Skipping Towards Gomorrah

by Dan Savage

  Teresa introduced herself and then introduced me to her girlfriend, Shawn, who was sitting to her right peeling the bits of paper off the bottom her own oily bran muffin.

  “So is this your first time at a NAAFA event?” asked Teresa, batting her eyes and popping a tiny piece of bran muffin into her mouth. I nodded.

  Still picking away at her muffin, Teresa asks why I wasn’t at last night’s dance.

  “Late flight,” I lie.

  My flight was late, as are all flights into San Francisco. I missed Friday night’s sit-down dinner (“A Mexican feast!”) on account of my delayed flight, but the dance was still going strong when I arrived at the hotel shortly after midnight. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa dance “music” drifted down the hall from the hotel’s ballroom as I waited for the elevator, room and mini-bar keys in hand. I intended to head up to my room, brush my teeth, change my shirt, and then head back down to the dance. But as I sat on the edge of the bed, flossing bits of airline food from between my teeth, a grim CNN anchor warned me that the home video I was about to see was very disturbing. A mass of people at a wedding reception were jumping up and down on a ballroom dance floor when all of a sudden the dancers seemed to dip in unison. The dance floor collapsed under their weight, and the dancers disappeared in a cloud of dust. When the dust cleared, there was a black hole where the dance floor used to be. People screamed, the tape ended, and the anchorwoman informed me that twenty-five people were known dead, and many, many more were buried under the rubble. Suddenly dancing with a lot of fat people in a hotel ballroom didn’t seem like the best idea.

  The next morning, I headed down to the hotel’s ballroom for a buffet breakfast and a speech by Bonnie Bernell, author of Bountiful Women: Large Women’s Secrets for Living the Life They Desire. I rode an elevator down to the lobby with three hugely fat women. Two appeared to weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds—fat, yes, but reasonably robust looking—while the third must have weighed upwards of six hundred pounds. She didn’t look healthy; she looked like a woman dissolving in a vat of oil. My perception may have been colored by the fact that this woman was too fat to walk. She sat in a motorized chair and chatted with her friends as we rode down the lobby.

  The urge to do the math was irresistible.

  The posted weight limit in the elevators at the San Francisco Airport Westin is 3,500 pounds. Exceed an elevator’s posted weight limit, and its cable will snap, I assume, sending the elevator and everyone on it plunging down the elevator shaft. Why post a weight limit otherwise? Quickly doing the math in my head, I figured that seven—count ’em, seven—five-hundred-pound women would have to join me on the elevator before we exceeded the weight limit, snapped the cable, and plunged to our deaths. While there was no shortage of five-hundred-pound women at the NAAFA convention, I didn’t need to worry about plunging to my death. The Westin’s elevators were pretty small; you would need a shoehorn, a snowplow, and a fifty-gallon drum of vegetable oil to wedge seven five-hundred-pound people into one.

  The hall outside of the ballroom was full of fat people—some reasonably fat (think Bennett), some distressingly fat (think Falwell) —and almost all of them were women (think Michael Medved). The gender imbalance struck me as odd, as there were plenty of photos of fat men on NAAFA’s Web site, including famous fat men, like Winston Churchill, Orson Welles, John Candy, and Santa Claus.

  Feeling rather conspicuous, I made my way to the registration table, where I picked up my information packet and meal tickets; then I headed to the ballroom. I was anxious to share my first meal with people who didn’t feel guilty about eating, and looking forward to the first guilt-free Danish of my adult life. According to my information packet, NAAFA members were fat, happy, healthy, and attractive. NAAFA’s FHHA membership rejects anti-fat bigotry, celebrates people of all sizes, and does battle with the evil airlines, a biased medical establishment, and the diet industry that, according to NAAFA, actually makes people fatter. (Not that there’s anything wrong with being fat, of course. But if you don’t want to get fat, NAAFA argues, then you shouldn’t diet.) NAAFA’s three-day convention would be a series of seminars broken up by meals—glorious, indulgent, delicious guilt-free meals, according to the brochure.

  Some people may think that the battle for fat acceptance is over, with NAAFA the clear victor. In 1969, the year NAAFA was founded, only 25 percent of American adults were overweight or obese. The percentage of American adults who are overweight today is 61 percent and rising. Fifty-four percent of the 1.4 million Americans in the armed forces are overweight, according to a report released by the Pentagon in January of 2002, a 10 percent jump in just six years. A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association warned that “American children are getting fatter at an alarming rate.” In 1986, researchers reported, 8 percent of black children were overweight, 10 percent of Hispanic children, and 8 percent of white children. By 1998, twenty-two percent of black children were overweight, twenty-two percent of Hispanic children, and twelve percent of white children. Those percentages are surely higher now. How many Americans will have to be clinically obese before NAAFA declares victory and passes out the Cinnabons?

  The floor of the ballroom was intact, having withstood last night’s dance. Saturday morning’s breakfast lecture was in a small ballroom. Breakfast itself was laid out over three long tables: bagels and cream cheese, Danish, oily muffins, small boxes of sugary cereal, whole milk, sweetened yogurt. Best of all, there were warming trays full of buttery croissants stuffed with scrambled eggs and bacon. The buffet was open when I came into the room, but no one was in line—everyone was ignoring the food. I was hungry, though, having missed last night’s Mexican feast, and headed straight for the buffet table. I loaded up a plate and found an empty seat at a nearby table.

  When Teresa told me I was in luck—so many women, so few men—I smiled and nodded and said nothing. She was right. Lots of women, not many men. But I wasn’t really sure why that was lucky for me—oh, hey, wait a minute. . . .

  It can take me a moment or two to realize when someone is flirting with me. Gee, I thought to myself, this attractive woman with shoulder-length black hair who appeared to weigh about 250 pounds seems awfully interested in my flight. I mean, she was leaning towards me, nodding her head, and listening. . . . Hey, wait. . . . She’s putting the moves on me. Even in places where I can reasonably expect to be flirted with (bars, clubs, confessionals), I’m pretty slow on the uptake. Being fat as a kid damaged my self-esteem and self-image. (I’m still fat in my head.) In the looks department, I place myself somewhere between (on a bad day) porn star Ron Jeremy and (on a good day) conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. I’m even slower to come to the realization that I’m being cruised when the person doing the cruising is someone I would never sleep with—like, say, a woman, any woman, big or small, fat or thin, living or dead. I hadn’t anticipated getting hit on at the NAAFA convention, and I began to panic. Picking away at my bagel (oh, glorious carbs!), I silently prayed the speaker would begin and put an end to our conversation.

  “Have you been to any BBW events up in Seattle?” Teresa asked. “I hear they have some really good BBW parties up there.”

  BBW?

  “Big, beautiful women, silly,” said Teresa, patting my forearm.

  When I told Teresa that this was my first BBW event other than normal family functions, she feigned amazement.

  “So what brings you to the convention?” Shawn interjected, leaning towards the table to get a better look.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I stammered. “I guess, um, I was just, you know, curious.”

  “You came all the way down here for your first event instead of going to one in the town where you live?” Teresa said, giving Shawn a nudge. “Don’t you want to meet a BBW who lives a little closer to home? Someone you could actually date?”

  I smiled and shrugged, unsure of what to say. While I knew I would be a very thin person at a very fat convention, I naively assumed I w
ould blend in and I hadn’t prepared a lie to justify my presence in case I didn’t blend in. There would be a lot of people coming and going, I thought, so who would even notice skinny lil’ me?

  “So how long have you been an FA?” asked Teresa.

  An effay?

  “Fat Admirer,” said Teresa. She laughed and turned to look at Shawn. “He’s not very up on the lingo, is he?” Turning back to me, Teresa said, “Well, we’re just going to have to teach you everything you need to know. Everything.”

  Teresa explained that some FAs like pear-shaped women, like herself, while others prefer apple-shaped women, like Shawn.

  “So what’s your preference?” Teresa asked, batting her eyes. “Apples? Or pears?” (Suddenly I was Tony Curtis in Spartacus being asked by Laurence Olivier if I preferred oysters or snails.) Teresa and Shawn were both looking at me, waiting for an answer. Apples or pears? Which one of them was going to get lucky this weekend?

  “I’m not sure which I prefer,” I replied miserably.

  Now I’ve been hit on by women before, and while I would normally clear up the confusion immediately—“See here, miss, I am a faggot. . . .”—I felt obligated not to shoot Teresa down. I was at a fat acceptance convention, for Christ’s sake, and I didn’t want Teresa to think I was rejecting her because she was, you know, fat. So I kept right on smiling, nodding, offering polite, one-word responses to her questions, which only dug me in deeper. I felt like a hiker cornered by a bear who lies down on the ground and plays dead in hopes that the bear will go away and then suddenly remembers that he has a candy bar in his pocket.

  “Are you going to the pool party tonight?” Teresa asked. She leaned forward. “There’s a hot tub by the pool, and that’s where the action is these weekends.”

  Holy Christ.

  Playing dead wasn’t working, so I did what I had to do. I confessed that my preference was for banana shapes.

  “Of course, the only halfway decent-looking guy here is gay,” Teresa said, throwing her hands up in mock despair. “And I’ve been sitting here making a fool of myself.” She took what I thought would be devastating news—that I was unavailable—in ego-shattering stride.

  “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 u
s 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.”