Carry that Weight

I was called fat long before I ever was.

In fact, I was a scrawny, undersized runt of a boy until puberty hit around the age of 12. Then I seemed to decompress like a life raft. Suddenly I was tall and broad-shouldered. I took up space. I shot up to 6’2” and started filling out fast. But even then, I wasn’t fat. I was becoming a full-sized man, much bigger than my fearsome father, who stood 5’7” and 160 pounds on a good day.

None of that stopped my sisters from rubbing my stomach and asking when the baby was due. It was playful, even funny, the first few times. Then it became reflex.

“Fatso.” “Porky.” Words have gravity. They land and they stay.

I wasn’t athletic, though I flirted with the idea. Once I hit my growth spurt, teachers pegged me for basketball and football. But my parents didn’t care about sports, so there was no encouragement to pursue them. More importantly, I was catastrophically clumsy. I sprained both ankles repeatedly. I even broke a foot the summer I turned thirteen. All while walking. By 17, I had learned that gravity and I were not pals.

Being big, awkward, and sedentary made me an easy target.

“Big fat faggot,” they’d call me, which is fascinating, considering I was 6’2” and roughly 180 pounds.

So, I ate.

My relationship with food began at the family dinner table. Money was tight. Leaving food on your plate was forbidden. I loved everything we ate, so that rule suited me just fine. What I didn’t understand then was that my tiny father, who devoured mountains of food every night, only ate once a day. He worked maintenance in a Manhattan high-rise.

“Food makes me slow,” he’d say. So, he saved it all for the evening.

One night, when I was about ten, I asked for seconds. My parents practically applauded.

“You’re becoming a MAN,” my father said, beaming.

In a world where I was the “fat faggot,” that sentence felt like oxygen. It was masculinity, instantly and conveniently served on a plate. I started matching my father bite for bite. We were the MEN of the house. It fit neatly into the strange emotional triangle I occupied with my parents, especially my mother, where I was both child and adult confidant. No matter what the world said, the pile of food in front of me meant I was a man.

I ate it all.

Still, I wasn’t fat. I was burly. Solid. Teachers still wanted me on the field. But the words never changed.

Fat. Fat faggot.

There is a lie we don’t interrogate nearly enough: That weight is simply a choice.

“Just stop eating.”

“Go to the gym.”

“Have some discipline.”

If it were that simple, the world would not be a graveyard of miracle fat burners, starvation diets, juice cleanses, cabbage soups, and now injectable salvation. Entire industries do not exist to solve imaginary problems, but they thrive by selling hope to the desperate.

Being overweight remains one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination. It is still open season. Even people who know oppression intimately — because of race, sexuality, gender, class — will still reach for size as a weapon without hesitation. The cruelty hides behind the word health.

I learned early that this wasn’t just about desire. It was about permission.

In the early days of my career at Billboard, when I was young and increasingly influential as a music journalist, a “friend” took me aside. She told me, gently and with love that I was blocking my own success by being grossly overweight. The thing is, I wasn’t fat. Not even close. I simply wasn’t skinny. I took up space. I didn’t photograph sleek.

As brutal as that conversation was, I don’t believe she was trying to hurt me. She was trying to prepare me for a world that rewards bodies as much as brains. And the most unsettling part is this: I still wonder if she was right.

I have had a brilliant, meaningful career. But I did not reach the stratospheric heights others did; people with equal or even lesser talent, but bodies that read as disciplined, desirable, safe. Buff is a credential. Thin is shorthand for control. And fat, or even just not thin, becomes a question mark hanging over your legitimacy.

“If he can’t control what he eats, can he do the hard work required to win?”

How could that question not have been asked about me?

I will always wonder what my path might have been had I taken her advice instead of being wounded by it.

Then I came out as a gay man. That’s when I met true body fascism.

My friends were obsessed with twink bars. I didn’t belong. Too big. Too hairy. Just too much. Rejection followed me into the gay world like a stalker. Until one night, alone, I wandered into a bar called the Spike.

And there they were.

Men of every size. Men who looked like me. In that room, I was suddenly thin. I was welcomed. Encouraged. I was even encouraged to eat. Eventually, the pounds did pile on. I moved from burly to bearish. I liked it, but I still didn’t want to be fat. I wanted my high-school body back.

The bear community gave me something rare: A place where men whom the larger world dismissed as invisible or grotesque were considered desirable, magnetic, and deeply sexy. In that space, bodies like mine were not apologies. They were currency.

But even refuge has dark, even bleak corners. Size can become fetish. Desire turns into expectation. Some sub-sections drift into fat/gainer encouragement, where love gets confused with appetite and getting bigger becomes proof of belonging. What begins as sanctuary can quietly become another cage.

Then AIDS happened.

Before we understood the virus, bodies became evidence. Thin meant sick. Big meant healthy. Suddenly, the men who had rejected me circled back. I was desirable now. Safe. I preferred my bear world, but I didn’t hate the attention.

Until I realized some men didn’t want me.

They wanted a prototype.

One night, after going home with a stunning man from the Spike, lying in the afterglow, he said,
“Thank you. I can always count on you chubby guys to make me feel better.”

I asked, “Don’t you like me?”

“I like how hard you tried. But I’d never date a guy like you.”

That sentence has an echo. It turned the word chubby into an eviscerating insult. Call me fat, but do not ever call me chubby.

For a while, I became one of those militant bears who demonized anyone under 200 pounds. Then I became a professional yo-yo dieter. That lasted until I turned 35 and was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.

That woke me up.

Within twenty-four hours, I joined a gym and hired a trainer. I lost 80 pounds, dropping from about 320 to 240 in a year. On my frame, 240 looked like healthy. I was strong. Clear. Happy. I was also off my diabetes meds.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, my partner of 9 years — who had encouraged the weight loss — told me I was no longer attractive to him. I panicked. And I ate and ate. He left anyway, for a man even larger than I had ever been. The affair had started before the criticism. He just needed an exit.

I sacrificed myself to keep him. Just like I always had.

I ghosted my trainer. Quit the gym. Hid in shame. When the weight returned, the bear world celebrated me again.

“You look better with meat on your bones.”

I devoured the praise. And more food.

Years of therapy led me to a realization my therapist had suggested before; one I had fiercely rejected. I was an addict. Just like my father. Except my drug was food.

That realization didn’t clear the path forward. It made it more complicated. You cannot live without food. You must eat to survive. You must touch the very thing that hurts you every single day.

Bingeing carries its own irresistible thrill and inevitable crash. It begins with a brief floating moment where the world goes quiet and warm and nothing hurts, followed by physical sickness, nausea, shame, and the slow emotional hangover of self-disgust. Over and over. Relief followed by ruin.

Eventually, I tried the “love me, love my fat” era. I even modeled in magazines aimed at fans of bear-identified men. It was fun. It was also a band-aid on a wound I hadn’t cleaned.

There were nights when the taste of a hamburger was more satisfying than kind words or a hug. It was more reliable. There were also nights of hiding wrappers, of labored breathing from overeating, of nausea so intense it felt like a hangover. There is no love of your fat in those moments.

Then I met the man I would marry.

He loves my body. But more importantly, he loves me at any size. For the first time, I wasn’t being recruited into someone else’s identity war. I was allowed to be a person.

Today, I am back on the road of better health. Again. But this time the work is different. It isn’t about shrinking for love or expanding for belonging. It’s about untying food from masculinity, from worth, from safety, from success. It’s about making peace with the part of me that still believes eating is both salve and celebration. Some days I look him in the eye and ask him to let me be free.
More often now, he does. But there are days when he wins and I lose.

The hard truth is that this road may never end.

But I’m walking it with open eyes. I try to follow one piece of advice that’s actually helped: eat when you’re physically hungry, not when you’re emotionally starved. It works about half the time. Right now, I’ll take that.

I no longer believe that my body is a problem to be solved or a compromise to be negotiated. It is a history I carry, a future I shape, and a home I am finally learning to live inside.

For the first time, I am willing to be alone rather than surrender that home to the appetites, fears, and judgments of others. That resolve has cost me belonging. It can be lonely. I have had to gently refuse the idea that “one piece of cake won’t kill you,” because some day it might. Or worse, it might trigger the binge that follows.

Still, I know this is worth it.