Fat Off, Fat On by Clarkisha Kent

Author:Clarkisha Kent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

MY WOULD-BE PARAMOUR

Why are you so protective of bi and pan boys?”

A good friend of mine asked me this question about a month before Pride 2018. At that point, I was in Knoxville (to be discussed!). We were in some hipster coffee shop whose name I can’t remember. But it was nice. Warm. I watched the steam rise from my undisturbed cup of tea and leaned forward to stir it. My friend’s brown eyes locked with my own, full of even more questions about my passionate recurring defense of such men. I looked back down at my tea and realized, of course, that I didn’t have an answer ready for them. Okay, that’s a lie. I said the most cliché line in the history of clichés:

“It’s complicated.”

And as cliché as that sounds now, it was. It would have been “easy” to respond that “Oh, I’m bi too,” so I “get it.” But that is not only a woefully underdeveloped take but also an unnecessary one, considering that I had some actual lived experience that explained my commitment to such men. This fierce loyalty to bisexual and pansexual men started with my own ill-fated relationship with a bisexual cis man in college.

Let’s call him … Bruce.

It was the year 2015. The very beginning of February. Mere weeks after getting my heart broken by Jason and attempting suicide. Anyway. It didn’t hit me until we eventually got up-close and personal, but Bruce, frankly, was a beautiful man. Striking brown eyes. Facial hair that hugged a particularly strong-ass jaw. Muscles in all the right places. A goofy-ass smile that was enough to derail my thoughts, which is quite the feat considering that, for those who are astrologically inclined, my Mercury is in Gemini, so I literally have thoughts running through my mind a mile a second. At all times.

He had this thick, curly black hair all over his body. I had never seen someone that hairy. It was as if Wolverine decided to go to college! And it was a look that I wouldn’t usually go for. But I couldn’t help but be pulled in by it … and a very microscopic part of me (thanks, demisexuality) pondered the prospect of tugging on it all during quiet hours. I imagine he looked like what Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey thought they were doing with their version of Adonis. His only “flaws” were that he was slightly shorter than me (I was more shallow then. I still am, buuuuuuut it’s something I try to be mindful of every now and again.) and a year and a half younger, but that went out the window when he opened his mouth.

In my first year in college, in 2012, I became way more involved in social justice groundwork. I was trying to seek penance for my previous life as a conservative dickhead who was content to parrot 99.9 percent of my parents’ dickheaded rhetoric as it pertained to (American) Blackness. I’d also felt like my life had been snatched from under me when Mike Brown died, knowing that he had been the exact same age as Craig.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.