In his review, Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth and the Politics of Stigma by columnist Mark Joseph Stern of Slate Magazine, he dissects some of the painful (and often surprising) realities that fat gay men face in what he calls “the cruelly stratified” pecking order of gay male existence. In fact, he probably sums it most correctly at the opening of his piece: “For a group of people bonded over a shared stigma, the gay community does an awful lot of stigmatizing itself.”
The book, as Stern points out, is a mixture of folly, self-incrimination and – are you surprised – sex. Large gay men are as much in need (and are as worthy of) love and sex as anyone else. But in our world, never the twain shall meet. Gym rats, at the head of the food chain, hold a special place in our idealized culture, followed closely behind by hairless 18-25-year-old twinks, followed by those virile, hirsute creatures, leftovers from the 1970s when having hair was the ideal and the norm not, in our super plastic surgery saturated world, the exception. Next come those of average stock, neither super good-looking nor toned but well within the American Medical Association’s guidelines for height and weight proportionality. At the bottom, well, you know the rest.
From Stern’s review:
“In an attempt to escape the stigma of corpulence, fat gay men wear it as a badge of honor. These efforts lead to great parties and, apparently, great sex. But reading about them also leaves you with a sharp sense of melancholy. The fat gay men described in Fat Gay Men are tired of being ostracized by their communities, so they decide to ostracize themselves instead. [Jason] Whitesel’s book focuses primarily on Girth and Mirth, a nationwide social club of fat men who hang out with each other to dodge the stressful expectations of the larger gay community. One passage tracking different men’s paths to Girth and Mirth is startlingly moving. One man joined the day he was diagnosed with HIV; another stumbled across an ad for the club while looking for a suicide hotline number. Not every Girth and Mirther, of course, emerged from such dire straits; some merely wanted to socialize without fretting about their bodies”
Stern also turns down another interesting direction. He cites an interview between now-deceased author, and one of the founding fathers of modern gay literature, Gore Vidal and one-time Columbia English professor Albert Goldman wherein Goldman pronounced with stifling pomposity, “homosexuality was “a more narcissistic, more self-indulgent… more self-centered and essentially adolescent lifestyle”.
Surprisingly, given Stern’s gifts for insight, he seems lost in drawing any conclusions about why those pretty (and muscular) little things at the top of the food chain invest the time they do into their own personal appearance: “Yes, for reasons that remain totally unclear, many gay men do put a disproportionate amount of effort into personal appearance.” It’s the same reason Jews put such a premium on education. For Jews, it’s to avoid ever reliving another Pogrom. After all, their education and wealth have landed many of them in key position in banking, entertainment and the government, all places that would make such a thing, if not impossible, much more difficult today.
For gay men, the stigma of AIDS, that hollowed out, lecherous look that wasn’t just a manifestation of death but an emblem of all that was wrong with the gay lifestyle to middle America was countered with the new, hypermasculinized world of the gym build. We see its residual effects today.
Still, it’s a great book review of what seems to be an interesting topic in an age when a new generation of gay men seem to have all the interest in their culture that gym rats and twinks have in fat gay men.
some of this is really silly. First of all, no one really lieks twinks except other twinks. And the fat guys definitely have a HUGE (pardon the pun) community in most major cities-Silverlake, the Castro, etc