Hello
professor, as always your blog is a nice place where I can refresh my
mind and learn about this community now I'm bringing you another
question more about our community by itself than me individually.
I
know that the taste and admiration for the fat has
been around since ancient times,and even if today our community
still continues to grow, it has only recently begun to
exist as such, then, although there has always been a
taste for fat people and gaining weight (which may be evidenced by history)the gainer community as
we know it has a recent onset (or at least I
guess), so when do you might consider the birth of the community itself?, when do we stopped just being a few
people to form a real community?.
As you can
see I'm interested about the community story, but well there is not
much info about it!, so I hope you would help me a bit. Thanks for
reading and keep doing your best as always who is really appreciated.
Truly
yours:
H.
************************
Dear
H,
It's
very true fat admiration (in men as well as women) has been part of
various human cultures throughout history, and it's probably more significant to ask why American and Western European cultures suddenly
“switched” from appreciation of well fed people to feel as if
“fat/bad” and “thin/good.”
Some
believe it's related to the economy, where for most of human history,
being larger meant you were more successful, and being big meant you
had access to the resources to give you those curves. This was true
across the world, and historically, among the Polynesian People, for
example, nobility was expected to be very big, and some African
traditional people had “fattening” ceremonies because a large man
or woman fit their ideal of beauty.
Biologically
speaking, the higher the body fat percentage of a female, the sooner
she enters puberty, which is why in the United States, for example,
we're seeing girls as young as ten years of age starting puberty. On
the other hand, in communities where food is scarce and females have a
very low body fat percentage, their puberty is “arrested” and
won't happen until their late teens. We also see in certain female
athletes (say long distance runners or competitive bodybuilders),
when they maintain a body fat percentage under 7%, their menstrual cycles are irregular, and they will have a problem becoming pregnant.
Just so, there is most likely a evolutionary imperative to have more
fat than less.
Part
of the current emphasis on being thin may be directly tied to the
“Youth Culture,” where a great deal of money and medical science
will focus on how to keep someone looking as young as possible for as
long as possible, and being thin or lean is associated with being an
adolescent or young adult. Also, especially in the United States, poor people tend to have a higher rate of obesity, so now many people associate fat with being poor, and lean with being rich enough to afford a personal trainer and chef.
When
I was teaching at the Kinsey Institute, there was a very interesting
collection of erotic art in many different forms, and the art from
the late 1800s and before that will often show very rounded women,
and men who definitely don't look like men you'd see on the cover of
today's fitness magazines.
First
of all, people may have an interest in a particular “kink,” but
historically will have a problem connecting with others who have a
similar “kink,” particularly if it has a stigma attached to it.
Also, up until around World War 2, at least in the United States,
most people stayed in the area where they were born. That also
limited exposure to others who might share the “kink,” or their
sexual orientation. A popular British comedian has a routine about
being “the only gay in the village.”
But
by the mid-1940s-early 1950s, we see a major population shift from
rural (agricultural) communities to urban (manufacturing) ones.
Because of the War, a young man who might have never traveled 20
miles away from his home town in rural America, surrounded by corn
fields, enters the army, get sent to a training center and was then
shipped out to a war zone.
For
many military men, their first sexual experience was either with
another male in his platoon, for example, or with a prostitute
(female or male) in a foreign port of call when they had some time
off. When the War was over, many of these men returned to the United
States, but didn't go “home,” but often stayed in the cities
where they received training or shipped out. This might be, for
example, San Francisco, San Diego, or New York City. These cities
(and others) often became the birth sites of gay
communities. It's a little more complicated, where, particularly in
San Francisco, it was rather “wild” in the 1800s because of men
on their own participating in the Gold Rush, and many “boom towns”
immediately set up houses of prostitution because men wanted sex,
they had money, and at the time, there was little law enforcement The
bottom line—you end up with what we call a “perfect storm,” of
horny men, little supervision, and ample opportunity for sexual
exploration.
If
you were in your little hometown where everyone knows everyone else,
you always know someone is watching you and people will gossip about
you. But large cities mean you can be anonymous. For many, they won't
even know the names of their closest neighbors. This encouraged gay communities (and neighborhoods) at a time when being gay was illegal.
How
did people find each other? Gay bars, bathhouses, and what later
became known as “personal ads.” As printing costs went down,
people also used newsletters and self-printed magazines to make
contact with others. In some cases, these were simple xerox copied
(or mimeographs—a sort of very cheap printer) “magazines.”
In
1969, an organization was formed for the National
Association to
Advance Fat
Acceptance
(NAAFA), which wasn't intended to deal with “fat kinks,” but that
was an unintended consequence. A special interest group split off
focusing on what later became known as BBW (Big Beautiful Women) and
a number of magazines featuring them were published that would often
be found in “Adult Book Stores.”
Similar
magazines (and again, many of these began as very amateur (which,
btw, the original meaning of “amateur”
has the root word of “love,” so while now it often has a
derogatory meaning, it used to mean someone was doing something
because he or she loved doing it, and not because it was an
occupation.) featuring fat men also started being published to meet
the needs of gay and bisexual men. There were also specialized gainer
newsletters, most coming out in the 1980s. One of the first “slick”
or “high gloss” magazines (these are “trade terms that refer to
the paper stock used on the cover, where it costs more and looked
like professional magazines you'd see, like say, Cosmopolitan or GQ
these days. That was Bear magazine,and it was first published in
1987.
Remember,
this was before the Internet was easily accessible to the general
population. Organizations formed like Girth and Mirth Clubs in the
1970s that brought together large men and their admirers.
Organizations like this started in other countries as well, and there
are regular conferences, where such clubs or organizations meet
together. One of these is called “Convergence” and the 2013 event
will be in New Orleans:
http://www.convergence2013.com/event/seminars.aspx
When
the Internet became more popular, people interested in various
“kinks” found each other through “newsgroups” designated as
“alt.sex.” There were also something in those days called
“Message Boards” that allowed people to connect via the Internet,
but that was to really provide telephone contact between those with
similar interest. One of the first specifically for gay gainers, for
example, was the “Waka Waka” message board in Seattle,
Washington.
As
the Internet became even more accessible, several sites “evolved”
from the alt.sex groups into some sites that are no longer available
(such as Gainerweb, or Gainrweb), and those like Bellybuilders.com,
and BiggerCity.com, that are still very active. These begat newer
ones, such as Beefyfrat.com, and now Grommr and Grommr's new “sibling
site” with more of an emphasis on chasers as well as “the
chased.”
Parallel
to this have been sites primarily focused on BBW, which have in some
cases, as with Fantasyfeeder.com, become more gay/bisexual friendly.
Just in terms of sheer numbers, because there are more straight men
than gay ones, BBW sites may be more financially supported because
there are more straight men looking for women than there are gay men
looking for other men.
And
finally, this is also something I feel important to history. Remember
we see that one of the first “professional” magazines for men who
liked their men big—was Bear magazine in 1987. Do you know what
else was a focus of the gay community at that time? AIDS. Do you
know what AIDS was often called in Africa? “The Skinny Disease.”
One characteristic of the disease was “wasting syndrome,” where
back in the days before our current medical treatments changed HIV
from a terminal disease to a “manageable one,” the way, say
diabetes, is a “chronic and manageable disease," it was easy to
walk down the street in San Francisco and immediately identify
someone who had AIDS, at least in the later stages.
This
led to a (false, btw) assumption that if you weren't skinny, you
didn't have HIV. This coincides with the “growth” of the Bear
culture, which while not the same as the gaining community, obviously
has a lot of overlap. One of the treatments for AIDS at that time was a doctor prescribing steroids to prevent the loss of muscle mass.
As
a result, you can see two responses to “The Skinny Disease”:
being fat (in those days, doctors would recommend to their “normal”
sized patients to gain at least 15 or more pounds while they had no
symptoms, because when they did get sick, their body would have more
resources to “fight off” the opportunistic diseases that came
with AIDS. In other words, guys who had been told by the gay culture
at the time “We value someone with a 29 inch waist,” were told by
their doctors, “A 29 inch waist means if you do get sick, you'll be
more likely to die than if you are carrying extra weight.” Many of
the AIDS related publications and brochures at that time actually carried recipes
to help patients get fat(ter).
The
other response was to get muscular, and many men who had never been
really muscular, found that the steroids they had been prescribed
allowed them to obtain bodies that, well, could only usually be
obtained from the use of steroids.
On
a related topic, if you look back at gay related ads as well as in
straight publications before the 1980s, the “desired” image
of a male was not a guy who spent time in the gym at all, but was
fairly lean. Here are two men from 1960s ad, and one from the movie
“Making Of A Male Model” from the 1970s.
After Stonewall, the
early 1970s image of gay men switched from a focus on very thin and
somewhat femme men to a much more stereotypical “masculine” one,
often inspired by the artist, Tom of Finland, so you get what was
derogatorily called the “gay clone” that usually included a large mustache and a sort of lumberjack look or like the Leatherman, from
a popular gay music group known as the Village People. The steroid
treatments allowed a lot of AIDS patients to achieve this look, at
least for a certain amount of time.
A
lot of the men you and many others admire, often reflect these
“unusual roots” of the rebellion against the “femme”
stereotypes before Stonewall and gay rights, by the embracing of a
more hairy/”masculine” look, and an attempt to avoid looking like
you had “The Skinny Disease” by carrying extra weight, or
striving for a very muscular body.
And
that brings us up to current times, where obesity rates are
increasing across the population groups, gay or straight. That makes a bigger belly more of a "norm," where a lot of people don't necessarily feel as much pressure to strive for the old 29 inch waist. The
Internet can instantly connect people with similar interests on a
global level. For example, in the 1950s, you would have to work very
hard to find someone with an erotic interest in gaining—such folks
were out there—but they would be difficult to locate, especially if you
lived in a rural (and homophobic) area. These days, I enter “Chubby
Chaser” into Google, and in .19 seconds, I have 795,000 hits. You
can locate guys who don't want to gain, but just want to bloat, or
people who are “just” encouragers or are specifically “chubs
for chubs.” Again—it wasn't that people with these interests
didn't exist before you were born. But we now live in a world where
individuals with a specific kink are much easier to find. And
finally, the Internet provides a certain level of “protection,”
where if you find someone with a matching kink, and they end up not
being someone you find of interest outside of the kink—another
person is just a click away. Gay bars, by the way, are now declining
in numbers because while in the “old days,” they were basically
“community centers” and a safe place for gay and bisexual men to
meet—many younger men have never even been to a gay bar, because
the Internet, or a Grommr meet satisfies their needs.
And
they all lived happily ever after. (Which is how I think most
histories should end.)
