Who Gets to Wear the Speedo?
Image Description: A white, fat man with tattoos sits in a folding chair on the sand next to a dark-skinned, fat man with tattoos who stands beside him. A red surfboard lies at the second man’s feet in the sand. Behind both men is the ocean and sky. Photo by Molly the Cat via Unsplash+.
Content Warnings: Disordered eating, mention of specific weight numbers, mention of intentional weight loss, anti-fatness, dysphoria
Pink doesn’t exist, according to the headline on a copy of Psychology Today that’s in the waiting room of my therapist’s office. Turns out pink is what happens when our brains interpret the space between red and violet. Internally it’s real, externally not so much, the article says. It’s about wavelengths we can process, not gaslighting. I put the issue in my tote bag. I’m unsure why it hits the right chord with me, but it feels important.
When my therapist asks how I’m doing, I sigh. It’s summer, the worst season—the heat, the bugs, and people talking about how they need to lose weight before they go to the beach. Anti-fatness shows up regardless of season, but it seems worse when people start focusing on beach bodies.
“No offense,” I joke to my very tall, professional swimmer-shaped therapist. It’s easy to imagine him in a Speedo.
Men in Speedos are on my mind because I’ve seen a few gay, cisgender male writers posting pictures of themselves in their Speedos while holding their books as promotion for those titles.
How does that make you feel?
Annoyed. Or angry. Unsettled, maybe. I’m working on naming my emotions better.
What makes you feel this way?
I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t get the same kind of positive reaction—lots of likes, fire, and/or drooling emojis—if I did that with a copy of Fat and Queer (the book I co-edited).
Has anyone told you that you can’t or that it wouldn’t be well-received?
*
Pick a color that doesn’t bring attention to your midsection. This is the first piece of clothing advice from a vlog episode called “How a Chubby Guy Should Dress for the Beach” from a thin creator called The Dapper Aristocrat. Dark colors like black, navy, and gray are the best choices. This advice comes after he suggests eating “clean” and going to the gym. He won’t say the word “fat.” Instead, he repeatedly says “large midsection.”
“Just say fat,” I plead to the screen. But fashionable equals not fat. His refusal to say “fat”—and he’s not the only one: my doctor won’t say the word when talking to me, a fat person—makes the word taboo, vulgar. It’s okay to say fat. I want to be fat. Being fat makes me feel better about myself.
*
This is not to shame anyone for their body or how or where they display it. But why do thin authors in Speedos upset me? No one directly told me I can’t post pictures of myself in a Speedo.
I’m nonbinary, so why should I care about a male beauty standard? But I’m called sir, guy, man by strangers. I’m interpreted as male because of the way my fat has gathered mostly in my belly, because I have facial hair, because of the “M” on my birth certificate.
I weigh 255 pounds, which some people might consider fat, but I was 315 pounds in 2018 and I miss that version of my body. And then. I retreated into my head and wanted to pretend I didn’t have a body. For traumatic reasons. I didn’t want to associate my body with anything pleasurable, so I ate less. I turned into a ghost. However, I hadn’t realized the full extent of it until I sat down to write this essay about Speedos, which meant I had to think about my body.
Without warning, my awareness or my perception of my body dropped—an actual physical sensation—into my chest. It’s what I imagine being possessed would feel like, except I was the one doing the possessing and the one being possessed at the same time. It scared the shit out of me. I don’t want to talk about trauma. But how can you talk about bodies in an anti-fat culture without acknowledging trauma?
In her book Body Work: The Radical Power of the Personal Narrative, author Melissa Febos writes, “...the resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part—and often nothing but—a resistance to movements for social justice.”
Fatness is a social justice issue. It’s the reason I wanted a book like Fat and Queer to exist. This year I went to Chicago’s Pride Parade for the first time in six years. Many of the floats were full of flat-stomached guys shirtless in short shorts or Speedo-like briefs, waving their arms, dancing, smiling as the crowd cheeredd. Fat guys were in the parade too, but all of them wore t-shirts. Most of them kept their faces pointed down, not smiling. I was the only one around me who cheered for them.
No matter the group—bears, gainers, otters, whatever—there is an ideal body type and shape. Muscle bears are the coveted body type now. Uber masculine. Hard, taut bellies with bodybuilder mass are raised up as the ideal. Not everyone’s fat is distributed that way. Not everyone’s muscles develop in the same way. That’s the problem with body ideals, right? People will deviate whether they want to or not.
I’m not particularly muscular. Bodies go through trends; we’re conditioned to think trendy bodies are correct bodies. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking I should have the muscle bear body. I don’t want that type of body. I want more softness.
Writing this essay sends me into flight; for calm, I rush down the street to Hollywood Beach. This beach is the gay beach in Chicago. It’s a Friday and the weather is nice, so lots of people are out. This will be a research trip: I need a reason to be less mad at myself for having fled from my computer.
As I trudge through the sand in my Crocs, shorts, and t-shirt, I see plenty of Speedos, but the wearers range in weight, age, and body shape. These guys don’t seem bothered. But I notice that I feel uncomfortable, not by them but by my body even when it’s mostly covered. Vulnerable. I’m jealous. That’s the word I’d been looking for when describing those Instagram posts to my therapist. Like the men here, those authors on social media feel comfortable enough in their bodies not to hide them. What would it take to bring this freedom to their counterparts in the writing community? I’ve noticed many fat, male-presenting gay writers hold their books by their faces, hiding their bodies.
How I interpret my body is changing. The questions are changing. Not: Can I wear the Speedo? Rather: Do I want to wear one? I don’t. This makes me no less of a fat activist. It represents my moving away from looking to gay cis men for how I should feel about my body.
Jane Schoenbrun, director of I Saw the TV Glow, said of their post-transition life, “It has just been an incredibly moving few years of feeling things for the first time that I kind of knew about or had experienced as a ghost.”
What am I saying? I’m not entirely sure. All I truly know is that I’ve spent too long being a ghost. I’ve spent too long not paying attention to what my body wants to tell me. Towards the end of I Saw the TV Glow, “There is still time” is written in chalk on the street. It’s a message to the main character, but also to the audience—to me—to put away the worries about how much or how little I might wear. My message to me, and anyone who needs it: Stop hiding. Speedo or not, get out there and enjoy the sun.
