gay-coded early 2000s barbie villian

When I was recently invited by a queer student group to give a reading at their college, it was faggots who got angry at me after I read from my book Deviant Propulsion. One young man angrily confronted me, “The things you write are not making room for discussion or acceptance! My parents love and accept me, but they would NEVER accept the things you write in your book!” Hmm. How weird to be in this position, I thought, but decided to say what I felt was best. “First of all, your parents SHOULD love and accept you, so stop giving them brownie points for something they SHOULD do! Second, this is your world too, stop walking on eggshells and take up some space! And not only that, but do you realize you’re asking me to write different books for the love of your parents? You need to get off that shit right away and get crazy and open to the possibilities of your life!”

When I was twenty, everybody hated us, and in many ways I can look back on that now and realize how great it was for me. Never once have I written a poem or anything else with the love and acceptance from others in mind—my writing is mine, and has always been mine! Society’s hatred has kept me true to my creative punch. But how do I get young faggots to realize that this time of assimilation means that we need to become even angrier and more rebellious and creative so we can change the grim, apathetic direction in which we’re all headed?

So much attention and so many resources now go towards creating a pro-gay military, and this has brought us a horrifying sense that we need to serve, we need to sacrifice, in order to be loved and accepted. FUCK ALL THAT! Being queer in this brutally homophobic world is more than enough sacrifice! And with the pro-gay military also comes the ever streamlined pro-military gay body, worked on obsessively, a machine for the common good of the state. It’s never been more unacceptable to be fat, and no one knows this more than fat faggots like me. Being fat these days is not just unacceptable because it’s unappealing and gross to mainstream society, but it’s also now seen as contrary to the very movement for acceptance. The mainstream war machine regiments our appearances, actions, and lives. Fat bodies do not fit into military-issue battle fatigues!

An old friend asked me once, “Doesn’t it disturb you that men only want to be with you because you’re fat?”

“NO! I LOVE IT! How about your boyfriend? Would he like it if you got fat?”

“NO! He would LEAVE ME!”

"Ah, I see! Doesn’t it disturb you that he only wants to be with you because you’re skinny?”

My friend laughed, “OK, you got me!” His mouth watered as I drank my delicious chocolate milk shake. He loved chocolate milk shakes, but would only drink them vicariously through me. While others live in fear at the gym, I’m eating a cream-filled cannoli with a smiling man’s hard cock hiding inside. Our love truly is free because it’s unsanctioned! The Joy of Gay Sex has no chapter for us, and I’m glad! Fuck the experts and their claustrophobic parameters!

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."

@iliveinprocrasti-nationn real!! i remember something similar, in one course, with the number of classes we were allowed to miss before it impacted our grade. i tried to argue that if i used them for the holidays, i wouldn’t have any left in case i got sick. they were like “well, the point is you can use it for whatever you want, so if you choose to use it for holidays, it’s still fair.” but it’s not, because the christian students didn’t need to choose between taking off holidays and having off days left!

“YES MAYBE YOU SHOULD!”

I'm lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.

"Inside," he said.

"Okay," I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.

But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.

"Outside!" he said.

You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. "You go wherever you want!" I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.

But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn't unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn't being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son's problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.