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Coming In Loud and Queer
| Coming In Loud Big, Fat Hog |  |
by Joel Nichols
When I went to college in the Fall of 1998, I was fat. Not just pudgy, fat. I wore size extra-large and jeans with a 38-inch waist on the good days and with a 42-inch waist on the bad ones. I never went to the gym and loved the all-you-can-eat freshman dining hall. I wasn’t unhappy, per se, but I was conscious of the fact that I was “heavy,” “big,” FAT!
Now, on top of all of this, throw some queer into the mix. Take your average straight guy and compare him to your average gay guy ... let me guess which one is skinnier. So here I am, fat, queer, and a freshman at good old Wesleyan. (Did I mention that I was a lifeguard at the athletic center and therefore got to be around the swim and water polo teams almost daily?) I live a hefty life, but I survive.
I have my first boyfriend the following fall (still fat, mind you, but he was no Twiggy, either) and then decide to study abroad in Germany. While studying in the valleys of Bavaria and backpacking endlessly around Europe eating little more than wine, I lose some weight. I get back from my month of spring break and my friends in Germany notice I’m skinnier. I have to inherit size 36 jeans from a friend and they are far too big. None of my old clothes fits, but I wear the baggy look taken to excess until the end of the semester.
I return home and my parents don’t recognize me in the airport. Luckily, my mom eventually does notice a kid wearing a baggy, long-sleeved tee shirt “standing like” I do and we’re reunited. The rest of my family is astounded. The entire month I’m home jaws uniformly drop when I’m seen for the first time. I have to buy new clothes and get to try on sizes I had only dreamed about before: mediums and smalls for shirts and size 32 pants. I’m back at college thin and ready to start my junior year.
I go to the gym at least twice a week, eat well and I realize that I think I’m a big, fat, hog. I start noticing how fat other people are, because if you’re not deathly thin at Wesleyan, you’re at least muscular.
I also made a lot more gay friends and become very active in queer politics on campus. I don’t mean to say that the queer community here wouldn’t accept fats (although certainly the coolest ones are not the fattest ones), but rather that my own self-confidence jumped and I felt able to join in with all the merry queer fun to a greater extent than I had before.
There aren’t that many people who wear extra-large at Wesleyan. I can barely see myself in the mirror or in pictures because when I look down at my stomach, nothing has changed from my freshman year. I’m convinced that people look at me and think I’m a super-hog.
It’s hard to stop obsessing. My eating gets out of whack, alternating binge-on-carbohydrates or eat-only-one-piece-of-steamed-vegetable-every-other-day diets. I’m really tired of it. If I slack off and let myself eat and avoid crunches and a daily jog, within a week my stomach feels flabbier than hell and I look terrible. I can’t wear my favorite tight T-Shirt and I respond by trying to hide in a hooded sweatshirt.
I’m up to a size 34 now and still get worried when I look into a mirror to check out how my T-Shirt fits. My anxieties about my stomach probably won’t be gone for a while, but every day that I look in the mirror and say “I look fine” instead of “I look fat,” they are less powerful. A recent study on male anorexia recently reported what we all already knew: gay men are more likely to develop eating disorders than are straight men.
I’m sick of it. We all should be.
Joel Nichols grew up in Brandon, VT and is about to graduate from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.