Chowing the Fat

I guess I'm going to have to start this post by confessing my love for Perez Hilton. For a long time, I'd suppressed any interest in celebrity gossip, but when I met my current lovethang, that faggy little tranny had a subscription to Us Weekly and was a regular visitor at PH, which gave me an excuse to check it out myself (I couldn't let him have all the fun). Anyhoo, while I hate that he's feeding into a national obsession that could easily be classified as (to say the least) unhealthy, and I think that some of the judgments he passes down are petty and perhaps unfair, I love that Perez himself is a kind of mockery of the ridiculousness that is celebrity. I also love him for what he is: a big faggy queer blogger. But what really won me over when I first started visiting his blog is the sweetness he posts about the wonderful magic that is Beth Ditto.

Self-indulgent, slightly stalker-ish bragging aside (I like to believe that when I saw her perform last year in DC, that it was my, slip-clad, gyrating titties that inspired her to dance right off the stage, straight at me, which would make for a better story if I hadn't panicked and stepped aside before she danced past, leaving me to wonder, forever, whether she might have indulged even the tamest version of one of my hottest femme fantasies, by rubbing up against me or something), I can't say enough about Beth Ditto or the Gossip. The music is bangin' and heart-felt and fresh--the Ditto herself a fierce queer feminist and fat activist. And, of course, hot as fuck. I'm especially excited about a few quotes from her recent interview with Spin Magazine:

On stripping onstage during shows, as a big girl:

"In the beginning, people were really uncomfortable with a big girl, so it was a radical political statement; and it's even more radical to not be objectified with your clothes off. Also, onstage, it's so hot we're dying. It just feels nice sometimes."

As a fat femme, I feel that my body at once scares and titillates (the degree to which it does each, depending I suppose on the inclinations of the observer/toucher) because it represents an appetite for two things--food and sex--an appetite that, in spite of the life-affirming wholesome nature of these things, has been vilified throughout history, and is particularly squashed by our fucked up media, and especially so for women. We're only supposed to eat to fulfill our nutritional needs, and by the looks of the women our society admires, maybe a little less--and we're only supposed to want to want to fuck to please, which is not altogether a bad thing to want to do, but nevertheless, if we're limited to it, well, it's ridiculously unfair.

Even a desire to warm or cool the body is judged, particularly, again, for women--one of my collage mentors once told me how she loved hot, muggy weather, and that I only didn't because I bought into society's idea that sweat is gross. And while I would say that some just really don't like the heat, I would confess to having felt unfeminine and rather disgusting on many an unreasonably humid day in New York and DC. Which is ridiculous--everybody sweats. But imagine if I'd stripped off my jersey-knit dress and continued striding down the sidewalk in my heels? How many construction workers would I have to tell to fuck off, because they felt entitled to express their fear and frustration by demeaning and harassing me? And yet, a man can sweat and ditch his shirt w/o trouble. At least, a bio-man could. A tranny, like my sweet thang? Not so much.

On Britney Spears (but in a roundabout way, on food politics)

"She's from Louisiana, I'm from Arkansas. When I go home, guess what's in those baby bottles? Mountain Dew. I'm not saying it's right, but it's just normal. People fail to see that regional culture is a massive part of a person's experience."

Now, I don't remember what my loving mom put into my baby bottle, but I do recall that we drank an awful lot of Coke when I was a little girl, and that there weren't a lot of vegetables or spices laying around the house. We weren't poor--in fact, my dad made enough as a railroad brakeman to make us think we were middle class, a mistake that keeps folks from recognizing that we're getting fucked right along with the poor, which in turn keeps us from revolting--but I'm getting off-track. The fact of the matter is that where you grow up, as the brilliant Miss Ditto points out, is part of what makes you who you are and greatly influences what you eat (or feed your kids). But the culture of Mountain Dew baby bottles, like the culture of teenage pregnancy, is a result of societal and governmental systems that are at once unhealthy and unfair, particularly for the poor, making it cheaper to fill up on Twinkies than salad (and much easier to talk to some Bible-thumping anti-abortion activist than get your coochie examined).

It's tricky to talk about this stuff--investigation and understanding leads to blame, and blame should be placed, but without losing one's sense of pride--I want everyone to have access to good healthy food, but I want to be able to say so as a proud, hot, fat femme. I also want to be able to strip down when it's hot without being hassled, but I also want to do so as a proud, hot, fat femme. It's tricky, but Beth Ditto pulls it off like it's simple, which is probably why I can't decide whether I want to do her or be her...which is why, I guess, it's better that I just sing her praises from out here in the Charm.

Allow me to introduce myself

A few years back (seven years to be exact—I was living in Seattle), I had this sketchy rockabilly boyfriend who I let move in waay too early in our relationship who didn’t eat vegetables. He ate a few kinds of very common veggies, mostly corn, but anything else he wouldn’t touch. He was cute, I guess, in that pale, skinny, tattooed way, that attracted the 20-something me, who was going through a self-destructive period (following another self-destructive period abroad, which culminated in an unplanned pregnancy—the resulting abortion being the source of this particular period of self-destructiveness) and he was a pretty smooth talker, so I guess that’s how I wound up in the situation, which didn’t last long because before two months was up our engagement (I think we got “engaged” about two weeks in) was off, before the “kitten” tattoo he got in my honor had even healed (if you ever see a skinny, Italian-looking guy w/a tattoo of a kitten on his forearm not eating veggies, RUN!) when I caught him making very expensive phone calls to chat lines from my phone. Looking back, I think that his refusal to eat vegetables was a huge red flag, even huger than his lack of a paying job.

Now, some people will say I’d be going too far in saying that this dude was crazy because he didn’t eat vegetables, but I’m not so sure. We all know that our brains need nourishment, and that our attitudes and behavior hinges on our blood sugar level. I worked for many years as a waitress (in fact, was working at a lovely Korean joint called the Garlic Tree near Pike Place Market, which has since closed, when all of this went down) and have seen people of all walks go from murderous to ass-kissing in the magical first 2 minutes of a meal (my current boyfriend, who eats his veggies, calls this phenomenon “hanger” as in "Sorry I snapped at you, baby, I'm just getting a little hangry--let's get something to eat").

Now, I’m not saying that if this guy had eaten kale everyday that he wouldn’t have been a jerk—he had a lot of other bad habits, most of which I shared (like drinking and dope smoking), and I would say that he likely falls into a large percentage of men now in their 20’s and 30’s who are ill-equipped for a job market that is constantly changing (I don’t remember this guy having any skills, really) and perhaps confused by changing gender roles in the workplace as well as the home and don’t know what to do when their girlfriend makes more money than they do (except that this guy professed to be radical, and seemed pretty smart) and so end up on the couch, mooching off their lady friends. But if the Christian Wrong can say that eating soy products makes people gay, then I can say that my psycho ex was psycho, in part, because of his terrible diet.

When I first read that little gem about soy making people gay, I, and a lot of my friends, joked that, in fact, we all knew a lot of queer folks of varying degrees of vegetarianism, so maybe they had something there.

Maybe the moral here is that if more people ate lots of veggies and had more queer interaction, the saner and happier we’d all be.

Today, as of two weeks ago, I live in Baltimore with my boyfriend, Mr. Charm who (in case you were wondering) is an FTM transgender man, which makes us not quite “gay” but certainly not “straight”—my being a femme bio-woman. We identify as queer, which I imagine won’t require any explanation from the people I expect to be reading this blog, but makes for some interesting conversations with the doctor, co-workers, my father…In fact, I’ve decided that 2008 will be the year that I’ll come out to my estranged mother (a woman who doesn’t eat a lot of veggies herself, a fact that only strengthens my earlier point), a practicing Mormon, so look for that in upcoming months—I’ll try to get a picture of her face, or at least get a couple of good quotes to share, when the shit goes down.

Anyhoo, food issues (both personal and political) and sex (personal, interpersonal, political, you name it), being the two somewhat controllable aspects of humanity without which none of us would be here, are two of my deepest interests, and though I’ll likely be chatting about some other stuff here, everything I do and say is somehow shaped and framed, and even caused, by my identity as a queer femme who tries to eat in an ethical way (I’ve gone back and forth on the veggie thing for years but have never been vegan, and though I only very very rarely eat meat now I am looking forward to eating some pastured meat this winter). I try not to judge—most of our food decisions are based on what’s available to us, and what our parents fed us growing up, and I know that folks of many genders and sexual identities could criticize my getting domestic in what could appear to be a heteronormative way (not that I’d take it to heart). Lao Tzu said there are many paths to enlightenment, and on a good day, I imagine that we’re each on one.

So, a little more background before I go:

I’m originally from the Pacific Northwest, but since I was 20 I’ve lived in Olympia, Seattle, Wyoming, Montana, Spain, DC, and most recently NYC, where I worked as a PR rep for a nonprofit program and had managed to set up a pretty decent deal (the job was wearing on me, the roommate was cuh-razy, but the social scene was happening) in under a year, only to find myself in love with one of the cutest tranny boys around, who’d already decided to relocate to B-more. What’s a self-admitted nomad w/o a tribe to do but follow her heart?

So here we are in the Charm, hon, praying that my dog and his cat will one day learn to get along and that we can find a car or the public transport gets a lot more efficient before it gets much colder. I’m freelancing now, still for nonprofit, and he’s working on his MFA, and we’ve got a place that is twice as big as my Brooklyn apt, at less than half the rent. We thought that once we got down here life would slow way down (which it has, it always does when you move someplace cold, w/o knowing anyone, but it never lasts so I’ve learned to relish it, those first weeks of chillin’) when we got here and very much looked forward to cooking great food at home, crafting, writing more “for myself” and just generally getting domestic. We’ll see how it goes…