Since looks are one of the organizing features of the gay world, big gay men have an added exclusion that has not been fully explored. Like women, gay men experience conflict with their appearance, physique, and relationship to food more than heterosexual men do.
They are also rendered third-class citizens in the heterosexual world for being gay and fat. Big men are rendered second-class citizens in the gay community for being fat. It is ironic that the worst injury inflicted upon gay big men is, in fact, that coming from gay society. Appearance is especially important in the gay community. What are some of the elements of social stigma facing the group you studied?īig gay men constitute a multiply marginalized group, who feel stigmatized for their size and sexuality.
I am gay, but I have thin privilege, among others. In conducting this research, I negotiated my position as an ally-outsider-within. being gay but thin) and also the many challenges that come with being a participant-observer in a community. Throughout my research and writing, I was also very conscious about my own status, (e.g. This in no way reflects poorly on the group: the members of the club I studied made my research experience a total delight. Suffering a bit from group anxiety, it was difficult at times to participate regularly in the club I was studying. Ethnographic research became my niche, but like teaching, the risk for me is emotional drain. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but I am a bit of an introverted ethnographer. What was the most difficult part of conducting your research? My book about this group places sizism as a central social problem in the gay community that must be attended to. This is why I set out to study members of the group for almost three years.
#Fuck fat old gay porn full
I had observed the gay scene full of fat-shaming and negative body talk and my initial idea was to see if I could locate a critique of this I expected to find it in the world of big gay men who belong to Girth & Mirth. Therefore, in my career in sociology, body image/appearance concerns among gay men have increasingly become a socially relevant topic. Jason Whitesel’s Full Interview What motivated you to study fat gay men?Īs a gay man myself, and as a sociologist, I have been very uncomfortable with body fascism in the gay community.
I would highly suggest reading through their testimony, because they address a variety of topics including the struggles and surprises they encountered during their research, as well as their future plans and their advice for young sociologists and criminologists. They wanted to do these things and they strove for “normality,” but also felt uncomfortable, because of both real and perceived stigma and, in some cases, a lack of shared experiences.” Similarly Whitesel described how he was “surprised by the ordinariness of the group gatherings,” and realized that “there was nothing terribly revolutionary about the Girth & Mirthers.” He explained how he learned that the gatherings specifically for fat gay men, that he had “anticipated being a group reaction to body fascism, was actually just a group of men who were struggling to carve out an ordinary place for themselves.” Both female ex-prisoners and fat gay men have disadvantaged social statuses, and individuals from both groups yearn for the ideal of normality and attempt to reshape their identities to become more like what they perceive as normal.Īs mentioned above, I had the pleasure of interviewing both Jason Whitesel and Andrea Leverentz about their recent books, and below are the full responses from their interviews. These women hoped that these steps would help them to become “normal,” even when the women were not sure what normal meant to them. Additionally “many of the women also felt out of place in “normal” situations, like college classes or work. In the interview with Leverentz she noted how many of the women sought to redefine their identities by being good workers, finding meaning in their work, becoming economically self-sufficient, and strengthening their relationships with family members. While fat gay men and female ex-prisoners are vastly different groups, they both deal with social stigma, but even more specifically both Leverentz and Whitesel witnessed how these women and men long for “normality”. She describes how the women she interviewed are labeled as “bad women and bad mothers” and how they struggle to redefine themselves, despite the many barriers to employment and stable housing. In her book, She describes what she learned through her interviews with women who had recently been released from prison. On the other hand, Leverentz, Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Criminal Justice Program at University of Massachusetts: Boston, studied a vastly different population in her book, The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemma.