Best Sex Writing 2012

by Rachel Bussel

  Smack just chuckled.

  The agents were talking to me, but I wasn’t paying attention. Looking down, I noticed my right leg pistoning again, but this time I didn’t attempt to make it stop.

  “I’m not homosexual.” I had to choke out this word. “I’m not.”

  I blurted this out and the agent sitting at the desk stopped talking. The man standing chuckled and tossed his coffee into the trash, cup and all.

  “Quish says he saw you having sex with…” The agent looked into the folder in front of him. “Fear,” he said.

  “That’s a lie,” I said. I spoke with confidence. Of course, I was lying here, purposely ignoring the act. My confidence was born of the only thing of which I felt certain that night: I was no queer.

  “Quish is lying,” I said.

  The agent sat back in his chair and sighed.

  “What does Fear say?” I asked.

  I felt certain Fear would back me up. With Fear and me against Quish, we were certain to win. The agents exchanged a glance. Seeing this look pass between them, I felt emboldened. “Get Fear in here,” I said. “He’ll straighten this out.”

  “Fear’s gone,” the agent said.

  I leaned back in my seat, confused.

  The agent looked at his watch. “Right now Fear is about halfway to…” He leaned forward and checked the paperwork. “Michigan,” he said.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “We do not allow homosexuals in the United States Navy,” the agent standing said. “Fear was a homosexual.”

  “You,” the seated agent said, “are a homosexual.”

  “No,” I said, although even I knew I didn’t sound too convincing.

  The agent at the desk tugged out a sheaf of handwritten paper on a yellow legal pad and passed it over to me. When I asked what it was, he told me that Fear had written a statement. I saw the big loops of Fear’s penmanship, neat and precise. I knew the agents were watching me. I shuffled through the pages but I didn’t bother to read the words. I wondered what I would tell the people back home. I felt a sort of sick awareness growing in my gut. I thought about facing my father, my brothers. I thought about Smack, who would probably laugh at me. I had intended to use the military to turn my life around but had always imagined that the change of course—the about-face—would happen in due time, that it would simply overtake me and somehow sweep me off my feet.

  “It’s a lie,” I said.

  I hadn’t really understood the stakes earlier, but now I was terrified, blinking to keep back the tears. I joined the Navy to become a man. This thought seemed so ridiculous that I made an unbidden snort, even as I fought to stay in control of myself. I had no way of knowing that I was about to take my first few tentative steps toward manhood. I was about to be forced to tear off the mask I had worn through high school. About to stand revealed before the adult world and acknowledge who I really was: a heterosexual male who struggled with authority, an indiscriminate rebel who had a weakness for a little good head.

  I exhaled noisily.

  I realized the agents were waiting for me to speak. I supposed they wanted me to say that I was homosexual. And then I realized that I was thousands of miles away from everyone I knew, my entire family and all my friends, in a land filled with strangers. I was sitting with two NIS agents who thought they had my number. I looked at the agent standing by the file cabinet, the agent sitting behind the desk. I had always imagined it would be a therapist who suggested that deep down I was gay. These agents didn’t look half qualified. On whose authority could they tell me what I am? When I thought of it in terms of authority, the decision was easier to see. I could feel my blood rising. All in a rush, I came to the usual conclusion: No, I thought.

  Fuck you.

  I took a deep breath, my eyes narrowed.

  Earlier in the week, I had been watching afternoon TV in the lobby of the barracks. One of those old detective shows from the 70s was on—Cannon, maybe? Colombo? The detective confronted a criminal with a sheaf of paperwork. The criminal looked at it and threw it to the floor. “Dis reads like a comic book,” he said.

  I tossed Fear’s statement onto the desk and glared at the agents. “This reads like a comic book,” I said, trying to scowl convincingly.

  Together both agents sighed as one.

  They told me that I had just chosen to do it the hard way. This was true, for it was 1979: long before “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” or the current swell of popular support for allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the armed forces. I would discover that it took the better part of a year to sort this out. During that time, I would find some champions, in particular a young lieutenant junior grade who would help me get a lawyer and deal with some logistical issues. But I had already made some powerful enemies—Thompson and Quish—and I would make a few more before the year was through. As I awaited the outcome of my military tribunal, my father would grow suddenly ill, waste away, and die. By then he had discovered that I was using heroin on my visits home, and he wanted to discuss it with me. Because the stigma of heroin addiction was less damaging than the stigma of having sex with another man, I would shame myself in the last days of his life by resolving that, even if captain’s mast went badly, at least Dad would never know what happened to me in the Navy.

  To cope with my father’s death, my mother and most of my siblings would cloak themselves in the mantle of fundamentalist Christianity that swept the nation at the time. On emergency leave visits that winter, I would think of Anita Bryant and her ongoing campaign against homosexuality. You can’t go home again.

  It would be years before I stopped using drugs, even longer before I came to some understanding about my sexuality. But from this experience I learned what it felt like to be an outcast, to come face to face with my fears about the kind of man God made me to be. I would eventually be allowed to remain in the Navy, but the submarine base in San Diego was a small community, and as in all small communities, word traveled fast. On any given day, half the base wanted to kick my ass—while more than a few of the rest wanted to blow me.

  Summertime in San Diego, lying in my bed in the cool of the night. Hearing a knock on my barracks door, I would get up and reach for the doorknob, never really knowing which way it would go—proposition or fistfight—until I came out into the hallway light.

  Guys Who Like Fat Chicks

  Camille Dodero

  Dan Weiss is 26, stands five foot six, weighs about 130 pounds, and has a thin chinstrap beard outlining his jaw—without the scruff, he looks 12. This Tuesday afternoon in March is the first time we’ve ever met, even though he’s a freelance music writer and we’ve been emailing each other professionally for years.

  I first took an interest in him in September 2009, when he reviewed a live show of the Coathangers, a scrappy all-female grrrl-wave four-piece group from Atlanta. In a note that was apropos of nothing really, he mentioned that he had taken out a description of the women in the band as “super-cute,” because, he said, he didn’t want anyone to think he was into “skinny girls.”

  His Facebook profile filled in some of the blanks. He wore black-rimmed glasses and uniformly tight band T-shirts. He had shaggy black hair that fell in wiry squiggles. He played guitar and studied English at William Paterson University. There were snapshots of him posed with a beautiful young woman who appeared to be more than twice his size, wearing a French-maid Halloween costume. And there was a link to Ask a Guy Who Likes Fat Chicks, an unsigned advice-column blog “for your plumper-related stumpers.”

  Blog entries happily, ravenously, referenced double bellies, back rolls, and “big old ham thighs.” Feminine body shapes were compared to pears, apples, and in one case, a calabash squash; their weights spanned from 180 pounds to over 500. “Big Fat Sexy Kitty,” a young woman who described herself as five feet tall and 260 pounds, wrote in: “I want fat sex. I want my jiggly bits rubbed and squished and fondled sexually.”

  In person at the East Village’s Cafe Orlin, Dan exp
lains that, yes, he likes round bellies. He likes double chins. He likes breasts the size of his head. He loves flabby biceps. “Fat upper arms are awesome. I would almost say I’m an arms guy,” he says, not by any means whispering. “I didn’t know that they would be that soft. I, like, fell asleep on a girl’s arm once. I was like, ‘Wow.’”

  The Ask a Guy Who Likes Fat Chicks blog began on a whim, with Dan posting during his border-crossing bus sojourns to visit his long-distance girlfriend of two years, the smoky-eyed French maid from Toronto. The phrase “fat chicks” was meant to be a reversal of the college-humor slogan “No fat chicks.” And in the online world of Facebook groups and BBW (Big Beautiful Woman) message boards that Dan inhabits, “fat” is preferable to “overweight,” which implies a standard, or “hefty,” which belongs to the trash bag, or “heavy,” which sounds like furniture. And “fat admirer” is the most frequent shorthand for straight men who prefer fat partners—the better-known term “chubby chaser” has become associated with the gay community.

  Too lazy to consider himself an activist, but cocky enough to be the mouthy weakling “who would be getting my neck rung by the bully and still saying shit,” Dan is ego-driven enough to envision a greater purpose. “Society sucks, and society says you need male validation. If you’re trying to say fat is attractive, as a lot of women out there are, it helps to find legitimate people who find this attractive.” Or, as he put it more bluntly on his Facebook page, after contributing two pro-fat pieces to lady blog The Hairpin, “I write about my preference for fat women in hopes that other men who share my preference will make themselves known so they’ll stop being little ballsacks and let the millions of fat women in this country find them.”

  In other words, Guys Who Like Fat Chicks are not make-believe. “We’re out there.”

  Dear Askaguywholikesfatchicks:Why do you like fat chicks?

  —Sincerely, A Fat Chick

  I’m so glad you asked. But the answer is: I don’t know. It’s the same I-don’t-know that pubescent boys will tell you after waking up strangely soaked from a night of dreaming about—I don’t know, Ashley Tisdale. The real question is, why are so many Fat Admirers in denial? I can’t tell you how many guys (or gals) there are like me, and a good portion of them being in the closet makes the numbers even fuzzier. Over half the US population is considered—DUN-DUN-DUN—“overweight.” Someone’s fucking all the fatties.a Be a sport and let them know.

  Once upon a time, if a young man wanted to see a fat girl naked, he actually had to woo her. Playboy and Penthouse didn’t publish stretch-mark-mapped centerfolds. BBW nude-model paysites like PlumpPrincess.com and BigCuties.com did not exist. Dan Weiss didn’t have that problem. “An early memory was having Entertainment Weekly, cutting out pictures of Anna Nicole Smith in the Guess ads, and just studying her boobs,” he says. But unlike his fat-appreciating forebears, he had the Internet. “I was looking for bigger and bigger boobs online, and when you looked at bigger and bigger boobs, you wound up finding bigger girls. And I was like, Oh, wait. I like all of this.”

  Kevin N., a marine biology doctoral candidate at the University of Maine, Orono, figured it out on the school bus in high school. “This girl sat next to me, and she was about three hundred pounds—she was gorgeous, she was blond,” he tells me over the phone. “That day, everyone had to sit three to a seat. I was up against the window, she had to push up against me, and the other kid was sitting with one ass cheek hanging off the seat. I’m just sitting there with my backpack on my lap, like, Hunhhhh.” That was the first public erection he ever had. “You realize, I think I like this.”

  Immediately, that made Kevin different. “In high school, you have your prototypical locker-room discussion, ‘Hey, did you see so-and-so?’” he says. “You can’t come out and say, ‘Oh, no, not really,’ because then you’ll get, ‘What are you, some sort of fag?’”

  That’s what everyone assumed about the Red Sox fan anyway. A basketball player with type 1 diabetes, Kevin was five foot ten and 131 pounds at his Coventry, Rhode Island high school. Meanwhile, his “pretty” girlfriend was an all-state softball player—size 16, five feet nine inches tall, maybe 200 pounds—but she could bench more than her scrawny boyfriend. A rumor spread that he was gay, which he didn’t bother to refute. Liking a fat girl was so much more preposterous that he worried the truth would “make it snowball even more.” Kevin recently became engaged to a 25-year-old Ohio woman he met five years ago in a BBW chat room.

  Fat Admirers (FA) have historically adopted queer nomenclature for their self-discovery stages and preferences. Men who openly pursue, prefer, and date fat women are “out.” Men who like fat women but more or less hide them from friends and family are “closeted.” Men who say they like both skinny and supersize women are “bisizuals,” a controversial term that’s regarded as disingenuous in various online circles.

  Keith Ferguson, a 24-year-old FA from Westchester (“We had two African American kids in our schools and one fat girl”), wonders if he would have been treated better if he’d been gay. “The immediate reception from my friends was, ‘You’re a fetishistic freak, and I can’t believe I hang out with you.’” He confided in a friend who then spilled it to their freshman class. “It’s almost like the same level of stigma that a homosexual would deal with. But in high school, there were two ‘out’ gay kids before I turned 16. People were like, ‘Ah-hahaha, you’re gay.’ They were maybe on the outskirts of the socially accepted circle, at the end of the day, but enough people liked them that it didn’t really matter. For me, I was actually ostracized.”

  Even from his family. Keith, a six-foot-one, 180-pound blond smoker who was raised eating “twigs and sticks,” didn’t speak to his mother for years. “She always had a certain mentality. She’d make jokes like, ‘If I got that fat, just smack me.’ The Biggest Loser is her favorite show: she’s like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe how much weight they lost.’ She’s obsessed with not being fat.” There were other problems at home, but Keith’s declaration, at age 12, that he liked fat chicks was the tipping point. “For her son to prefer fat women? That was her biggest nightmare in the world,” he says. He moved out by the time he was 15.

  “If someone starts talking about guys who like fat women or girls who like fat men, the first reaction is, ‘Ewww,’” Keith says. He lovingly rubs the tummy of his 300-pound 30-something professor girlfriend in a corner booth at the Nolita bar Puck Fair. (“I’m the only fat person in my building, by far,” she admits. “I walk around this area and I never see fat people.”) Keith continues, “The second reaction is, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ The third is, ‘That is so unhealthy, and you’re killing the person you want to be with.’ It all leads up to: ‘We don’t want to talk to you. Get the fuck away.’”

  Dear Askaguywholikesfatchicks:Is it because fat girls are easy?

  —AAA

  If only. Try convincing an archetypal “easy” fat girl to do it with the light on, or let you play with her belly, or refer to her as “fat” without her sobbing and trying to throw up the nice dinner you bought her. Spend weeks convincing her you’re Not Joking, your buddy’s not gonna jump out of the closet with Tucker Max and a camera. Fat girls are just as complicated and frustrating as any other earthling.

  The scoop on Lawrence (not his real name) is that he’s charming, “impossibly smart,” and a “bachelor,” as Dan describes him—he dates, but he’s keeping his options open. The 28-year-old Upper West Side resident says, “Ninety-nine percent of the women you see in magazines, I couldn’t get it up for.” He reluctantly adopts the Fat Admirer identifier, though he winces at the self-help sound of that moniker. “Fat Admirer? Do I ever really say that? I just like fat chicks, that’s all.

  “A girl you’re in the office with will be like, ‘I’m so fat, I’m never going to find anyone,’” he offers. “I will say, ‘No, plenty of guys like that—it’s not a negative, it’s a positive.’ And these women just”—he shakes his head in bemused
disbelief—“vehemently deny it: ‘Whatever, no, that’s absolutely not true.’ And it absolutely is.” He hesitates. “I could go the next step and reveal myself,” he admits. “But I don’t want to talk about that at the office.”

  Fortunately, we’re a safe distance away from the Theater District, where Lawrence holds a desk job in the “fairly gossipy” performing-arts field and aspires to become a producer. His professional ambitions are one reason the California native asked to be identified under a pseudonym. Another, he explains from the back corner of Malachy’s Pub, a narrow West 72nd drinking trough, is the insidiously growing tentacles of the information era. “I don’t want to be the guy who talks to a reporter about anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s fat chicks or sports or having peanut butter shoved up my ass.” Peanut butter, you say? “I don’t want sexuality to be on my public dossier.”

  Lawrence has thick brown hair, a beard that grows like crabgrass, and a toothy smile. He speaks confidently over whiskey, and as he lays out the popular misconceptions of “quote-unquote” Fat Admirers, it’s with the measured air of someone delivering a prepared monologue.

  Misconception #1: Loving fat women is a fetish.

  “Steve, over there, has a type,” says Lawrence, gesturing wanly at a stranger in a hockey jersey probably not named Steve. “I have a type, too. Mine’s just bigger. He may like skinny blondes with bangs and long legs. I like pear shapes with brown hair and green eyes. I have a type—it just happens to be fat.” Besides, people aren’t fetish objects, they’re people. “It’s not like having a thing for leather.”

  Misconception #2: Fat Admirers pursue fat women because they are vulnerable prey.