by Guy Branum
I don’t know if anyone ever really loved my dad before I met him. His parents were cold and indifferent, blaming him for his unexpected birth and their tepid relationship. My mother became his wife through an unexpected pregnancy, and spent her life understanding that her affection and housework were the tools she used to earn her room and board. My sister showed my father great affection, but she made it a game of manipulation.
Maybe my dad trying to love me was like me trying to wash his car at eighteen months. Maybe he was trying to do a thing he’d never really seen. Maybe he was scared of it. Maybe when you don’t go to college and write papers about Coriolanus, you never pick up the things you hate about yourself and look them in the eye. Maybe when you grow up in the arid lands of Shinbone, you never get to see a real rose, and the best you know is a cactus rose.
As time went on, my father learned to be kind. When I was in high school, while we were at a convention for one for the many organizations I participated in, he saw a teacher and another student exclude me from a planned trip to Medieval Times. In a fit of solidarity, he took me to Disneyland, just for dinner. You cannot imagine what a decadent act this was for my father, paying a full day’s admission to Disneyland at seven p.m. It was wonderful.
These gestures were rare and strange, but they came. Then I came out of the closet, and things got worse, but then they got better again.
Then my sister had a child and abandoned it with my parents, and my father finally had a child who wasn’t crazy and who wasn’t Ranse Stoddard, and I got to watch him grow to truly, and maybe generously, love someone.
In December of 2015, I called my parents on my way home from work. My dad answered, and we engaged in the stilted, bad conversation we’d had on the phone for years. The brief dance before he handed the phone to my mom. Over decades of doing it, I’d slowly learned that in that conversation, there was always a little hunger. He wanted to have more to say, he wanted us to have something we could talk about. I’d tried; occasionally, I’d ask him about work and let us feel like our relationship had texture.
On this occasion, he asked me what I was doing, and I said I was going to record my podcast.4 You should understand that my parents have paid as little attention as possible to my creative work throughout my professional life because they are reasonably certain that everything I say is a description of anal sex or a criticism of them (or both). They do not want to know about my creative life, but that is a different story. What you need to know is my father said, “Now, your podcast. What’s that?” And I had explained to him what my podcast was repeatedly by that point. I’d been doing it for a full two years. I had told him, and he’d not cared enough to pay attention, and I was done. I conveyed this to him as clearly as possible: “I’ve told you about it many times before. If you actually wanted to know what it was, you would have paid attention.” And then I asked to talk to my mom.
A few days later, I called to talk to my mom, and my dad told me he’d listened to my podcast. The episode that week was a throwback where we talked about pop culture from fifty years before, 1965, a period when my dad was actually familiar with pop culture. He liked it. He talked to me about it. He tried.
And two months later, at a Division of the State Architect conference in Oakland, he had a massive heart attack and stopped being.
And now I find myself needing to ask a question about wiring, or noticing particularly good wall texture or a poorly graded slab, and I pack that thing away. I put it in the place where I put things to talk to my dad about, because conversation with Mom burns on its own, but conversation with Dad needs this fuel. Then I remember he is gone and the fuel is for no one but me.
Maybe my dad loved me. Maybe he loved me as well as he could love anyone in 1975. Maybe he learned how to love better from loving me. Maybe he watched three foreign-language movies5 at my behest even though he hated “reading movies” and loved two of them.6 Maybe he went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and SFMOMA even though he didn’t want to, and he enjoyed it. Maybe he was proud of how big I was, and even, eventually, proud of how well reasoned I was. Maybe he once spent two hours playing Catchphrase with the family and never once suggested anyone should be working. Maybe he saw me do stand-up at a theater where the Beatles had played, or read an article I’d written in the New York Times, and realized the skills I had were something he could be proud of.
Maybe.
But this is the West, sir, and when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
* * *
1. For people too young to remember a world before ubiquitous cable, instead of having a designated cable network for specific types of entertainment, we just had specific dayparts. TCM was summertime at night on non-network stations, Cartoon Network was Saturday morning, and ESPN was Sunday afternoon. It was purest barbarism.
2. God knows my sister wasn’t going to do it.
3. Educating Rita, discussed in a later chapter of this book, contains a scene where the protagonist’s husband takes her schoolbooks and burns them in the backyard. That scene is frighteningly evocative to me.
4. It’s called Pop Rocket. It’s a pop culture roundtable show. Download and listen today!
5. All About My Mother, Monsoon Wedding, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
6. Not the gay one.
SHOULDER TO HIP
THE MEMORY IS OF bracing clarity. It involves 20/20, a newsmagazine hosted by Barbara Walters, a dazzlingly famous person everyone talked about, and Hugh Downs, a man who exemplified everything we looked for in news anchors in the 1980s (which is to say he had no discernible qualities). That it was 20/20 also means it was Friday. It means I was pumped: An entire weekend lay before me, and for two whole days, I didn’t have to go to school and have my handwriting criticized by adults, nor my mannerisms criticized by my peers. It means it was ten p.m., and I had just watched two hours of very good ABC children’s programming. This was not TGIF—that quartet of hallowed sitcoms most readily associated with Full House or Family Matters—but the years before TGIF, when ABC could simply run a block of semi-bad family sitcoms without feeling the need to be so whorey as to brand it. Mr. Belvedere was probably involved.
I was having a pretty good night. Maybe my best friend, Ramon, had come over to play, as he did so frequently on Fridays. Maybe my dad had gone and picked up food from McDonald’s or another of my most beloved purveyors of victuals. We cannot know for certain, but I am setting the stage to make clear to you that I was in the rather delicious mood of a young man who was well fed, played out, and unbounded by the constraints of a bedtime. And then, like that, at ten p.m., 20/20 came on.
If you are under the age of thirty-five, you probably don’t really know what a newsmagazine is, but 20/20 was the gold standard. Back when we had only three to four networks, there was no cable news, so the worst parts of cable news—the sensationalist investigative stories meant only to make you upset, as well as celebrity interviews—became a nighttime fixture. Basically, Anderson Cooper 360 was one hour of television every week that aired opposite prime-time soaps. We loved it.
Also, we needed something to do with Barbara Walters before she found her true calling: making perimenopausal women fight for sport on The View.
20/20 began with its opening teases of what would be on the show, and Barbara, America’s non-rhotic news-reading sweetheart, started saying something about America’s obesity epidemic. They ran B-roll of fat people, as you do, and the B-roll featured fat people who were shot from shoulder to hip. I realized every time I’d seen B-roll of fat people, their faces had been cut off or pixelated. As a nine-year-old fat person, I didn’t entirely understand why they were doing that. Clearly, they were implying that being fat was so humiliating that no one’s identity or personhood should have to be associated with such an indignity. But didn’t they realize that we fat people spent our lives with our fat heads attached to our fat bodies? What were they trying to achieve?
They were trying to avoid shami
ng people by merely implying that their fatness was so horrible their identities needed to be obscured. “Oh, don’t worry, lardo, we’ll blur your face so people won’t realize you’re the wide load we’re talking about. You know, the way they do when they see you in real life.” This was the 1980s equivalent of the 1920s newspaper photos of men arrested in gay bar raids with black boxes over their faces to obscure their shameful identities.
The moment filled me with real anger, because it seemed evident to me that the result was basic dehumanization. Even today, when fat people are represented on the news, we are represented as meat. Lumps of meat and fat lumbering through a mall or parking lot. There is no story, no humanity. We are livestock.
I have always been fat. From my ten-pound birth to my grade school years of constantly outgrowing clothes, through high school weight training and football when I worked out four hours a day, through diets and self-hatred and sweatiness and people not wanting to sit next to me on the plane. I have been fat. So this was, I suppose, my first moment of realizing that this basic building block of my identity influenced the way people understood me.
The clearest message sent to me by popular culture is that, as a fat person, I will not do important things. Fat people are not protagonists. We are not dynamic. We do not solve the problem. We are, in fact, often seen as the problem. We can be the friend1 or associate2 of the person who is solving the problem, but we are usually too cowardly3 or lazy4 to assist that person properly. The very premise of the Eddie Murphy iteration of The Nutty Professor is that the lead character, Sherman Klump, is so docile and incompetent as a fat person, he must be transformed into a not-fat person, Buddy, to be brave and “get the girl,” Carla.5 When Sherman defeats Buddy through an internal war for self-acceptance, the resolution doesn’t involve Carla falling for Sherman, just a platonic friendship and a chaste dance. We need not discuss Sherman’s family, the perpetually eating, perpetually farting, fat-suit-wearing Klumps. Just know that we are children, ruled by our appetites, incapable of anything else.6
You’ve got Otto von Bismarck and Winston Churchill and Catherine the Great and Oprah Winfrey just sitting there in history, proving to us that fat people are perfectly capable of forging a German nation or media empire out of blood and iron. We don’t usually think about those people, though. We think about fat the way 20/20 told us to: Fat people don’t have heads, and heads don’t have fat people.
The best example is the NBC reality competition show The Biggest Loser. On the show, a dozen or so fat people showed up to stop being fat. They had no other characteristics. They had race and gender, I guess, but you never got a sense that they had a life worth living. They had loved ones who worried, but not careers that rewarded them. They were sad and long-suffering, not exciting or full of ideas. The fat people who came to be on The Biggest Loser were arriving to have people, real humans, yell at them until they, the competitors, lost enough weight to be human beings.
There was always a moment with every competitor when one of the trainers would come and yell at them about how they weren’t trying hard enough and were complicit in their own suffering. Then the fat person would blubber about Their Sad Truth. Sometimes it was a tragic loss of a family member, or someone who had never loved them, or something about food being love. The point was, we were led to believe that every fat person had a Freudian closet containing some issue that, when revealed, would break the spell, allowing them to unfat and finally turn into a real boy or girl.
We watched them lose weight by being yelled at and humiliated on-camera, then drugged and dehydrated off-camera. When someone won, we cried because we believed fatness was a dragon that could be slain, and then the person went off and gained all or most of the weight back. They never got to have a personality then, either.
This narrative illustrates the complex, nearly Calvinist construction of obesity with which America is in love. We need to believe that fat people can lose the weight. We cannot accept that it might be an aspect of their—our—lives created by genetic predisposition or circumstance. We need to know fat people could lose the weight, because if they don’t, it’s a choice. It’s a question of morality. Being obese is dangerous and bad and must be opposed with every fiber of your being. And if you do that, you will be transformed. If you just eat less and exercise, you can be saved. Salvation through starvation.
Kate, the fat sister on NBC’s This Is Us, is a fictionalized version of a Biggest Loser competitor. She has no qualities. She’s thirty-seven years old and is wholly devoid of skills or passions other than kind of liking singing. While one of her brothers earned a graduate degree and the other bounced between acting jobs, Kate did nothing of note or merit. We can assume her time was spent romancing wheels of Camembert and being too scared to talk to a boy because she knows she’s too fat to be loved.
Have any of these people met a fat girl? A real Kate, in the real world, would be awesome. She’d have tons of gay friends and go to drag bingo a lot. She’d have learned to be fearless with fashion, because people are going to judge her anyway. She’d have a joke to make when she’s too sweaty. She’d have broken a chair before, and she’d know what to do when it happens the second time. Chrissy Metz gives great soul to the character, but as she’s written, Kate is a cul-de-sac of a human being who has tasted nothing of the world except cheesy fries. That ain’t any of the fat bitches I know.
The reason the writers of This Is Us cannot imagine Kate doing anything valuable is because her existence as a fat person means she is doing things that are unvaluable. If Kate is fat, she cannot have been journeying toward unfatness with all of her power. If she, say, had become one of Canada’s most beloved stand-ups,7 or become a New York Times columnist,8 or become the most powerful human being in world media,9 we might have to contemplate the idea that her time was well spent. We might say, “Yeah, she got fat, but she had some shit going on.” Kate is deserving of personhood and dynamism only during those times when her singular purpose is unfatting herself.
Famously, this is a part of Chrissy Metz’s contract. She is required to lose weight so that she can tell Kate’s story of triumph. Happiness and success are there for Kate, but only in her future, only as part of her narrative of losing fat, and only if she doesn’t fail.
And we need fat people to fail. We need them to be so dumb and lacking in willpower that said salvation is never actually achieved. We need to know that their immorality is inherent so we can believe our own thin morality is inherent. Our narratives about conquering fatness aren’t about saving fat people, it’s about letting thin people feel like they’re already saved, members of the chosen people.
We fat people are bound to live our lives tied to this struggle. Until we’re done being fat, the trying has to be all of who we are. We are told that we must seek exercise to rid our bodies of their fatness, but we also know we’ll be ridiculed for exposing our gross bodies at a beach or gym. We are told that inside of us is a thin person screaming to get out, and we must thereby know our bodies are prisons for some other, better people.
This narrative is deeply damaging. I know you think you’re doing something great when you tell me my weight predisposes me to diabetes or knee deterioration, but what you’re really telling me is that I should fear using my body as it is. One time in my mid-twenties, I went to a new doctor who told me that my weight was more dangerous to my health than a crack addiction. At that moment I had to step back and legitimately consider, should I get a crack addiction? I’d definitely lose weight, and the good doctor did say it was healthier than my baseline existence.10
Popular culture demands that we fat people recognize our existence as an overwhelming crisis. It’s a thing to be expunged, not managed. When I go on a hike or some other group physical activity, I’m always freaking out. Will I get too exhausted? Will I sweat too much? I’m not worried about it being painful or inconvenient for me. I’m worried about the extent to which my different physical reaction to situations will mark me as Other.
On a recent vacation, I went on a snorkeling trip. It was a physical activity with which I wasn’t familiar, and I began cycling through questions about how my body would fail me this time. My traveling companion and I went to get flippers from the resort, and I discovered that they did not have any to fit my gigantic feet. They told me I could go without them if I wanted, but that it would be hard to keep up with everyone else. I slid further into panic. As the boat took us out to the coral reef we were going to swim around, I started preparing myself with the stories of shame and fatness I was certain to encounter. We got to the reef and jumped out, and I started working with determination to overcome the inadequacies of my body so I wouldn’t be ashamed.
Wanna know what? I was fine. I’m a strong swimmer. I have big feet, so I didn’t need flippers. I kept up with everyone. My traveling companion, the very image of masc gay gym muscle, panicked the moment we got in the water and climbed back up in the boat, but I did just fine. Nevertheless, it took me until halfway through the expedition to realize I didn’t need to keep bracing for the moment my fat body would fail me.
Western literature’s greatest fat character is Tracy Turnblad, the Baltimore high school student at the center of the 1988 John Waters film Hairspray and its ensuing stage adaptation.11 Tracy is distinct from most other fat characters in that she is very good at something. Fat characters are typically slow and sad, needy and childish. They’re generally some version of Shelley Winters in The Diary of Anne Frank.12 They are obstacles for nonfat heroes. Tracy, however, is talented and she knows it. She’s the best at something. She gets to be confident, she gets to challenge the social order. She gets the guy, and we understand why. Tracy is like the fat girls I know.