Doug Pollard – Food, fat and faggotry

I love food. I love to cook, I love to eat, and I love to feed other people. And it shows.

Yes folks, I have committed the cardinal gay sin: I am fat. (Actually, two cardinal sins — I got old, too. But that’s for another column.)

Some people tell me I could ‘do something about it’, but at my age there are going to be more than enough risky surgical interventions in my future without my adding to them.

Nor am I going to waste pointless time running nowhere on a machine showing me pictures of places I’d rather be, or grilling my epidermis on an oversized halogen cooktop. Animal Liberation activists burn down places that do this sort of thing to rats, chickens and chimps.

And we’ve all seen the end result for those no longer in the first flush of youth, those weirdly stiff hairless gentlemen of uncertain age, tightly upholstered in pale orange faux-lizard, with oddly immobile faces and wrinkled hands.

A tip, guys: keep your fists loosely clenched when you’re out cruising — that way your hands won’t
give you away.As for dieting: please don’t do it. It is insanity. Only humans have turned fuelling themselves into an art form, the highest art form there is.

A good meal is a wonderful symphony of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. Why would you choose to spend your time starving when there are such glories in the world?

I used to worry about my weight, but no longer. The body we are now supposed to aspire to, which has colonised the pages of gay publications and websites like a mutant plague, is impossible, a ridiculous cartoon. Even for a fit 20-year-old.

How much of this body comes from brain-dead hours in the gym, how much from drugs, hormones and implants, and how much from computer-generated trickery, I do not know.

I would ask, but when I approach buff young men and ask to examine their musculature, they run screaming from me, as if fat was somehow contagious.

Once a flat stomach was the ideal. Then it was a six-pack. It’s an eight-pack now. But far from looking fit and healthy, these models don’t even look human. With their segmented midsections, they look like insect-human hybrids from a particularly silly episode of Star Trek.

Being immersed in a culture that deifies a particular body type — particularly if it’s one that isn’t even real to begin with — is bound to make you feel bad about yourself. And it’s showing up in the increasing number of young men suffering from anorexia and steroid abuse.

So please don’t wait until you’re older and wiser to toss the magazines and their ridiculous fantasies aside. Say, “Shit to that,” and do it today.