The Weight of Shame

A man with tan skin wearing a tight, black tank top grins at you. His tremendous belly stretches out over his belted jean shorts, while bulbous calves and arms protrude from his torso. On his belly rests the hand of a thin, bearded, blond white man whose eyebrows rise as if to say Wow! Look where my hand is! A slim redhead with a skateboard tucked under his arm and headphones around his neck smiles from behind a septum piercing. His smirk says, You’d want to date me if you saw me in person, right? Maybe you’d even want to fuck me? You could lead me around a rodeo pit by my piercing.

Only I can’t date the redheaded hipster because he’s a cartoon that welcomes you to chasabl.com, a gay dating website aimed at men of size and the men who love them. As a fat gay man who has never felt like I belonged, discovering this niche of online dating should have felt liberating but instead made me feel like a slab beef hanging on a meat hook. My memories of growing up fat in St. Joseph, Missouri start with a shirts-versus-skins basketball game in fourth grade. After being picked last for the skins team and removing my shirt, all of the boys laughed at me and pointed out my “titties.” On my fifth-grade football team, a boy shouted, “Hey Haskey, I bet you make your dick by rolling up your jelly rolls!” I can laugh at the absurdity of those moments today, but the repression and anxiety they created are very real, and the internet is the best place to hide your anxieties behind a wall of anonymity.

According to Forbes magazine, approximately 1,000 new online dating websites open each year. These websites must market themselves as being different from their competitors, so they diversify. Niche dating websites make a single person feel safer toeing the waters of the dating pool, whereas the larger, more general websites might not speak to the needs of the typical single person. Because of some exclusionary requirements, such as eHarmony’s heterosexual exclusivity, websites for more specific groups crop up. We get FarmersOnly.com for people wanting to date people in rural areas. We get STDchats.com for people with sexually transmitted diseases or people who want to date people with such diseases. We get AshleyMadison.com for people who are already married to have affairs. And we get three websites that cater to fat gay men like myself: Bigger City, Grommr, and Chasabl. Each website has its own goals, but none of them can solve the dilemma that I, and thousands of others, face as fat gay men: Would he still love me if I were thin? Or, at the very least, thinner?

Online dating in the age of social media and technology is more common than ever before, especially for people near my age, 29. A Pew research study confirms that those aged 25-44 have double the number of online dating profiles of those aged 18-24 or 45-54. Not to be outdone, I have profiles on six different websites and apps. There’s strategy in how I sculpt each profile. My OkCupid profile is meant to highlight my wit and intelligence because the website itself is more geared toward long-term relationships, whereas my profile on Adam4Adam is vague (noting just that I’m “looking for whatever”) because Adam4Adam is almost exclusively used for hooking up. The advertisers on these websites offer proof. On OkCupid, the ads are for Verizon, Audi, BMO Bank, and Hilton Garden Inn, among others. The ads on Adam4Adam are guys riding dicks, sucking dicks, holding dicks…just dicks upon dicks advertising porn websites for “boy temptation” and “sex at work.” With the exception of one rare picture advertising “stocky dudes,” the aforementioned dicks are all attached to men whose bodies are carved from marble. Even the stocky man in the ad was skinnier than me. He’s the Seth Rogen to my John Goodman. So I enter these websites that aren’t geared toward my body type just hoping someone won’t care about my weight. Weight is on my mind with every unreturned message I send.

Not that I haven’t tried to do something about it. Between early 2012 and late 2013 I lost around 100 pounds. The motivation was getting laid. I was a twenty-seven-year-old virgin and had not yet been out of the closet for a year. At more than 375 pounds, the prospect of love and sex seemed impossible. Who could love this body? I’d ask myself during my morning mirror time, still dripping and naked from the shower. I still had the jelly rolls I used to make my dick. Life in St. Joseph had offered limited exposure to gay culture. I saw loud, sassy, thin gay men on The Real World or on Ricki Lake. I was afraid, awkward, and fat. I did not meet an out-of-the-closet gay man until I was 19 (and not living in St. Joseph), and any gay man I saw was lean and muscular. My titties didn’t match their titties. It never occurred to me that there might be a subset of men who were attracted to my body type. Those men, chasers, would have loved me, a chub.

Ignorant, I went about eating better and exercising more, spouting off familiar clichés to people who asked why and how I did it. I want to be the best me I can be! Bullshit. I wanted someone’s penis, and I didn’t think there would be anyone willing to share their phallus with me with my body the way it was. I had never been on a date with a man, and I had never experienced any physicality with a woman beyond a tongue kiss. I always assumed this was because of my body, and the assumption made the belief true. I exerted no faith in myself that would make someone believe I loved myself enough to love someone else.

As the weight loss began, I got my first gay crush using OkCupid. Each morning as I strapped on my tennis shoes I told myself I’m doing this for him. I’d take my stubby strides with burning thighs repeating This is for him in my head. The struggle birthed more self-confidence than I had before. The pounds shed steadily, like my body craved the attention I was giving it. I lost 15 pounds in one week during March of 2012 doing nothing but jogging each morning and eating vegan. My body needed this, but there was something empty inside, something else it needed. My crush rejected my advances, and even after losing over fifty pounds I felt like I had failed.

Then I met the first man I ever loved on Chatroulette, an online video chat environment that was supposed to be used for video chatting with new people from around the world. In reality, it’s used by guys who want to jerk off. We met doing the latter. He hooked me instantly when he told me how much he loved my gut. I was wearing a shirt, and he insisted I remove it. I love ur belly, he wrote. I confided to my chaser that I had lost weight and wanted to lose more. Don’t lose too much, he told me. Don’t lose that belly. Our relationship started as purely sexual video sessions, and then two months in he told me he loved me. He was deep in the closet, and I was deeply naïve regarding relationships. I allowed him to have a girlfriend, and by virtue of our online relationship, I was easy to hide. No one would ever have to know his dirty little secret about liking chubs. It comes as no surprise to me now that our relationship did not work out.

Gay culture has a history of labeling, and even within the culture of chubs and chasers comes additional nomenclature. In more mainstream gay culture, twinks, otters, silver foxes, daddies, and probably dozens of other woodland creatures lurk. The first website to cater to chubs was Bigger City, claiming to be “the largest online community for chubby men and the men who love them.” The site boasts more than 345,000 profiles from around the world, falling into the more traditional dating website category with profiles, pictures, and a mail system for messaging other members. Users can register as a chub, chaser, chub4chub, or a bear (generally considered a larger, masculine, hairy gay man).

That, however, only scratches the surface of gay chub labels. Grommr.com, 36,000 members strong, proclaims itself as “a social network and dating site for gainers, bloaters, encouragers, and admirers. A ragtag bunch into fat and fatter bellies, chubby men, beer guts, big muscle and chunky muscle, bears and non-bears, and so much more!” A cartoon also greets visitors of Grommr, but this cartoon features men with pronounced bellies in pint-sized shirts shoving full sandwiches into their mouths, all with another grateful thin man in their midst. As their labels might suggest, Grommr men are focused on size above all, to the point where some self-identify as “gainers” to achieve the chub look.

Chasabl is the newest of the fat gay dating niche websites, with more than 25,000 members in a little more than a year. It utilizes the same social media style as Grommr, but is less focused on gaining and encouraging weight gain; instead it focuses on the diversity of body sizes. On Grommr the men are “fat,” on Chasabl the men are “big.” While Chasabl may be less fringe than Grommr, the labels continue. Members can search for users by body type, including “slim” and “toned muscle,” as well as “pear-shaped chubby” and “super chub.” Just when I thought I had found someplace to belong on these websites, I was in high school again, looking around for which clique I fit into. I wasn’t a super chub. Moreover, several men on Chasabl have gone on to tell me I wasn’t fat enough for them. I wasn’t slim enough to be a Chubby Bear. Being a plain chub seemed the most fitting, but the whole thing still felt like a nightclub where I wasn’t allowed to access the VIP area.

Near the end of my relationship with the man I met on Chatroulette, I got into a debate with a friend about labeling. As a gay man, he felt like he did not fit into any particular mold either — too big to be an otter but too small to be a bear — and I said I was fed up. I rejected the labeling. I didn’t want to be a chub or a bear; I wanted to be Brandon. I especially rejected the idea that someone might like me specifically because of my weight. I felt fetishized. I felt like it made me dirty. A freak.

Single, I moved to Chicago and had nothing to do but exercise. I got to near the hundred-pounds-lost goal. Then I discovered apps and websites where, if I looked hard enough in a city of three million people, I could find someone who either didn’t mind having sex with a fat man or actually enjoyed having sex with a fat man. My every interaction with a man, whether I am looking for friendship, dating, sex, or directions to the train, still boils down to my size.

The very point of these websites is to help me not obsess about my weight, but instead find someone who likes me for me. The websites are designed with me in mind, to ensure that I’m accepted and adored for my body. Because of my body. If I had known people felt that way, maybe certain aspects of my life would have been easier, but maybe I would still weigh almost 400 pounds. I might have never made the choice, however uncouth my reasons, to take some control of my health. I’m healthier today because I felt unwanted yesterday. There’s no excuse for body shaming, whether direct or indirect, but I’m stronger because of it.

I don’t expect drawings of fat men on websites like Chasabl to give me personal fulfillment. Grommr’s potentially unhealthy gainer/encourager culture won’t change how the world views my body. All I want is to feel at home with a man I love. I don’t want to feel like a fetish. Whenever the right one sneaks into my life, he’ll love me no matter what, without labels. My doubts about my body, though, might not ever let go. I accept that.