Skipping Towards Gomorrah (22 page)

“So are you here to meet big men?” asked Shawn.

“No!” I responded, a little too quick. “I mean, I have a boyfriend already.”

“Is he big?” asked Teresa.

“No, he's skinny—not that it makes any difference to me.” I was lying, and they could tell. I'm not attracted to fat guys (sorry, Jerry), something I've always felt guilty about. But I couldn't tell Teresa and Shawn that I wasn't attracted to fat guys; if there's one place on earth a fat person shouldn't have to listen to a skinny person talk about why he's not into fat people, it would have to be at the table next to the buffet at a fat acceptance convention. Not that I needed to explain; the damage was already done. My too-quick-too-loud “No!” made it clear to my new fat friends that I'm not only not attracted to fat people, but that I wouldn't want anyone to think I might be attracted to fat people either.

“So what on earth are you doing here?” asked Shawn.

There was that question again. I didn't want to tell them the truth—I came to dine with the gluttons—but I had to say something.

“Well, I wanted to check it out. Most of the people in my family are”—I shrugged—“big. Looking around this room, I feel like I'm home for Thanksgiving. So I thought I'd come and see what the issues are.”

As lies go, it was pretty lame, not that it really mattered. Teresa and Shawn didn't seem to be listening. Their eyes were darting around the room as they wrapped the remains of their muffins up in napkins.

“We are
so
getting daggers,” said Teresa.

“Absolutely,” Shawn agreed.

Teresa put her hand on my arm and leaned in close. We were girlfriends now, and Teresa spoke to me in a throaty mockconspiratorial tone used by girlfriends all over the world, in contrast to the girlish voice she used when she was flirting with me. “You're the only halfway decent looking guy at this event, and of course everyone assumes you're an FA—”

“Teresa certainly did.” Shawn laughed.

“—and we snagged you the second you got here. There's an unwritten rule at NAAFA that says we're supposed to let the FAs circulate and give everyone a chance.”

There aren't enough FAs to go around, Teresa explained, which was why Teresa broke the ice by telling me I was in luck. A good-looking, single, presentable FA at a NAAFA convention can have his pick of the women. About 250 people were at the Westin for the NAAFA celebration, and 95 percent were women. The whole reason most women come to these events, Teresa explained, was to meet men.

“It's nice to see old friends and socialize,” Teresa laughed, “but it's the sex that keeps us coming back.”

There was nothing on the NAAFA Web site or in the brochures, I said, about the convention being a meat market. I thought we were all here to, like, advance the acceptance of fat and, you know, stuff like that.

“That's what the political fat people are here to do,” Teresa said, “but most of us are just here to have fun.”

Which is what I came for, I guess—only I was looking for a celebration of gluttony, not lust. I felt like I'd gone to a porn shoot only to find everyone sitting around fully clothed eating doughnuts.

Looking around the ballroom full of women, Teresa let out a loud sigh. She said she was worried that her last NAAFA event was going to be a total bust.

Her last NAAFA event?

“Yes,” Teresa said. “I'm just not fat enough for NAAFA anymore.”

 

A
rail-thin blonde—a physician and a NAAFA board member—stepped up to the podium at the front of the room before I could ask Teresa what she meant. How could she not be fat enough for the “size acceptance” movement? The thin woman at the podium invited all of us to attend a series of movement classes she would be teaching over the weekend, and implored the women in the room to incorporate more movement into their daily lives—not with weight loss as a goal, but only so that we could be healthy and fit whatever our size.

“Why don't we do some movement right now?” the thin woman asked.

The thin woman told us to inhale; we inhaled; the thin woman told us raise our arms up over our heads; we raised our arms up over our heads; the thin woman told us to exhale and bring our arms back down; we exhaled and brought our arms down. We repeated this movement three more times—feel the burn!—and then she led us in a big round of applause for ourselves.

Teresa and Shawn slipped out of the ballroom while the thin woman introduced the morning speaker. They'd been to a million NAAFA events, she whispered as they gathered themselves up, and they knew all the speeches by heart. They asked for my room number and told me that, gay or not, I was going to tonight's formal dinner and dance with them.

“Sleep with whoever you want to,” Teresa said, “but you're dancing with us.”

The speaker was a big woman dressed in an alarming shade of yellow, not a color fat women usually wear. Before she began her speech, the speaker asked us all to look around the room.

“Have you ever seen so many big, bright, beautiful, bountiful women?” the speaker asked.

I didn't look at the—what were they now, BBBBWs? Thanks to Teresa and Shawn, who had just finished explaining that the women of NAAFA all assumed I was there to fuck the fat chicks, I was afraid to make eye contact with anyone. I didn't want the BBBBWs to think I was undressing them with my eyes. Using my amazing powers of peripheral vision, however, I could see that I wasn't the only man in the room. There were a few others: the speaker's rail-thin husband, introduced to much applause, and two or three other skinny husbands sitting next to enormous wives. Two men—one hugely fat, one extremely short—sat at the next table over; they appeared to be a couple. While I may not have been the only man in the room, I did look like the only man who came stag.

The woman in yellow began to tell us what inspired her to write her book. She was from a long line of doctors and medical researchers, and it was something of a family tradition to donate your body to science when you died. “And when I tried to make the arrangements,” she said, looking suddenly very serious, “they told me that they didn't want my body.” Women began to hiss. “It turns out that if your body is thirty or forty pounds overweight, they don't want it.” The hissing grew louder. “I was shocked and horrified. What started out as an honorable act on my part was turned into one more time to feel ashamed about my size.”

That experience inspired her to do a collection of fat women's stories—good and bad, inspiring and infuriating—and the speaker asked if she could share some of the stories with us. One story in particular, about a woman whose doctor misdiagnosed a serious illness, got the women in the ballroom hissing again.

“Since all this doctor could see was a fat woman,” she clucked, “and not a patient, he overlooked a very serious illness that had nothing to do with her weight.”

More hissing, some boos.

“These people hate doctors,” I scribbled in my notes—and so they would. Being fat is undeniably, indisputably, irrefutably Bad For You Big Time, and while the friends and family of NAAFA members know better than to say anything negative about being heavy, a physician who avoids the subject is guilty of negligence. Of course, it's equally negligent for a physician to ignore the health complaints of a fat person, or to tell a fat woman that he can't help her at all until she loses some weight (like the doctor in the speaker's book). Still, the medical establishment drives NAAFA nuts with statements like this one:

“While obese individuals need to reduce their caloric intake and increase their physical activity, many others must play a role to help these individuals,” Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, the CDC's director, was quoted in a press release. “Health care providers must counsel their obese patients; workplaces must offer healthy food choices in their cafeterias and provide opportunities for employees to be physically active on-site; schools must offer more physical education that encourages lifelong physical activity; urban policy makers must provide more sidewalks, bike paths, and other alternatives to cars; and parents need to reduce their children's TV and computer time and encourage outdoor play. In general, restoring physical activity to our daily routines is critical.”

There isn't a single statement in the above paragraph that NAAFA would sign off on. Telling people to reduce their caloric intake presumes that obese people overeat, which NAAFA disputes; health care providers shouldn't pester their obese patients to lose weight, since being fat isn't bad for you, according to NAAFA; fat people have a right to eat the foods they enjoy and thin employers and friends shouldn't be wavin' apples under their noses; telling people they can lose weight by getting out of their cars or “restoring physical activity to [their] daily routines,” presumes that fat people aren't already active, and fat people are just as active as thin people, NAAFA argues. Just look at all the fat women at the convention today—here it wasn't even ten o'clock and they'd already raised their arms up over their heads! Three times!

Most of the stories in the speaker's book were about fat women who found love, and soon the ballroom was filled with
aww
s instead of hisses. One woman profiled in her book actually met her soul mate while filling her shopping cart with half-price Marshmallow Peeps the day after Easter. It turned out that they both shared a passion for those mushy Easter candies, which come in toxic pink and a shade of yellow very similar to the color of the speaker's dress. The story was a popular one, apparently, as most of the women in the room seemed familiar with its details. Indeed, there were boxes of Peeps for sale in the lobby, the candies having been transformed into a kind of love talisman by the women of NAAFA.

“Flirt!” the speaker implored us as she wrapped up her speech. “Flirting is such a good thing to do! Don't assume rejection! The message fat women hear all the time is, ‘Get thin, find love.' The message I want you to take away from our talk this morning is, ‘Get confident, find love.' Live your life now, as you are, and live bountifully. Flirt!”

There I was, sitting in a ballroom full of fat women, a presumed FA, and the speaker was whipping the women of NAAFA into a flirting frenzy. Feeling like I had a bull's-eye on my ass, I thought it might be prudent to get a head start, so I slipped out of the ballroom when the thin board member came back up to the podium to thank the speaker for her inspired remarks.

On my way out of the ballroom, I snagged a Danish from the buffet table. There were dozens left. No one seemed to be eating.

 

I
ate my Danish as I walked through the trade show in an adjacent ballroom, checking out the super-plus-size T-shirts, jeans, lingerie, and swimsuits. At one table I picked up some fat-activist political pamphlets: “Fat people are not unhealthy!” “Fat people do not eat too much!” “Fat is not unattractive!” Based on the condition of the buffet table after breakfast, I had to concede that fat people didn't seem to eat too much—not in public, at any rate. But the first two propositions—fat wasn't unhealthy, fat was attractive—still struck me as dubious. If you're fat and happy, then you should be willing to accept the increased health risks and live your life. Pleasurable pursuits often carry some risk. Downhill skiing carries some risk, drinking and drugs can be dangerous, sleeping around is emotionally and physically risky. An adult who pursues happiness in booze, drugs, sex, or food has to accept the higher risks; indeed, most sinners will tell you that the happiness they derive is worth assuming whatever risks come along with their pleasures, and reasonable sinners take steps to minimize their risks. But there are always risks, and there are sometimes consequences. Sinners can't really ask the Surgeon General to protect us from reality, and it's not bigotry to point out the increased health risks of being heavy or drunk or high or promiscuous.

I was lost in thought in the trade show when Teresa tapped me on the shoulder. I was happy to see her because I wanted to ask her about something she said at breakfast. What did she mean by not fat enough for NAAFA anymore? Teresa told me we would have to leave the hotel if I wanted to talk about being too thin for NAAFA. Whatever it was she had to tell me, it wasn't something she wanted other NAAFA members to overhear her discussing. We made plans to have lunch, outside the hotel.

“People in NAAFA were used to seeing me when I weighed four hundred pounds,” Teresa explained over sushi in a Japanese restaurant a mile or so from the Westin. “Women who get too skinny are looked down on at NAAFA. And God help you if you go from four hundred pounds to a normal weight. They treat you like a traitor.”

Born and raised in San Francisco, Teresa has two siblings, both heavy. While she had been fat since age five, her brother and sister didn't get fat until middle age. Intelligent and quick-witted, Teresa never went to college because she feared not being able to fit into chairs with attached desktops common in classrooms and lecture halls. Teresa went to work as a bank teller after high school; she still works at the same bank, but now she's a supervisor for the tele-banking department. She joined NAAFA in 1991 primarily to meet men who were attracted to fat women. Teresa was already something of a BBW celeb at that point—she'd had been spotted by a producer for the
Donahue
daytime talk show dancing in a night-club in New York City called Goddesses that caters to BBWs and FAs, and appeared on the talk show with her then-boyfriend. In the mid-1990s, Teresa met a fat admirer at a NAAFA event, fell in love, got married, and let her NAAFA membership lapse. She weighed about three hundred pounds at that point.

“My husband was a big-time FA,” Teresa said. “So he loved it when I started gaining weight.” Her husband wasn't a “feeder,” Teresa made clear. Feeders are men who get off on stuffing their wives or girlfriends with food, with the goal of making them as fat as possible. The wives and girlfriends of feeders are called gainers.