(18+) This piece was commissioned by Harry Clayton-Wright for his zine ‘You Otter Know’, published March 2021 with support from Arts Council England.
FATT F*CK
Dramatic scenes from the life of a fat icon in the making (to be read in the voice of an ageing Southern Belle) by Fatt Butcher.
‘They knew how to entertain their gentlemen callers. It wasn’t enough for a girl to be possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure — although I wasn’t slighted in either respect’
– Amanda Wingfield in ‘The Glass Menagerie’, by Tennessee Williams
I said I would write something about being Fatt, being fat, and sex. I’m not sure where to pitch this. The temptation is, of course, to lean into the salacious and erotic (well erotish at any rate); but I also find myself compelled to dig into myself, to expose myself (slide in my DMs for more), to think about the year of transformation that has happened in me, and to consider what the next year might look like for me – a fat non-binary drag queen dick machine.
In short, I’m gagging for it AND I’m also a fatty – big 2020 mood, I know. These facts, although both separate and independently verifiable, are deeply intertwined. Unavoidably this has left me somewhere between penning a glorified singles ad (Hello, yes I am single AND available) and appropriating that particular brand of southern belles you will find gracing the pages of a Tennessee Williams play, but I’m here for it.
I think it’s somewhat inevitable, given the ever changing state of my mind and body (or at least my relationship to that body), that this article is going to jump around a bit – like a dream-play, flitting between memory and moment, swirling my experiences of fatness, queerness, sex, and gender. Blurring past, present, and future. So I present vignettes, tiny snippets of dramatic scenes from the life of a fat icon in the making.
I’m writing this in the voice of Amanda Wingfield (from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie). For the uninitiated, wikipedia reliably informs us that ‘Amanda Wingfield lives in a world that fluctuates between illusion and reality. When it is convenient to her, she simply closes her eyes to the brutal, realistic world. She uses various escape mechanisms in order to endure her present position in life’. This sits well with my current french vanilla fantasy. For the purposes of wading through this delicious soup of the mind she, which is to say Amanda, shall be I.
Basicallys babes, I can’t find a logical way to string this all together – I’m living in the middle of it. So I’ve created this outrageously pretentious and theatrical framing to avoid having to do the unnecessary labour of logic and to dress it in the mystical, yet tragically faded, illusions of glamour to which I have grown accustomed… and probably to give myself enough distance to be able to relay this to you…
Read the full article and the rest of the zine here (strictly 18+, issue contains nudity, sex references, and all manner of delicious things).
Adam Carver 