“Girth & Mirth: Ethnography of a Social Club for Big Gay Men and Their Admirers” documents performances at Girth & Mirth group events and examines how participants use allusion and campy-queer behavior to reconfigure and reclaim their body images. Girth & Mirth started as a national social movement organization in the 1970s in response to weight discrimination in the gay community and provides a social network for big gay men and their relatively few supportive others. This work explores how big gay men experience size as a marginalizing status and how they seek dignity and respect in spite of their marginal position. Gay men, as a subaltern group, have their own hierarchy, and this work questions whether the social consequences of failure to be height-weight proportionate should be so high in the gay community. To explore how big gay men manage concepts of shame and pride, I use interviews with and participant observation of members of Girth & Mirth at charity fundraisers, weekend retreats, pride parades, café klatches, restaurants, and potlucks.
Sociological research provides a lens to understand the role of social organizations in effecting change and reformulating identities. This study builds on the work of Erving Goffman (1963), who examined how stigmatized individuals manage their identities against medicalized or pathologized social categories. Folklore performance research of Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) and others also provides a model for understanding the club’s special events as carnival, which involves rituals of inversion, exaggeration, and camp. This study provides examples of how performance can be used as a resignifying strategy that acknowledges but resists stigma. In reaction to being treated as a single undifferentiated mass, big gay men engage in performances of reconfiguring the shame of their fat stigma by distinguishing among different kinds of fat “selves.”
This study analyzes the political potential found in the group’s positive and fun-loving approach to size and sexuality, drawing distinctions between the club as a normalcy group and its unmaking of normative groups. It shows how Girth & Mirthers use sexual objectification, status differentiation, and celebrating otherness to reconfigure shame. Often, reconfiguring shame makes big gay men into objects of desire; however, reconfiguring is not always reduced to sexual behavior, but can also be done through one’s level of (fat and gay) “outness” so to speak, through consumer inclusion (status symbols or clothing), or by taking shelter among one’s fellow sufferers. This work also points out differences between Girth & Mirthers effecting “real” structural changes in the external world and mostly the temporary, symbolic performances and status differentiation in which they engage. As the campy-queer performances of many Girth & Mirthers have revealed, the road to acceptance appears to be paved with something more than simply managing stigma; it requires an unforgettable performance.