How plus-size queer folks are both fetishised and shamed by the queer community

The recent hateful trolling towards Sam Smith celebrating their body in a music video is reflective of the larger unfortunate dichotomy within the queer community

When Arihant Palekar, a 27-year-old physician based in Pune, first saw the music video of the song I’m Not Here To Make Friends by Grammy award-winning Sam Smith, he was pleasantly surprised. In his recent memory, it was the first time an openly queer musician had celebrated the human form so unabashedly, expressing the highest ideals of self-love throughout the video in what looked like eclectic, custom couture pieces. 

“As queer people, we have always had to point out the lack of meaningful representation growing up,” says Palekar. “And now that we have stars like Sam Smith and Lil Nas X who are owning their bodies and defining boundaries, our own community gets all choked up in god-knows-what anger.”

Smith’s video sparked unnecessary outrage within the queer community. While there was a section which celebrated Smith’s outrageously beautiful examination of self-love, others couldn’t stomach the fact that Smith had dared to flaunt their curves, without hiding or sprucing up their natural body. 

For Palekar, the hateful comments were triggering. Some of them were so dehumanising that it felt like music could no longer be appreciated as an art form, that people just couldn’t let it be. 

The toxicity of fatphobia

Such body shaming and fat phobia is an extension of what many gay men have already witnessed on the gay dating app Grindr. While queerness inherently challenges the binary status quo upheld by a cis het world, the gay community bitterly clings on to dated ideals of the perfect body and masculinity.  

No fats. No femmes. No chubs.

The preferences of those on Grindr and elsewhere are so divorced from reality that such conditions are viewed from the lenses of honesty. Why can’t I have a preference some fatphobic, straight-passing gay man will argue about? In the same breath, he won’t shy away from receiving a quick blowjob behind his dormitory. 

“The concept of an ‘ideal body’ is a very rooted one. Although a few brands have started pioneering real representation of queer people, along with  collectives that talk about it, influencers trying to create awareness, books being written, and talks being given, it is a very fundamental thing and personal to oneself,” says Minazuddin Kazi, a 25-year-old entrepreneur. “It’s a change that must come from within because you want to be a decent person and respect people.”

The way he looks at it, no amount of campaigning is going to help if we don't correct people on the ground, as little as when (queer or not) people around us target anyone with fatphobic comments or reinforce the stigma, for starters. 

But doesn’t this affect one’s self-esteem, to be fat-shamed almost on the daily, to be made to feel less than human, an object? In Kazi’s case, he became acutely and rudely aware of the superficial nature of the queer community via-a-vis his body early on in his journey of queerness. 

“I've always been an effeminate, fat kid and that comes with a lot of body shaming, which led me to not respect my body the way I should have,” he explains. “Then suddenly when you're young and sleeping around, you realise there is a particular set of people who like you for your body and, at first, it seemed like a great boost to my self-esteem, but in retrospect, most of those partners have fetishised me for my queerness and/ or my body.”

In the queer community, people who fetishise plus-size folks for their bodies, refusing to love or get into any relationship with them off the bed, are often referred to as ‘chubby chasers’ and ‘bear lovers’. This dichotomy is jarring—fetishising plus-size gay men for their bodies and simultaneously shaming them for it. 

A 2016 study titled ‘Fat chance! Experiences and expectations of antifat bias in the gay male community’, found that more than 33 per cent of gay men, most of whom were not overweight according to BMI standards, reported experiencing fatphobia. Not surprisingly, the most common type of weight stigma experienced was rejection from potential romantic partners due to one’s weight. 

The road to love 

When one’s self-esteem is hacked by what one considers their safe space, or hopes to derive some strength from, what does the road to self-love, or any kind of love, look like? According to queer-affirmative counselling psychologist Deepak Kashyap, who’s in a polyamorous relationship himself, fetishisation in itself isn’t wrong. You could have a foot fetish, or a boob fetish, and as long as it’s consensual and safe, what’s the harm?

“But fetishisation becomes a problem when you’re not being considered a full human being,” says Kashyap. “We don’t know why we are attracted to certain body parts; the roots of our desire will always remain vague to us. But if you reduce someone to just their body parts, that becomes a problem.” 

Such an attitude is the reason why some Indian men will fetishise Eastern European women, knowing full well that they will never want to have them as wives and girlfriends, but only for sex. “Your humanity is being robbed in the social context and that’s where fetishisation becomes harmful. My whole self is not visible to you, only my lips or nips are, if you fetishise them, that is.”

However, Kashyap says that as a community, the onus is also on us to take control of the narratives of our lives. If, on social media, all I post are pictures of my nipples, I don’t fully get to whine about people fetishising my nipples. 

“You will always have some assholes online, regardless of what you put out, but what you want to be defined as is in your hands,” he says. “Share what you’re reading, of you giving or attending a lecture, what you like eating, perhaps your thoughts on issues that matter to you. That’s when people will have no option but to look at you as a whole—as a living, breathing human being. People will only see what you show them.”

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