Being ugly in the gay community is hard
I grew up hating my body. I had stretch marks and curves in the “wrong” places. I came out as a queer man a limited years ago and I thought I could finally discover comfort and acceptance, but it didn’t take me prolonged to realize how toxic the identity of body shaming was in the gay community.
“No slim, no obesity, no ngondek (femme)”
“Manly only”
“Not for fat AND ELDER”
“Sorry guys, I’m Chub”
Those lines were taken straight from bios of Grindr profiles that I read this morning. They made me question why I decided to redownload the dating app time and again. The last profile bio I came across just broke my heart. Should that person admit fault for being plus-size in this world? Should I?
When I came out, I was excited to live in a time with plenty of dating apps for people enjoy me to join one another. I was ready to dive into Indonesia’s gay culture chief first, looking for love or a one-time companion to get me through the night. I was naive then. I did not yet realize that once people saw my picture—my curved, grinning face, plump glasses, oversized T-shirt and pants—they immediately marked me as undesirable. Hundreds of men rejected and ignored me, or even mocked me for having the
I am a gay human in my late 50s and have never been in a relationship. I am so lonely, and the painful emptiness I feel is becoming absolutely unbearable. In my initial 20s, I hooked up off and on, but it never developed into anything. I have always told myself that’s okay; I’m not a people person or a connection kind of guy. I have a few sapphic friends but no male friends. I have social anxiety and can’t proceed to bars or clubs. When hookup apps were introduced, I used them infrequently. Now I move totally unnoticed or am quickly ghosted once I reveal my age. Most nonwork days, my only interactions are with people in the service industry. I am well-groomed, employed, a homeowner, and always nice to people. I go to a therapist and take antidepressants. However, this painful loneliness, depression, aging, and feeling unnoticed seem to be getting the best of me. I cry often and would really like it all to end. Any advice? —Lonely Aging Gay
“In the very short phrase, LAG needs to say his therapist about the suicidal ideation,” says Michael Hobbes. “In the longer term, well, that’s going to take a bit more to unpack.”
Hobbes is a reporter for HuffPost and recently wrote a mini-book-l
Ugliest
C – Ugliest continues to follow the story of Nic, an agender teen who is going to OMAS, along with their friends Mack (trans man), Jenna (gay cis woman), and Jacon (bi cis man, and a person of paint [Black]). All of these characters are so likable, and while I don’t really understand what it means to be anything other than cis, this series has helped me see things from the eyes of someone who is not born into the right gender. I know a lot of Christians say that God doesn’t make mistakes—so perhaps He doesn’t, and these people are meant to be that way.
A – The read was adorable immersive, and I must say it really took me back to entity in school. I’ve never been to a academy like OMAS, but I have been in a situation where I had a roommate sharing the same room with me and that’s never really fun. And I’ve definitely had a teacher that hated me before, though he hated me because I accidentally was so invested in reading a book I didn’t catch the Pledge of
INTERVIEW: ‘The situation for LGBTIQ+ Indonesians is ‘ugly’ and has deteriorated’
Intolerance of non-conventional sexual and gender identities and diverse genders and sexual orientations in Indonesia seemingly remains stubbornly high.
The results of a survey in 2016 conducted by Indonesia’s Wahid Foundation showed that just over 26 percent of Indonesians ‘disliked LGBT people’; and a 2020 survey by the Pew Foundation found that only nine percent of Indonesians agreed with the utterance that homosexuality should be accepted.
Dr Dédé Oetomo is an activist and founder of the GAYa NUSANTARA Foundation, Indonesia’s longest running lgbtq+ rights organisation, and an Adjunct Lecturer in gender and sexuality at Universitas Airlangga.
He spoke with Melbourne Asia Review’s managing editor, Cathy Harper.
How would you describe the legal and social truths of LGBTIQ+ Indonesians?
It is ugly. For example on Valentine’s day, in many small towns, and not-so-small towns, the so-called public instruct police, or sometimes the proper police, go from hotel to hotel—cheap ones, they would not go to the Marriott or the Hyatt—and raid rooms that might hold a man or woman, or increasingly th
Body Dysmorphia Continues to Be a Serious Issue Among Gay Men
Reasons Why Body Dysmorphia Is Prevalent
While a growing body of study and experts point to the minority stress model as a key culprit in the scourge of BDD among gay men, there are other causes.
The Media Sets the Block Too High
Gay men often find themselves with an Adonis complex, explains Dr. Whitesel, believing what the media says a queer man should look like.
“Weight stigma is so baked into our society that we don’t even register,” says Lacie Parker, PsyD, a therapist in Seattle, Washington, who has published research on eating disorders in the LGBTQ+ collective. “Media representation of gay folks, which is lacking in general, certainly doesn’t portray larger bodies. Instead, we see thinness and muscularity allotted as the ideal, while fatness is the butt of the jokes. That’s extremely challenging to deal with when you’re trying to generate sense of the planet and attract a spouse in that community.”
In truth, a review published in 2020 in the Journal of Eating Disorders, and authored by Dr. Parker, set up that men who internalize media images of beauty that glorify thin bodies were at greater exposure of feeling d