My Pandemic Body

A Lockdown Story

Jonathan Alexander

University of California, Irvine

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During the first weekend of October in southern California, late 2020, when the weather wants to release us from the late summer heat and turn to the gentle fall of a steady 75 degrees, a few of us sit, socially distanced of course, in my backyard, drinking wine and celebrating my 53rd birthday. A friend has brought a vegan chocolate cake, and my husband slices me a hefty chunk, even though I’d asked for a thin slice. Thin. Nothing thin about this delicious but dense cake, its density one of the usual side-effects of vegan baked goods.

We eat our cake and my mother, herself just having celebrated her 77th birthday, comments on how much cake we’ve eaten in the past few weeks. We have safely eschewed larger celebrations in favor of smaller gatherings, and each has had its own cake or other sweet, festive goodie. Vegan doesn’t mean without sugar, or the popular substitute for cream, coconut milk, one of the fattiest (if tastiest) substances on the planet.

All of the talk of food prompts Mother to reflect on her career working in child care, remembering Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” Campaign. She recalls mashing cauliflower for kids to eat, offering them the healthier substitute to potatoes. She’d sometimes have to drench the mashed vegetable in cheese to get some of the children to eat it, those kids who refused to be fooled by the faux “potato.” “Michelle would not have approved,” I chide her. She laughs.

“We’ve all gotten fatter since the Obamas left office,” she quips back.

And she’s right. Ok, maybe not all of us (my husband has actually lost weight), and maybe not all for the same reasons. But I look down at my belly, the most visible sign of the weight I’ve put on in the past few months, and think yes, absolutely, I’ve gained weight.

I immediately think to myself, why? what’s happened? who’s responsible for this? But, really, whom do I have to blame? Donald Trump? Life during pandemic? Myself?

***

Many people “struggle” with their weight. Funny how we say “struggle.” Like a wrestling match. I actually dreamed last night that I was a high-school wrestler, woefully unprepared for an upcoming match. In the context of the dream, I’m not sure I’d even ever wrestled before, but somehow, in dream logic, there I was, in my singlet, my family taking pictures, facing off against my opponent, shorter, trimmer, and obviously ready to kick my ass.

In the dream, I too was trim — taller than my adversary, as I’ve been six feet tall since I was at least 13, but also trim, lightly muscled. This is how I remember me. This is actually how I think of myself most of the time. I surprise myself when I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a random mirror, belly protruding over my waistband, thick thighs, the dreaded pear shape pushing outward from the layers of subcutaneous fat.

What a fucking slob, I think in the moments I’m realizing that’s me, I’m the fucking slob.

To be sure, my obesity — for such is what it’s medically called — isn’t that profound. I’m not morbidly obese (another medical term). But I am noticeably fat. A shaming term.

I’m getting a sense of the “struggle” just writing this. How do I describe myself? Against what norm or ideal am I understanding my body? How do I feel about my body, catching it unawares in a stray mirror? How do I understand that disconnect between how I think of my body, when I think of my body, when I think of myself, and how I mis-recognize that body when I catch sight of it off guard?

I play this game all the time. I’m trying to trick my body into showing me its real true thin self. I’ve moved from just sneaking peaks in public mirrors to turning a corner into my bathroom and suddenly spotting my body, sucking my gut in, hoping to see my skinny self returned. Then I pose, in my briefs, moving around, circling the floor, monitoring from different angles the progression and distribution of fat. I then take out my phone and snap some pictures, documenting different sides, inquiring: What is my best side? How does my ass look? Can I suck in my gut enough to diminish the pear?

Since the pandemic began, over six months ago as I write this, this behavior has only intensified. Nightly I stand in my underwear in front of my bathroom mirror. Every few days I hop on the scale, its electronic numbers blinking toward judgment. Before the pandemic I was a stocky and solid 230. “Not great,” my doctor said. But much of it was muscle. With gyms closed, with the heat of the summer, with a little bit of panic eating, I soon crested 240. Now I’m at 245. Sometimes 245.5.

250 starts to seem the threshold, the point of no return. So I starve myself some days, keeping myself at 245.

It’s a struggle alright. And part of the struggle is the rationalization. Note the excuses. But then also note the need to note the excuses. To whom am I rationalizing? Who is owed my justifications?

***

For sure, we — all who struggle with weight, which might be every American, even the thinnest amongst us — we all have our complicating factors. The pandemic seems for many of us the most immediate complicating factor that has contributed to weight gain. But there are others. (I’ve made a list.) Mine include the following:

Workaholism: Having grown up working-class and being a first-generation college student, I absorbed early into my mind and body the drive to succeed. And while I was raised ethically enough to want to succeed not at the expense of others, I was brought up under the dictums of Christian self-sacrifice so that I have been completely willing to harm myself in the pursuit of success. This is a toxic combination that many Americans have succumbed to. For the longest time, to secure my place in the professional world, I worked six-and-a-half days a week. I ate poorly. I didn’t exercise. I achieved success but at the cost of stiff joints, expanding gut, and higher cholesterol.

Stroke: Eventually, this kind of life caught up with me and a little over two years ago I had a minor stroke, technically what’s called an “eye stroke,” as a little golden globule of cholesterol broke off an artery in my neck and lodged itself in a retinal blood vessel in my eye, partially blinding me. Message received. Changes must be made.

Medication: Part of those changes have included a number of pills to lower cholesterol, lower my blood pressure, thin my blood, etc., etc. I also take an anti-anxiety medication to deal with stress — the former stresses of work I took far too seriously and now the stresses of feeling like I’m a ticking time bomb, my head just waiting to explode, because of how badly I treated my body earlier in my life. Unfortunately, these medicines, which cumulatively lower my metabolic rate, also contribute to weight gain.

Pandemic: And then, of course, there’s the closing of the gyms and other facilities that I actually did use in what I’ve come to call the “before.” Yes, I could go walking, and I sometimes do, or I could outfit my garage with some weights and contraptions to get my body moving, but, like many of you, I too am listless at times, the overwhelming nature of what’s happening to our world making it hard to do more than what needs to be done to keep the money (fortunately) coming in. Hard to think about the future. Harder to think about moving my body in the face of that future.

The Future: Speaking of which, what exactly would I be losing weight for? I mostly talk to people on Zoom these days any way, and I can easily hide my gut. An unexpected benefit of our remote working conditions: in the minds of others, I might be just as thin as I remember myself.

So fuck. Fuck me. Complicating factors, yes, and I know all too well that I only have myself to blame for some of them. For others, the cure is as bad as the illness when it comes to managing weight. So here I sit, a cup of black coffee at hand, meditating on the varied conditions that have contributed to and now sustain my obesity.

I fully recognize that such problems are markers of privilege. Others, far too many others, cannot earn their living by working from a series of screens and email messages. In a weird way, my fat body signals the luxury of my economic and professional situation.

But it also bears the traces of a set of societal values that have been killing many of us, and that nearly killed me.

***

Traces. I pause on that word. I can trace the creases in my groin, the folds of fat that have formed and that push out my skin into little mounds I can pinch and squeeze, sometimes aggressively. I hold an inch of fat between my thumb and forefinger, jiggling it, telling it to go away, that it’s not welcome in my body. I watch these little folds come and go, seem to fill and dissipate and fill again as I try to adjust my caloric intake, vary my exercise regimen, etc. etc. It’s a constant push and pull, a come and go. I trace the creases of the folds with my finger and think about what I could try differently next week, what sacrifice could be made, what new diet to try, etc., etc.

But “trace” also extends out to the larger causes I outlined above, and then to what I call the “causes of the causes,” tracing back my health crisis, the eye stroke, to not just the generalities of a toxic culture with its toxic foods but also the particularities of my life as rooted in that toxic culture: my queerness, my slight effeminacy, the homophobia I encountered early and consistently in life — early and consistently enough that I consider myself a post-traumatic stress survivor, the stresses of early abuse traceable in the folds of fat that now form in my groin as I try — what? to protect it? to protect myself? to insulate my body from the psychic assaults and threats of physical violence I endured for years as a young boy growing up so identifiably queer in the deep South of Reagan’s America?

I wax metaphoric, yes, and maybe not so metaphoric — the protective layers not just psychological defenses but manifesting as flesh, extra flesh, deforming flesh.

I write “deforming” and hear the traces of a fat-phobic culture constantly marketing its stark body images of emaciated torsos as the ultimately desired form while making the attainment of such bodies nearly impossible as it throws cheap, salty, fatty food at us. Yes, yes, I’m shifting the blame, tracing the causes of the causes of my obesity.

I should suck it up.

Then again, pandemic, apocalypse. Who can blame me if I just want to take a break, let the folds unfold for a little bit. Not give a damn about some things because there’s just so much to give a damn about right now.

I can’t keep up.

***

But I’m going to stay with the traces for just a bit longer, if you don’t mind. Let me tell you a story.

A few years ago, teaching a class on “Writing Sex,” about the long history in the 20th century of how journalists and public intellectuals developed different languages and discourses to talk about sex and sexuality in the wake of Kinsey, and before him, of the late 19th-century sexologists who started collecting stories of “deviant” sexualities, I remember one particular class session in which I traced the evolution of the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” — the former created first to identity same-sex erotic intimacies as a “condition,” a kind of innate predisposition as opposed to a set of practices that anyone could possibly engage in. I lectured about how these early terms were not the only ones created to identify acts and identities, and other term, such as “invert,” persisted for decades as preferred descriptors of “deviant” sexual behavior.

I spent some time talking to my students about the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German sexologist and early sexual rights activist active in the mid- to late 19th century, who coined numerous terms to identify a variety of possible sexual identities, based in part not just on preferences and predispositions in terms of sexual object choice but also gendered mannerisms and body type. His typology of sexual identities puts the contemporary division of our species into hetero and homo to shame, making it seem impoverished—intellectually, affectively, and somatically.

Before the journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny first published the term “homosexual” in 1869, Ulrichs had developed the term “Urning” to describe someone born as a man but with a “female psyche” and who is primarily attracted to men. From there, the Urning could be subdivided into the Mannling (pretty “manly” in appearance), Weibling (a bit feminine in appearance; note the word “Weib,” which becomes the English word “wife”), the Zwischen-Urning (zwischen meaning between) for not exactly masculine and not exactly feminine acting or appearing and with an attraction primarily to younger “normal”-acting men), the Virilisierte Mannlinge, a male Urning who appears “normal,” and the Uranisierter Mann, a “straight” man who sometimes, for whatever reason, engages in male-male erotic behavior. These are only a few of the types Ulrichs developed, with a collateral set of names for women as well. (This Wikipedia page provides a useful overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranian#Taxonomy_of_Uranismus).

What’s extraordinary about these categories is how they slice and dice a variety of predispositions, proclivities, tastes, preferences, but also appearances and supposed interiorities, an individual’s subjective experience or sense of self (e.g., “feminine psyche” in someone otherwise who looks like a “man”). My use of “quotation marks” as I write seems to proliferate because, as I work through the different permutations, my sense of what constitutes “man” or “feminine” starts to wobble a bit. And maybe that’s the point. An expanding set of terms comes to suggest, after a while, that the thing being dissected might just be too complex and multifaceted for useful categorization. At the very least, the contemporary terms homo and hetero just seem brute by comparison.

With that said, I won’t soon forget the moment in my class about “Writing Sex” when I was describing these different categories, with accompanying pictures that represented the Mannling, the Weibling, and the Zwischen-Urning (amongst others), and I stopped — quite literally, involuntarily pausing — when pointing to the Zwischen-Urning, a somewhat pear-shaped and pale body.

“Oh my god. I’m an Urning. A Zwischen-Urning.”

The realization was partially one of somatic recognition, seeing a version of my body on the screen, but also a psychic resonance, in that, like the Zwischen-Urning, I enjoy the company of younger men, especially younger straight men (even if I don’t engage them sexually). And my husband is a younger man, tall, built, pretty butch.

Shit, I thought to myself as I continued with my lecture. I’m a type. And it’s a fat type.

To be fair, Ulrichs and other sympathetic (or queer) sexologists thought that the typologies they offered would help to normalize or even naturalize diversity in sexual behavior. Following in the footsteps of other scientists in the 19th century who were rapidly, even aggressively categorizing everything under the sun, some (though admittedly not all) sexologists believed that their categories wouldn’t just document the plethora of sexual types but rather might show other scientists, and the general public, how regularly occurring “perverse” sexual activity actually is. There’s so much natural variety in human sexuality, Ulrichs reasoned at the time, so why are we criminalizing so much of it? Such work and thinking paved the way for later sexologists, such as Alfred Kinsey, writing nearly a half century after Ulrichs, to collect similar data and make similar claims.

A dilemma of typing, however, is that it makes what might once have been hidden a bit more readily identifiable — and then possibly a target. Indeed, the late 19th century saw the proliferation of laws criminalizing same-sex erotic behavior, in part because government officials were more aware of its existence due to the research activity of sexologists. So, despite the best efforts of Ulrichs and others (Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, to name just two more prominent sexologists of the time), their categorizations served in the short run less to normalize sexual diversity than to create classifications of “deviant” behaviors that could now be managed, disciplined, psychologized, and even punished. In time, the Urning, much less the Zwischen-Urning and other subdivisions, resolved into the simpler binary of hetero (legal) and homo (illegal) — a partly managerial move to regulate sexual activity.

The story, of course, is far more complex than my brief sketch here allows. But I offer it because I’m trying to account for my very real and very visceral response to seeing the image I projected up of the Zwischen-Urning — and then identifying with it. Yes, I saw myself in a type long out of circulation, and never really in public circulation. But beyond that, I recognized it as an undesirable type, a type that shouldn’t be in circulation, a type I didn’t want and certainly didn’t want to identify with.

I realized I’ve been fighting my Zwischen-Urning body for years.

***

There are many reasons for this struggle, including internalized homophobia (in general), but also internalized urningphobia (in particular), which is bolstered by what I want to call an externalized urningphobia (in both gay communities and the larger straight world) due to a pretty ubiquitous fatphobic culture in the US. Having more particularly identified the problem, I can now say that the “dreaded pear-shaped body” (as one friend called it, involuntarily shooting a glance at my mid-section) has a particular name, a type, a designation. And unfortunately, contra the best wishes and intents of early sexologists, that typing wasn’t normalizing it. It rather made my body type a target of collective and personal — and then internalized — hostility, a thing to struggle against, a demand indeed that I work in whatever way I can to “un-Urning” my body.

And in the before, I definitely tried. I hated my Urning body. For several years, I was at the gym three to four times a week, sweating through cardio and weight training. I hired a sequence of personal trainers to punish my body, to send a strong signal to it that its Zwischen-Urning shape was not welcome. I was committed, even when others mocked me; my physician, who had to sign my release to work out at the gym, laughed at me, saying “We’ll see how long this lasts.” But it did last. For a good long while. I delighted as my gut retracted ever so slightly, and my arms grew, my shoulders thickened, and I seemed — in my mind at least — a bit more balanced, my chest and gut forming more of a block than the unsightly wobbly pear. And my efforts were noticed, particularly by others at the gym, working out their own bodies, all of us together monitoring each others’ progress, encouraging one another, motivating the transformation of flesh into ideal forms. I didn’t want to be a Dioning — a straight, masculine man — but I wanted his body.

Now that the pandemic has made it so much harder to un-Urning my body, the pear has returned. My chest, shoulders, and arms shrink as my gut expands. I’ve gone from a tight-fitting pants waist size of 36 to the much roomier 40 inches. The Zwischen is dominant once again.

I miss the gym, yes. I miss the body I was moving towards, that was emerging from my flesh. But I also admit that the thought of going back to the gym is, frankly, exhausting. It’s a lot of fucking effort to engage in un-Urning your body, if that’s what your body wants to be. Don’t get me wrong: I need to exercise, and I actually do miss the kind of exercise that allowed my body to move, that taught it how to extend itself comfortably into space. My joints in particular miss that kind of activity. But, curiously, maybe because the pandemic itself is so psychologically exhausting, I am not missing the tortures of a gym session focused on “straightening” my body out.

I’m not comfortable yet, and I suspect I never will be comfortable, saying that it’s ok to be obese. And while fat might be beautiful, and I love dearly some overweight folks, I’m far too conscious, post-stroke, of some of the health complications of my particular obesity.

But the pandemic, with its enforced break in routines, with its enforced downtime for someone as admittedly privileged as I am, has made me much more conscious of my un-Urning tendencies, all of the labor I used to spend un-Urning my body. I’m not at all sure I want to go back to that labor.

The question I’m left with, then, is what now?

***

Answering that question actually sends me back to the Urnings and all of Ulrichs’ categories, which oddly survive — transformed, surely — in a variety of contemporary types in the gay male community, namely Bears, Otters, and Wolfs, amongst other designations that mark a “difference” from the emaciated and hairless young torsos that discipline our sense of somatic self as they gaze, often haughtily, from the glossy pages of sleek magazines. In contrast, Bears are generally hirsute and portly, large guys, sometimes beefy, sometimes plushy — but big and hairy. The opposite of gay Twinks, the painfully thin and depilated boyish waifs that pass for an idealized gay body in some quarters — a legal ephebe, if that’s a term still circulating. If buff muscled gays (think 70s “clone” performing masculinity to the nth degree) are your Mannling Urnings, and softly femme Twinks are your Weibling Urnings, then Bears are your Zwischen-Urnings. Granted, the requirement that the Zwischen-Urnings be interested in young men isn’t universally shared amongst contemporary Bears (present company excluded). But the somatic type seems spot on: somewhere between masculine and feminine, big and hairy enough to satisfy the requirements of the former but soft and round enough to qualify for the latter.

That in-between is clearly the zone I’m in, the one my pandemic body has made camp in, the territory I currently occupy.

The good news for me is that having a “type” in the contemporary gay world means that there are people who want my body. After all, “types” only really exist as a form of marketing now, a way to identify bandwidths of attraction, as well as a commodity category for vendors to hawk various paraphernalia and clothing to those wishing to further accentuate their identification. In full disclosure, I actually have a “Bear Pride” top, a large black t-shirt with the Bear Pride Flag (in manly browns and tans) emblazoned on the front. I’ve read some trashy gay books about Bears (I recommend Wayne Hoffman — woof!). And I’ve seen some of the apps that gay men use for random hookups, apps designed specifically for Bears looking for local love, with names like GROWLr and Grizzly. (PSA: Obviously these are not safe to use during the pandemic, so exercise caution.)

The bad news for me is, well, a lingering internalized bearaphobia (the contemporary version of Urningphobia, particularly Zwischen-Urningphobia). I did not grow up a Bear, even as I have clearly grown into a Bear. In fact, I used to be a Twink. A college gal pal once even complained that I had more of a figure than she had. I was super thin, relatively hairless, and more than a little on the fey side. That all started to change after I hit thirty, with my latent Urning waiting to assert himself (or themself?). My transformation into a Zwischen-Urning has only solidified with the passing of time, various health issues, and now the pandemic. My resulting cognitive dissonance can be acute: I pass a mirror (or, as I describe above, narcissistically dawdle in front of one) and wonder who that Bear is. Where did his Twink body go?

I’m far past the point where I personally am tempted to use the apps to find confirmation in the adoration of a Bear hunter. But I appreciate the men who do find this body (note how I can’t quite yet call it mine) attractive. One cute young cub in his late twenties approached me after a talk I gave and asked if I was single. (He was so sweet!) I’m not in any way bragging when I say that such things happen more frequently than I acknowledge; my husband (who calls me “husbear”) is always pointing out men who are checking me out. The attention always surprises me. This isn’t the body I wanted, so why should anyone else?

And yet, my husband does. And the cub attending my talk. And the barista at the coffeeshop I like to go to, in part because I know the young man — an otter, hairy but slimly built — looks at me with pleasure whenever I walk in, his eyes peeking out over his mask, appreciating me.

But is this kind of external validation — however lovely — enough? Is it ever enough?

Of all of the things that I’ve experienced during the pandemic, the full settling in of my Zwischen-Urning body is amongst the most personally distressing. And yes, I recognize the fullness of the privilege I have in saying that. I have time and means to bemoan my body. Many others don’t.

With that said, the lockdown has afforded me the chance to think about my body in ways that I’ve never thought of it before, to regret things I didn’t do in the “before.” No, not go the gym more. Not diet. Not punish the emerging Urning further. But rather, not going to a Bear retreat, to the Lazy Bear week at Guerneville, just north of San Francisco, to the even more famous Bear Week in Provincetown. These are large celebrations of large, hirsute gay men, dancing, partying, frolicking with one another. As for me, no need to hook up, or experience sexual validation. But maybe being around enough people who seem to love their bodies the way they are that some of their good humor might rub off on me.

So I’m starting my plans to spend some time in Bear country, Guerneville, Provincetown. I want to try wearing my Bear Pride t-shirt in public. I want the pandemic to be over so I can join the party, or at least put a booted foot in the pool. I want to learn further how to love my Urning body. Oh, I’ll exercise again. I will return to the gym, surely. But maybe this time I won’t worry as much about my Bear-ish figure expanding my t-shirt, pushing out, wanting out, wanting to be loved too, at last.

About the Author

Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of twenty-one books, including several works of creative nonfiction, such as Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot and a memoir trilogy: Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology; Bullied: The Story of an Abuse; and Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir.