Big Big Love had its beginnings in a ’zine I did with my friend, illustrator Liz Tamny, in the 1990s. Back in the days when this thing called “desktop publishing” was new and shiny, Zaftig! was an attempt to produce a publication focused on fat sexuality that I myself actually wanted to read. I had seen the sketchy, low-budget porn mags produced for straight guys who liked fat chicks. But they were, in a word, depressing. I didn’t want pictures of fat women in bad makeup, poor lighting, and cheap, unpretty lingerie. I wanted images and words about people being sexual on their own terms, hot and complicated, not merely offering themselves up, with a whiff of hope-against-hope, to maybe just this once be the object of someone’s desire.
What I wanted was something that reflected my life and my friends’ lives. It struck me as a problem that, despite the immense quantities of porn out there in the world, there was really nowhere to encounter the desires and the sexual experiences of fat people themselves, male and female, straight and queer, different skin colors and backgrounds, kinky and vanilla, able-bodied and not—the whole funky mixed bag of fat humanity. Based on the idea that nobody should be deprived of their own image, Zaftig! tried to provide some of those images, reflecting some of the many bodies and sexualities that never seemed to make it into the frames and pages of mainstream sexual materials.
Zaftig! didn’t last long, even with Liz’s valiant work in the design department. I was in grad school at the time and producing ’zines is time consuming. It did, though, ultimately lead to my teaching some classes on sex and sexuality for fat folks at places like Boston’s feminist sex toy store Grand Opening!, and that in turn led to my being asked to write the first version of Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them for Greenery Press. I had never written a book before and had never really given it any thought. Still, I believe, as the British composer Arnold Bax once said in Farewell, My Youth, “you should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing,” so I said I’d do it. I wrote the original Big Big Love in a wild flurry, and in February 2000, it was published.
Having Big Big Love out in the world was a fascinating and weird experience. It certainly wasn’t anything I’d ever expected I’d be doing with myself professionally—I’m trained as a classical musician and as a historian. It was, however, a great learning experience and, for the most part, a lot of fun. I did a bunch of readings and workshops and met hundreds of fantastic, sexy, funny, smart people of all sizes and shapes. I gave a lot of interviews, including to interviewers who were, let us say, not always able to bring themselves to think kindly on the idea of this particular book. I spoke at some conferences, I lectured on some campuses, and I answered a metric ton of email from readers, much of which floored me with its candidness. If I had ever doubted that there was a need for fat people to have their own images reflected back to them in media that celebrated them as vital and vibrant and valid sexual beings, those emails made it crystal clear. Even now I still get reader mail from people who are just encountering the 2000 edition of Big Big Love. In 2001, I edited an anthology of fat-related erotica, a companion volume to Big Big Love if you will, named after my dearly departed ’zine. Zaftig: Well Rounded Erotica was published by Cleis Press.
By and by, I moved on to other projects, and eventually the original version of Big Big Love went out of print. By that time it was becoming outdated, and, although I certainly had mixed feelings about it no longer being available, I figured it was probably for the best. Then in 2010, Ten Speed Press approached me about doing a new Big Big Love, the book you are now holding in your hands.
Although the new Big Big Love resembles the original in some ways, and some of the section titles have stayed the same, the content is all fresh and newly written from the ground up. Only the positive attitude, and the general feeling that fat people are sexy people with no need whatsoever to apologize for their bodies, have been recycled. Additionally, thanks to the fantastic people at Ten Speed Press and our delicious, fat-positive, sexy-minded artists, photographer Molly Bennett and illustrator Elizabeth Tamny, this edition has artwork, something the original Big Big Love was unable to accommodate.
In putting together this new, updated, and hopefully even more useful Big Big Love, I was supported by many, many people in many wonderful ways. My gratitude, then, goes to Sheila Addison, Austin J. Austin, S. Bear Bergman, Will Byam, Leigh Ann Craig, Debbie Notkin, Jenny Erhardt, Anne Gwin, Zak Hubbard, Laura Waters Jackson, Substantia Jones, Kathleen Kennedy, Lesley Kinzel, Marissa Lingen, Keridwen Luis, Deb Malkin, Jude McLaughlin, Lisa Nichols, Golda Poretsky, Moira Russell, Sandy Ryan, Jeannette Smyth, Ned Sonntag, Mary Sykes, Elizabeth Tamny, Cheryl Wade, j wallace, Rhetta Wiley, Liza Wirtz, and Yohannon, along with numerous others. Thanks are also due to interns Kelly Morris and Arianna Iliff, Lisa Westmoreland and Julie Bennett at Ten Speed Press, and the unimprovable Christopher Schelling. To them, and to the Weinberg YMCA on 33rd Street here in Baltimore, Maryland, I owe a great deal of what passes for my sanity. Finally, my profound gratitude goes to Malcolm Gin, my partner of the past fifteen years. Thank you for being my love, my friend, and my favorite coconspirator ever. I really am the luckiest girl in the world.
I am also grateful to every one of the seven-hundred-plus people who took the Big Big Love 2010 Survey, which has influenced virtually every page of this book, and to the numerous anonymous volunteer interviewees whose words grace these pages even though their names do not. Throughout this book, you will find anonymous quoted remarks and insights, set off in a different font, from a variety of self-identified fat people and people who are attracted to fat partners. These quotations come from this one-of-a-kind survey that was conducted specifically for this book. The survey was conducted online, during the months of July and August 2010, and ultimately generated 748 completed surveys. Survey respondents were recruited online, primarily through word of mouth. This is, obviously, not a scientific or a randomized survey, and I make no claims that it delivers an accurate statistical portrayal of the fat population. It does, however, provide representative and often insightful information about the personal sexual experiences of at least a small subset of what is a monumentally large and diverse population of people.
The respondents to the survey ran the full gamut of sizes and sexualities, ages and backgrounds. The average age of the respondents was 34.5 years, but the range of ages spanned from 18 to 73. They were split approximately equally between heterosexually identified, homosexually identified, and bisexually identified individuals (multiple answers were allowed).
Respondents reported that they had made their sexual debut, on average, at the age of 17, and at the time of the survey, the average respondent had had 25.5 sexual partners. “Sexual activity” was self-defined, since not all people choose to engage in the same kinds of sex.
Those surveyed described their own bodies diversely, as “average” (10.3%), “overweight” (29.8%), “fat” (58%), “obese” (14.3%), “thin” (2.7%), and “supersized” (5.1%), and with other terms like “fluffy,” “deathfat,” “voluptuous,” “thick,” “chubby,” “chunky,” “bear,” and “lush.” They described the kinds of body types to which they were attracted with similar diversity: 9.4% of them said they were attracted to “very thin” partners, 47.8% to “thin,” 88.2% to “average” body types, 67.9% to “overweight” partners, 58.7% to “fat” partners, 22.9% to “obese” partners, and 15.4% to “supersized” partners (multiple answers were permitted). In addition, 94% of respondents said that they had been sexually or romantically interested in a fat partner, while 6% said they had not. However, only 16% said that they were specifically attracted by fatness, while 84% were not specifically attracted by fatness.
On the whole, the survey respondents indicated that, at least among those taking the survey, a robust sexual existence and fatness are not at all a contradiction in terms. In fact, it seems that in this respect as in so many others, it’s normal to be normal. Fat people’s sexual lives seem to be just as vibrant and variable as they are for any other group.