My Trade and Art

Ah, Spring! It is upon us and so, that annual Seattle tradition, the Airing of the Pink Knees. Last week the beloved husband A. put up the portable AC up in our bedroom. (We spent the morning hunting up two of the little screws that connect the accordion-tube to the window-block. Couldn't leave for work until we found 'em.)

We do not get what anyone in their right mind would call "hot" weather until August, but as the temperature went into the low eighties last week -- horrors -- we prepared.

Think pink.

I take the shorts from closet and again dazzle passersby with my profound whiteness. Really though, pink. I am a pink person. I am also now a round person. Think Mr. Bubble.

In other words, I've run -- or rather walked slowly -- to fat.

Fat is a sharp word for such a soft thing. I don't much mind the word. Others do. I understand. I'm fat. You needn't be. Fluffy, curvy, chunky, big, I don't have a problem with any of the current euphemisms, or with the old ones come to that. Full-figured to me suggests the ski-sloped bosoms and elaborate undercarriage of my grandmother's generation. Stout seems a very Victorian thing to be, likewise portly, or plump. I prefer Pickwickian, but no matter. Say what suits you.

But then it's easier being a fat man than it is to be a woman of whatever shape. It's being female that requires the kind of critical analysis Roxane Gay provides in her book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. She speaks to me nonetheless:

"...to show ourselves as we are, no more and no less, would be too much."

Indeed.

As the object of the male gaze, as a survivor of sexual violence, as a woman, of necessity she must address her body as everyone else feels free to do anyway. I needn't. As a white man, even as a gay one, my survival is less dependent on the opinion of men. For me to be fat I need only to eat too much and move too little. As a gay man, fat adds to my invisibility I suppose, but it is my white beard that has already made me altogether harmless. (There are advantages to this. Whenever I am now clocked checking out the local male fauna in bloom, I am now met with... concern. "You okay, sir?" Considering the hostility with which my clumsy cruising used to be met, concern is simply bliss. Happy to be helped across a street, sonny.)

Not an easy phrase though, "as we are." Montaigne, among others, spent his writing life attempting to describe himself as such, thus his "trade and art," and I suppose, in a small way, mine.

"I am no philosopher; evils oppress me according to their weight, and they weigh as much according to the form as the matter, and very often more." -- that from Of Vanity.

And that is the subject at hand, isn't it?

I was vain of my calves when I was young and rode a bike.  I had "a comely leg." And when I was starving in college, I was very glad of my twenty-eight inch waist. Got me a man with that body, and kept him after too. Mostly though, my vanity has always been intellectual. Tell me I'm clever and you're in, boy. Of that I am now a little ashamed, if unreformed.

Henry Miller said he needed to ponder his shame and despair in seclusion -- though he did say this in Tropic of Cancer, hence in public, so there's that. Personally, I'm glad to see shame become shameful, particularly as women have come to see themselves as beautiful in all their variation. I should like to think I might learn from their example, though I may simply be older now and if not wiser, less interested in being interesting to men. Maybe that's the lesson, or at least another.

Of my body I am and have always been less than proud. Even when I was all too briefly skinny, I was still short, and pale when that was still a bad thing. I'm hairy without ever being hirsute, a quality I've often admired in others. I've never then been entirely happy in my own skin. I've always been suspicious of those who are.

My father was a little vain of the fact that well into his forties he could still fit in the trousers he wore as a much younger man. Then he got a bum ticker and got a belly. Didn't much care for that. A very active man to the end, I know he did not like the failure of his parts.

My parts to date have yet to fail me, but I do not tax them much. Nonetheless there is an aspect of fat on which everyone still seems free to comment, the health of the over-stuffed person, and that is something I do still encounter. Fat can kill you. My waistline worries people. They are not wrong. Again, I find comfort in the Victorians: "It's an uncommonly dangerous thing to be left without padding against the shafts of disease." -- from George Eliot's Middlemarch.

All of which, dear reader, is but prelude.

I have been asked to do another photo-shoot for the bookstore where I work. Not my first rodeo. I've been in a couple of Christmas campaigns (No surprise there.) I was even, briefly, on a billboard. Why not? So when asked if I would be willing to participate in a Gay Pride campaign, I was down.

"Anything you need," I says, "anything," I says, "On a bearskin rug if you want me," I says.

Well.

I could see I'd kindled a mischievous spark with that last remark. My interlocutor from the Advertising & Promotions, he's a young fellow, and himself a friend of Dorothy -- though he may be too young for that reference.

"Are you serious?!" he says.

And here, soon enough, we will be.

So just how comfortable am I really with the body I've made? Is the absence of vanity the same thing as being willing to be photographed in just an apron and a smile?

The photo-shoot is scheduled. I'm bringing a bathrobe. Stay tuned.