Dense

I realized I was gay when I was sixteen.

My friend kissed me, I kissed him back, and then I left his house and drove home. I avoided him for the rest of the school week, but that Friday night, I emailed him asking if I could come over. I knew his parents would be gone. I remember him opening the door, me walking in and then kissing him again. I don’t think we spoke. I think it was all understood. That was the first day I felt another guy’s body next to mine, and it was revelatory. I’d actually lost my virginity to my girlfriend not long before that, and that was also revelatory in that it didn’t feel like much, It still didn’t when we tried a second and third time. I actually had begun to suspect that sex just wasn’t all everyone talked it up to be, but really, just kissing a man made me feel more than I did from the entire physical scope of my relationship with my girlfriend.

Looking back, I can pinpoint a few incidents that made more sense in light of me being gay. I’d had a strong friendship with a boy in grade school, and I was really aggravated anytime he wanted to have his neighbor over to play when I was there. As an adult, I can look back and surmise that I probably had a little gay boy crush on my friend, and even though I didn’t consciously process it as that, it was there, making me act in a way that I would have otherwise. But by and large (ha), I can’t recall feeling a physical attraction to men before that kiss,

That’s not to say that I didn’t have those feelings. No, I did, but a potent cocktail of being sheltered and naive and just a little dense prevented me from realizing them. If you’d asked sixteen-year-old me if I liked girls, I’d probably say, “Sure, I guess,” because that is how guys were supposed to be. I also thought I liked pop punk and wearing clothes from Pacific Sunwear. (Hey, it was the late 90s.) However, had I had any experience with introspection or talking about my feelings at all, I might have realized, “Oh, actually maybe I don’t like girls.” And had my friend not planted one on me that afternoon, it might have taken me even longer to get there.

If you have read the first two entries in this series, you might know where I’m going with this.

I dated girls though the end of high school, strictly for show, and I covertly had sex with my friend until the beginning of senior year, when he simply stopped talking to me. He acted like he couldn’t see me. Yes, that hurt badly, but I kind of get it now. He’s married with children. I don’t think he was gay, really. I don’t think he had a way of processing what we’d done. Well before high school ended, however, I was very clear that I was gay. I liked men. I wanted to date men. I wanted to have sex with men. It had taken me a while, but once I got pushed in the proper direction, I figured it all out. And then I began the labor that every queer person undertakes in order to understand what their orientation means for every other aspect of their future — basically, what of “normal life” just wont be for them.

You probably won’t have kids.

You may never get married.

If you do, it might not look like the traditional weddings your family dragged you to all your life.

You might have to come out over and over again, and ever time you do the specter of a bad reaction is going to make your stomach flip a little.

You might not ever get to perform the act of being in love with someone, because it’s not a done thing where you are, to say nothing of the places where holding hands with your boyfriend might get you cracked over the head.

And even if you do live in a place where you can publicly show affection with a person of the same sex, that little voice that asks “is this really safe?” may never be permanently silenced.

The list goes on. But it doesn’t matter how long the list is because eventually almost all queer people decided that despite all the ways their sexuality will complicate their lives, they should come out anyway, because it is just so much easier to be yourself. The moment you stop denying who you are — to yourself, to others — it feels like you get to unclench a muscle that’s been flexed your whole life. It’s a relief, bumpy road notwithstanding.

I came out to my friends in college, to my folks right before I graduated, and I slid through my twenties feeling pride in living a life that skipped past a lot of the milestones that my hetero contemporaries celebrated. They weren’t for me. I was living my own life. I’d stepped away from the path I was expected to follow.

Having done that, it’s all the stranger to me that it was only a year ago that I realized not only that I’m more or less explicitly attracted to bigger men but also I have a profound desire to become a bigger man myself. I’ve thought about this a lot, and while I suppose it’s possible I got converted, vampire-style, by a night with a sexy guy with a belly and now I must walk in the earth on the hunt for more husky men, it’s more likely analogous to me being gay and just being too sheltered and naive and dense to realize.

In college, most gay guys I knew fell into the very narrow range between twink and jock, and the guys who were heavier were either actively trying to not be that way or were presumed to be trying to not be that way. Trips to West Hollywood only further cemented that perception. The media that catered to gay men my age did as well. Based on what I was taking in, it seemed like I had only two choices: be thin or get jacked, and I chose one or the other depending on what year we’re talking about.

But I can’t blame gay culture only for this. I grew up seeing fatness as a failure. People who were overweight were too lazy to exercise or so morally weak that they couldn’t stop themselves from eating too much. If they had the agency to not be fat, they wouldn’t be fat. This is the message I got from my family, from the town I grew up in and from being an American, where we cast a judgmental eye on fatness even though there are many fat Americans. Everyone was better off being less fat, as a rule.

So that’s two societal biases, then: one against being gay and one against being fat. (Yes, there are many others, but these are the most germane to what I’m talking about, and as a cisgendered white man, I don’t have the necessary perspective to discuss all the rest with any credibility.) Although people would largely say that it should not be this way, I’d say it’s pretty much agreed that being gay or being fat both present a person with certain complications and more complications overall than if they were not gay or not fat. And dumb, skinny sixteen-year-old me was able to look at all the challenges that a life as a gay person posed and nonetheless say, “It’s still worth it,” and start the process of coming out. It’s amazing what a sex drive and a sense of self-worth can do.

However, just based on my personal experience, I would say that the bias against being fat was even greater, to the point that my brain couldn’t really conceive of me being attracted to fat men or giving myself the permission to become one. It remained locked away in the recesses of my subconscious, even after years of therapy and introspection, until it finally emerged in the form of surprising boners I got from looking in the mirror and finally having sex with fat guys and realizing how much more satisfying it was.

In many ways, realizing I’m a gainer has felt like coming out again. I went from not having a clue about an aspect of my life to fairly quickly embracing this new thing regardless of how much it would change the way I live. I went from being terrified of things that seemed wrong — putting another guy’s dick in my mouth, for example — to savoring that experience because the thought of doing something taboo made me more excited to do it. And similarly I went from sucking in my gut all the time and especially in pictures to feeling proud and even sexy for publicly posting a pic where you could see just how much of a belly I’d gotten. And just as I inched toward coming out, dropping hints and testing the water before I could finally just say “I’m gay,” I’m now casually commenting on how big guys are hot, and how I’ve put on weight and am not especially eager to lose it, gradually getting to the point where I can openly discuss how I’m a gainer and how good it feels to see myself transform into a big, beefy guy with a belly.

It was not expected that I would be gay, and that I would reject a lot of societal norms in doing so, and it sure as hell surprised me to find out I’m a gainer and that I’m rejecting norms of gay society as I grow.

The one difference, I have to say, is that when I stopped and really thought about it, I could pick out moments throughout my life where I showed signs of being gay, of preferring boys over girls but wanting to do feminine things that other boys didn’t. There aren’t a lot, but they were there. Looking back on my life before the past year, however, I try and think about moments where I was especially interested in a fat guy or had any awareness of wanting to be fat myself, and I have basically nothing.

Basically.

Well, two things.

And those are both stories which will be the subjects of future posts.

This is a blog I’m writing about my journey to body acceptance. This is a work of creative nonfiction, in that these events did happen to me, but for the sake of narrative coherence, I’m moving some details around. The quotes I’m putting into my recollections are, obviously, a combination of what I remember and what fits the essence of what was communicated during the various conversations I’m recalling.