The Chase: In Search of Fat Gay Love

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “The Chase: In Search of Fat Gay Love” by T.C. Martin. T.C. (he/they) is a Pittsburgh-based nonfiction writer and poet from Southern Maryland. His previous work can be found on Poets.org and in Longleaf Review. His manuscript-in-progress, The Watchers, is a memoir about growing up fat and gay.

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He comes to me at midnight. His knock at my motel room door is polite. I’ve spent the last hour dressing and undressing myself. I search for a magical outfit that will somehow disguise my fatness without appearing too staid. I settle on basketball shorts, a navy tank top that shows off my chest hair, and a gleaming silver chain. I’m showing more skin than I normally reveal. I feel exposed. But why else would I be here in a state I’ve never visited, waiting for a man I’ve only seen in pixels, if not to test my limits?

I gaze through the peephole. Skinny build, wiry brown hair, thick glasses framing his round face. He is a teacher. (High school, English.) He is 30 years old. I am ten years younger, a rising college senior. So what? my best friend said to me last night. You’re just hooking up with him, not marrying him. Ten years isn’t even that bad. That was the pep talk I wanted from her. I reach for the door handle.

Neither of us says anything for a beat.

“Hi,” he ventures with a lopsided grin.

“Hi.” My voice is almost a whisper.

He clears his throat awkwardly. “I, uh, brought these,” he says. He hands me a white box with red and green lettering. I open it and find six warm Krispy Kreme donuts. I feel my resistance melt like icing in the sun.

“Please, come in!” I say too eagerly, moving myself aside.

#

Growing up queer in a conservative exurb of Washington, D.C., I could count on one hand the gay boys I knew at school. I suppose limited options are still options, but I weighed more than all three of the other gays combined. My size and sexuality made me feel not just out of place but monstrous, a made-wrong body cursed with the wrong desires.

When I discovered I had been accepted to Yale, I felt happy—but more than that, I felt relieved. I hungered for the freedom of being gay at “the Gay Ivy.” The student body was several times larger than my high school, and I reasoned that I might find a potential partner or two there despite my size.

I downloaded Grindr after arriving on campus. I tried to pick profile photos in which my fatness was obvious but not obscene—another pointless obfuscation. I gathered four or five images I thought would work, then set about filling in my stats.

Age: 19.

Height: 6’1”.

Weight: I skipped this. Why would a potential partner need to know my exact weight?

Body Type: Large. (This is Grindr’s euphemism for “fat.”)

Relationship Status: Single. (Terribly.)

The only thing left was my bio. I found myself wanting to write some variation of the lines I would later see other fat men employ on their profiles. Lines like: I’m chubby, but I can cook one hell of a dinner! and I’m not fat, I’m fluffy! I felt the desire to get out in front of my body, to name it, explain it, and put it aside so that any potential partners wouldn’t have to. This is a way of saying I wanted control. The easiest way for me to get what I wanted, I thought, was to somehow compensate for being fat—for being myself—or to lie and call myself something else.

After two dry years on Grindr, I began to wonder: was there a dating app that catered to fat gays?

An App Store search revealed that yes, there was. I downloaded the first one I found, an app called BiggerCity. Coming to a city like New Haven was a culture shock. Back home, my Grindr radius had to stretch for miles and miles just to fill up the screen. But at Yale, the farthest person my grid would show me was less than five miles away.

I copied most of my profile information from Grindr, adding a few more recent pics. (I had gotten noticeably bigger in the intervening years.) Most of the line items were the same between the two apps except one: my “community tag.” I considered the options:

Bear. Chub. Chaser.

“Bear” I knew from Grindr was a thick, hairy, somewhat older man. “Chub,” meaning chubby, was a fat man. (Just like “fluffy,” I’ve always despised the word “chubby.”) And lastly, “Chaser”: a man of thin or average build attracted to one or both of the other groups (usually the chubs).

It wasn’t hard to figure out which group I belonged to. I swallowed my distaste and clicked “Chub.”

Within an hour, my profile had twenty views. Messages began rolling in, some from New Haven and its suburbs, others from as far away as London and Riyadh. I felt like international news. I noticed there weren’t nearly as many users from Yale on BiggerCity as there were on Grindr. No students at all, in fact, and only a few rows of people from New Haven. The bottom of my grid picked up men as distant as New York. For those of us with bodies deemed undesirable, a wider net needs to be cast.

With the spring semester ending soon, I knew I would be leaving campus to go back home. Before that, though, I had plans to visit a cousin in Michigan whom I hadn’t seen in years. I set my BiggerCity search location to the base of Michigan’s thumb and sent a quick text to my cousin, declining her offer to crash at her place for the weekend, telling her I would instead get a room at a Red Roof Inn just outside of town. That night, I began to message the teacher.

#

We’re lying on the motel bed, fully clothed. I feel the stiff mattress springs poking my back. No, wait—those are his fingers. They’re mapping the terrain of my body, searching for something. He runs his hands over the folds of my side, where flesh kisses flesh.

“Can you take this thing off?” he asks, his breath hot in my face. I yank the tank top off and gesture at his own shirt. He dutifully unbuttons it.

“Come here,” he says. I curl up under his fuzzy arm. His whole body is hairy, hairier than mine. He kisses me then, and his lips taste clean. It is the first time I’ve ever kissed anyone, a fact I do not reveal to him.

He moves his hands to my chest. I’m astounded by the power of the sensation there. He brings his mouth to my nipple and my mind goes thrillingly blank, like television static. The feeling makes me bold.

“Can I jerk you off?”

He nods, and his fingers stop their probing search of me to fumble with his fly.

When he’s finished, he motions to return the favor. I find myself saying no despite desperately wanting to say yes. He nods in understanding, as if he expected it: he’s been told no before. Why are fat people so eager to give pleasure and so uncomfortable receiving it? I don’t feel ready to relinquish that control.

He stands up to buckle his jeans, buttons his shirt with quick motions of his hands. He leans down to kiss me, then steals one donut from the box he brought. “You can keep the rest,” he says, winking. Then he is gone.

I scarf down the five remaining donuts in quick succession, barely tasting them, and fall into a sugared sleep.

#

There are other men after the teacher.

There is the chaser from Philly. The first time we meet, I drive to his house late at night and we eat cheesesteaks. This time, I let myself be touched. He asks me how much I weigh. “I don’t know…like, 350?” I say, lowballing by about 80 pounds. I am literally naked in his hands, and yet I cannot tell the truth about this body.

“I’ve had bigger,” he says with a shrug.

There is the chaser who moved to the U.S. for nursing school. We make out and hook up on an air mattress in my parents’ basement. When I ask who his celebrity crush is, he says: “Well, if it’s a woman I would say Rihanna. But if it’s a man, it would be…” He trails off, trying to remember the name. Frustrated, he pulls out his phone and does a quick Google search. “If it’s a guy, this would be him.” He turns the phone to show me Kevin James’s face. It’s the movie poster for Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

There is the chaser who wants me to get bigger. He is an encourager, he explains, someone who wants to see their fat partner eat his way into an even fatter body. It would please him, somehow. For so many people I am too large, and yet for this man I am not large enough. What is the end goal? When would I be done transforming myself for his enjoyment? I want to ask him, but I don’t. I’m afraid of what the answer might be, of how his fantasy, fully described, might ruin my attraction to him and cut our time together short. Instead I ask if we can just keep hooking up, no encouragement involved, and he says he’d rather stay at home and play League of Legends by himself.

#

To find stories of fat love, we have to dig deep. It was while searching for alternative tales of loving-while-fat that I came across a little-known 1980 novel by Leon Rooke titled Fat Woman.

I found myself equal parts endeared to and angered by Rooke’s portrayal of Ella Mae, the story’s protagonist. While growing up as a young girl in poverty, Ella Mae submitted to her mother’s constant chiding about weight loss and marriage. The only way she could escape being poor was by marrying a man of better station. But what man would select a wife, her mother told her, who had neither looks nor money? When Ella Mae reflects on this episode from her youth, she swells with gratitude for her thin husband, Edward, who chose her despite her size. He rescued her from her mother and gave her icebox cakes and homeownership and mail-order dresses that, despite their awkward shapes, kept her suitably clothed.

What more could she ask for?

#

I first meet N on Growlr, another app often used by fat gay men. He lives twenty miles away from me—next door by my standards. He’s fat too.

Despite having used these apps for two years, I have never met up with another “chub.” I chalk this up to the fact that many chub profiles explicitly state “chasers only.” But after many nights spent with men who look nothing like me, I begin to wonder: Am I harboring a preference for thinner men myself? It doesn’t seem far-fetched that a bias so ingrained among gay men may have imprinted itself onto my own brain.

Around the same time I begin thinking about this, N appears on my grid. We message back and forth, exchanging niceties and flirtations and, later, phone numbers. We quickly agree to meet up.

#

“Have you ever been in a relationship before?” N asks. The question pulls me out of my stupor. We’re lying together in a hotel room Jacuzzi, his back against my stomach.

I shake my head. “Nope. What about you?”

“Yeah. We broke up a few months ago. He just ghosted me, like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. The wet sound echoes against the tile.

I recall all the users I’ve messaged on BiggerCity over the last two years, how countless numbers of them chatted for a while, then stopped for no apparent reason. That stung plenty. I can’t imagine having a relationship end so abruptly.

“That’s awful. I’m sorry.”

“It’s been hard. But I’m putting myself out there again now.” I feel his chest expand against mine, his shoulder blades squaring themselves. I know the gesture. He is deciding to be fine.

“Hey, your profile said you know Spanish. Is that true?”

I nod.

“In that case, my mom will love you when she meets you.” He splashes a handful of water at me playfully, and I dodge it.

I’m not sure how I feel about what he just said. On the one hand, I’m glad he feels comfortable enough with me to consider a possible future together. On the other hand, we don’t really know each other. We’re still strangers, really, albeit intimate ones. Why are we already talking about exes and meeting each other’s parents? It seems like we’ve fast-forwarded through crucial plot points.

The water feels suddenly lukewarm. Wordlessly, I unplug the drain, and we go to sleep.

#

In Fat Woman, Ella Mae prefers not to think of the wedding band strangling her ring finger. It has become far too small for her, a fact that her husband, Edward, reminds her of incessantly.

So what if Edward monitors the biscuit pan daily to see how many she snags before supper? He has given her two children and a home better than any she could have imagined. It is only natural, then, that she would accept his veiled put-downs and his strange actions, like boarding over Ella Mae’s bedroom window for no clear reason. He acts cagey when she asks why.

Rooke’s novel reads like satire to most readers, what with Ella Mae’s endless deliberations on the nature of fat and God and suffering. Pages and pages of tortured interiority—over cookies! But for fat people, the book resembles a horror story about the dangers of giving too much of ourselves in exchange for love.

As the plot progresses, Edward’s surveillance of Ella Mae’s habits becomes more overt. His jokes grow barbed. In the novel’s climax, he baits her into eating an ice cream cake laced with poison. His sinister plan is revealed: he hopes to lock his wife away in her bedroom and starve her in order to “whittle” her down.

Worn out by Edward’s tactics, Ella Mae cannot refuse his torment. To lose Edward would mean losing her home, her family, her sense of self, and—crucially—sex. So she submits. That way, she can retain something that resembles love even as she loses herself.

#

I wake with a start. My eyes flick to the clock on the nightstand: half past three in the morning. It takes a moment to remember where I am. I feel something crawling on me.

It’s a hand, I realize. N’s hand, under the covers, running back and forth over my ass. I’ve made no movements since waking up—he must think I’m still asleep. As I lie there thinking about what to do, his fingers become bolder in their searching. They aren’t inside me, but they edge closer and closer.

Anger kindles in my chest. I had told him earlier that I wasn’t comfortable with this kind of sex. And for all he knows, I’m unconscious.

At that last realization, my rage turns to dread. What other boundaries may he be willing to push? If I rebuke him, will he respond with apology or offense? My mind whirls with possibilities, some uncomfortable, some violent, all unwanted.

When the probing becomes too much, I stiffen and stretch my limbs as if I’m cresting the top of my sleep cycle. His hands pause.

Finally, I think with relief.

In a few seconds, though, his touch returns. I lean up suddenly on my arms and look right at him.

“I’m really not in the mood right now. Please stop.”

His grip falters. He lets out a nervous laugh. “Oh, sorry. I just didn’t want our time to go to waste.”

It is a curious choice of words. Why does he assume our time is limited? He seemed so certain of our future together before we had gone to sleep. Now he seems to think I’ll vanish if I’m not within reach. It is a contradiction that my brain is too wired to hold.

“I would really just like to sleep now,” I say slowly and firmly. I turn my back to him once more and screw my eyes shut. He doesn’t touch me again.

The next morning, after I drop N off at home, I block his number, his Snapchat, and his Growlr account. It feels guilty and good, like slamming the door shut in the face of someone who wronged you.

When I remember how N’s last boyfriend ghosted him, a guilty feeling rises up in me. But when I recall the visceral fear of lying beside him in bed, unsure of his motives, aware only of his transgression—then petulance takes the prize.

#

In the weeks after I ghost N, I sometimes feel the urge to reach out, to explain. I want so badly to believe anything but the likeliest truth: fresh off a terrible break-up, and keenly aware of how hard it is for fat men to find partners, N probably felt as desperate as I did. I was the closest, gentlest thing. And he reached for me, despite despite despite. I wanted intimacy as much as he did. If only he hadn’t tried to seize it without permission.

Whenever the impulse to reach out to N grows overwhelming, the cautionary tale of Ella Mae bursts into my consciousness and reminds me of what lies beyond capitulation. Whatever it is, it isn’t love. I hold her trouble in my hand like a shield when the League-playing encourager crawls back into my DMs with an innocuous “How are you?” I remember her husband’s warped idea of care when another chaser messages me: “You are my ideal, I would take care of you, I would kiss you everywhere.”

She inoculated me against the sickness of being an object, even one of fascination, and I am grateful to her for it. Because of her example, I want to be loved here on the ground, as I am—not for what convenience I provide or what my body may become. I will be held this way, or I will hold myself.

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