Never a Fit: Body Policing in Queer Male Spaces
“Body terrorism is a hideous tower whose primary support beam is the belief that there is a hierarchy of bodies. We uphold the system by internalizing this hierarchy and using it to situate our own value and worth in the world.” — Sonya Renee Taylor
I turned forty last year. In gay years, that’s ancient.
This isn’t just hyperbole.
As I enter middle age, I’ve been reflecting a lot about the way my body is policed in the queer world. After all, that’s what the massive ageism in many gay spaces is about: controlling the way my body is allowed to exist in a world where it sometimes seems like everyone is trying to be something that they’re not.
What’s more, age isn’t the only reason my body is policed. I’m agender, so the fact that I think I look pretty in certain make-up and nail polish and clothes means that I’m too effeminate in a world that prioritizes masculinity. I’ve had a difficult relationship with my weight over the years and the fact that I’m fat means I’m not even given a second glance. The paleness I inherited from my Northern European ancestors means I’m seen as sickly.
In a world where the mantra of “no fems, no fats, no old dudes” rules, there’s a lot of reason I don’t fit in with the dominant notion of what it means to be queer.
Any one of these could be overcome if I was willing to put myself in a box. My age could be overcome if I was wiling to embrace an identity of a “daddy,” which would entail performing my gender more masculine and losing weight. My body wouldn’t be a problem if I was willing to fit in the bear community, a hypermasculine ideal that has plenty of fatphobia and effemophobia of its own. My gender identity would be great if I could lose weight, look younger, and go full-in as a “fem boy” (never mind that I’m agender so the identity of boy doesn’t ring true anyway).
When I reflect on it, though, all of these ways of trying to “fit in” are just more policing of my body, explaining to me how my body is allowed to exist if I want full acceptance.
I remember being body policed from a young age. As I live at the intersection of queer, mad, and fat identities, it’s always been difficult for me to pass as the person society told me I should be: a muscular (or, at worse, slim), masculine, middle-class, confident, happy man who will be eternally young, or at least long enough to find a partner and start a family.
The shame that enforces this ideal started showing up as early as kindergarten. I remember being teased by peers for being different: for being too effeminate, not wanting to fight or play sports, for being too sad or not behaving in ways that were expected of me, for wearing clothes that didn’t match up to the expectations of fashion. I remember in fourth grade being told by a teacher that little boys shouldn’t so much affection towards teachers (though nothing was ever said to the girls who gave the same hugs I did).
And this was only at school! At home, I received conflicting messages of wear more clothes or don’t wear so many clothes. My father taught me both that I was too much of a sissy and that I didn’t have the right to express autonomy over my own body when I was punished for not wanting to take my shirt off when he believed I was too hot.
All of this led to me having a very warped idea of what my body was supposed to be going into adulthood.
But it gets better, right?
Queer as Folk had just premiered when I started coming out of the closet. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before: a wonderland of queerness, of love and acceptance and finding new ways of being in the world. I thought that this was what I wanted my life to be like, with nights out partying with good friends and embracing the love and lust I felt in my bones.
For many of us coming out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was the first time we had ever seen a show where the entire main cast were queer heroes, struggling with the same questions of acceptance we were, trying to figure out how to be queer in a world that still so often saw us as a threat.
But even Queer as Folk was policing my identity, telling me how I should and should not be. In retrospect, it didn’t offer the utopian vision I thought it did.
In one season one storyline, Ted, the token thirty-something gay man who doesn’t look like he’s “old” nearly dies after trying some drugs to impress a younger guy he’s attracted to. In the aftermath he decides the answer is to no longer go after young, attractive, skinny guys.
In the episode “The Art of Desperation,” the title of which should tell you how condescending the episode is going to be, Ted dates Roger, a really nice, slightly older, balding, and slightly out-of-shape guy who he’s not attracted to at all.
At the time I didn’t realize how toxic the episode was or how indicative it would be of my experience in the queer world.
One scene towards the end of the episode, as Ted and Roger are trying to have sex for the first time but Ted just can’t get into it, really exemplifies the body politics of the episode and deserves to be reprinted in full:
Roger: Well? Go on, say it.
Ted: You’re just not my type.
Roger: Type? Are you serious? God! I don’t believe this. After all that? I thought you didn’t want sex to be everything.
Ted: Yeah, but…I’d like it to be something.
Roger: You’re just like all the others. Where’s my sock?
Ted: Look, it’s my fault, I admit it. I mean, I-I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with me. I mean, you’re a catch. Any straight woman would find you incredibly attractive.
Roger: Oh, is that supposed to make me feel better? Fuck you.
Ted: Look, I know we share all the important things — music, a sense of humor. This would be a totally appropriate relationship for me. The only problem is, is that sex isn’t appropriate.
Roger: You know, I was wrong. You’re not like all the others, you’re worse. Because you think knowing Sesto’s aria from “Clemenzo Di Tito” somehow makes you better. Well, let me tell you, you’re nothing but a pretentious, self-involved, boring asshole, who’s still hanging around with younger guys who don’t want you and never will. You’re pathetic!
Ted: And what about you? You know, after you conduct your 501st tribute to Sondheim, you might try going to a gym. You know, get on a treadmill for once in your life, would ya? And do something about your breath! Listen. I don’t suppose we could still be friends.
In retrospect, Ted sounds like quite the asshole in this scene, but Ted was supposed to be the hero, and suffers absolutely no consequences for his behavior in this episode, either now or in the future. In fact, in later seasons, he starts dating the guy who left him for dead, the younger, skinnier, more physically attractive guy.
I could go into much more detail about other problems with Queer as Folk, but, suffice it to say, the Ted-Roger storyline stuck with me, and I thought I’d never be accepted unless I changed my body.
I was naïve going into the queer world, convinced that this was where I would find myself, that I would finally be a person who was loved and accepted as I am.
I thought I would find my community.
In some ways I did, finding a group of really wacky and weird friends who shared my passion for queering and mind-fucking the world. In other ways, it’s been a challenge just to get guys to take a second look at me, each of them wondering if I could be less queer or less fat or less mad, for my body to take up less space.
Like Roger, I’ve even had someone tell me, “You’re such a great friend! Why are you so worried about people finding you attractive?”
With such backhanded compliments, I’ve spent much of my adult life trying fad diets or struggling to find clothes that hid my body. I tried to pretend but the mantra of “no fats, no fems, no old dudes” followed me every step of the way, from my earliest experiences of trying to find dates on XY and gay.com to the current proliferation of GPS-based dating apps. Time after time, the message was that I wasn’t even worth acknowledging.
Sometimes the worst are the ones who acknowledge me. I’ve been offered unsolicited advice on everything from my hair to weight loss to my teeth (I was born with a condition called hypoplasia which means my teeth will always appear dirty or discolored, another thing to be shamed for).
Time and time again, I’ve been given the message that I don’t have a right to my body, that other people know what is best for me. I’ve even been sexually assaulted. The place where I thought I would find community became a place where I reinforced my childhood self-hate.
If I’m honest, I’ve been complicit in this behavior as well. I hated myself so much that I am sure I passed my own shame onto others whose only crime was wanting to talk to me.
It’s an insidious system I’m a part of that’s self-reinforcing, after all, and it depends on everyone playing their part. The misogyny, racism, ageism, sizeism, ableism, saneism, and heterosexism involved in queer body policing is insidious. Very few people today do anything.
Queer folks knowingly or unknowingly spread all the same myths that go around the dominant society. We aren’t immune to it, and there are very few saying, “No!”
In recent years, feminists and fat liberationists have questioned the insidious body policing that happens all too often in women’s spaces and, though they’re often mocked by the people who wish to maintain the status quo, they have made amazing inroads to starting conversations about what it means to express radical self-love for yourself. Thinkers like Naomi Wolf, Sonya Renee Taylor, and adrienne marie brown have successfully started conversations about liberating their bodies from the male gaze, the propensity to sexualize them for their pleasure.
Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a parallel movement in queer spaces, especially those dominanted by men. It’s time to talk about how the male gaze is alive and well in queer spaces, judging people based on the insidious oppressions our society so often upholds. Too often, queer body policing is seen not only as normal but expected, and, rather than being a community where we find acceptance, it becomes yet another place where we’re told we’re not enough, unlovable and repulsive.
It’s time for that to change. It’s time for the Rogers of the world to find a queer world that isn’t so judging.
All of this may seem strange coming from a successful person with a partner. It’s true: not everyone out there has bought into these unreachable body standards. I feel like we’re all complicit, though, until we start having a conversation about how we’re not currently the accepting utopia we often pretend we are, that it isn’t getting better for a lot of people, and queer spaces are too often doing a lot of damage to a lot of people.
I want to see a queer world free of body policing. I want us to talk about how queer spaces and apps and beauty standards reinforce a hierarchy of worth that can zap a person of their self-worth. I want to talk about how places where people should be able to find themselves only end up pushing the same narratives many of us have heard since we were kids.
For me, the queerness should be a where people can find acceptance who have never felt it in their life. After all, if the original meaning of “queer” is different, we should be open to an abundance of lived experience and identities rather than gatekeeping off who is and is not good enough. It should never be a place where we’re told why we’re still not good enough.
So I’m saying no today. I’m tired of trying to live up to a standard I will always fail. It’s time to start the conversation about bodies that are queer enough to be queer. It’s time for those in queer male-dominated spaces to take seriously our need to reshape the world into a place where anyone can find acceptance, starting with the places we live, work, and play.
