gay, smoking, fat

Whew, happy hurricane aftermath.  Is everyone okay?  I'm happy to report that I did not lose power, and in fact spent my Monday watching almost the entire second season of this glorious show:



RuPaul's Drag Race!  The most perfect application of the reality tv format that this world has ever seen.  And besides all the (staged) backstage fights, absurd challenges, and just incredible camp, I love that Logo, the (queer) channel that hosts the show, features moments of the queens talking about their experiences being gay and how doing drag has helped them after rough childhoods.

While I had that thought stewing in the back of my brain, I spent a lot of time today browsing Dave Eggers and Jordan Kurland's site, 90 Days, 90 Reasons, where 90 different writers and performing artists have written short essays on why they are voting for Barack Obama.  I came across Lemony Snicket's essay, which features jaw-dropping quotes from GOP politicians, including this one:

I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.

We can credit Mike Huckabee with this quote.  He said it in 1992, an important year in the AIDS epidemic, when many, less extreme people shared this same belief.  It made me think about changing public perceptions of fatness: on one end of the spectrum we have fat advocates who equate fat hatred with the passe belief that homosexuality was an immoral choice/ communicable disease; and on the other, fatness is like smoking; a bad choice for your health that we should shame and legislate around as much as possible.

Ah, obesity, the next great public health disaster.  Are fat people just "born that way"?  Or are they a product of some giant obesity lobby?  By the way, there is no such thing.

If you read Huckabee's quote out loud and change the word "homosexuality" to "obesity", does it feel natural for you to say?

The most problematic part of this comparison, and Mike Huckabee's wording, is that the idea of fatness is that it's "sinful" - morally reprehensible.  (Uh, it's not.  Prepare for a post on that soon.)  And that it's contagious.  (That is also untrue.)

So yes, as you can imagine, I fall into the camp that wants to push the stigmatization of fat people where it belongs, in the past, with the unfair stigmatization of homosexuality.  Which I believe is not incompatible with a productive dialogue about health that includes every one, regardless of sex, size, or income level.

Okay.  Looking on the other end of the spectrum, we have condescending reactionaries who write garbage articles like this one and think they are so clever.  The beginning of the article actually sounds like a satire, or a critique of the many ways in which we already shame fat people, but by golly the man is serious.  It stresses me out to think that this writer represents the epitome of what we're up against; a complete ignorance of what fatness is/means, an unwillingness to accept that shame is not an effective motivator and a handful of crude fat jokes.

We've already tried shame.  It doesn't work.