Missed Connections

by Brian Francis

  No doubt you thought taking that risk would pay off. You did have a nice physique, after all.

  But sadly, Dwayne, you just weren’t my type. Muscular guys made me too self-conscious about my own body. I was a fat kid, you see. Over 200 pounds at thirteen years old. Specifically, 203 pounds. That number had been scorched into my brain when someone said it out loud. Weight’s a funny thing. So long as no numbers are spoken, it’s almost as if those numbers don’t exist. There can be so much self- denial when it comes to weight. I don’t mean your weight is something you can hide, although there are ways to camouflage it. But you can’t escape your body, your physicality. It’s always there, surrounding you, keeping you tethered. Denial can be the one coping mechanism getting you through the day. To be clear, it’s not like I’d look in the mirror and see someone thin. It was more about not looking in the mirror in the first place. Or believing that my weight was something fleeting, like a pimple. Maybe when I woke up the next day, I’d be thin, the sheets wet with the fat that had magically melted off during the night. I refused to let the magnitude of my weight sink in because if I did, I’d have to face reality. And, at thirteen, reality was no friend of mine.

  I had other troubles. Around that time, I developed gynecomastia, a condition in males where your estrogen and testosterone levels get all fucked up. Basically, you grow breasts. In my case, it wasn’t so much breasts that were the problem (I was already top-heavy in that department, as you can imagine) as it was my nipples. They puffed out. They went from looking like wrinkled raisins to the cherry-red tips of badminton birdies. And they were very noticeable. Naturally, I was horrified. It was the absolute last thing an overweight burgeoning homosexual needed. My rebellious nipples were yet one more secret I had to hide.

  I went to the doctor, who was pretty useless. Give it time, he said, my hormones would settle down. But I needed an immediate solution. I had to go to school the next day. And the day after that. Warmer weather was on its way, and it would only be a matter of time before I had to trade my jackets and sweatshirts for lighter, less forgiving clothing. So I came up with a solution on my own.

  I taped my nipples every day. At first I used Scotch tape, but that didn’t hold very well against my skin, especially when I perspired beneath my clothes. So I moved on to wrapping masking tape around my torso. It was awkward to do, and the binding around my chest meant I had to be careful not to take any deep breaths, but, for the most part, it kept my secret safe.

  Isn’t adolescence a batshit time? I mean, there I was, an overweight thirteen-year-old, wrapping masking tape around my body every morning, and never once did I stop to say, “What am I doing? This is nuts.” There was no questioning it, because to question it would have meant an admission—of my failure as a boy. It would have meant bringing the monstrosity of me out into the open. And that was the last thing I needed. There’s a strange solace to be found in the secrets we labour to keep, the rituals we perform, the pieces of ourselves we try to conceal under our clothing. So long as we’re the only ones who know how screwed up we are, we feel safe. The universe will protect us, but we must be vigilant. If our secrets get out, if our true selves are revealed, we’ll be rejected, reviled, humiliated. Whatever shreds of dignity we have left in our fat, taped-up bodies will be trampled into the ground.

  I shouldn’t complain too much. My nipple and weight issues ended up being fodder for my first book, Fruit. I wanted to reclaim that period of my life, to own that dysfunction for what it was, even if only through the pretense of fiction. And my protagonist had it worse: his nipples talked to him. I don’t remember mine speaking. How could they, under those layers of masking tape?

  So yes, there were body issues, Dwayne. I was closeted, overweight, and had puffy nipples. It was the unholiest of trinities.

  The weight, at least, was one thing I could control. My uncle, who had been overweight for most of his life, had gone to a hospital dietitian and lost over one hundred pounds after trading in his Kentucky Fried Chicken for raw cabbage. He went from bringing my sisters and me bags of penny candy to packages of Trident. (Bullshit, as far as I was concerned.) He was a lifelong bachelor and I think his weight loss represented a second adolescence, another shot at life. He’d show up at our house in jeans (!) or sporting a purple faux-fur fedora. And because I had always thought of my uncle as a bit of a joke in the way that relatives sometimes seem to teenagers, it bothered me that he had reached the other shore, where all the thin, happy people resided, whereas I was still stuck where I had always been, Jack Horner with my thumb—and every other finger—in the pie.

  My oldest sister, who was also overweight, was the first to follow in my uncle’s footsteps. Soon after she went to the same dietitian, the dynamic in our household shifted. Our fridge was stocked with cans of Tab, the freezer loaded with boxes of Lean Cuisine four-cheese cannelloni and sweet-and-sour chicken, the cupboards full of Sugar Twin and packages of Crystal Lite iced tea mix. Now there was another traitor in our midst. While being overweight can be a lonely experience, there’s solidarity in being around your fellow fatties. So long as you’re all overweight, none of you are overweight.

  Don’t ask me to explain this psychology.

  It wasn’t long before I wanted a piece of the (calorie-reduced) pie. So I went to the hospital dietitian, too. I remember sitting next to my dad in the waiting room, eyeing the other overweight people, comparing myself, taking inventory of everyone else’s body, how my fat compared with theirs.

  “Two hundred and three pounds.”

  That was what the dietitian announced when I stepped on the scale. Her voice was so matter-of-fact. This was a woman who spent most of her days weighing fat people, after all. I’m sure I wasn’t the largest thirteen-year-old she’d ever weighed. Or was I? A part of me waited for her to pick up the telephone. “Hello, Guinness Book of World Records? You’re not going to believe this but…”

  I was ashamed, naturally. I hadn’t stepped on our own bathroom scale in years. Hearing that number spoken aloud was like being thrown into a cold lake. My weight was an insurmountable obstacle, a mountain where the top wasn’t even visible due to crowning clouds.

  After my weigh-in, the dietitian sat me down to review my eating habits. She set out rubber replicas of food on the table between us. A grey pork chop. A hard white pile of mashed potatoes. A bumpy mound of bright green peas.

  “How much would you say you eat of this, Brian?”

  “I don’t eat rubber peas.”

  She tried to be encouraging. She told me that when her husband got a sundae, all she ever needed was a spoonful. “I just need one bite and that’s it,” she said with a smile and a goofy shake of her curly hair. “That’s all I ever need.”

  I immediately felt sorry for her.

  I was put on a plan, outlined in a printed tri-fold brochure that I tacked onto the fridge. Everything was about portions. I’d need to weigh my food. Cut wieners in half. Drink water instead of Coke Slurpees.

  It was awful in the beginning, this self-control business. But I stuck to it, because it was new and a challenge and something different for me. I wanted to be thin more than anything. Once my mind switched over, once I believed I could be good-looking, thin, and popular if I wanted it badly enough, there was no stopping me.

  I would become someone else. Someone not me.

  I lost eight pounds in my first week, which felt like a miracle. Losing weight was so easy!

  But, as I’d soon find out, weight loss doesn’t maintain that momentum. It only gets harder. You can go from week to week without losing anything, even if you’ve been very good. Well, mostly good. And that’s when the frustration would set in and I’d find myself with a bag of Mr. Christie’s Pirate oatmeal peanut butter cookies. I’d twist off the outside cookie layers and devour them before mashing the stacked icing discs together into a ball, which I would slowly, almost hypnotically, nibble on while I watched Cr
eature Feature on a Saturday afternoon.

  I fell off the diet, went back on, fell off, went back on. Anyone who has struggled with food, or any other kind of addiction (someday, Dwayne, I’ll write to you about smoking), will be familiar with this. There’s rarely a guiding light that keeps you moving towards a cleanly marked and defined destination.

  My weight fluctuated throughout high school, though I was never as heavy as I’d been at thirteen. My gynecomastia cleared up, eventually, but it took so long. All those years of hiding my body, of never feeling confident or normal, left me fucked up about it. There were boys everywhere whose bodies looked and behaved in the way they were supposed to. I felt so betrayed, so denied, by this body of mine. But which of us had betrayed the other first?

  By the time you sent me your letter, I was rail-thin. A student diet of sardine sandwiches and Matinée Extra Milds will do that. And while I had always dreamed of being thin, I also quickly learned that thin wasn’t the end goal I’d always believed it to be. Now I had another issue to contend with: my lack of muscle. I was soft, Dwayne. Arms like twigs. Stretch marks like scratches. Love handles that spilled over the waistband of my jeans.

  It’s funny. It’s not until you share your body with someone else that you realize how imperfect it is. Up until that time, I could be solitary in my insecurities. No one needed to know about my body, since I wasn’t revealing it to anyone. But I had entered a new arena: the sex arena. And it’s awfully hard to be erotic wearing a button-down. Lights would have to be low. Sheets pulled up. In truth, I’d never be able to really enjoy sex, or just completely let go, because I’d be too conscious of my partner’s experience with my body.

  “It’s like you have a layer of fat over everything.”

  Someone I was dating once said this to me. Yes, he was an asshole. But the comment stuck. Obviously. What he said was insensitive, but it wasn’t untrue. The person I’d been trying to escape, the overweight thirteen-year-old with the taped-up nipples, he was never as far behind me as I would have liked.

  I’ve been thin for over thirty years now. But in spite of how I look, fat is still the lens through which I view the world. A part of me is still stuck at thirteen, and in many ways, he’s the person I identify with more than any other version of myself from any other time in my life. Maybe that’s true for all of us. The person we were when we were the most lost, the most vulnerable, the most beaten down, the most hidden, is who we want to protect. Keeping him here, in the cradle of my arms, means that he’s safe. No more harm will come to him. Not on my watch.

  Now I’ve got my fifty-year-old body to contend with. Everything is drooping. Varicose veins ripple along the back of my right leg. My knees crackle when I go up and down the stairs. I have rings of hair, like tumbleweeds, around my nipples. (Just imagine ripping masking tape off them now!) My love handles are a constant threat. I’m always readjusting shirts and sweaters, pulling down corners and edges, even when I’m by myself. I step on the scale every day and step away feeling either that I’ve managed to escape something or that its shadow looms on the horizon.

  As I get older, I need to take care of myself. And I also need to let go. I’ll never have a body that I’ll be entirely comfortable with, one that will make me want to walk around naked in front of someone when the lights are on. A body that I’ll forget during sex, that I’ll send a photo of to a stranger as a selling point.

  But here’s something you might appreciate. A couple of years ago, I joined a gym for people over the age of forty. It’s a relief to be among the seniors as they power-walk on the treadmills or do their stretches on the mat. I don’t feel defeated before I start. I don’t compare. I don’t give a fuck what I look like either. I wear cheap shorts and free promotional T-shirts. I put my earbuds in, listen to nineties dance music (specifically Club Cutz Volume 4), and talk to no one. There’s a satisfaction in knowing that I’m not simply on the sidelines.

  Maybe I’ll see you at the gym sometime. I’ll be the one in the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals T-shirt, bench-pressing seventy pounds like a motherfucker.

  Sincerely,

  Dear Gorgeous Blonde Hunk!!!

  I don’t normally resort to answering ads like this, but like you I’m tired of being alone. I’m 28, 5′7″, and 145 pounds of solid muscle—NOT!!! I find myself unable to meet men whom wish to pursue something of substance. Each time I allow myself to think that “he” might be the “one” the train goes completely off the rails and I find myself alone, bored stiff. (Interpret that any way you wish.)

  I’m going to stop here. Now it’s YOUR turn. I will await your reply. My address is included. Do NOT forget to include a photo!!!

  Sincerely,

  Snuggles

  P.S. Don’t hold back. I’m open to ANY questions you have. You have my assurance that discretion will be used. (By both of us I hope???)

  Snuggles

  Dear Snuggles,

  Call me presumptuous, but I’m going to guess that you were never in the running for the title of Mr. Masculine of the Universe. I realize that reading my words might cause you to bristle even if you were reclined on a chaise longue, eating bonbons and wearing a silk robe trimmed with ostrich feathers. It always seemed like a low blow, calling out another gay man’s masculinity—or lack thereof. To be called a screaming queen wasn’t exactly a slur, especially if it was another queen calling you that, but it was definitely a means of putting—and keeping—a gay man in his place.

  I could be wrong about you, though. Maybe you were happily in touch with your feminine side. Maybe, unlike me, you had managed to rise above that gender landfill and see all the masculine/feminine bullshit for what it was.

  A trap.

  And yes, even yours truly had played right into those polarities in my personal ad, casting aside the Princess Di and Rambo wannabes. At the time, I thought I was being clever, but I see now that I was sending a very transparent and exclusionary message about the types of guys I was interested in—and the types I wasn’t.

  Some of the respondents to my ad (including the ones I replied to) used the term “straight-acting” to describe themselves. The whole “straight” thing was considered such a selling point, wasn’t it? Like saying you had a car with leather seats or that you were well-endowed. “Straight-acting” was regarded as an achievement. It meant you could pass as heterosexual and manoeuvre successfully through the world. Of course, for many gay men, masculinity, or at least the appearance of it, was a means of survival. From a young age I knew that the more feminine a male acted, the more he was a target. And it wasn’t long into my coming out that I also learned that the more feminine a gay man was, the less desirable he was. Even among the gay community, feminine gay men were often desexualized, perceived as caricatures or there mainly for comedic relief, always cast in the best friend supporting role but never the romantic lead.

  You don’t need to look much further than gay pornography to understand the standards the gay community had internalized. The first gay porn I bought (a VHS tape, Snuggles) was called Dick Dreams. I won’t go into detail about the intricate plot lines, but let’s just say there was some questionable behaviour going on at an abandoned warehouse and Detective Dick was assigned to get to the, er, bottom of it. Dick had all the makings of a tough-talking detective: the suit, the snarl, the big gun. But as soon as he opened his mouth, the purse fell out. And while the rest of the characters didn’t seem to pay too much notice (they were preoccupied with other things), Dick’s effeminacy extinguished my warehouse fantasies. I thought of him as someone to mock. When I was around my gay friends, I’d often impersonate him during his various scenes. “That’sss it. Sssuck that cock, you cockssssucker!” We’d roar with laughter.

  As gay men, we had been conditioned to dislike one another so much, to devalue the expression of our femininity, that we ended up turning against ourselves and upholding the pillars of the straig
ht world—the same world that had shamed us in the first place.

  It never even occurred to me that, when it came to my impersonations of Detective Dick, the joke was really on me.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know about your childhood, Snuggles, but by the time I started kindergarten, I understood that the world was divided between feminine and masculine. Television commercials told me that only girls played with Easy-Bake ovens and only boys played with Tonka trucks. At school, girls lined up on one side of the hallway, boys on the other. At recess, boys could chase girls, but rarely would girls chase boys. (And boys never chased other boys, much to my chagrin.) Even my superhero bedspread and matching curtains featured only muscular men in tight costumes. (Not that I was complaining.)

  And what did those messages say to a boy like me, who wanted to be chased and dreamed about making cherry chip cakes in an Easy-Bake oven of his own? A boy who was more interested in a Holly Hobbie rag doll than Evel Knievel and his Stunt Cycle?

  Where did I fit in?

  From my perspective, the world of girls seemed like such an easier place to reside. I’m not saying that girls had it better than boys, because they didn’t. But things seemed less constrained for girls, more fluid. They appeared to have more options. Pants or dresses. Short or long hair. Ultra girly or tomboy. When a girl strayed towards more masculine attributes, it didn’t carry the same negative connotations it did for boys who ventured towards the feminine. And that had more to do with how femininity was viewed from the get-go. Regardless of whether you were a boy or a girl, femininity was a hallmark of weakness. Masculinity signalled strength.