Meat, Gays, and Fatsos

Nothing but a great dinner to bring people together.  And nothing but the subjects of meat, gays, and fatsos to strike-up conversation during a good dinner, right?

Right!  Or, well, “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!” comes to mind. Something like that, anyway.

When you’ve got busy and varied lives among friends, the not-frequent-enough dinner together is always a good place to decompress, so I look forward to these.  And they never really disappoint!  Whether as a matter of the food, the company, or the conversation, (or everything all around) these dinners really do make me feel alive.

Yesternight’s dinner was especially good all around.  The prime rib, roasted veggies, and dessert were good.  And as always, the company was stellar.  Sometimes it’s a whole gaggle of us and other times — like this time — it’s just a couple of us.

We dug right in.  First topic (and isn’t it always?) was about life — the whole alphabet from acrimony to zeal.  Whose life is coming along swimmingly? No one.  Whose life is everything they ever needed? No one.  Whose life had more shit in it than a public restroom? You couldn’t shut the gang up.

Someone was having husband problems.  This couple comprises two gay males; successful, independent, living from two homes, middle-aged, husbands having problems.  The honeymoon had come and gone like acid-wash jeans so their mid-cycle mini-crisis boiled down to this:  One husband is not openly-gay.  I know, I know…  The issue, though, doesn’t linger, so it’s not a problem for them per se.  It just re-appears when things come to a head, on whatever the subject is at that moment, which actually isn’t very frequent.  This time it was rekindling the romance.  I digress, because their reconciliation is not my point here.

My point is the closetedness.  Like a baseball cap covering a baldspot, being in the closet for some is a movable shield that is worn when the situation warrants it.  And like that baseball cap, some days you wear it snugly and other days, it’s barely hanging onto your shiny orb.  Some gays are torn between being openly gay and circumstances in work life, community life, or even home life that don’t permit the openness that might be desired.  Other times, it’s just plain inability to own a self identity.  In this case, I think it’s a little of both.  And that’s why the husband who is not closeted is able to cope with the husband who is.  Apparently you don’t need to wear a “baseball cap” to have sex. <wink>

We had other stuff to talk about as we chewed on our prime ribs.  The conversation continued on mundane stuff like who’s traveling where, whose car is in need of the heave-ho, or who’s just had a shitty mess of a day.  But our quiet moment was broken-up by me peeking at Twitter.

At that moment, I saw a twitter post which read:  “Guess the cool kids still make fun of the fat kids. Messed up.“  This was from a tweeter who is portly.  You know, as I’m portly; as all of us who isn’t a waist-size 26″ rail-thin A&F spokesguy is — maybe not portly, but — not the ideal body shape.  So I replied with a simple sad face.  The reply back showed even more angst:  “yup, hate feeling like I’m in high school again.“

I shared with the group.  Shit, I had to share.  Here we were, noshing on a pound each of dead cow smothered in butter-sauteed mushrooms, sipping diet Cokes (insert fat-lady-in-muumuu-buying-cake-and-diet-coke joke here), and some asshole on twitter was making fun of someone who just didn’t look svelte enough apparently to garner a nod.  Such sophomoric bullshit.

So there’s nothing I could do but be supportive.  I consider this tweeter more than an acquaintance, and I know the punch line to many fatso jokes, so— really! — I knew his pain.  There are assholes out there in the world who seem to think acceptance is a private country club where put-downs are votes from the co-op board on his or her admission.  But there will always be assholes like that.  Some days, those assholes get thrown out of their country club for being uncouth.  And that’s when us fatsos laugh loudest.

But this gets me to a larger point and one in which that closeted husband of a friend of mine plays as key a role as my corpulent compatriot does.

This closeted friend wields a luxury that my fellow fatso doesn’t have: The power to play the audience.  Whenever it suits him, this pal can throw on his cloak of gay invisibility and exist in that double life of his, in many cases with nary a peep.

Whereas, my twitter friend is there, being fat.  He’s got a target painted on his forehead that only small-minded dipshits seem to see.  Seriously, there’s only so much an overweight person can “suck in,” so life goes on remembering that size ‘husky’ exists.

The world isn’t fair.  No one — especially not my twitter friend — was asking for special treatment.  And there’s no moral here.  I don’t have a cauterising thought that will solve the social ills that gays and overweight folks experience.

But we (my faithful group of friends) did, for that evening, come full circle.  The din of judgmental hisses about this friend being married to someone who’s in the closet really faded after everyone realised that there were things all of us wore as badges of honour that were indivisible,  part of our own pursuits of happiness.  After all, individuality is a part of the human experience.

Tough shit for anyone who either didn’t agree or had something disparaging to say about the humans we excel at being.  And whatever it was that we wore proudly, whether that was our weight, our religiosity, or our sexuality, or anything else, at least we excelled at something other than being assholes.