One Fat Scared Sissy

[Louie Crew <lcrew@ANDROMEDA.RUTGERS.EDU>]

Thank you for addressing the issue of obesity, with which I too have had a
life-long struggle.

In some ways, gluttony is easier to confess than most other sins, because
"my sin is ever before me" already, for the whole world to see.

Almost every belt that I have bought as an adult has been either several
inches longer than, or several inches shorter than, the previous belt.

Some of my bad habits I learned at home.  Neither parent exercised; nor did
I until I was in my 30s.  Mother used food as a love additive (not a
substitute).  She did not like it when my father and I teased her by singing
to the child's tune "Praise it, praise it, all ye little children, Food is
love, Food is love!"

Mother often said that she had asked God to tell her a week before she was
to die so that she could eat everything she wanted.

Obviously there are healthy ways to deal with anxiety, and unhealthy ways.
I have too often used the latter, as I tried to capture in a poems I wrote
in 1976 (one of my leaner years, actually):


            One Fat Scared Sissy


Each globule of both my fat rolls
is a hate call, a cat whistle,
a child's spit in my face,
a student's glance averted,
an anonymous note threatening
      to cut out my tongue.

When I knead my rolls, I feel
concentrated knots of hetero hate
and count them prayerfully like beads:

      |  This one's for the time
         a bishop told the editor
         that my lover and I caused
         a tornado.   I ate one chocolate
         cake and 25 Mars bars.

      |  Twenty-two boxes of Girl Scout
         cookies here translated
         a dean's decision
         not to hire me.

      |  Four hundred Cokes solidified
         here when my Vestry told me to
         "find some other place to worship."

      |  This long seam jells
         my family's fear.

      |  Boxes of bubblegum made this pink spot
         when I feared I'd scared my lover away....

I doze and dream that I rotund myself
as large as the world itself,
become Mother of all Indigestible Hate....
and waken to inglut again the hetero world.

           -- Louie Crew, 1976*

Louie

Louie Crew, 377 S. Harrison St., 12D, E. Orange, NJ 07018 973-395-1068
http://www.gracechurchinnewark.org/  Home of "America the Beautiful"

* Has appeared:

Barbecue Planet, 8 (1977): 19.

Seams, Spring-Summer, 1991:  18.

Pyramid Periodical:  Journal for Gay People of Color, 3.1 (Winter 1992):
97.  I used my Chinese pen name, Li Min Hua.  The editor knew my identity as
Louie Crew.

Scorched Earth Publications 'Change Issue', December 2004 at
http://www.scorchedearthpublishing.com/one_fat_scared_sissy.htm

Queers!  For Christ's Sake!~  From May 12, 2004  at
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/queers.html#onefat