certain my photo was taken, only to find it not included in the next day’s Instagram post.

I wonder if this is the same way Paul felt at his first visit to the gay bar before he realized what it would cost if he wanted to be seen, desired, and included. I also wonder, had my mom lived longer, if I would have been more privy to the passive exclusion she surely faced on a daily basis.

Desire is about more than fucking. It’s about who we desire to be around and who we choose to share space with. It’s about who we are willing to make chitchat with in the checkout line. It’s about eye contact. It’s about who we give our attention to. It’s about telling our friends they’re hot, not as an evaluation of their bodies but as an acknowledgment that you can tell when they feel good in their bodies. It’s about being delighted by people whether we want to fuck them or not. And while desire is about more than fucking, interrogating our sexual desires and how they translate to how we treat people matters. These small acts of social inclusion—of seeing and desiring one another, in community—matter. Writers, artists, and thinkers like Aubrey Gordon, Da’Shaun L. Harrison, Shoog McDaniel, Sonalee Rashatwar, and many more tell us that the desire, even the mere willingness, to be in community with fat people impacts who lives, who dies, who is believed, who is valued, and who gets to live a life worth living.

For many of us, media, algorithms, and clothing companies have created an illusion that the price of admission for fat people to be desired has been canceled. Yet if anything, the price of admission hasn’t been canceled; it’s simply been normalized. Fat celebrities like Lizzo and Aidy Bryant bear the implicit responsibility to create media that centers their bodies and the anti-fatness they face. Size-inclusive clothing companies create a mirage of liberation through buying power, while fat social media influencers make that mirage glossy and trite. I hope that one day the illusion becomes real and that our culture, systems, and the way we treat each other make fat people feel seen and desired beyond the blips of capitalism that pander to us. In the meantime, I need fat world-making now just as much as I always have. I need to be able to trust that I am seen and desired by the people I’m in community with. I need to feel as safe and secure as I once did, dozing off on my mom’s belly, waiting for Paul to come home with fried chicken and biscuits for dinner.