There’s some supporting data, too: A 2016 study found that a third of the gay men surveyed had directly experienced anti-fat bias even though most of them weren’t overweight, and that gay men were more likely than straight men to expect a fat man to be “blatantly ignored, treated rudely or mocked behind his back if he approached an attractive potential romantic partner.” (Making him, essentially, unfuckable.) The term “gay fat” - describing the way in which men who are considered “chubby” or even “average” in heteronormative spaces are deemed “fat” in gay communities - received mainstream attention in a 2010 episode of American Dad!, in which character Greg Corbin describes himself as “straight thin, but gay fat.” That gay men are especially “ fat wary ” is a topic that receives fairly regular media attention, especially since the notorious “ NO FATS NO FEMMES NO BLACKS NO ASIANS ” Grindr dictate permeated mainstream consciousness.
![plump stocky fat gay men plump stocky fat gay men](https://media.them.us/photos/5a8c3c91add518001082d024/3:4/w_392,h_522,c_limit/bear-in-mind.jpg)
“We’re talking ‘gay fat,’ so not even fat as most people would define it. “ still wouldn’t be acceptable even if it was an extreme catfish situation where I was secretly huge, but I was a 21-year-old kid who didn’t have a flat stomach,” he continues. “It ruined my self-esteem for years.”Īrthur now understands that the man represented an “extreme example” of body negativity, but the situation still baffles him - especially because he wasn’t fat in any real sense of the word. “I ended up crying in Washington Square Park ,” Arthur continues. After a while, he messaged me to say it was because I was too fat for him,” he says, showing me screenshots of the man calling Arthur “incredibly overweight” and chewing him out at length for having “strategically cropped” and “misleading” photos. “I had a guy ghost me after we’d dated online for several weeks and then finally met in New York. Arthur, a 24-year-old waiter in Melbourne who has asked to be identified by his middle name, is recounting his most brutal rejection.