Fat is not only acceptable… fat is cool! Fat is radical. Fat is punk. Fat is sexy and playful. Fat sex is hot sex. Fat people are brilliant and thoughtful and deserving of love and attention and health care and caring. Don’t be ashamed, live your life. “Don’t dream it, be it.” Tell your truth. Just get out there. We want you! You are valued and you are wanted … in your entirety. Self worth is a revolutionary act. But self worth is not enough, and we have to change the system, and no one else is gonna change it for us, we have to change the world. Fat Girl was celebratory, and it was also confrontational.
[Combined answer from Max Airborne, Candida Albicans Royale, Bertha Pearl, Sondra, April Miller, and Barbarism]
FaT GiRL was a snapshot of the infinite possibilities of fatness, fat bodies and fat lives, at a singular moment in space, time, and global history. A collective run zine “for fat dykes and the women who want them,” FaT GiRL published seven, 64-72 page full size issues between 1994-1997. It was a project created by a friend group of queer fat dykes in the San Francisco Bay Area who wanted to be heard. They were frustrated by the way mainstream queer women’s media did not include their political issues, bodies or lives, and dreamed of the day every type of media “actually just has some fat people in it” (Max). They “wanted it to be everything,” (Max) so they handed out stickers at Pride, designed issues on work computers, gathered their community and wrote. They crafted articles, manifestos, poetry, erotica, shot editorials and centerfolds, held intersection focused roundtables, organized and platformed community events. They were tired of being invisibilized, so they created a forum for their community to document their multifaceted realities, in public and in their own words. FaT GiRL was unlike anything the queer community had seen before, and though not without sizable controversy or pushback, they were embraced phenomenally. FaT GiRL created a visual culture of “living out loud,” (Bertha) and in doing so created new possibility models for robust, joyous, connected queer fat lives. It irrevocably transformed its readers and creators, changing the world through unabashed, community oriented, political, confrontational pleasure.
—Rose Gelfand, 6/1/22
Author of Building the FaT GiRL Table: Excavating Cultural Memory of Queer Fat Activism in the ‘90s (2021)
