Abstract
This paper is based on an ethnographic study of body image concerns such as weight, appearance and eating disorders as these are experienced among lesbians, bisexuals and gay men. I argue that both gender and sexual orientation have significant effects on the degree to which this community is concerned with appearance and weight, and in turn, at risk for developing eating disorders. In addition, I explore other significant factors including race, age, family history, sexual abuse and political activism.
This work draws on interviews and participant observation with forty lesbian, bisexual and gay people in a Midwestern college town. A balance of gender and sexual orientation, as well as a range of age, race and class was important in the selection of participants. Relying on a form of "reciprocal ethnography" in which participants had input into the project at each stage, I involved participants in not only the "field work" stage but also in the writing of the ethnography.
Through their personal experiences, the study participants indicate that they are involved in a dynamic interaction between personal desires and cultural values -- both those of the wider "mainstream culture" and those of the lesbian, bisexual and gay "culture(s)." Too often lesbian, bisexual and gay people are reduced to their sexual orientation, and other important aspects of their experiences are ignored. This study shows how these factors contribute to the complexity of lesbian, bisexual and gay people's attitudes toward their own bodies and the bodies of others in their community.

SECTION 1:
Review
The young, middle-class white woman who diets to please men, eventually taking it "too far," becoming anorexic -- an emaciated figure afraid of her own gender and sexual identity -- is the stereotype of body image disturbances most familiar to Americans. The young woman's supposed "natural" desire to please men and her family is presumed to have been good, but to have gotten out of control. Although many psychologists have emphasized personal dysfunction as the cause of eating disorders, feminist theorists from fields including psychology, sociology and anthropology, have emphasized the cultural roots of this epidemic problem. Naomi Wolf's popular book, The Beauty Myth (1991), highlighted the social and political causes behind eating disorders and other weight obsessions.
Yet, few of these works have challenged the assumption that this is primarily a problem of heterosexual, white women. Gender and sexuality are often at the heart of the argument -- but usually in an essentialist framework that does not problematize the relationship. Most of the hundreds of books on body image issues assume a straight white woman as the focus -- the primary risk group. Becky Thompson's ethnography, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep (1995), is the first book to look at how these issues affect women of color and lesbians. None of the books focus on men, least of all gay and or bisexual men.
Some research on body image among lesbians and gay men has been published in the psychological literature and we find the occasional personal piece in a lesbian or gay publication. For the most part, these works discuss quantitative psychological research and/or theoretical models. I will review these materials -- looking at what can be learned, what questions they raise, and in what areas an anthropological approach could illuminate the meanings of appearance and weight in lesbian, bisexual and gay communities.

The Body as a Cultural Symbol

"The body is the first and most natural instrument of man."
Marcel Mauss

Ted Polhemus in his article "Social Bodies" (1975), offers an analysis of what American and European anthropology contributes to our understanding of the body as a system of socially constructed meanings. Although his analysis begins with Charles Darwin and others who focused on expression and gestures, he credits Robert Hertz (1909), Marcel Mauss (1935), and Mary Douglas (1970) as having contributed the most to the focus on the human body "as it is transformed by its social environment and 'embodied' with social meaning" or the development of the "social body" (1975:28).
Mary Douglas in her book Natural Symbols begins with the assumption that "the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived" (1970:65). She observed that the body is a natural symbol supplying some of our richest sources of metaphor. Polhemus explains:

[i]f Douglas is correct that "the human body is always treated as an image of society" then it follows that by examining a people's attitudes to the human body, and the definition of its boundaries, we should gain some understanding of the native informant's other body -- his social body, his society (1975:28).

Drawing upon the work of Douglas and other earlier theorists, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret M. Lock present three perspectives from which the human body may be viewed:
(1) as phenomenally experienced individual body-self; (2) as a social body, a natural symbol for thinking about relationships among nature, society, and culture; and (3) as a body politic, an artifact of social and political control (1988:6).

They begin with "an assumption of the body as simultaneously a physical and symbolic artifact, as both naturally and culturally produced, and as securely anchored in a particular historical moment" (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1988:6). Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Howard F. Stein discuss the ways in which scientists and people from various cultures have "conceptualized the body" because "Western assumptions about the mind and body, the individual and society, affect both theoretical view-points and research paradigms" (Scheper-Hughes and Stein 1987:6). This premise is an important understanding for any analysis of the body within a culture. Without such an understanding of the cultural and historical context, such inquiries may fall prey to ethnocentric assumptions.
Although human bodies are part of the natural world, they do not come to us naturally. Robert Crawford explains:
As our most immediate natural symbol it [the body] provides us with a powerful medium through which we interpret and give expression to our individual and social experience...It is a vital foundation upon which behavior and values are predicated. Conversely, as a symbol of nature the body must be contained and transformed by culture (1985:60).

Michel Foucault described the body as constantly "in the grip" of cultural practices (1980:55). Susan Bordo, in her article "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture," clarifies:
Not that this is a matter of cultural repression of the instinctual or natural body. Rather, there is no "natural" body. Cultural practices, far from exerting their power against spontaneous needs, "basic" pleasures or instincts, or "fundamental" structures of body experience, are already and always inscribed, as Foucault has emphasized, "on our bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures." Our bodies, no less than anything else that is human, are constituted by culture (1988:90).

This perspective is called the "lived body" or the body-as-experienced. An understanding that humans do not experience bodies apart from culture can release us from our misconceptions about what is "natural."

Constructing Sex
Social construction theories in anthropology have turned to the questions of sex, gender and sexuality (Caplan 1989; Newton 1988; Vance 1991). Rather than seeing these as "natural," they may be understood to be highly variable and culturally constructed. The categories of sex, gender and sexuality are seen as related but not interdependent. From this perspective, for instance, sex may be seen as the physiological category to which the individual is assigned (usually at birth), gender as the learned set of behaviors assigned to each "sex," and sexuality (including sexual orientation), the learned or conditioned expression of physical erotic contact.
The dominant ideology in the United States, indeed in Western societies, sees sex, gender and sexuality as natural, innate, instinctual and directly relational categories (Caplan 1989). Carol S. Vance writes that:
In this model, sexuality is not only related to gender but blends easily, and is often conflated, with it. Sexuality, gender arrangements, masculinity and femininity are assumed to be connected, even interchangeable. This assumption, however, never illuminates their culturally and historically-specific connections; it obscures them. The confusion springs from our own folk beliefs that (1) sex causes gender, that is male-female reproductive differences and the process of reproduction ... give rise to gender differentiation, and (2) gender causes sex, that is, women as a marked gender group constitute the locus of sexuality, sexual desire, and motivation (Vance 1991:879).

In the social construction framework, sexual desire is challenged and is understood as a constantly changing social system.
According to Pat Caplan, "it is probably when we consider homosexuality that we are most likely to examine the relationship between gender and sexuality" (1989:22). For in a culture where heterosexuality is assumed as a natural result of sex differences, homosexuality is a transgression of gender. Thus, it challenges the notion of a natural progression of sex-gender-sexuality.
Male homosexuality threatens male solidarity and superordination because some men take on what are thought of as female characteristics. Lesbianism is likewise seen as threatening to male superiority because the women who engage in it appear not to need men (Caplan 1989:2).

Alan Taylor found in his study of the relationships between stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, that the respondents most likely to express negative attitudes towards homosexuals had a "greater adherence to traditional sex role prescriptions, and less approval for equality between the sexes" (1983:42). He concluded that "the social function of negative attitudes toward homosexuals is to define the acceptable limits of behavior for men and women" (1983:43).
Bisexuality may be even more threatening to the ideology of natural categories. By assuming some people were just "born gay" one can still place sexuality in the category of the natural (Newton 1988). Bisexuality undoes the rigid dichotomy between heterosexuality and homosexuality, and in many ways between male and female. Bisexuality also "unravels traditional notions of the immutability of sexual identity. Bisexuals contemporaneously or sequentially select sexual partners of the same or different genders, demonstrating that these choices vary over time and opportunity" (Schuster 1987:62).
Historical and cross-cultural analyses of sexual identity also break down this notion of a fixed identity (Caplan 1989, Newton 1988, Vance 1991). Such work shows that there are considerable shifts and variability "in sexual behavior and the meanings attached to it" (Caplan 1989:3).
A feminist perspective on these issues brings social construction of gender and sexuality into the realm of the political. For instance, it has become clear that, for women, "what seemed to be a naturally gendered body was in fact a highly socially mediated product: femininity and sexual attractiveness were achieved through persistent socialization regarding standards of beauty, makeup, and body language" (Vance 1991:876). Feminists have been able to deconstruct the ideals of beauty and weight to see how they are culturally constructed and linked to gender roles.
Susan Bordo has offered a powerful analysis of eating disorders as distinct cultural phenomena of the West that:
... reflect and call our attention to some of the central ills of our culture -- from our historical heritage of disdain for the body, to our modern fear of loss of control over our futures, to the disquieting meaning of contemporary beauty ideals in an era of female presence and power (1988:88).

Culture-Bound Syndromes
A culture-bound syndrome is a "constellation of symptoms which has been categorized as a disease" involving core values and norms of a culture (Rittenbaugh 1982:347). According to this perspective, Leslie Swartz has explored the implications of anorexia nervosa as a culture-bound syndrome (1985). Like Bordo, Swartz considers the core meanings involved in eating disorders to be indicative of a specific set of ideals in Western industrialized cultures. Banks further points out that "there may be different meanings of the symptoms of anorexia in different subcultural contexts" (Banks 1992:868).
Caroline Giles Banks warns as well that the meanings for eating disorders might vary in different subgroups and that these meanings might be important for the treatment of these illnesses.
Anthropologists especially should not assume cultural uniformity or homogeneity in the genesis or subjective expression of any behavior, including psychopathology (Banks 1992:868).

One potential health care problem involves the difficulty that these values might become "built into the diagnostic system and into treatment models" which would inhibit the recognition and care of eating disorders in some groups (Banks 1992:881).

Homosexuality and Eating Disorders
Most of the "early research on physical attractiveness consisted of studies of males perceiving females, reflecting researchers' implicit assumption that the phenomenon was limited to or most powerful when one of feminine beauty in the eyes of men" (Cash and Brown 1989:362). In addition, reports of body image focused on women where it seemed that eating disorders and other body image disturbances were more prevalent among women. Reports showed that only 5-10% of eating disorder patients were men or boys (Barry and Lippmann 1990:161).
Because of the focus on the male gaze as a prime motivator in developing eating disorders, men were not considered at risk for these illnesses. The heterosexual bias in these studies assumed that the only people interested in attracting men were women. The influence of body image disturbances on lesbians and bisexual women was not even considered by most researchers. This can have profoundly negative impact on the health of lesbian, bisexual and gay people who may face mistreatment by health care providers or avoid needed treatment because of neglect and prejudice in health care research and education (Stevens and Hall 1991).
The earliest reference to homosexuality and body image that I have located is a study on adolescent males' adjustment and self-image. Robert E. Prytula et al., found that homosexual males differed from heterosexual males in their "physical appearance, the perception of their physical appearance by others, and their perception of how their physical appearance was perceived by others" (1979:567). The gay and straight men were self-labeled. The authors concluded that "homosexual males reported that they were significantly less adjusted during adolescence than heterosexual males" (Prytula et al. 1979:567). There is no discussion of the way societal factors such as homophobia, may have influenced this result.
It was not until the early 1980s that psychological literature began to focus on males with eating disorders in an attempt to understand how and why these supposed female conditions were affecting them. In 1984, Herzog et al. published a report claiming significant "sexual isolation, sexual inactivity, and conflicted homosexuality" among their male patients in contrast to their female anorexic and bulimic patients. They reported 26% of their male patients were homosexual in contrast to only 4% among their female patients. They cited "cultural pressure on the homosexual male to be thin and attractive" as possibly placing him at greater risk for eating disorders but did not elaborate on the cultural factors. Pope et al., followed in 1986 with a report that said they "found little evidence of increased homosexuality or 'sexual conflict'" among their male patients. Both studies defined homosexuality as reported sexual behavior with another male, not by sexual identity.
That same year, Kay Deaux and Randel Hanna published a report on the influence of gender and sexual orientation in personal advertisements (1984). The personals have long been a popular way for gay men in particular to meet. The authors looked at 800 ads, representing an equal number of men and women, including heterosexual and homosexual advertisers on both the East and West Coasts of the United States. The identity of the advertiser was based on the gender given for the advertiser and the gender of the person they were looking for, not their stated sexual identity. Therefore sexual identity was not explored as a factor, nor were they able to look at bisexuality. They did find significant differences by both gender and sexual orientation, as well as on the intersection of these. Men were more concerned with "objective and physical characteristics," while women were more interested in the "psychological aspects of a potential relationship" (Ibid:374).
There were also significant differences by sexual orientation. Women looking for men were more likely to offer physical attractiveness, search for financial security, specific occupational information and sincerity. Women looking for women placed less emphasis on physical traits and more on personal information such as hobbies and interests. Men looking for men were more likely to place emphasis on physical characteristics of both themselves and their partners (Ibid:374).
Another study also found emphasis by gay men on physical characteristics (Sergios and Cody 1986). This study was done on a college campus among self-identified gay men. No description is given of how identity was determined or participants recruited. The participants were matched for "computer dates" through an "afternoon tea dance" arranged by the researchers. They found "the largest determinant" of how much a man liked the other man and would like to date him again, was the partner's physical attractiveness. However, attractiveness did not seem to influence how often they actually did go out afterwards (Ibid:71).
Fichter and Daser (1987) published a study on male anorexic and bulimic patients indicating "atypical gender role behavior." The study reported that half of the patients felt they were less masculine than other men and that a quarter of them had had sexual contact with other men. The study confuses gender role with sexual orientation, reinforcing a stereotype of gay men as "feminine." The discussion section seems to imply that homosexuality and/or feminine mannerisms is a "psychosexual development" disturbance, thereby pathologizing homosexuality and reinforcing male heterosexual behavior as "normal." These authors impy a lack of proper gender conformity that leads to eating disorders in men. Yet, they include no discussion of how homophobia or sexism may have contributed to the problem.
The first non-clinical sample study that showed a link between the development of eating disorders and gay men was by Yager et al (1988). This study compared self-identified gay men from a Gay Men's Rap Group at UCLA with groups of other students on campus. They found:
The homosexual men had higher prevalence of binge-eating problems, of feeling fat in spite of others' perceptions, of feeling terrified of being fat, and of having used diuretics than other male students. They also scored higher on the Eating Disorders Inventory scales for drive for thinness, interoceptive awareness, bulimia, body dissatisfaction, maturity fears and ineffectiveness (1988:495).

This study implies that there may be many gay men with or at risk of developing eating disorders and other body image disturbances than are indicated by the studies of eating disorders patients. This may be because male patients seek treatment less often than female patients (Barry and Lippmann 1990:163-164). It is possible that with the added stigma of homophobia, gay men may be even less likely to seek professional help with their problems with body image.
Another study comparing self-identified gay and straight men found similar results (Silberstein et al. 1989). They found that "homosexual men showed more body dissatisfaction and considered appearance more central to their sense of self" than did the heterosexual men. They also reported that heterosexual men were more likely to exercise for strength, while gay men were more concerned with exercise to improve their physical attractiveness. This study is the first to specifically mention gay culture:
It has been observed that the homosexual male subculture places an elevated importance on all aspects of a man's physical self -- body build, grooming, dress, handsomeness (Ibid:338).

One of the more striking aspects of these early studies is the lack of theoretical discussion. Except for the one just mentioned, the only causal explanation given for the correlations between homosexuality and appearance concerns among men was to pathologize homosexuality. Most studies offered no explanation. In addition, all these reports are clinical in nature, and I have yet to find a piece written by a gay man on the topic in these early years. This is particularly interesting given that almost all the work on lesbians and body image has come from lesbians themselves.

Women at Risk, Lesbians Immune?
The earliest publications on the lesbian experience and body image came out of the fat women's liberation movement in the early 1970s. The earliest essays were part of a literature package developed by the Fat Underground which formed in Los Angeles late in 1973 and was active until some time after 1977. According to Vivian Mayer, the movement was a blending of radical feminism and radical therapy (Mayer 1983:x). These early writings and others were later published in Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression (Schoenfielder and Wieser 1983). This book contained several personal narratives (some previously published in feminist publications) which spoke to the issues of weight discrimination in general, but also within the lesbian feminist communities.
In contrast to the scholarship on gay men, the first academic material on lesbians and body image was not published until years after the personal and political work began. Laura S. Brown had a theoretical article in Lesbian Psychologies (1987). Drawing on clinical experience, Brown proposes not only an evaluation of lesbian body image but an analysis of cultural factors and possible solutions to change conditions. First, she states that "lesbians appear to make up a smaller percentage of women with eating disorders than of women in general. Most of the women with eating disorders who are described in the literature are either clearly defined as heterosexual or their sexual orientation has not been the focus of inquiry" (Brown 1987:295). She also points out that lesbians have been very active among "fat activists, that is, people who define fatness as a normative variation and the stigmatization of fat people as political oppression" (Ibid:295). She continues by outlining parallels between attitudes toward fat women and attitudes toward lesbians, including the rule "for women in patriarchy that states that women are forbidden to love other women, because that would lead them to love and value themselves, and perhaps break the other rules" (Ibid:298):
My clinical observation is that homophobia and "fat oppression" ... can and do intersect in very particular ways in the lives of lesbians. .... Lesbians and fat women are both valued negatively and stigmatized in patriarchal culture. Fear of being fat/being perceived as fat and fear of being lesbian/being perceived as lesbian are used by the institutions of patriarchal culture as a means of controlling women socially. All women will internalize homophobia and hatred of fat during their socialization in patriarchal culture. Lesbians are at risk from fat oppression in different ways than are heterosexual women. A lesbian's own internalized homophobia is likely to determine the degree to which she fat-oppresses herself. Specifically, I hypothesize that the more a lesbian has examined and worked through her internalized homophobia, the less at risk she is to be affected by the rules that govern fat oppression. The more a lesbian shames and stigmatizes herself for her lesbianism, the more likely it is that she will also actively fat-oppress herself (Brown 1987:299).

She explains that lesbian "fat activists, a non-client population, seem to be women who are comfortable with their lesbianism" (Ibid:300). She gives examples of clinical work suggesting that the more homophobia the client had the more problems she experienced with her body. She cautions that lesbianism is not a "magic cure for the problems with weight and eating." Yet, this work was the first to daw a connection between internalized homophobia and suggest the value of "coming out" in the treatment of eating disorders.
Another theoretical piece by Sari H. Dworkin was published in Women and Therapy (1989). This work primarily draws upon Shadow on a Tightrope and other published lesbian fat activist work. She explains:
Lesbians do not think of themselves as objects to be defined by male subjects. Therefore it seems lesbians ought to be able to escape from the negative body image and lack of self-acceptance that other women in our society suffer from. And yet as the lesbian literature suggests lesbians, even feminist lesbians, have bought the myth. Lesbians suffer from body image disturbance and discrimination against fat lesbians who do not fit the patriarchal standard of beauty (1989:28).

She reviews the lesbian body image literature (except Brown's work) and briefly explains fat politics. She concludes that lesbians suffer from body image problems because they "live and work within the heterosexual, patriarchal society" (Ibid:33). She posits that the influence of the job market may play a major role in limiting lesbian self-acceptance.
The first clinical study on lesbians was not published until 1990. Ruth H. Striegel-Moore, Naomi Tucker, and Jeanette Hsu (1990) studied body image among lesbian and heterosexual students and found few differences in body esteem, self-esteem and disordered eating. They did find lower self-esteem and other social difficulties. They found less dieting among lesbians, but found more binge eating.
Although lesbian ideology rejects our culture's narrowly defined ideal of female beauty and opposes the overemphasis placed on women's physical attractiveness, such ideology may not be strong enough to enable lesbians to overcome already internalized cultural beliefs and values about female beauty. Unlike other minorities, lesbians do not grow up with parental or peer models representing lesbian standards as an alternative to the majority culture's norms (Ibid:498).

As they point out, age may also be a factor, as the study included only women in their late teens and early twenties. The results might be different with a group of women who had been established in their lesbian identity longer and more comfortable with their lives. This study, like those with men, excluded bisexuals. According to Naomi Tucker (n.d.), the study originally included bisexual women, but they were later dropped from the sample before publication.
Two years later, a study by Herzog et al. found "homosexual women were significantly heavier than heterosexual women, desired a significantly heavier ideal weight, were less often concerned with weight and appearance and had less drive for thinness" (1992:391). Women in both groups were heavier than the weight they perceived potential partners would find most attractive and heavier than the weight they considered ideal. Yet, heterosexual women were more likely to be concerned about their weight and to diet, even though they were more likely to be underweight. More homosexual women were satisfied with their bodies. This study included a greater age range, 18-45. Those with bisexual identities were excluded, while those with bisexual behavior sometimes included. Only women who categorized themselves as "exclusively" or "primarily" homosexual or heterosexual were included. Because behavior and identity are not synonymous, this allowed that some of these women may also have been involved with men but still identified as lesbian.
That same year, Brand et al. compared lesbians, gay men and heterosexuals with results that illustrate the complexity of the issue:
Heterosexual women and gay men reported lower ideal weights and tended to be more preoccupied with their weights than were lesbians or heterosexual men. However, gender was a more salient factor than sexual orientation on most variables, with both lesbians and heterosexual women reporting greater concern with weight, more body dissatisfaction, and greater frequency of dieting than did gay or heterosexual men (1992:253).

The sexual orientation of participants was self-identified. Bisexuals were again dropped from the sample. The age range was larger for the lesbian and gay sample than for the heterosexual sample who were primarily college students.
The next year, Thomas E. Gettleman and J. Kevin Thompson found gay men and heterosexual women "showed greater actual concerns with appearance, weight, and dieting, and were perceived to possess greater body image disturbances and dieting concerns" when compared to heterosexual men and lesbians studied (Gettelman and Thompson 1993:545). The mean age of participants was in the mid-twenties and once again, bisexuals were dropped from the study. The discussion section emphasizes the importance of cultural conditioning including the differences within lesbian and gay male subcultures.
Michael D. Siever (1994) found similar results -- heterosexual men were the most satisfied with their bodies, gay men were the least satisfied. Heterosexual women were less satisfied with their bodies than were lesbians, but more satisfied than gay men. Siever puts forward the theory that "gay men and heterosexual women are dissatisfied with their bodies and vulnerable to eating disorders because of a shared emphasis on physical attractiveness and thinness that is based on a desire to attract and please men. Although men place a priority on physical attractiveness in evaluating potential partners, women place greater emphasis on other factors, such as personality, status, power, and income" (Ibid:252).
One way to test Siever's hypothesis would be to look at the bisexual women and men and see what results their dual attraction had, if any. Unfortunately, like all the previous studies, bisexuals were dropped from the study or lumped in with homosexual or heterosexual identities through the use of the Kinsey scale.
In 1994, Esther D. Rothblum, a leading body image researcher, offered an analysis of lesbians and attitudes toward physical appearances. She lists six ways in which appearance affects lesbians:
First, lesbians, as all women, grow up surrounded by institutions that value physical appearance. Second, lesbians are not in sexual relations with men, and this may lessen the importance of standard appearance norms. Third, research on stereotypes indicates that the dominant culture has extremely negative attitudes about lesbians, including lesbians' appearance. Fourth, the process of identifying with the lesbian culture may depend on the ability to recognize and be recognized by other lesbians, and thus on physical appearance. Fifth, lesbians who are also members of other minority groups may be invisible or may need to choose which group to identify with. Finally, the lesbian community itself has norms for physical appearance and these have changed over the course of the century (Rothblum 1994:84-85)

An important component of Rothblum's analysis is the effect of visibility and appearance norms. While some other work has pointed out the different appearance norms in the lesbian and gay cultures, none have explained how these norms may help as well as hurt. According to Rothblum:
Appearance norms in the lesbian community have had two functions: (a) to provide a means for members of an often invisible and oppressed group to identify one another without being identifiable by the dominant culture and (b) to provide a group identity and thus separate norms from the dominant culture (Ibid:92).

In addition to helping members identify each other, privileging visibility is a tactic of identity politics whereby "participants often symbolize their demands for social justice by celebrating visible signifiers of difference that have historically targeted them for discrimination" (Walker 1993:868). But the tactic has inherent problems. Those who do not fit the norm or are not visible such as a "femme lesbian" or an "invisibly disabled" person will sometimes be doubly marginalized by both the mainstream culture and the subculture. For those who have another visible marker such as race or disability, their less visible identity may be neglected.

Gay Men Respond
In a reversal of the pattern with lesbians, gay men have only begun in recent years to publish more personal accounts of their experiences with body image and discrimination. Patrick Giles published a commentary "A Matter of Size" in Outweek, Oct. 24, 1990. That was followed by a feature length article on the subject by Jay Blotcher, entitled "A Matter of Gravity: How the Queer Community Trims the Fat" Outweek, Jan. 23, 1991. The second article included some interviews with lesbians as well. Both pieces offered a bleak picture of the conditions for gay men and weight. The material still lacked analysis and seemed to offer no possible solutions.
Only very recently do gay men seem to be coming to talk about these issues and then only a few offer any solutions. To date, I have seen only two articles by gay men on body image which articulate any solutions for change. Darrell g.h. Schramm's "More Than a Sum of Parts: Rescuing the Body From Fundamentalism," published in White Crane Newsletter in 1993, offered a vision of change that included a reconnecting of the body and spirit for gay men. And "If Only I Were Cute: Looksism & Internalized Homophobia in the Gay Male Community" by Andrew J. Feraios (n.d.) articulates a clear "personal is political" analysis and offers examples of ways the gay men's community might change its ideal.

Homophobia and Body Image
Meanwhile writings on lesbians and body image have gone from the personal narrative to the quantitative study to a fusion of the two. Thompson's new book (1995) along with two recent studies (Auerbach et al., Myers-Parrelli et al.) forthcoming in Looking Queer (Atkins, n.d.), break from the quantitative survey to use the more qualitative form of interviews. Although Thompson is a sociologist and the others are psychologists, they use anthropological techniques such as interviewing and meaning-centered analysis to explore body image for lesbians and bisexual women.
A Hunger So Wide and So Deep is the latest and probably most important book on body image to come out in a long time. The author, Becky W. Thompson, is a feminist sociologist, who in 1984 began to conduct workshops on eating problems. She noticed that among the women she worked with, their diversity did not match the presumption that only middle and upper class white, young women have eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia and compulsive eating. She interviewed 18 women, including five African Americans, five Latinas and eight white women. All of the white women, and some of the women of color, were lesbians. They ranged in age from 19 to 46. By focusing on women who were not white and/or heterosexual, Thompson illustrated that women of color and lesbians can be affected by eating problems and body image distortions.
Thompson's and other work suggests that women of color whose families or life situations promote assimilation into the "mainstream" or "white" culture may be even more prone to eating disorders as they try to cope with the stress of racism and the impossible ideals of beauty which make women of color invisible. As children, the women of color in Thompson's study experienced conflicts that negated positive body attitudes from their communities when they did exist. Many attended all or mostly white schools so that they felt different. Some had families who internalized racism and passed it on in forms such as telling them that white women were more attractive. Some families were accepting at first but became caught up in the "culture of thinness" when they sought to move up socio-economically. Over and over, it seemed that racism within and beyond the families was a key factor in these women of color developing eating problems.
Thompson also shows that "lessons about heterosexuality often went hand in hand with lessons about weight and dieting" (Ibid:39). In order to submerge or deal with their own and other people's homophobia, many young lesbians turned to food and fasting. And most found that "coming out" was a beginning, but not an end, in the healing process. Patterns begun early in childhood do not simply disappear when women develop a positive lesbian identity. Feeling that this was expected, many had trouble talking about their eating problems with other lesbians. Coming out and developing positive attitudes was more of a "complicated maze" than stepping out of a closet, but it was a beginning. Thompson analyzes the cultural and personal situations that have perpetuated these women's eating disorders and makes suggestions for ways to change the problem.
Myers-Parelli et al. (n.d.) support Thompson's work that many lesbians and bisexual women continue to struggle with body image issues even after coming out. Although many report that their views about their appearance changed dramatically after coming out, some struggle with lesbian appearance norms they might consider to be as restrictive as the mainstream culture's. Age and length of time since coming out did make a difference for these women. The younger or newly out lesbians felt more appearance pressure than did older lesbians or those who had been out for a while (Ibid:7).
Auerbach et al. (n.d.) found, too, that lesbians and bisexual women still struggle with body image issues and experience pressure from media, families and friends, although many also receive support from lovers, friends and the lesbian community to work through body image problems developed in their youth or young adulthood. They also express concern about the changing politics of lesbianism and its continued ability to be a form of resistance:
What our interviews reveal is that insofar as lesbianism is understood and enacted as a right of refusal, it works to challenge body image oppression. .... These dialogues about power and injustice empowered lesbians to resist gender based norms for body size and appearance as they defied the compulsory heterosexuality. However, when this refusal to accept a cultural and public identity of 'straight' ceases to be understood as a refusal to perpetuate a culture of disempowerment, it appears that other structural inequalities go unchallenged. As demonstrated by the steady rise of media centered around gays and lesbians, more and more, gay identities in popular culture are moving from their roots in resistance from the civil rights and women's movements to a commercial market (Auerbach, n.d.:7).

These pieces represent only two of sixty works in the anthology Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgendered Communities (Atkins, n.d.). This will be the first book devoted to body image and queer identity. It spans both the theoretical and the personal. Many of the pieces in the book focus on the construction not only of appearance and sexual identity, but of gender as well. The collection includes work by intersexuals, transgendered people, butch and femme lesbians and bisexuals, and men who challenge gender categories.

Risking Invisibility
... from the beginning of the epidemic, there has been an effort to divide people into distinct social categories. While the idea of risk group has been strongly challenged, and the emphasis in recent years has been on risk behaviors, there remains the sense that discrete and bounded categories of people exist that are a special risk and in need of special prevention efforts... (Singer 1994:937)

Although written to describe issues in AIDS, this observation about the hazards of risk groups is also applicable to body image disturbances such as eating disorders. The popular image of the "straight, white young middle-class female anorexic" often limits the discussion of the broad range of body image disturbances and how they manifest differently in a variety of situations. Unfortunately, this has the effect of preventing many who have body image disturbances from recognizing that their very personal trouble is part of a larger problem with possible solutions -- and this lack of connection to resources of support and recovery can be devastating, even fatal.
As Singer points out, risk groups may have "little correspondence with the active social identities and social locations of those at high risk" to disease (1994:937). As he and many others have pointed out, sexual orientation is a fluid category which can vary over a person's life-time as well as cross-culturally and historically (Newton 1988; Singer 1994; Shuster 1987). Not all people who participate in homosexual behaviors identify themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual. And there are many people who identify themselves as lesbian or gay, who participate in bisexual behaviors.
The material reviewed here indicates that identity and behavior might operate in different ways through body image. For instance, lesbian identity may offer a supportive environment that is not directly related to sexual behavior, in which women may find protection or recovery from pressures that lead to eating disorders. And yet it appears that gay male identity, and the pressures to conform in those communities, may have the opposite effect. However, most researchers were not clear in their use of the labels lesbian, bisexual or gay. They often conflated identity and behavior in ways that make it difficult to hypothesize the factors that are a risk and those that are a form of protection.
Five possible complications of risk groups make it important to re-evaluate the use of these categories in body image. First, individuals with body image disturbances may believe they do not have eating disorders because they are in a group that "does not get them," e.g., men and lesbians. Second, health care professionals may also fail to diagnose these conditions even when the symptoms are apparent, for the same reasons.
Third, symptoms of these distortions may vary among people of different backgrounds, complicating both diagnosis and treatment. Men with bulimia, for instance, often do not express the desire to "lose weight" as much as to "become more fit or toned." Since some diagnostic criteria include the preoccupation to "lose weight," they may not be recognized as eating disordered. Caroline Giles Banks found this problem among some women who identified their refusal to eat with religious symbolism rather than with the idioms of dieting (1992).
The fourth difficulty is that those who fall into "non-risk groups" may be inadvertently stigmatized when they do have body image distortions. Within lesbian communities with a strong sense of body acceptance and a rejection of the mainstream feminine ideal, a woman who is eating disordered might be seen as not living up to the lesbian ideal. This might prevent her from seeking help and isolate her from support she would need for recovery.
And a fifth possible short-coming of the concept of risk groups is that those who fall within the risk groups for eating disorders might perceive their body image disturbances as normal and not in need of any changes. If the studies and popular conceptions indicate that as young heterosexual women and, increasingly, gay men, are obsessed with their appearance, this may come to be seen as normal both by these people and those around them. This would make it more difficult to encourage them to seek assistance. For gay men, such changes might be seen as a refusal of gay community values and lead to their stigmatization within their communities.
These complications indicate a need to re-evaluate the theoretical tools used in developing an ontology of these illnesses and their place within the individual lives, located communities and the larger social constructions. Lesbian, bisexual and gay body image is important not only in terms of the health and social issues in these communities, but also for the way they can illustrate the complexities of body image for those affected.
In order to address these issues, my study has focused on a reasonably wide spectrum of lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals in order to examine the way different aspects of identity and experience affect views of one's body and the bodies of others. It is my hope that this will further understanding both of lesbian, bisexual and gay people's lives and of body image in these and other groups. My aim is to add to our knowledge so that we may change the conditions that lead people to discriminate against others and devalue themselves.

SECTION 2:
Methods -- Form as Content
Reciprocal Ethnography
And my work is "reciprocal" in that we ... have established a working dialogue about the material, a reciprocal give and take. This process is not to be understood as reciprocity, where obligation or payment is the motivating factor -- but reciprocal, in the (I hope) best sense of sharing and building knowledge based on dialogue and shared/examined/re-examined knowledge. .... Their knowledge and mine are presented as a collaborative multi-voiced ethnography. While I fully acknowledge that I am writing this book, I am committed to presenting the work as collaborative, as a dialogue, and as emergent, not fixed (Lawless 1993:61).

One of the key critiques of non-feminist research by feminists has been the objectification of research subjects as "objects." Feminist researchers have attempted instead "to turn those who had been constituted as other into selves, that is, into subjects rather than objects" (Abu-Lughod 1990: 25). This has led to many strategies to attempt to bring into balance the power between researcher and subjects, or informants.
As a model for the type of research that would reflect a concern with this interaction and attempt to avoid many of the problems inherent in traditional research methods, I have drawn from a number of sources. For the term "reciprocal ethnography" I have drawn from the concept presented by Elaine Lawless. In this same vein I have chosen to refer to and treat those in this study as "participants." This term captures the "spirit" of my intent in this work. At each step in the process, I have worked to balance the power and needs of each participant and myself, and to make the work as inclusive as possible.
It probably would have been easier to focus on a specific group such as "working class lesbians" or "young gay men" in doing this work. There were many problems with trying to mix gender, sexual orientation, age, race, class and other factors -- both in finding participants and in interpreting the material. But I felt that the focus on individuals from diverse backgrounds would be more representative and more enlightening in both their commonalties and differences of views.

Participant Observer: Inside-out
Ethnographies that seek to be reflexive not only require the ethnographer to document her biases and interactions with the people she studies, but they are predicated on an honest presentation of self at the outset and throughout the field research. Thus reflexivity is not merely about the presentation of data and the recognition of how the ethnographer places herself within the context of the field situation and engages with the participants in a common endeavor to write, in the end, an honest and truthful ethnography (Lawless 1993:27).

In the "personal is political" and "self-reflective" traditions of feminism and the "new ethnography," I have been acutely aware of how my own identity and experiences would affect this work. I am a white bisexual woman in her mid-thirties, who grew up in the southern Mid-West but recently moved to Iowa after living in Northern California for ten years. As such, I was both insider and outsider to every participant in the project.
As an insider, I am a participating member of the lesbigay community in Iowa City. The people I interviewed were in the classes I attended, organizations and committees I serve in, are friends with some of my friends, or connected to me in any number of ways. When I spoke to women, bisexuals, working class or white people, we shared something else in common. On the other hand, I was an outsider to everyone in some way. To lesbians, I am bisexual. To men, I am a woman. To people of color, I am white. To older people, I am young and vice versa. To native Iowans, I am a newcomer.
I was acutely aware of the similarities and differences in each interaction and the different power dimensions they represent. There was no uniform power relation between myself and the participants other than that of researcher/subject, which I made efforts to minimize. In some cases the person interviewed was a professor in the institution at which I am a graduate student. In another case I was the older, white person interviewing the young Chicano woman. I hope that my awareness in both the process of conducting the research and in writing it, will help me to negotiate these power differences in a way that will minimize risk for those involved.

Locating Participants
I began the process of finding participants by announcing my project in lesbigay groups I work in and to friends, asking for volunteers and/or names of potential volunteers for the project. I explained the purpose of the study and that I would need an interview of approximately two hours in length. I encouraged people to tell friends and have them call me. I also made some posters about my need for research participants that were posted in the local women's center, a gay bar, a women's music event, and sent to other lesbigay groups in the area. I then asked each person interviewed if they knew others who might wish to participate. This process of "friendship pyramiding and snowball sampling" was then offset with "theoretical sampling" (Weston 1991:10-11) by deliberately selecting people of color, older people and others whose identities were not yet present in the study or still underrepresented.
Most participants came through personal contacts. People were understandably leery of discussing these topics with a researcher they knew nothing about, and were more likely to volunteer if they knew me or if I were recommended by a friend. Few asked much about my background before the interview, beyond my program of study and whether or not I was a member of the lesbigay community.
Some volunteered because they were interested in body issues. Most expressed that their primary reason for participating was that they felt it was important that research about lesbian, bisexual and gay people be done. Many felt my sexual identity was also important to their desire to assist another "lesbigay" person in their work, especially when they saw it as benefiting their community. No one was offered any monetary compensation. Several people expressed appreciation of having their opinions listened to and communicated to others.
Each potential participant was told that I was conducting research into "lesbian, bisexual and gay attitudes toward the body and sexuality." Each was also told the interview would be taped and that their identities would be masked with pseudonyms.
Initially men were more likely to volunteer than women. This surprised me since I thought that as a woman myself, women would feel more comfortable with me. While I still puzzle over this, some possible reasons I have speculated about include that women: 1) are put off by discussing sex with a stranger, 2) might be less trusting of research, and 3) might be more nervous about revealing information to me since I am part of their social network. I suspect all three may have been involved to some degree.
A couple people who initially volunteered for the study or whom I asked, canceled or declined. Each cited "lack of time" or "scheduling conflicts." I am aware that other factors, including distrust of me, may have played into these cancellations, but I have no way of knowing if that was the case.

Interviews: Reading the Body from Words
Some feminist scholarship, happily, has managed to merge the concern of feminist methodology with the primacy of experience with an understanding of the contingent and negotiated nature of narrative, leading to a singular grasp of the personal narrative as a reflection of a cultural process rather than as a videotape manqué or literal account of observable behavior. Women say what they do, or what they did, as a way of constructing key notions of self, and in the process go on to construct gender. ... personal narratives offer us a chance to see how women account for themselves, make sense of their situations, and designate themselves in relation to others -- how they, in fact, negotiate their identities in collaboration with or in opposition to prevailing cultural expectations (Lewin 1993:14).

The process of using interviews and participant-observation is well suited to giving us the context for people's understandings about their bodies and how it relates to their personal experiences and feelings of identity. My questions in the interviews attempted to direct people into a "story telling" mode of conversation where they related to me the important aspects of their life, their views and feelings about their bodies and other people's bodies, their sexual histories, their sexual identities and their coming out process. I typically began by asking, "tell me a little about yourself, some background." If it was not volunteered, I would usually suggest they share information about who they found attractive, what they thought of their own appearance and/or attractiveness, how they came to and thought of their sexual identity, who they were "out" with and what they saw as their goals for the future.
In my research with lesbian, bisexual and gay people, I found other work on these groups to be helpful in directing my interview process. For instance, Kath Weston's description strikes at a core theme in every interview:
During interviews I used coming-out stories as a point of departure for investigating issues of identity and relationships with blood or adoptive relatives. Such narratives are customarily related to and for other lesbians and gay men rather than for the benefit of a heterosexual audience. Coming-out stories had the advantage of representing a category meaningful to participants themselves, a category so indigenous that one woman asked, "Do you want the 33 or the 45 rpm version?" Making new acquaintances was one type of occasion that often called for telling a coming-out story, and it seemed to me at times that my role as interviewer began to blend with the role of "lesbian friend of a friend" (Weston 1991:15).

I asked few specific questions about food, weight or other "body image" questions unless the subject was brought up by the participant. I felt it was important to see what concerned them and not bias them any more than necessary towards telling me what they thought I wanted to hear. Instead, I attempted to see if this was an important issue for them. If they brought it up, I tried to elicit their views. Some people brought up information about eating disorders or sexual abuse without prompting.
Of course, this does not give me "clinical data" on who is or is not eating disordered or suffering other body image disturbances. Even those materials brought up are subject to errors, omissions or out-right lies. For instance, during one interview a woman told me her "entire" sexual history without mentioning childhood sexual abuse until it came up later in another context. She said she did not feel it was relevant to her sexual identity or feelings about her body. I have had to keep this in mind when interpreting the material and attempt to make sure both views are presented.
In choosing to base the primary focus of the project on interviews, I am aware of the that these are subjective. The interviews were focused, open-ended conversations in which I attempted to elicit participants' views about the body and their sexuality in the context of their life histories. Although I had specific questions and areas I wished to cover, I attempted to allow the greatest space possible for the participants to bring up these topics or other topics they felt were relevant. In addition, I ended each interview with a question of whether there was "anything I haven't asked you that you feel I should or that you would like to talk about?" Many times the participant added valuable insights when prompted this way.
Many factors influenced the length, detail and content of these interviews including the background of the participant, their comfort with talking about their experiences, their rapport (or lack thereof) with me, their views of what an interview should be, and their feelings about things that day. Some lasted just over an hour, while others lasted two to three hours. In an ethnography of a lesbian community Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis explained their interview process:
The interviews were organized by a combination of the flow of the narrators' memories, the periods a narrator had delineated in her discussion of turning points, and the topics that concerned us. .... Oral history as a method involves a personal relationship between the narrator and the researcher; in any successful interview there is a bond of affirmation and understanding that can be very rewarding for both parties. The narrator has a chance to reflect fully on her life with the interested attention of another person. The interviewer has the benefit of learning valuable and exciting information that may be relevant to her own life (Kennedy and Davis 1993:20-21).

I felt the process of interviewing people was profoundly rewarding. The experience of listening and the privilege of having people share their life stories is immeasurable. Participants also mentioned how much they enjoyed the conversations.
Each interview was held in private -- with no other people who were able to listen to the conversation. At the start of the interviews, the participants were asked to read and sign a "research agreement." Unlike a simple release, this document stipulated their rights and the way the research would be conducted. It also included my name, phone number and the name and number of my thesis advisor. We each signed a copy of this agreement with the participant keeping one copy and the other for myself. I felt this was important to balance the power of the researcher and to make sure they understood I was willing to be held accountable for my promises. This was the only context in which their real names appeared.
I explained to each that participation was voluntary and could be withdrawn at any time during the interview. They could bar specific topics, turn off the tape-recorder or ask for a different question. I also explained that they would have a chance to read, edit or withdraw their transcript from use after it was typed.
After the agreement was signed, each participant chose a pseudonym that would be marked on the tape and used in the study. Most people happily chose their own pseudonym. A few people objected to the use of "false" names for their interviews. What is particularly relevant is the context in which their objections were understood. Each said that they are "very out" and saw no reason "to hide" anything about themselves. In the lesbigay culture, "being out" is an ethic of pride and courage. The participants wanted people to understand that they were not ashamed of who they were and were concerned that pseudonyms might give that impression.
Yet still others felt the pseudonyms were important and were concerned that their privacy be protected, especially as their stories would affect family and others who had not consented to the interview. Keeping this in mind, I also changed or omitted the name of every person mentioned by participants in the narratives.
Several of the women picked masculine or gender-neutral sounding names. This struck me as problematic. I was concerned that the work would begin to sound as though I had only included men. Yet, these gender-obfuscations might have had several meanings. Some women might identify as "butch" and the names in this context might be an expression of their lesbian identity. In addition, this might be another way of obscuring their real name even further than the feminine pseudonyms. Or, I could be reading too much into this.
After the first few instances of this, I gave instructions that the participant choose a name that would reflect their social identity without revealing their actual identity. This had the advantage of eliciting pseudonyms that were not only reflected gender but racial identities as well.
Another important aspect of the interview process was that there were times when I disagreed with the participants. It was easy to nod and say encouraging things as long as I was in agreement with the person. But when I was upset by or disagreed with the participant, I found myself in a difficult bind. I did not want to be seen as someone who was there to judge their life. Especially in my position as "researcher," I did not want to impose my beliefs on them. Yet, I could not act the part of "aloof" observer in this very personal conversation.
I compromised by taking the cue from the participant. If they asked my opinion, I would give a cautious but honest opinion. If they did not, I tried to resist the urge to criticize. This was particularly difficult when they related self-destructive behavior or misinformation about body image issues. It came in direct conflict with my feminist commitment to helping with these problems. I uneasily resolved to handle this in two ways. First, I volunteered that I had education resources about body image if they were interested. And second, I resolved that since my opinions would be expressed in the text of the ethnography, this was their time to talk, not mine. In her enthography on race among white women, Ruth Frankenberg explains her negotiation of this process:
Central to the task was my development of a "dialogical" approach to the interviews. Rather than maintaining the traditionally distant, apparently objective, and so-called blank-faced research persona, I positioned myself as explicitly involved in the questions, at times sharing with interviewees either information about my own life or elements of my own analysis of racism as it developed through the research process (Frankenberg 1993:30).

I also tried to balance how much I shared about myself with the desire to make their experiences the center of the interview, yet stay engaged in a conversation and be responsive. I shared elements or short stories when they seemed relevant to the conversation. I would also answer questions asked of me. Several participants asked to talk off tape with me about who I was and what my background was after they completed the interview. I accepted easily, and was comfortable sharing what information they wanted to know about me.
The degree of rapport with each person varied tremendously. Some people were nervous and/or had difficulty with the "open" style of the interview. Others seemed immediately comfortable and talked openly about their lives. I sometimes felt that men were easier to talk with. It was more difficult for me to relax around women and friends. The connection to my personal relationships made it harder for me to know what "role" I was in at that point.
Several ethnographers have written about the difficulties of doing fieldwork in your own social community. For instance:
Presumptions of a common frame of reference and shared identity can also complicate the anthropologist's task by leaving cultural notions implicit, making her work to get people to state, explain and situate the obvious (Weston 1991:14).

Whereas in Tiawan I was able to periodically escape out of the foreign setting into a familiar one (reading Time magazine or watching an American movie would do this), in this project there was nowhere to escape. The things I was discovering about gender in our society and about the lives of the other women overlapped and informed both the most personal aspects of my life... (Martin 1987:10).

And in a frank discussion of the effects on their personal lives, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis relate:
Our contact with the community, however, also had its pitfalls. The main drawback to researching a community where we carried on our social lives was that we could not make a clear separation between work and personal life, placing tremendous demands on our moral character to meet high ethical standards for research. We felt -- rightly or wrongly -- the need to be models of respectability and sensitivity in order to convince people that we were trustworthy and that the project was worth their participation (Ibid 1993:18).

Studying the people I socialize and work with, in the town I live in, created similar dilemmas for me. There was no "there" to return from or go home to. What has often been difficult for me is the shifting nature of relationships that affect my association with those in the study. For instance, several times I have interviewed someone I had never met or only briefly met, only to later find that person join an organization or social group that I participate in. This means that our new relationship was influenced by what I knew from the interviews, but it was important that I not reveal that information or let it adversely affect their participation in the group. I have needed to be especially careful of my interactions in these situations.
A positive effect of this is that it has increased my knowledge of the history of the community and of its diversity.

Choices in Writing
To be a feminist entails being sensitive to domination; for the ethnographer that means being aware of domination in the society being described and in the relationship between the writer (and readers) and the people being written about (Abu-Lughod 1993:5).

In the classic ethnography, the lone anthropologist returns from the field and turns the notes of his (usually male) experiences and observations into a text about the people he has studied. In this scenario, the people studied might never read the work, let alone participate in the writing of the text. It is against this that feminist ethnography contrasts itself, with an emphasis on the collaborative process of research and a move toward such collaboration on the writing of texts:
Feminist ethnography, here designed as reciprocal, multi-layered, and polyvocal, mirrors the text and sub-text of the women's stories, which are equally multi-layered and polyvocal (Lawless 1993:80).

As I entered the writing stage of my project, I was aware that the power imbalances and dangers to my participants are in some ways magnified by the process of turning our conversations and experiences into text. Some have about the inevitability of this danger, agreeing with Judith Stacey's assertion that the "appearance of greater respect for and equality with research subjects in the ethnographic approach masks a deeper, more dangerous form of exploitation" (1988:22).
I recognize that the greater the intimacy between researcher and subject, the more the chance of the ethnographer finding out details of the subjects' lives. Yet, it also seems important to recognize that it increases the researcher's ability to understand the nuances and impact of this information. There are ways that the position of the participant and the researcher can be balanced through the writing process. The emphasis on balance is important here. I do not feel it is appropriate to turn over primary responsibility for the project to the participants. Allowing the participants to censor my analysis or disavowing my authorship of the text would be a reversal of power, rather than a balance. It is still ultimately my responsibility and privilege to sort through the information collected and make sense of them for readers.
Once the interviews were completed, I had the necessity of turning hours of taped conversations into text. First, I transcribed the interviews, including incomplete sentences, phrases and pauses. These materials were spell-checked, but not otherwise edited. I warned participants that I would send them "raw" transcripts to review before I used them. I then mailed them copies with a letter explaining that they could edit, delete portions, make comments/ suggestions or withdraw from the project if they sent me notice by a specified date (usually within 2-3 weeks). Once that date was passed, if I did not hear from them, the material could be included in the text. To my surprise, no one withdrew from the project after the interviews.
The next step was to sort out the relevant information and quotes from the material. I tried highlighting issues of identity and experience in order to look for patterns and divergences. Here I was challenged to write ethnography without generalizing, to point out relevant patterns without erasing differences, to avoid what Lila Abu-Lughod refers to as trafficking in generalities:
Whether "seeking" laws of human sociality or simply characterizing and interpreting ways of life, our goal as anthropologists is usually to use details and the particulars of individual lives to produce typifications. The drawback, as I will argue, for those working with people living in other societies is that generalization can make these "others" seem simultaneously more coherent, self-contained, and different from ourselves than they might be. Generalization, however useful for our projects, helps make concepts like "culture" and "cultures" seem sensible. This in turn allows for the fixing of boundaries between self and other (Abu-Lughod 1993:7).

While she warns that this may happen when working with people in other societies, I feel this is applicable even within one's own society. The problem is that if carried too far, it would seem to take the voice from the ethnographer and make it difficult for the reader to comprehend the material. I am more comfortable with the balance struck in Elaine Lawless's approach:
Research methodologies, for the most part, seek to offer reproducible generalities. Yet the women involved in this study decry the scholar's attempts to generalize from the particularities of individual lives; they argue instead for a validation of difference. .... As an interpreter, I have drawn some generalities from the plethora of data generated by this study. I feel obligated to draw the reader with me into what I feel is the essence of the material, and to call attention to patterns, motifs, structures, and harmonies that, by virtue of my position in the study, I am able to see and interpolate (Lawless 1993:285-286).

I believe that by focusing on the particulars of experience and their contexts with attention to the patterns, I may avoid at least some of the more severe implications of "generalities" without losing coherence in the text itself.
One difficulty was to balance the need to contextualize experience with the need to protect the privacy of the participants. I did not wish to change relevant details, but I needed to be vague on some locations, occupations and other markers that might break confidentiality. One fact I did not change was the location of the study. I felt that the specific history and location of this college town were relevant to the type of interactions in the community.
After the writing of the first draft, I sent copies to participants. Although their feedback was not required, this would allow them to point out any concerns with the material I included and the conclusions I drew from it. While I wished to check my own perspective rather than to subject myself to censorship, I incorporated their feedback into the final version. If we disagreed on interpretation, I included both my opinion and that of any participant(s) who challenge my interpretation. This allowed the participants not only to contribute narratives of their experience but to be part of the process of interpreting that experience.
Doing feminist ethnography in your own community presents special problems, it has particular benefits as well. Just as practicing feminism in your daily life grounds the perspective in the personal and allows one to connect to the larger political implications -- ethnography at home has the potential to break down the dichotomy between work and private life, between friend and subject -- between self and other. Through this project I am acutely aware on a daily basis that I share experiences with and am also different from others in my community, and I am better able to integrate this understanding into a complex whole.

SECTION 3:
Queer in Iowa City
Iowa City: "Gay Mecca?"
Iowa City is a liberal college town surrounded by corn fields in the fairly conservative state of Iowa. Iowa City's population is around 60,000, with another 10,000 in neighboring Coralville. The University of Iowa and the associated University Hospital make up the primary employer and the largest population draw for the community. The University draws almost 30,000 students, making it a significant portion of the community.
Several of the participants in the study referred to Iowa City as Iowa's "Gay Mecca." Although the area does not have the population and resources of larger cities like San Francisco and New York, Iowa City's liberal political climate makes it a draw for lesbian, bisexual and gay people in other parts of the state. Both the City of Iowa City and the University of Iowa have policies preventing discrimination based on sexual orientation. Iowa City also has a same-sex partnership registry and, since 1995, added protections for transgendered people.
There is only one openly gay bar, The 620 Club, and at least one other that is gay-friendly. There are no local gay newspapers, radio shows, book stores or community centers. However, there is a local public access television show called "Those Two Homos," and several of the local bookstores stock a good selection of lesbigay books and magazines. There is a yearly "Coming Out Day" celebration in the Fall and "Pride" month celebrations in June. The University has a student organization called the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Union (GLBTU) as well as the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Staff and Faculty Association. In addition, there are a number of smaller groups focusing on such issues as Latino lesbigay, bisexuals, older lesbians, etc. In 1994, the University was host to "Inqueery, Intheory, Indeed: The Sixth North American Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Studies Conference." Also, the University-sponsored Women's Resource and Action Center often serves as a center for lesbian and bisexual women.
Although many of the participants in the study originally came to Iowa City to attend the University, most stayed because of the liberal atmosphere. Even so, many expressed dissatisfaction with "the gay community." Many complained of not being into "the bar scene." Younger participants complained that they were too young to get into The 620 Club. Older participants often said they did not like bars, especially The 620 Club. Still others complained that the problem was that there was only one gay bar. Yet, most had gone to The 620 Club at one time or another, and some were regulars.
Those who did feel that they were part of "the gay community" cited two types of connections -- organizations and friendship circles. Students and faculty often felt more connected to "the gay community" and were often members of campus lesbigay organizations. Some off-campus organizations that were important to participants included the Bear Club (for large, hairy men and their supporters), Bi Group, and Lesbians Over 50. Some felt their most significant connections were through informal friendship networks such as parties, dinners and other get-togethers sponsored by individuals.
A few people felt completely disconnected from "the gay community." In general, these were either young people who had just discovered their sexuality or lesbians in committed relationships who felt they did not have the time or inclination to get involved. Even so, these participants could not have been completely disconnected from the "community," as they came to me through friendship circles that were part of the community.
Most participants were "out," publicly-known as lesbian, bisexual or gay, in the Iowa City community. Some had been so for only months, while others for over thirty years. The degree to which people were "out" to family, especially parents, varied considerably. For most, the process of "coming out" was an on-going one.

Range of Participants
I interviewed 40 people for this project (21 women and 19 men) who currently live in Iowa City or neighboring Coralville. All participants are self-identified as lesbian, bisexual or gay -- although quite a few are uncomfortable with what they see as "labels." For instance, several women who publicly identify as "lesbian" explained in their interviews that they are also attracted to men and so might be considered "technically bi." At least three women who initially told me they were lesbian, explained in the interview that they are "just people." TJ illustrates a common theme:
If I had to label myself that's probably the label (lesbian) I would use. I don't believe in labeling people. To me, there's not such a thing as lesbian or bi or hetero or whatever. It's just people, you know .... People are just being themselves. The only reason they want labels is because if you can label it, you can look down on it. And that's the only reason. Otherwise they wouldn't have any need for them. And some people want labels because they can't take pride in themselves without having a label on it. If they can't label it, they don't know for sure what it is, so they don't know for sure what it is to be proud of, so it's very difficult for 'em to be proud. Like you really need a reason to be proud of yourself anyway. I don't need a label to be proud of myself. It's too bad other people do. I'd just as soon hide it from people. It's none of their business. If they ask me I'll tell them. I'll answer pretty much any question you want to ask me except where I hide my money and I'm not that stupid. You know if you want to ask me personal questions, I'll tell you all day long. You come flat out and say, are you gay? I'll say well, I don't know, I've slept with some women, I'm married to a man. Am I gay? You decide.

Yet, many women and men also expressed how important it was to find out "what" they were and that there were others like them. Their sexual orientation was a core part of the way they viewed themselves. Mark explains, "I still believe that if somebody doesn't know that I'm gay they can't really know me." The men often placed more emphasis on their sexual identity than women did -- although there were certainly exceptions on both sides.
Self-identification of sexual identity was vital for several reasons. First, there is quite a bit of evidence that people's sexual behaviors and labels are not synonymous. Sexual orientation is a fluid category which varies over a person's life-time as well as cross-culturally and historically (Newton 1988; Singer 1994). Second, some people whose behavior is homosexual or bisexual, do not wish to be so labeled. These people would be at risk of being so labeled if they participated in the project. It would also be difficult to locate people who practiced the behaviors but did not label themselves as lesbian, bisexual or gay. And lastly, I feel that from a feminist and queer politics perspective, it is ethically questionable to label people when they do not consider it part of their own identity. Thus, by choosing participants who are self-identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual, I could respect their views and avoid several ethical problems.
The ages of participants ranged from 18 to 72. I felt this range was important to understanding the ways people's attitudes towards their bodies might vary depending on age or generation.
Men Women Total
Under 30 12 22 22
30-39 3 6 9
40-49 2 1 3
Over 50 2 4 6

Over half the interviews are with people under age thirty. Iowa City is a college town that primarily attracts a younger population. Participants often expressed the belief that most lesbian, bisexual or gay people move away from Iowa City to larger cities when they finish college. Another factor though that was brought up by my contacts was the "lack" of gay men over 45. My contacts felt that AIDS has killed many of the older gay men. In one sad and moving conversation, my contact tried to think of several people only to say, "but he's dead " three times.
One important aspect of the age range was that participants often described coming out in different "historical moments" or at "different stages" in their lives. For instance, one woman described being a lesbian in the 1940s and yet did not "publicly come out" until she was in her sixties. A man described coming out as gay during the 1960s when "your gender didn't matter, everyone was sleeping with everyone." Another woman came out during the lesbian feminist wave of the 1970s. Among the participants, every decade for the past fifty years becomes the backdrop for someone's "coming out."
Another difficult aspect of finding diversity in Iowa City is that the population is primarily white. This was complicated by my location as a white, female graduate student in her mid-thirties. The project includes seven people of color: two Latina women, two Latino men, two African-American women and one Asian man. It was not until late in this study that any people of color volunteered -- and then only after I began specifically seeking them out.
In addition, because of historical and cultural differences, I speculate that people of color and older people might be less prone to be "out" about their sexual identities than younger and/or white participants.
The class range was something that would have been difficult to consciously select for and is still difficult to define. Some participants readily identified in their opening description of themselves as "Irish working class," "upper middle class" or "from a wealthy, influential family." Like many Americans, others seemed uncomfortable using these categories and tended to avoid language about class. Yet, using these identities, descriptions of parents' background, education and occupation, as well as the participants' education, I was able to determine a range of class backgrounds. The range is fairly extreme, from rural farm families with few resources, to welfare families, to highly educated, wealthy family backgrounds. Access to resources differed widely among participants. This may also have been complicated by problems of balancing economic resources with the possible alienation from families that "coming out" can often entail.
Most of the participants were "from" the upper Midwest, having spent most of their lives and in many cases, born in and raised in this geographic region. More than half are from Iowa. Those participants who were older or from wealthier background had traveled more and had lived in a wider range of places. The exception to this was the half dozen participants (women and men) from working class backgrounds who joined the military and thus traveled through this service. Although two participants were born outside the United States, the remaining participants came from either the New England area or the West Coast and had primarily come here to attend or work at the University of Iowa.
Some participants had only moved to Iowa City within the last year, while others had been here for over 30 years. Some were born and raised in the area. Others had left, traveled, and returned. Some felt very much a part of the larger Iowa City community and the "lesbigay community" while others felt they were very much visitors who would be moving on.
These interviews do not qualify as a "representative sample" and are not intended to be. I question the notion that any group ever truly is "representative." Instead I wanted to explore the details of individual experience. In her work on lesbian and gay families, Kath Weston explains:
In any sample this diverse, with so many different combinations of identities, theoretic sampling cannot hope to be "representative." To treat each individual as a representative of his or her race, for instance, would be a form of tokenism that glosses over the differences of gender, class, age, national origin, language, religion, and ability which crosscut race and ethnicity. At the same time, I am not interested in these categories as demographic variables, or as reified pigeonholes for people, but rather as identities meaningful to participants themselves. I concentrate here on the interpretive links participants made (or did not make) between sexual identity and other aspects of who they considered themselves to be, always with the awareness that identical symbols can carry very different meanings in different contexts (Weston 1991:12).

In choosing to include both gay/bi men and lesbian/bi women in this study, I am really pulling together groups that may not always see themselves as connected. I believe that the ability to compare and contrast the way gender interplays with other aspects of identity was vital to a feminist perspective and a fuller understanding.

Participants: More than Statistics
The men:
Alex is 37, white and gay. He grew up in middle class family in Iowa and has lived here all but two years of his life. He has lived in Iowa City for nineteen years. He originally moved here for college. He has a BA in the arts and does clerical work. He owns his own home and currently lives alone.
Anton is 26, white and bisexual. He is from a middle class family which "moved allot." He has lived in Georgia, Oregon, California, Tennessee and Japan. He recently moved to Iowa City from Oregon. He was in the military for four years. He has a B.A. in the social sciences and is currently a graduate student in the humanities. He currently lives alone in an apartment.
Bill is 33, white and gay. He grew up in a farming community in Pennsylvania. He moved to Iowa City four years ago to live with his partner, whom he met through Bear Magazine. He has a staff position with the University and is active in the Bear Club. He lives with his partner, Lawrence who is also a participant.
Cody is 26, white and bisexual. He is a graduate student in physical education, an activist and AIDS educator. He is active in the lesbigay community.
Corey is 53, white and gay. He grew up in a wealthy upper class family in Des Moines. His undergraduate degree is from a private college in California. He served in the National Guard during Viet Nam. He moved to Iowa City for graduate school thirty years ago. He discovered his sexual orientation and came out in the 1960s. He has a faculty position with the University. He was recently ordained as an openly gay minister. He has one adult daughter from an early relationship. He owns his own home, has never been married and currently lives alone He is active in several lesbigay organizations.
Dan is 20, white and bisexual. He grew up in Minneapolis. He moved to Iowa City for college two years ago, but had to stop because of financial trouble. He is currently unemployed and was, for a time, homeless. His family income has ranged from middle to working class. He currently rents an apartment which he shares with a roommate. He has an infant son who lives with the child's mother.
Fred is 31, white and gay, possibly bi. He is from an upper-middle class family. His father was in the military, so his family moved around as he was growing up, mostly overseas. They spent summers at their lakeside house in Iowa. He has a BA in the social sciences and is working on a second BA in the humanities at the University. He moved to Iowa City a year and half ago to go back to school. He is active in several lesbigay groups. He currently lives alone in a house owned by his parents.
George is 26, white and bisexual. He is from an upper middle-class family and has lived in Iowa City all his life. His partner is a woman and this is his first relationship. He shares an apartment with a room-mate.
Greg is 18, white and bisexual. He grew up in Washington, DC, in upper-middle class family. He moved to Iowa City last year and is an undergraduate in the sciences at the University. He lives in a university dorm.
Ivan is 19, white and bisexual. His father was in military service so he moved through out his childhood. He went to high school in Michigan. He moved to Iowa City a year ago to attend the University. He is active in several lesbigay organizations. He lives in a university dorm.
Jeff is 24, white and gay. He grew up in middle class family in rural Iowa. He lived in Iowa City for a while in 1988, moved to California for a couple years and returned to Iowa City four years ago to complete his undergraduate degree in the social sciences, with a focus on lesbigay issues. He has been in a relationship with a male partner for two years. He currently lives alone in an apartment.
Joe is 28, white and gay. He grew up in Minneapolis in a working class family. He moved to Iowa City three years ago. He works for a non-profit agency. He rents a house and lives with a roommate.
John is 26, white and gay. He grew up in a small town in Minnesota. He moved to Iowa City a year ago to be openly gay. He has an undergraduate degree and now works with a local non-profit organization. He lives with his partner, Mark, who is also a participant. They recently bought a house together.
Lance is 51, white and gay. He grew up in a small town in Iowa. He moved to Iowa City thirty-three years ago to attend college. He has a Ph.D. in the sciences and a faculty position with the University. He is well traveled but continues to live in Iowa City. He owns his own home and currently lives alone.
Lawrence is 42, white and gay. He grew up in St. Louis and moved to Iowa City five years ago to live with a man. When the relationship ended, he stayed. He has a staff position at the University. He is active in the local Bears Club. His family owned their own business. He and his partner of four years, Bill (also a participant), rent an apartment.
Mark is 23, white and gay. He grew up in an upper middle class family in Iowa City. He is now a graduate student in the humanities at the University. He is from an upper class family. He lives with his partner, John, who is also a participant. They recently bought a house together.
Ozzie is 44, Latino, Jewish and gay. He was born in Cuba to a poor working class family and immigrated to the U.S. when he was fourteen. He went to high school and college in New York City. He moved to Iowa City for graduate school twenty-three years ago. He has a Ph.D. in the humanities and works in the health sciences and teaches at the University. He is active in several lesbigay organizations. He currently lives alone in a rented house.
Pracheon is 24, Asian and gay. Born in raised in Thailand in a middle class family, he moved to Iowa City a year ago to attend college in business. He currently lives with his male partner of three months.
Rico is 23, Latino and bisexual. He grew up in New York in a working glass family and moved to Iowa City four years ago to attend the University. He is a graduate student in the arts. He currently rents a room and lives alone.
The women:
Amy is 20, white and bisexual. She is from an upper middle class family in California. She moved to Iowa City three years ago to attend the University. She rents an apartment with her male partner of five months.
Carmen is 22, Latina and lesbian. Although born in Chile, she was raised primarily in Iowa City. She is a student in the arts at the University. She is active in Latino and lesbigay organizations. She lives with a roommate in an apartment.
Carol is 47, white and lesbian, although she does not identify with a sexual orientation label. She grew up in a middle-class family in Michigan. She moved to the South, was married to a man for seventeen years and has two children. While in the process of a divorce, she fell in love with a woman. She moved to Iowa City three years ago and is a graduate student in the social sciences. She currently rents a house and lives with her female partner of twelve years, Sherlock (also a participant). She participants in an older lesbian group.
Cherry is 56, African-American and lesbian. She was raised in a working class family in inner-city Detroit, Michigan. She moved to Iowa City ten years ago to attend the University. She is currently a graduate student in the humanities and a published author of several books. She was married twice to men -- once for eleven years and a second marriage separated (but not divorced) after a couple years. She has three children and three grandchildren. She currently rents an apartment which she shares with a house-mate.
Elizabeth is 31, white and lesbian. She is from a small town in Illinois. She has a liberal arts undergraduate education and some graduate school. She and her partner moved to Iowa City four years ago to be in a more progressive community. She works as an office manager. She lives in an apartment with her female partner of four years.
Gail is 58, white and lesbian, possibly bisexual. She was born in working class family in New York, then raised on a farm in Iowa before her family moved Iowa City after a couple years. She was married for five years and has two children. She came out into the women's community in the early 1970s. She has traveled extensively. She has a B.A. and Master's in the humanities. She has a clerical job and is active in a local older lesbians group. She lives with her female partner of three years, Jessie (also a participant).
Irene is 72, white and lesbian. She was raised in a working class farm family in rural Montana and Iowa. She went into nursing in 1943. She was a nurse in the military, taught nursing education and worked in clinical settings. She is retired. She never married a man, and had female partners long before she connected with the lesbian community. She was with her last partner of seventeen years, having separated five years ago. She is active in an older lesbian group. She currently lives alone in her own home.
Jessie is 61, white and lesbian. Born in a working class family in New York City, they moved to Iowa when she was twelve. She spent twenty-seven years in the military, six active and the rest in the reserves. She then taught special education, worked in a government lab in California, and finally held a job as a literacy coordinator. She is currently retired. Her first relationships were with women, but she was married to a man for four years before he died. They adopted two children. She is active in an older lesbian group. She lives in her own home with her female partner of three years, Gail (also a participant).
Kristine is 31, white and bisexual. She grew up in a middle class family in the Midwest, including Missouri and Iowa. She has lived on the East Coast for the last six years. She has degrees in psychology and social work, and has worked as a social worker. She and her Mexican-American husband of two months recently moved to Iowa City. They live in a rented home.
Mary is 37, white and lesbian. She grew up in Chicago in a working class Irish family. She moved to Iowa City twenty years ago to attend college. She has advanced degrees in history and political science and has a staff position with the University. She owns her one home where lives with her female partner.
Max is 36, white and lesbian, possibly bisexual. She was born and raised in a small town in Iowa. Her family was lower middle class. She was married for five years and has two children. She moved to Iowa City five years ago. She manages a local business and is in a graduate program at the University. She currently lives with her children and female partner of ten years in a rented home.
Paige is 20, African-American and lesbian. She grew up in Chicago and moved to Iowa City three years ago to attend college in the humanities. She is also a member of an athletic team. She shares an apartment with a roommate.
Petrina is 23, Latina and lesbian. She was born in California and raised in Iowa. She lived briefly in Iowa City, then Saint Louis and then returned to Iowa City a year ago to go to college in the sciences.
Sam is 28, white and lesbian. She grew up in a upper middle class family in Des Moines and moved to Iowa City ten years ago to attend college. She left school for a while but has returned and is an undergraduate in the social sciences. She lives alone in an apartment.
Sara is 24, white and bisexual. She grew up in Iowa City, has a BA in the arts from a college in Illinois and currently works is a financial business in Iowa City. Her parents are upper middle class. She lives with her partner/husband of three years and has a long distance relationship with a woman.
Sharon is 21, white and bisexual. She grew up in a small town in Iowa in a middle class family. She moved to Iowa City four years ago to attend college. She is currently not a student and is working at a local grocery. She has a male partner of two and half years. She lives in an apartment with a couple of roommates.
Sherlock is 34, white and lesbian, although she says she hates labels. She grew up in a poor working class family in New York -- first in New York City and later in the Catskills. She moved here three years ago to attend the University. She has a Master's in the health field and is a graduate student in the social sciences. She rents a house where she lives with her female partner of twelve years, Carol (also a participant).
Susie is 23, white and bisexual. She grew up in Iowa in a middle class family. She majored in Mathematics at a private college and moved to Iowa City after graduation to find a job and be near her then-partner. She currently works in apartment management and is going to culinary school. She lives in an apartment with a roommate. She is active in local and regional bisexual groups.
TJ is 35, white and lesbian, but does not like labels. She grew up in rural Iowa in a working class family. She spent fourteen years in the military, living in the South, the West Coast and Iowa. She is currently not working due to a disability. All her relationships were with women until she met her male partner/husband of four years. They live in a apartment.
Tracy is 28, white and lesbian. She grew up in South Dakota in a middle class family. She has an undergraduate degree in the social sciences and massage therapy certification. She moved to Iowa City three years ago to be with a woman lover, whom she is no longer seeing. She works as a massage therapist.
Virginia is 23, white and lesbian. She grew up an upper middle class family in Missouri . She moved to Iowa City a couple days before the interview in order to attend graduate school in the humanities. She lives alone in an apartment.

SECTION 4: Embodying Queer
The Stereotypes
The common stereotypes of lesbians, bisexuals and gay men are very different from each other and often contradictory -- presumptions based on notions of gender and sexual desire. These stereotypes might be summed up as:
· The lesbian is a woman who has rejected male ideals of attractiveness and has therefore "let herself go." She is presumed to be fat, hairy and casual (or masculine) in the way she dresses and acts. Some have made accusations that women are lesbians because they "hate men" or "couldn't get a man" since they had not succeeded in living up to the image of the "ideal" woman.
· The gay man is stereotyped as the vain, body-obsessed man who is only interested casual sex. Because men are assumed to be more "visual" than women, he is cast as one who is only interested in what he and his sexual partner look like. The current ideal is expressed as a lean, muscular young man with little body hair.
· Bisexuals, both men and women, are presumed to be "oversexed." That is, to have thrown out even the gay man's criteria and will sleep with anyone and everyone. Here "lack of discrimination" is the offense.
These are, of course, gross generalizations. Yet these images are not simply creations of the "mainstream media" but images that people who are lesbian, bisexual or gay often simultaneously endorse and contest. For example, before she "came-out" Sharon was afraid that being a lesbian was synonymous with being unattractive. She explains:
It was like, "Oh my god, I'm not going to be a dyke. I'm not going to be somebody who's just fat and lazy and sits around, you know..."

Many of the gay and bisexual male participants complained about the gay male "culture of desire." And bisexuals both criticized the "anything that moves" stereotype while asserting the importance of "the person not the body."
How do individual lesbian, bisexual or gay people view their own bodies and those of their lovers? How common are eating disorders among them? What do they make of the stereotypes and of their communities? How would they change themselves or their communities? What can we learn about these communities by talking to individuals about their bodies and sexuality?

The Image in the Mirror
The degree to which participants liked or did not like their own bodies ran the gamut from what might seem like narcissism to abhorrence. The differences in this area related to both sexual orientation and gender. Yet, there were also differences within each sexual orientation and gender category.
Overall, more women than men expressed that they were comfortable or accepting of their body size and appearance. Men were more likely to be critical of their own, as well as potential lovers' bodies. Yet, women's stories of childhood and adolescence were full of reports of sexual abuse, dieting, eating disorders and severe problems with their bodies. This would seem to confirm several of the other studies about lesbian and gay men.
While gender differences were the most pronounced, there were few bisexuals among those who were currently trying to lose weight. Only one bisexual woman stated that she was currently trying to become thinner. And, among those who have eating disorders, there were none who primarily identified as bisexual. There were many bisexuals among those who have struggled with weight but who have decided upon self-acceptance. This might be significant given that earlier studies excluded self-identified bisexuals.

Never a Problem
Among those whose feelings about the size and appearance of their own bodies have always been positive, there were four men and five women -- and all of them are average to thin in body size. Jessie and TJ (both women) said they liked their bodies because they have always been "strong." Carmen, Sharon and Petrina all said that it was never an important issue for them. The men who said liked their bodies and did not mention struggling with their appearance, were those who also most matched the "gay ideal" mentioned by most participants -- lean and muscular. Joe, Lance, Pracheon and Rico all seemed not only comfortable with their naturally lean bodies, but proud of them.

Never Too Thin?
Three male participants felt they were or had been "too" thin -- Corey, Dan, and Mark. None of the women, even those who were thin, expressed feeling "too" thin. Dan, who at six foot two inches has trouble maintaining a weight of at least 140 pounds because of a metabolic condition, has been teased since childhood about his size:
I remember in grade school I would be ridiculed because I was the wimp in the class and my brother would be ridiculed because he was the fat kid. And it was impressed upon me real clearly that neither one of us were a desirable figure.

Dan also worries about his health. He worries that if he can't eat enough to maintain his weight, his muscles and internal organs will be damaged. And it affects his self-esteem:
I just don't like the look of my body, because I tend to associate it with discomfort. ... I'm pretty much of the opinion that a person becomes attracted to my personality first and then becomes accustomed to the rest.

Mark has accepted his weight but also feels being thin is unattractive. He feels it makes him look immature and would change it if he could:
I don't like my boyish appearance. I mean I'm definitely an adult and anybody could tell you that, but I'll always have a more slimmer boyish figure. I've always wanted to be like the guys who made fun of me. I always wanted to be more muscular and so I guess starting through puberty was when my image of myself wasn't so good. And then I guess in college when I finally could, when I had the hormones and stuff to do it; I started lifting weights in the hopes of looking like a stockier, more muscular guy and that never happened and it was frustrating but I kept trying and trying. And I did eventually get a nice definition to my body, which I became satisfied with it cause I had just learned that I'm going to be this body type. So I just have to deal with what I've got. .... See, it's funny one guy that I dated a long time ago who thought I had an attractive body told me Mark you still see yourself the way you did when you were in junior high school. And when you look in the mirror you see something different from what everybody else sees. And I believe him, but it's hard to tell myself that.

Corey, who felt "skinny, gangly and awkward" as a kid, but who has gained a lot of weight due to an illness, feels he has never been physically attractive but that it may have a positive side:
I've got to say, in looking back over an enormous time frame, that I'm aware that I have always felt a need to compensate in other ways for what I thought was wrong or lacking or deficient about my body and my appearance. But which on the whole has probably been a good and healthy thing. To feel that because I was perhaps, according to most standards, not quite as attractive as most of my peers, that I had to make up for it by being more interesting, more outgoing, more giving, more something.

Corey admits that his perspective has changed now that he is older. He wasn't always this optimistic about the experience.

Fat Thin Person
Four of the men and two of the women who said they believe they are too fat and/or should lose weight are at most average in size, and some actually thinner than average. Of these, only one described behavior that was clearly eating disordered -- all six seem to qualify as having a distorted body image.
Alex, who looks to me to be thin, surprised me when describing himself as "medium build" and then going on to explain that he felt he had a "big butt, fat legs, and big thighs:"
I was very self-conscious about my weight and I never was very athletic and physically active, so I didn't really, I sort of slimmed down as I got into high school. Other than a period of a year or two in between, I've always felt like I'm too heavy, and that my midsection is just this dead weight that I find unattractive and that I just assume other people find unattractive, and I'm sort of resigned to it, you know.

Later in the interview, I told Alex that I was surprised and didn't agree with his perception of his body. He admitted that he doesn't know what his weight is relative to others and that his "perspective is definitely skewed." He added, "I think I'll always feel not thin."
Ivan, at only 19, describes himself in terms of what he is not. He tells me that the gay ideal is athletic, buff, slim and tall. He explains that he "a long way from" the ideal and thinks of himself as too fat. This despite being above average in height and thinner than most people.
George would like to be taller and thinner. When I asked if he really wanted to be thinner, he answered, "Everyone wants to be thinner." He also said he would rather be female, but had no intention of altering that part of his body. George describes his mother as "a binge and purge person" but says he doesn't consciously diet himself, though he does sometimes "go without eating very much for a while."
Jeff says he started a weight program three years ago. He wants to "possess the body [he] eroticizes." Lean and tall, Jeff says he felt he had a "chubby face" and a "spare tire" around the middle.
Kristine's feelings about her body are mixed. She has dieted off and on since fourth grade and says she "always felt bigger." She is average size and says she likes her body "pretty well," but still feels she should have a flatter stomach, and bigger breasts and that she is "bottom-heavy." She says that she is doing weight lifting and exercises to "tone" her body.
Paige is slim and muscular. At 5'9" and 163 pounds, mostly muscle, and although she says she is "cute," she believes she is twenty pounds overweight. She is also bulimic.

Eating Disorders
Paige is one of only two in the study who seemed clearly eating-disordered. Sam describes herself as a "compulsive eater," but her behavior is currently anorexic. Gail, Tracy and Lawrence each described having been bulimic in the past, but recovered now. Many others describe current or past repeated dieting that may fit the definition of disordered eating.
Clearly there are some women who identify as lesbian but who are or were eating-disordered. There does seem little evidence for women developing eating disorders after coming out -- most describe eating behavior that begins in their early childhood or teens. Since most didn't "come-out" until teens or later, the eating disorders predate awareness of sexual orientation for most. There is also some evidence that "coming out" may help in the recovery process. Both Paige and Sam have only been out a short period. The women who have recovered from eating disorders seemed to have done so at about the same time as they dealt with their issues around their sexuality. This supports Thompson and others who have implied that internalized homophobia may play a part in eating disorders among lesbian and bisexual women.
Paige's case may also support Thompson's argument that internalized racism can also be an element in developing eating disorders. Paige says she was raised in a predominately Jewish school where she was the only black person. In fact, she says that until very recently, she did not find black people attractive.
Paige is twenty and began competing athletically at age seven. In fifth grade she was five-seven and 136 pounds and decided she was too fat, so she began dieting. At age fifteen she moved to a new school without a team. She believes that is the reason she gained twenty pounds in high school. She then began bingeing and using laxatives. She says that at one point she was using up to forty laxatives a day. She says she has stopped purging at this point and still has problems with occasional bingeing. She explains that her intestines are still "messed up" from the use of the laxatives. She would like to weigh around 140, which would put her "five pounds" over the weight she was at age fifteen (when she was already dieting). She doesn't see this goal as unrealistic.
Unfortunately, Paige is still bulimic. Although it is important that she doesn't use laxatives any more, she still restricts her calories and exercises far more than average -- which does qualify as purging. She says she swims twenty miles a day, works out and does sit-ups and pushups. She is on an athletic team at the University and the other athletes seem to be reinforcing her idea that she should be thinner.
I still don't understand why I'm carrying around this extra weight. Now I've slimmed down. This summer I lost eighteen pounds which is good. But I've gained four of those back, which isn't bad. ... And I just want to lose fifteen. ... And I think it's just because I don't want to be happy or something. Because it's not that hard. I don't know makes me want to go out and eat. I know when I eat like that it makes me feel like shit.

Paige seems convinced that not only will it make her a better athlete, but that potential women lovers would prefer her thin.
Last year ... when I told my roommate she [her girl-friend] was coming to visit and I said, "I want to lose ten pounds." She was like, "Why?" I was like, "Because I want to look good." And she's like, "Does she even care?" And it was so weird to me that if it had been my boyfriend, I would have had to lose ten pounds, she would have been like, "Ya, cool." But because it was a girlfriend, she thought it was humorous that I wanted to lose weight to impress my girlfriend. That's really tripped me out. I think that shows right there that some people think that lesbians don't have to look nice. .... I mean we're all victims of the society, first of all. So lesbians, of course, should probably look at their body type and feel either good or bad about it.

This is ironic given that Paige admits that she doesn't care about weight in her lovers as long as they are "not skinny." Her last girlfriend tried to tell her that she didn't want her to lose weight, but Paige dismissed the possibility that she would be attractive unless she lost weight. She says, "Like right now, I don't think I could be naked with somebody."
There are others who understand how she feels. Sam says she "wants to look good to other people." She has gone from bingeing to dieting to eating extremely little and says:
But I am sitting here in my mind saying, "Well, I wouldn't mind being anorexic for three months. I wouldn't mind being it for two months. I wouldn't mind being it until I reached that point, you know. And then, of course, then I won't be anymore." And see, if somebody were to say that to me, I'd be like, "Oh my god!" .... If it were anybody else, I'd be like, "I can't believe they're sitting there saying that."

And she appears to be eating little enough to already qualify as anorexic. She describes her food for a day as consisting of two little boxes of raisins, a fat-free cereal bar, a can of vegetable soup, a can of vegetables, two pieces of bread and a slice of cheese. Sam had gone to a nutritionist to help her lose weight but felt that the nutritionist told her to eat too much. She was only losing a pound a week but is now losing seven a week. Sam's current goal is to fit a size sixteen. When she began she wore a twenty-six.
Sam, like Paige, is not put off by the weight of a potential lover. In fact, she says she would prefer "women with meat on their bones." "I think it's very sensual," she explains. Yet, she feels other women will not find her attractive.
See, that's just too weird for me because I think that for me acceptance of my body the way it is now is easier and has been easier since I've openly become lesbian because, I mean, I just appreciate women whether they're this size, or that size or they look this way, or look that way. And yet, there's still a part of me that's insecure about my weight that feels like nobody's going to want to approach me because of my weight. .... I mean my experience of women is that they're so weight conscious, but at the same time, that does mean something.

She says that even though she knows some women prefer larger women, she considers herself grotesque. She believes that if she loses weight, that will change:
I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't, I mean, I'm not saying that I'm right. I'm not saying that my philosophy is THE philosophy. I sit here and listen to myself and try to disengage from my being and I sound completely flipped. I mean, I know that I've got my priorities in the wrong place. That I'm feeling weird about this. That I'm hearing myself say these things that are not real healthy, and yet, I can't lie to you and say that I feel any differently.

And although this study does show lesbian and bisexual women as not only accepting, but sometimes preferring larger women, there will probably be some women who won't accept Sam if she doesn't lose the weight. But what is more important here, is that Sam won't accept herself.

Sexual Abuse
Eight (over a third) of the women described being subject to sexual assault, many in early childhood or adolescence. Two men in the study described childhood sexual abuse. Many directly linked sexual abuse with eating problems or weight concerns. This is supported by other research that has linked sexual abuse to some eating disorders (Wooley 1994).
Sam felt her compulsive eating began because of the neglect, incest and rape she suffered for many years:
Because I was convinced that if I got big then I'd be okay. And then, I was convinced that if I got fat and ugly that I'd be okay. .... And also, I really think that food for me goes even further back just like how my mother says that she'd put food in my crib in the morning. I didn't have a connection with my mother or with a human being. My comfort came from food.

The story of Sam's childhood is nothing less than horrific and goes a long way to explaining not only her issues with eating but what appears to be an extreme disassociation from and struggle to reclaim her body.
Sam tells a life story that begins with extreme neglect and then extreme abuse. Her father was rarely home and her mother ignored Sam, her older brother and younger sister. Her mother reportedly rarely bothered to feed or clean the children, let alone provide any emotional support.
My mother is an incest survivor and she was very inaccessible when I was a child. My father was never home; he worked eighteen hours a day. My mother slept twenty-four hours a day. And my brother, my older brother was the only person in the world that I had. And we, kind of took care of each other. And he was the closest person to me.

What was already a tragic situation was then compounded when her brother began a campaign of physical and sexual abuse which lasted from the time she was ten until she was eighteen.
My older brother said, "Come here." And so I came there. And then he shut the door, locked it and allowed his friends to have sex with me. I believe that he did it for drugs and money. At first, he was not a participant. He would guard outside the door. But it did not take him very long to become a participant ..... My mother actually walked in on it once and then turned around and shut the door. My mother did not want to know. My mother did not want to see. And essentially, she did not want to deal with it.

Throughout her adolescence, her brother beat her, raped her and continued to sell her to men against her will. When she finally told her parents, they initially beat and threw her brother out of the house. Yet, not long after he was allowed back in the house. Sam confronted her mother about the situation a few years later, after she had begun therapy.
And my mother looks at me, right dead in the eye, and says, "So, you were promiscuous. You have to live with that." So, in her mind's eye, in order to live comfortably with both children, she had placed all the blame on me, which really isn't that much of a stretch because she was an incest survivor herself and very symptomatic of herself, blaming herself, you know. So, of course, she would blame me. And at that point, I did not question that; I did not do anything.

And Sam blamed herself as well -- she blamed her body:
I think that what happened was I started to be abused, sexually and I think what happened was I believed that it was the fault of my body size. That I was too small, that I couldn't fight back, that I couldn't stop this and I believed that it was my body size's fault. I have clear memories of late at night, where it's dark in the house and all I see is the light shining out from the refrigerator. I had opened the refrigerator. I'm sitting on the kitchen floor. And I'm taking food and shoving it in my mouth. I mean, indiscriminately just blu, blu, blu (making noises). Pushing more and more food into my body because I think that I believed that if I were bigger, I'd be stronger. If I were bigger, this wouldn't happen to me. .... I remember once I was sitting in the back of the car and we were picking up a guy in front of a Quick Trip or something. This man was going to fuck me. And I knew that. And he looked in the back window first to check me out. And I knew this. And he goes, "Aw, she's cute." I hated that. Oh my god, that was the worst thing I could possibly hear. From that, I just knew, you know, it was all my fault. I was cute. Well, fuck that, I'm not going to be cute for very long.

Not surprisingly, Sam's sense of dissociation and loss of control of her body is profound. In addition to the bingeing and dieting, she both accidentally and deliberately injured her body repeatedly.
I did not care what happened to my body. [I had] multiple broken bones, stitches, cuts, lacerations -- just a lot of things. At first, they were accidents, but they were accidents because I was placing myself in the environment where they could happen. And then I had taken some razor blades and I was cutting my wrists and I think that I wanted to kill myself. But more than that it was the cliché cry for help. My mother walked in and said, "Oh, put those down, you might hurt yourself." And then walked out. I realized at that point that there's no use even killing myself because they'll never get it. I'll just be dead and they'll never, ever get it. And at that point, is when I just realized that I was truly alone, but at the same time, I realized that there was something to gain from cutting myself. I mean, that that pain was real. My other pain was not justified. There was nobody to justify my other pain. So, this bloody gash that the world can see, I can get some kind of comfort. Not the comfort I need for my real pain, but for this pain. It was to the point where I would keep it on my bedside table and I would wake up in the morning with cuts on my body and not remember doing it.

Later she was a heavy drug user including marijuana, speed and alcohol. She was sexually unresponsive. After the death of a close friend, Sam finally "hit bottom." An academic advisor took her to the counseling center and, at age nineteen, she began therapy.
Sam says she no longer cuts herself, has gotten off drugs and alcohol, and is learning to reclaim her sexual feelings. Her struggles with her body continue in what seems to be a desire to reassert control through deliberate changes. In addition to her current drive to lose weight, Sam has had breast reduction surgery and she has gotten several tattoos. Her delight in her smaller, more sensitive breasts and her rainbow queer-positive tattoos is evident.
Sam's history is a painful one, but it also shows courage and a desire to survive. When she says "this here body has been through it all," I felt a sense of pride and determination. Her interview moved me deeply and I am hopeful that she will find peace and acceptance of herself.
Another person deeply touched by early experiences of sexual abuse is Ozzie. During our interview he read his poem "Perfectly Flawed" and I thought of how much he had in common with Sam:
I died of cuteness one day.

No, it was suicide.
Suicide... cuticide... No matter,
just kill the beast, so that it stops.

All the men, everyone,
said the same:
You're so cute, that I can't help myself.
And so it went,
day, after day, after day,
until I was old enough to run away.

For a while I thought the beast,
the monster,
the culprit was the cuteness in me.
That is why,
although it's hard to believe,
I thought I could kill the cute boy
so I could finally rest.

And that is why I died of cuteness one day.

Ozzie explains that his mother, who was much younger than his father, began by using him as "cover" for her affairs. She would keep the small child with her, even in bed, with her male lovers. This, Ozzie explained, was so that she could claim she would never have been doing anything with the baby there. By age five, his uncle and one of his mother's lovers, began sexually abusing him. His mother pretended it was not happening but always insisted he go with the man. This pattern continued with other men for several years until he got "old enough to run away" and began screaming when they tried to force him.
He developed a phobia of nudity, associating it with lack of privacy and safety. It wasn't until he began to have positive sexual experiences with "gentle" boy "protectors" in early adolescence that this changed:
He was the first one that I played with that had my complete permission. .... So, I was very attracted to this boy and his crazy family and he was the first one that actually made me feel. I remember when he touched me, he touched my arm, it was as if I had been touched for the first time, because up to that moment, I hated to be naked.

Unfortunately, his developing homosexual identity was met with rejection and abuse by his family. Despite his athleticism, they considered his mannerisms to be "too feminine." He was cleanly, had strong friendships with girls, and liked to draw. They tried to restrict his drawing and began to try to force him to be more masculine. His mother broke his fingers by slamming the keyboard shut when she found him playing the piano at a friend's house. Finally, they sent him away.
Having grown up in Cuba, at age fourteen he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in New York City. His family made it clear that one of the reasons was to "straighten" him out. Once in the states, his uncle began a "campaign of psychological warfare." His uncle forced him to change they way he walked, talked, sat and ate. The stress and isolation was so bad that he didn't speak for a year. Throughout his teens and early twenties, he withdrew within himself. He went to school and worked, but did not have close friends. He went home with a man once and was raped. He began having mutual masturbation with men in bathrooms because the public place made him feel safe. Here he could control how far things went.
It wasn't until he moved to Iowa City to attend graduate school that he was able to connect with other people. Here, he developed friendships and lovers. He explains that things weren't resolved though. When a long-term relationship ended, he "married AIDS education." He spent years working very hard in the community until finally "something triggered" in him. He was virtually catatonic with depression and anxiety. He was convinced he was dying. Friends helped him find therapy, and years later he feels he has worked through the effects of his early abuse.
Later in my life, this whole thing changed and I actually used my body to my advantage. Today, the way I feel about my body, you know, you have a good day, you have a bad day, and god, I look like shit or whatever it is this experience really clouded my psyche for a long time and I think my opinions today about people and bodies is very much affected by this. And it also affected the way I treated other people in that panicky moment of nakedness. I mean there's nothing more ridiculous than two human beings naked in a bed. I mean, it's hilarious, you know. But it really affected me in a positive way because I know how sensitive people can be or you think you're too big or too small or you have a zit or you have this or you have that. So I became very sensitive whenever someone else was naked in front of me, I always remembered how I felt. So, it made me sensitive.

Ozzie, like several other participants, expressed concern that people would think he was gay because he was sexually abused. Ozzie felt he was always gay and that this was used to justify abuse against him.
Like Ozzie, Rico was sexually abused by several adults when he was young. In his case, both female and male relatives incested him in a pattern which he says goes back generations.
But that was even as a child, I know that element of homosexuality and bisexuality was there, but I never used the abuse, not once to say, "Oh they made me gay or they made me bisexual." No, I made myself this way, because this is who I am and I can't live a lie. I can not live a lie down because it's just not right , it's not right. I don't care what people think.

Although Rico talked at length of the pain of sexual abuse, he was defiant in his enjoyment of his body and sexuality:
Thank god those people are gone. But, the positive side is when I starting having sex with a man, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it, the sexual gratification and stuff like that because that's part of life. .... God has blessed me very well. I would say I'm nicely endowed. I have a nice body, you know. I work out. As if you can't tell.

Rico's pleasure at his body may border on being too wrapped up in his attractiveness as the basis for his self-esteem. Yet, this seems to work for him. He has found strength in reclaiming the pleasure that others tried to take from him.
Several women were also concerned that their sexuality would be seen as "warped" by their sexual abuse. Petrina seemed reluctant to talk about the sexual abuse she suffered from her brothers. She seemed worried that I would imply that it was what made her lesbian:
I think it definitely affected my sexuality. Not through my choices or anything like that, but the way I express it.

Sam also worried about this problem:
I wish I was left alone enough to know somewhere along my history that I am this because of this or because of that. And I don't know why, but I hate to think that I'm lesbian because of the abuse. I am fiercely proud of who I am and I don't want it to have come from something so evil. But I 'm also aware that it plays a part in it. I mean, it does. I'm just purely not comfortable with males sexually and it doesn't do much for me but negative things. I don't want to give the impression that, therefore, I am lesbian by default. Because it's an active decision on my part based on very real experiences and feelings that I have so I would say that I am this way because of a lot of factors. I can look back before the abuse and see that I only had female friends and that the female friends that I did have, I was more attracted to them. I couldn't have said sexually, because I didn't know what that was. But there was something there.

Yet there was for some, a clear interaction between their sexuality and their eating disorder. Gail reports that she was sexually abused as a child, which she believes led her to develop alcoholism, bulimia, and internalized homophobia. Although she was bingeing young, she did not begin purging or drinking until she married a man (whom she did not love). She said she always found sex with him "repulsive," though she tried to convince herself otherwise. It wasn't until leaving her husband and becoming actively involved in the lesbian feminist community that she was to get sober and stop bingeing and purging.
It would be simplistic to indicate sexual abuse as a direct cause of all eating disorders. Not everyone who was sexually abused reported concerns with their weight or food. Nor did Paige mention sexual abuse. It is possible that she left this out or does not remember, but it is equally possible that she was not abused. Most of those with troubled body image issues cited the desire to be accepted by society as their motivating factor for beginning with dieting and other attempts to meet the "ideal" for a woman. Yet, when more than one is present -- there does seem to be ample evidence for an interactive effect between body image problems, sexual abuse, drug addictions, and homophobia.

For Their Own Good
All the participants who are or were eating-disordered, as well as most of the people with concern about weight, mentioned developing these feelings when they were young, often long before they were part of a queer community, sometimes before they were even "out" to themselves. It appears that the family must have played a large part in their development of these ideas. And their stories support this -- stories of harassment by one or both parents, of parents or siblings who are eating disordered, of being either encouraged or even forced to diet by parents, or of parents obsessed with their own weight.
Max remembers her father telling her mom "how fat she was." Her mom, in turn, constantly nagged her to "suck in your stomach" and other comments:
And I remember this vividly because my mom said to me, oh my God I can't believe how big your boobs are. Well, big, big, big, big. What I heard was fat, fat, fat, fat. .... . So from a very early age, I just knew I was this fucking mountain that somebody had moved in.

When she found old photographs of herself she was shocked to find that she "had been beautiful." She marvels that she didn't know it. But then her sisters who were smaller than her also suffered:
I, (laughs) depending on how sick I am at the moment, fortunately or unfortunately, don't suffer from an eating disorder. Both my sisters do. My younger sister almost died of anorexia. We have a picture of her when she was a junior in high school she went to her prom. She had on this little blue spaghetti-strap dress and you could see every bone in her body. And I remember saying to my parents after we got that picture back, "Jesus Christ, look at her, she's dying." And my mom saying, "You're just jealous cause you're so big." And my other sister who is four years younger than I has really struggled with her weight all of her life. She's probably not more than five-four. But she has ballooned up to a pretty hefty size at times in her life she's there again. She's practiced bulimia since she was probably thirteen years old and continues to do so very openly. And is raising three daughters.

Parents, especially mothers, obsessed with their own weight and that of their daughters was a common theme. For women, the actual weight of the mothers or their daughters didn't seem to make a difference -- thin women and fat women both report similar stories. All the women who developed eating disorders remember food and weight being important to their mothers. Gail traces her "compulsive eating" that led to bulimia to her mother who "was very depressed and kind of gone emotionally," and who "used food as a drug." Paige says that her mother was always worried about her weight and "was probably anorexic." Her mother's weight went up and down by as much as a hundred pounds -- at one point weighing forty pounds less than Paige does now:
So she's been losing and gaining weight all my life. She's been fat, skinny, fat, skinny. It kind of bothered me.

Tracy has recovered from her bulimia but still has trouble getting her mother to stop complaining about her weight. She says her mother has been telling her from as early as junior high that she would look better if she would "take off ten pounds."
See my mom's not fat either, but she thinks that she's fat. ... Last winter she kept telling me I was fat and my dad's side of the family was fat and tends to have high blood pressure, and you know she's just telling me for my own good but I should lose weight. ... I tell her, you know, don't do that, it really it hurts me when you say stuff like that, but she thinks she's being helpful. Her line is, "Well I'll always be your mother, I guess." (laughs)

For Amy, it was her father whose influence on her life and that of her mother was a painful presence that resulted in severe clinical depression:
Part of that problem was because my father is very much [focused on] my weight and my mother's weight. ... So he was always, always teasing us, you know, poking the belly and say "Oh, when are you going to lose your girlish figure." It was absolutely relentless. So basically from about the time I was thirteen I conceived of the fact that I am fat, therefore I am undesirable. I am ugly, no one is ever going to love me. My father still makes fat jokes around me and I've gotten a bit sharp-tongued with him, recently.

Both parents, but especially her father, figure into Elizabeth's obsession with weight. Again, the photos say one thing while the parents said another:
Most of my early memories are probably more related around my body. Ever since I can remember, I was told that I was fat or chubby or something. And when I look back at pictures of me in junior high school, you know, I had a round face and everything, but again I was a size eleven or twelve. I was clearly not fat and I go back to early pictures of me when I was in second or third grade and I was very skinny. That shocked me because I have no memory of ever having been skinny, in my whole life. I get that a lot from my parents. I think I was buying diet books before I was even in junior high school. And you know my dad was always [pressuring me with comments like,] "Well I'll buy you a whole new wardrobe if you lose weight" or when I put on weight in college it became "I'll buy you a car if you lose weight."

When Virginia was six years old, her doctor suggested that her parents put her on a diet. After that, the war began. When the kids teased her about her weight, her mom's answer was another diet. She spent her childhood battling early onset diabetes, her weight, food, and her parents. She felt they blamed her for her diabetes. And what might have been a way to eat for survival became a punishment for "being bad."
Susie says her brothers called her fat from the time she was three or so, "fat baby." At around twelve, she started to worry about her weight.
I started thinking that I had to start becoming a woman, you know, and that part of that was starting to worry about my weight and my appearance. And began believing that I was fat. ... And I remember lying awake at night and looking at my belly and hating it. I had just a little bit of curve to my belly, considerably less than I have now. And just being really upset with myself , that this was such a bad thing. ... I actually joined Weight Watchers. I talked to my mother about joining and I was looking for her reaction. And what she said to me was, "If you want to join, I'll join with you." And I read that as, "Yes, I think you're fat and I think you should do this. So I'll do it with you to make sure you do it." From talking to her about it later, I realized that her feeling was she didn't believe I was fat, but that she was trying to be supportive of a judgment that I was making.

Although it is true that boys received a lot less pressure from their families about their weight, they were not immune. Greg says his mother "hasn't been very positive" about her own weight or his father's, or his:
Ever since I was a child, I've been marginally overweight, and my mother has harassed me about it for years. ... She was open-minded about it at least and she believes in acceptance for people who are overweight. She's just sort of self-hating about it and rejected that a lot. She believed no matter what weight I came out, it would be fine, it would just be better if I weighed less because it would be better socially and I wouldn't hate myself because of it.

George describes his mother as "very health-conscious and weight-conscious" and also as a "binge-purge person." His mother tells him he doesn't need to lose weight, but he doesn't believe her.

Losing Battle
Three-fourths of the women and half of the men in the study, reported wanting to or trying to lose weight -- though many of the women and some of the men had since quit trying to lose weight and are focusing on accepting their weight. Yet, even when they were aware that it might not be possible or even good for them to lose weight, most of the men and some of the women still keep trying. Max explains:
I know the concept of what physically happens to our bodies when we mistreat it that way and don't eat. And I know this sounds incredibly sick, Dawn, but there have been times when I really wished that of the addictions that my sisters and I were doled out, mine being substance abuse (alcohol) and them both having an eating disorder, I really would have preferred the eating disorder. I tried to have an eating disorder. I tried to do the anorexic thing. And I just like eating too much. And I tried doing the bulimic thing. And I've just got an incredibly difficult gag reflex and I was never able to make myself vomit. Then I went the laxative route, but couldn't keep doing that.

Max has been losing and gaining weight back for years. Starting from the pressure to diet while growing up and after the births of her two children, Max has lost weight, gained it back, and started again. Like many people, she has probably added extra pounds through what researchers call "diet induced obesity" because of "yo-yo dieting."
I struggle with my weight, Dawn, I struggle with -- I'm consciously, constantly consciously aware of my size. ... I'm constantly aware of the size of women around me. ... [My partner] has been working out and really watching what she has been eating and in the last year she's burned up a lot, she's lost some weight. What once was a situation where her clothes were always way too big for me, my clothes are getting too big for her. And I'm very uncomfortable with that. I'm very jealous. ... And at the same time was pouting because it wasn't me and there wasn't any magic wand that I could wave.

Max explains that her unhappiness with her own body is having a negative affecting on their relationship:
So we went from having sex probably every day to now we go weeks and we don't have sex. And it's me, it's not her. She very interested. And it must be very frustrating for her to continually have me say no. I just don't. I can't say I don't find her attractive but I mean ... that sounds so male. (laughs) It's me, I don't find me attractive. I said this to her, "I don't find me attractive, I don't understand how you can." .... We don't have sex because there's some hidden agenda about I don't know. I'm sure there is there is in every relationship. .... [It is] frustrating for the both of us. I'm also very quick to blame myself for it. I'm always, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And then later I may go back and say, "What the fuck am I sorry for if I don't want to have sex I don't have to have sex." But the flip side of it is that I do wanna have sex. Just not in this body.

As I listen to her, I can't help but wonder if Max's problem isn't as much about her anger at her partner as her own body. It seems that things were more balanced when they both weighed more. It is understandable that Max might feel insecure about her partner. It would be easy to reason that if her partner didn't like herself larger that she also secretly doesn't like Max's body either. Of course, given that Max's weight loss didn't last (like most people's), there is no reason to think that her partner's will either. Time will tell if their relationship can withstand the pressure and if these women will find some peace with themselves and each other.
Knowing that diets don't work doesn't always change things. Fred talks about knowing that weight loss is almost always temporary, that it may be dangerous and that it "shouldn't matter." Yet, he says he is still dieting and intends to continue losing weight until he looks like he did "in high school" -- even though he is now thirty-one. Fred explains:
...unfortunately, I fall into a lot of the negative ... things about health and body image, I fall right into them even though I know I shouldn't, even though I know it's wrong. I say part of my wanting to "regain my health," but you know, losing a lot of weight and exercising a lot isn't necessarily the healthiest thing for you. Actually, losing a lot of weight can be bad for you. .... But the moderate exercise and the healthier eating I don't think can be too bad, but I have dropped forty-three pounds, but we're talking in the space of about a year. Which maybe still is too drastic but I don't really, I don't know.

He says he tries to fool himself into thinking he is doing it to be healthier but he know that isn't true. He reports that he didn't become sexually active until he was twenty-five and he feels some of that was because of his appearance. He has had problems with severe acne which left his face scarred. He thinks that even if he can't control his skin problems, he can have some control over his weight.
And a lot of it has to do with being in the queer community and wanting to have sex and wanting to be loved. I've especially felt that lately because I just ended a relationship.

He then adds that he began dieting before he met his last lover, and continued throughout their relationship.
I started doing that before I met him. But even though he kept telling me, "well you don't need to do this, you don't need to do this for me, I like you the way you are," and was wonderfully supportive in that way and was wonderfully positive about you know, helping me with my body image. .... Even so, I would like look at other guys that he had asked out before or he was attracted to and they were always thinner than me. And I believed him when he said, no. But he also said I didn't need to do it for him. But there was just some incentive there to want to please him, to want to enjoy sex more, I tend to enjoy sex more when I am thinner and feel better about being naked or about holding somebody. Again, falling into these negative body image beliefs and feelings.

Fred explains that he gained weight after an injury which cut back his mobility. He says he felt he was having a "harder time picking up people." He says it is hard to be accepted in "the queer community unless you look like some kind of Adonis," in what he refers to as "the culture of desire."

Finding Love
The two most common reasons given by both women and men for wanting to lose weight were to find a partner and to feel comfortable being sexual with someone else. Women cited the media images of women that they have internalized. Men cited the gay ideal of the "thin, muscular and hairless" man as something they were trying to live up to -- even when they knew they could not.
Lawrence explained that when he was "yo-yo dieting" he had two scales -- how much he weighed and how many men he could have sex with in one night. During the more "promiscuous" gay male culture of the 1970s, Lawrence would go to a park to have causal sex with men.
And I did notice that the more weight I lost the more sex I was able to have. And that began to be my thermometer. And it was really sad that I did that because not only did I get addicted to losing weight, but I also got very addicted and desensitized to the sex. When you start having sex with that many partners in a night, it becomes like another notch, not really like a conquest but it's like, oh God, I wanna say like, 'I need another one, I need another one, I need another one.'

And those like Lawrence who were recovered from eating disorders and weight obsessions often spoke about how finding a lover or community that did accept their body size as attractive, was a major step for them. For Lawrence, and others like him, that came in the form of the "Bear" community -- large, hairy gay men and their admirers. For many of the women, it was the "lesbian feminist" community. For some men and women, support from individual lovers who appreciated their bodies was key to developing self-esteem.
Amy says her first lover helped start her on the path toward self-acceptance. She met him though the internet and had told him before they met face-to-face that she was "rather unattractive." When he did meet her, he told her that he was surprised because she was so beautiful. She says she argued with him, but he kept praising her.
I really am glad that he had the patience with me that he had, because I was very, very shy because I thought I was extremely ugly. I wouldn't let him look at my naked body. We had to turn out the lights and he had to close his eyes while I,(laughs) while I was undressing. But actually, at the end of that [first] weekend I had lost a little bit of the nudity phobia.

Kristine explains that she used to be very jealous of other women whom she thought were more attractive than her, or that her male partner looked at. "Coming out" has helped change that:
I think one of the best things that happened when I identified as bisexual is that I could now see women as beautiful. All of a sudden, it opened it up. "Wow! She is gorgeous" or "wow! What a woman!" And all of a sudden, I didn't feel that jealous anymore when he thought women were beautiful. And it felt so good. Because that competition and that jealousy is just so heavy.

For Elizabeth, her woman lover allows her to feel more comfortable then she did with men. She felt that the men she dated were always "hyper-conscious" of her weight. She says that even fat men will make comments about women's weight. But with her partner, who is also heavy, she feels "more trust." She feels the similarities in their bodies allows them both to love each other and to learn to love themselves.
Partners, Carol and Sherlock both expressed similar feelings. For Carol, sex with a woman was reassuring.
Oh it's wonderful, it's different, I guess when you have sex with someone who's the same sex as you and has the same body parts. I always used to wonder what it was like for a man to have sex. Which made me feel like I understood half of what was going on at the time. I feel now like I understand what's going on for both of us. So it's double sensual. Yeah, because I feel like I'm on both sides at the same time. And that's very nice. It's made me more comfortable with my own body.

Sherlock's answer is romantic and to the point. She says:
When I'm with Carol, my body is just right. And whenever I feel uncomfortable with my body, I think about being with Carol.

Lawrence explains that since he hated his own body, he was never attracted to men his own size or larger. Yet, being with his partner, Bill, has helped him accept himself and be attracted to men like himself:
It wasn't until I was in bed with somebody about my same size and I was hugging them and snuggling up to them and realizing it was like this big warm pillow that I was just snuggling up against, it felt great, and I thought, "Wow, this feels great. If this is what those other people felt like when they were snuggling up to me, no wonder they liked it. Why was I pushing them away before?" So I do like people of all different sizes now, and I've learned how to drop different barriers, so I also like men of many different ages. Men 20 years older than me, men 20 years younger than me.

Yet, Lawrence still struggles with a desire to lose weight. Bill worries that Lawrence will begin dieting again:
I get annoyed with him. Because he'll mention diet. And I'll just like, why? I don't care if he loses weight because I'll still love him. It doesn't really matter to me. And I want him to be healthy. I just don't want to deal with that kind of dieting craziness. Just don't wanna do it. No. Not at all. I mean 'cause they're starving themselves, gettin' cranky, and takin' it out on you. Who the hell needs that? It's like, no, eat. Have a twinky, have a donut, who cares?

Lawrence knows diets don't work -- he has tried them:
You know, I always had a very bad self-image about my own body when growing up. I first joined Weight Watchers when I was seventeen. Pretty successful at that time too, I lost 45 pounds. And that began my whole yo-yo-ing after that. I now realize a lot of my health problems, right, are probably due to my dieting. And just now being able to tell people that yes, I was bulimic. That at that time when I lost all that weight I was not eating one day a week. And in the middle of the summer, even though I was running seven miles a day, I was also not drinking any liquid for 24 hours up to the time of weigh-in, and I was going through 12 to 15 squares of Ex-lax a day on top of the bulk-type laxatives. I dehydrated myself just to get myself as light as possible. (sighs). I feel bad now because I realize now I'm a product of diet-induced obesity. And yet I'm happy with myself like as a person. I'm not comfortable being this size. I no longer wanna be thin, but I would feel more comfortable if I could just slowly lose around fifty pounds.

Although he is no longer bulimic, the treatment of fat men by most the gay community makes it hard for him to feel accepted.
Cody has combined his participation in the Bear Club, with it's acceptance of diverse sizes, with teaching health courses. He has learned not only to help himself, but to help others to be healthy without dieting:
Probably not until this past year that I felt really comfortable being the [weight I am] and feeling like I could still be sexy, I could still be healthy. Teaching a health class, kind of being thrown in teaching a health class kind of helped me understand that. And at least tell my story to students, and my students tell me that I'm the most human person that they encounter sometimes. I think it's been quite a struggle. Until this year, when I finally realized there's nothing wrong with my body and maybe there's something wrong with other peoples' perceptions. I still fight it when I go out, especially when I go out to like gay bars. Not so much other places but especially around here, in a college town where people are young and into being "young and beautiful." And me wanting to be in some sort of environment still where I can still be social. I'm just finally coming out and saying, "This is my manifestation, this is the way I look, this is what I'm comfortable with, and I can still be sexy, I can still be desirable, I can still be attractive. I've always been attractive, it's just that people have told me I haven't been.

Cody feels that a large part of his progress has been when he came to understand that you have to buck the system that says you have to "be heterosexual, thin, marry a woman, be in one relationship your whole life -- all these ideals placed on us by society."

Feminism
For many women, feminism has played a crucial role in challenging society's weight standards and reclaiming their own bodies. Many of the women participants who no longer diet talked of the importance of feminism in changing their attitudes toward their bodies and the bodies of others.
Tracy explains that it was feminist literature in college and, later, her work with bodies in massage school, that helped her begin to feel better about herself. Virginia directly links her anti-dieting perspective with feminism:
The whole weight-loss industry is just so disgusting to me. It's just so imbued in capitalism and patriarchy -- women hating their bodies and learning to be disgusted with yourself and not love yourself. And for me that was definitely true. Just, pure disgust. But I wasn't contained, I was like, "I'm not going to mess with this!" (laughs)

And their anger is for themselves and for their friends and lovers. Susie explains:
I have a lot of anger towards our society, and particularly towards the dieting industry and all the industries that support dieting, because I have at least one very dear friend. I love [this woman] just as much as I've loved any lover. She has hurt herself very badly with more than one eating disorder. And while there are complex reasons why she developed eating disorders, I believe that part of it has to do with our society's view of women, and the way we're supposed to look. I know way too many women who are so unhappy with their bodies, and spend way too much time and effort. I work with a woman who is very smart, and very competent at her job. And a good woman. And attractive. And she puts so much time and energy into worrying about the way she looks. And you know the one pound she's gained or lost. And what she's eaten that day. And I just can't imagine putting that much energy into something -- it seems to me...I was going to say trivial but yet it's not trivial, it's too destructive to be trivial.

Over and over women told of the pain of their own struggles and those of their friends, lovers, mothers and sisters. This anger inspired Elizabeth to start her small magazine, the Hairy-Legged, Man-Hating, Feminist Gazette:
I got tired of hairy-legged man-hating feminists getting a bad rap all the time. And I just got tired of having to apologize for being out there because the way they really silence women by saying, "Oh you just hate men." So I got tired of it and went, "okay what's your point?" And went really out there about it. And I started drawing this cartoon, "Fat Chick," just as kind of a fantasy avenger thing for people who give you a hard time. And on my first episode and this guy says, "Hey you're fat" and she blows him up and says, "Hey, you're dead."

Her magazine is selling in women's bookstores around the country and several feminist fat-activist publications have been running "Fat Chick." She also says that drawing "Fat Chick" has given her courage to face her own real-life episodes like those in the comic:
So my partner and I went to [a fast food restaurant] to eat and there was this table of guys up at the front, by where I was getting my drink. And one of the guys sees my T-shirt that says "Lesbians" on it really big, and leans over to his buddy and goes "Whew!" And his buddy didn't get it. So he looks at me, nudges him again, and goes, "Whew!" So, uh, I turn around and go back to my seat, I walk right past him, and I look the one guy in the eye and I just go "Ditto." And that was all I said. (laughs). Total dead silence from the table, and his buddy has this embarrassed look on his face, embarrassed apologetic look, and then [my partner] said when she walked back, the guy gave her this look like, 'Well what's she got that I don't have?' (laughs). Because it's one thing for them to not want you, it's something totally different for you to not want them. I just felt so great, because I got it distilled down to that one word. And he knew exactly what I meant. I was just laughing my ass off and they left pretty soon. They were so quiet even when they left. It was great.

Skin Deep
Now, if you're white you're all right,
If you're brown, stick around,
But if you're black, Git back! Git back! Git back!
(quoted in Collins 1990:79)

In her book Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explains how race, gender, and sexuality converge in controlling images of black women's physical appearance:
Externally defined standards of beauty long applied to African-American women claim that no matter how intelligent, educated, or "beautiful" a Black woman may be, those Black women whose features and skin color are most African must "git back." Blue-eyed, blond, thin white women could not be considered beautiful without the Other -- Black women with classical African features of dark skin, broad noses, full lips, and kinky hair (Collins 1990:79).

She goes on to explain how these images also affect Black women's relationships with one another, pitting the "Brights" (light-skinned) against the "Lesser Blacks" (dark-skinned). This dynamic was apparent in the experiences of the participants of this study as well.
Cherry always felt that she was the "ugly duckling" her family. Her mother's family prized beauty -- and in this black family, beauty was defined by a white European standard. Cherry explains that light skin, straight hair and European features were what her mother considered beautiful.
The passing is very important. And so, by not being able to pass because of the way I look, I was called "the piece 'a yella' that got throw'd away" -- meaning that I got the skin color but I didn't get the hair. And I didn't get European features. So my "yella" was wasted.

Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, "before black was beautiful," Cherry internalized this view of herself. Later, in the 1970s, Cherry began to socialize with people from all over the world. The diversity of appearance and viewpoints helped her begin to rethink her family's standard of beauty.
She was also amazed to realize that they way "white women suffer" around weight. Hips, she says, were part of the standard of beauty she grew up with:
When I came here in 1985, I was amazed. I did not know about the phenomena of anorexia and bulimia. It never dawned on me that people would throw up their food to stay thin. I felt that was really an odd thing to do. I've always thought basically that white women as a group were skinny. I never understood why that was the standard of beauty.

Unfortunately, Cherry sees black women adopting the same white standard today:

That began to change as I got out of my own little community and I began to see that that was indeed what we were getting. That's what the media and that's what everybody was telling us. So, consequently some of us have tended to adopt that. But that was not what I grew up with.

Latinas, Carmen and Petrina both had light skin. They both said that this allowed them to "pass" growing up. The benefit of this was that they were not harassed based upon their appearance. On the other hand, both expressed that they needed to find a way to connect with other Latinas to undo some of the assimilation of growing up in predominately white schools.
Paige, who also went to white schools, had a hard time finding other black people attractive. In fact, she says it wasn't until her grandmother took her to Africa and taught her to value her heritage that she began to look at other black women as attractive. And Paige's bulimia would support Cherry's concern that black women are adopting the worst of white standards of beauty. Cherry herself says she counters it by celebrating women, especially women of color.

The Changing Body
As hard as it can be to accept our bodies in the first place, the changes brought about by aging, illness and disabilities can be even harder for some. Over a fourth of participants had had a major illness and/or surgery which affected their view of their body. Many times these illnesses were accompanied by changes in their weight which also upset them.
At puberty, Amy developed a thyroid disease which slowed her growth, increased her weight and left her extremely fatigued. She will have to be on medication for this condition for the rest of her life. But the medication has helped her live a more normal life.
Mary had repeated surgeries for a heart disease through-out her teens. She says that even though her family and friends were very supportive, it was very painful and lonely. "But you do learn your own mortality," she says.
After years as a very athletic person, Sherlock was immobilized by problems with her knees. Several surgeries followed and the change in activity levels resulted in some weight gain. She says it was a difficult adjustment:
I'm comfortable with myself now. I don't have the same body. It's a good thing I don't. I had knee surgery, my first knee surgery when I was 19. I played varsity soccer and suddenly my knee pops and I can't walk. And so I had gone from being this very active person on a sort of sexual basis, on a sort of physical basis to not being able to walk. And at that point in time I had to redefine what I thought of myself. It was really rough. And then, a year later, I had a second knee surgery where they didn't know if I'd walk again at all. So from the very beginning, I was always given these definitions of what my body meant and what I should do with it. I've always had to define it for myself.

This experience helped her to understand and be supportive of her partner, Carol, when she became severely and chronically ill. Carol remembers that at age forty-two she was in the best physical condition she had ever been when she was struck by this illness which destroyed her strength and turned her life upside-down. Whether it was a virus or hormonal imbalance was never determined. Carol is getting better, but the changes in her body have been hard for her to accept.
Well, I hated my body. My body was doing this to me, is what I thought. My mind was alert, my spirit was willing, my body wouldn't go. My body was doing this to me. .... I was very physically fit. I loved going shopping because everything I thought looked great on me. And then a few years later I'm up like four dress sizes, so I hated my body. I was too sick to go anywhere. .... And I couldn't afford to buy a lot of big clothes and I didn't want to -- that meant admitting that maybe I was going to stay there at that weight. So I just really hated everything about my body.

It was rough on their relationship, but Carol and Sherlock made it through. Carol is still struggling to regain her strength and wants to lose the weight she gained during the illness. She says she doesn't diet, just eats healthy. But Sherlock worries than Carol may be too focused on the weight:
I know that physically I could be healthier but there is no body [size] that I want to obtain. What I want to obtain is a certain level of healthiness. But there are times Carol may feel very dissatisfied with her body and wants to look tall, thin, and blond, let's say. And I get very frustrated with her. And so we've talked about what it is that we want from our bodies and is much more related to media issues and how people have expectations of what you should look like than I am.

In a culture where health and appearance are often tied together, it may be difficult for people to sort out their feelings about their weight when changes are brought about through illness.
At age fifty, Corey developed a blood disease which produced "stroke-like symptoms" and left him nearly helpless. The medications have brought the illness under control and "pretty much back to normal" -- except for his weight.
I spent six months on massive doses of steroids and just gained an enormous amount of weight. I think my mind and my capacity to articulate what it is I look like is still trying to catch up with that reality of being forty pounds heavier.

While Corey says he is not yet adjusted to his new size, he seems resigned to it. After all, he explains, he didn't feel he was very attractive before. He says there might be an advantage in that. Corey says he feels that people who have a lot invested in what they look like are going to have problems in the long run:
What I see when I look around at a gamut of different long-time friends, is that people who were too good-looking when they were in their twenties really have a lot more to cope with when they're fifty. ... When you lose it, if you've been one of those people, then I think it's almost inevitable to wonder if you have anything left. If it isn't essentially over. And another thing that I think you discover is that if you've been too pretty for too long, that you've gotten into a lot of bad habits of letting other people take care of you, and once that's over and nobody is interested in doing that for you anymore, all the things you've got to learn to do for yourself that make life pretty painful. And there are occasions where I take a certain kind of sick sense of satisfaction in watching that person who was always at twenty-five or thirty too snotty and too good for me, turn fifty and have a lot of humbling experiences.

Dan, whose metabolic disorder almost resulted in him starving when he was homeless for a year, says he has come to respect his body not for its appearance but for its abilities.
Well I've talked a lot about uncomfortability with [the condition of] my body. But on another level I have grown from and into a very definite comfortability in reliance upon my body. As I said, I grew up in a household that the body was nothing that was hidden or taboo, it was very comfortable then. Since the time that I was starving, I have spent a lot of time reflecting upon the value of the body as a tool given to us. And I've come to really regard it as about the most important tool I'm given in the physical world. .... I'm less concerned with cosmetic aspects of my body than I am with the purposes it's given to me for.

Aging brings up similar concerns for some people. At 72, Irene says she feels "pretty good" about her body. She is troubled by back and knee problems. She also worries about her weight, but not as much as she used to. She says that when she was younger she had been "on every kind of diet." Now she isn't as concerned about her appearance as she is with her health.
Gail also feels her relationship with her body has changed:
I'm post-menopausal now. And my body changed a lot with menopause as I think most women's do. It's not exactly for me not liking to look old. I don't think I have that idea too much. It's that when you start looking old, you look like somebody else. You don't look like who you used to look like. Like I went to my thirty-ninth high school reunion last year and it was just astonishing because nobody looked like they used to look. Until then, you could go to those reunions and people looked sort of like they used to look. Now they look like different people. So, it's quite a change. And then you have to deal with the ageism. I think I've got some ageism. I do have ageism. I shouldn't say that I don't have that. I have ageism internalized. So, it's kind of astonishing.

She points out that the irony for her is that she is healthier now at age fifty-eight than when she was younger. Now that she is no longer alcoholic or bulimic, she takes better care of herself.

SECTION 5:
Defining Attraction

The way participants talked about who and what characteristics they found attractive often supported the stereotypes. Gay men most often described certain physical features that they looked for -- particularly weight, age, skin color, musculature, etc. Lesbians usually began with personality traits such as intelligence and humor, but often mentioned a preference for women who were "not thin" or "had some meat on them." Bisexuals often agreed with others of their gender -- bisexual men with gay men, bisexual women with lesbians. But there was also a pronounced emphasis on "the person not the body" among bisexuals and some lesbians and gay men.

The "Male Gaze"
Most of the men gave very specific physical ideals of those with whom they would and would not wish to become sexually involved. Even when they also emphasized personality qualities, only a few of the men did not also give physical qualifications for potential lovers. For gay men, the overlap between what they would like to look like and what they were attracted to was often very sharp. Most were aware of this dynamic -- although they disagreed on whether this was good or not.
Eight men gave very rigid physical parameters. Of these, I found it interesting that four of them were the men who had said they had always liked their own body and the other four were men who had changed or were wanting to change their bodies to fit the "gay ideal." Men whose own bodies closely paralleled the "gay ideal" seemed to find little trouble in using those ideals to choose potential lovers. For many men, "muscular," "athletic," and "not fat" were common themes.
Joe says he believes his attraction for muscles is because of his strong attraction for men:
Let's get to the root of it. I will not deny that I'm very attracted to a sculpted body. And I think that is because I'm so far on the Kinsey Scale, I feel like I'm very much in the homosexual side of that. So I tend to be very attracted to very sculpted men because that is the image of what is a man. I don't know where it comes from, but I can't deny it. Just like I can't deny that I'm attracted to a man. So I think that is true of many people. I don't know how you can get around that. It's roots are so deep and that is just the reality of how I feel.

Of course, one wonders if this were true, then why do some gay men prefer other body types? This view does seem "essentialist" in its depiction of not only what it means to be gay, but what it means to be a man.
Lance says what he looks for in a lover is a "naturally athletic" body:
I want to have an athletic body. ... I like smooth, hairless bodies. I like definition. I want to be able to see musculature. I don't necessarily go for the extremely bulky, body builder types. I want to see a natural looking body.

He says he doesn't find most of the models in gay magazine's attractive because they look "phony." He says:
They don't look like they would be interested in talking to you. ... The people that I find attractive are the people I just meet in every day life. .... Although I may have a particular physical ideal, I'm not totally inflexible. I'm willing to modify it to some extent if there are other qualities about the person I find that I like.

Of course, Lance, who is in his fifties, admits that his ideal of the muscular, hairless, thin man has hampered him in finding a partner to share his life, especially someone his own age.
For Jeff, his "objectification" of men's bodies is blatant and unapologetic:
I definitely eroticize athletic bodies because of the body-as-machine theory. I don't eroticize athleticism, I don't necessarily eroticize athletes, but I do eroticize the athletic body. ... I was never into the social aspects of athleticism. So it would always have to be the body detached from the personality, but the athletic body. And not the large body but probably more feminized athletic body.

Lance and Fred both say their ideal is the bodies of swimmers, gymnasts and baseball players. Jeff explains that the ideal body is not about love for him:
I learned to objectify rather than love, and I was so -- because of my social withdrawing I did learn how to love, but my love was always on other levels. It was never sexual.

He says that until he met his current partner, he had never learned to combine emotional love with sexual desire. Yet, even so, his lovers did not always fit his ideal:
I would have to say of all the men I've dated, none of them have the body I have eroticized highly. Because they all fit different body stereotypes. And I enjoy all of their bodies. And [my partner's] body is a very feminine in some sense, in the classic societal sense, because it's not muscular. It's very smooth, very small and frail. And I eroticize that highly, just in a different light. I'm learning to eroticize things differently now.

Jeff seems genuinely concerned with puzzling out why he is attracted to certain body types. He says he realizes that he has some stereotypes and biases but is "allowing [him]self to play on that a bit." His explanation is long, but leads to some very interesting observations:
Then it became a possibility for me to have the body as machine type thing. And so then I was able to possess what I eroticized. And if I could possess what I eroticized, I figured that might help take the emphasis off of what I was eroticizing more. Or it would at least allow me to maybe find somebody who was going to want to eroticize something similar to themselves. I thought it would at least give me some accessibility. Oddly enough, even though people say people are sometimes looking for somebody different from their body, I do find it more often in the gay community at least, that people do look for bodies similar to their own. And that the body I've developed now, over the past three years, is closer to [my ideal].

I've had more men come up to me now than ever before. When I would go to the 620 Club -- I guess I can't believe I'm basing my life on interaction there -- no one would come up to me. No one even looked twice at me. I guess I shouldn't say no one, because it was the no one in my mind, but it was the people I wasn't interested in who would take notice of me. But it was nobody who was even similar to my age or my body. But anyway now I guess I'm finding people who are more eroticized towards my body who have similar bodies to mine, which I'm eroticized towards.

This is a tricky thing, 'cause I guess in some ways I've gone backwards. I've regressed in some ways because I'm no longer allowing myself to eroticize other body forms or other types. And I'm going to definitely miss out on emotional aspects of other people. I don't have the kind of quality friends I used to have or I used to be with on a daily level. I don't have that now. But I think some day I'll go back to that. I'm just really wanting to get into this physical thing. ... So I really want to experience a lot more sex. And I want it to be on this -- I guess I'm being selfish. I'm looking back to this little child I want to satisfy this little childhood quest, these times when I was younger when the bodies that I eroticized I couldn't have. And I wanted to fix that. Maybe I can get over that. And I can kind of go back to looking at people more as people and developing emotional bonds, and really putting no emphasis on the body whatsoever. Or learning to eroticize the body differently.

Jeff brings up a lot of issues here. First, his assumption that gay men will be attracted to men whose bodies are like their own. If this work is any indication, that is only true of men who like their bodies -- no matter what size. Thin athletic men or fat, hairy "bears" -- both found men like themselves attractive only as much as they liked themselves. And men of all sizes who didn't like their bodies were less likely to be attracted to men like themselves.
Jeff's tale of how he has worked to become his ideal in order to possess his ideal is very insightful. I think he is also right in realizing that he is cutting himself off from a lot of people -- potential lovers and friends.

"Not Fat"
John and Mark have very different ideals of what is most attractive to them. John is of average to stocky muscular build and is attracted to tall, thin (but not "too thin") men. Mark is tall and thin, and says he is "absolutely never attracted to anyone who looks like me," i.e. thin. They agree on two things. First, that their partner fits their ideal. And second, that they are embarrassed to admit, at least to me, that they are not attracted to fat men.
I guess what makes me uncomfortable is I am not attracted to men who are overweight. I'm not. And it doesn't matter how wonderful and charming their personality is. I just basically lump them in the same category that I would women. I don't want to date them. And that's how I feel and I recognize that it's discrimination. But I'm not going to be so politically correct that I'm going to go out of my way to change what I don't want to.

John is more ambivalent about it:
You know what's really funny? I love fat people. I'm not sexually attracted, but, for some reason I just think they're so cuddly and cute. One of my best friends is 325 pounds. I got another friend who's 520 pounds. I have some supersized friends. So maybe that's why it really bothers me that people make fun of fat people.

He says he isn't attracted to fat men, but then goes on to imply that fat is a state of mind rather than body:
Probably there's different kinds. Some [fat] people are just not attractive, but there are some people that carry their weight well. So, it's all attitude, it's attitude. It's how you carry the weight. I've seen some people that aren't fat but they walk around like they're fat. I've seen people that are really large, but they carry themselves a lot in a really rare fashion.

Does this mean that John might find a fat man attractive if the man "carried himself" well? An interesting notion, considering John also says he isn't attracted to people who "know they are attractive." Although he means well, there seems to be an implication in John's words that fat people are unattractive because of low self esteem -- but the logic is circular. For instance, he is not attracted to some fat men because the fat men don't have a positive attitude, but he would also not be attracted to fat men with a positive attitude because they would know they are attractive.
Rico says that while he prefers men who are "toned," he thinks some fat men are "good looking" and he has dated men of different sizes. He qualifies it though, to say that he doesn't like fat men with low self-esteem.
If you're fat, okay, you're fat, get over it. Move on, work with it. Work with what God has given you. Don't sit up here and be crying, "You're going to finally leave me for somebody else." People always use that when I'm dating big guys, you know. And that's another reason that I don't want to date big guys because they always throw this stuff up, they have this low self-esteem.

Lance is direct while explaining why he did not approve of a fat gay man who was looking at him:
I find it difficult to reconcile. I mean, if he has an image of what he wants in somebody else, why is he not willing to make some effort to try to get himself, you know, to stay as good looking as he can. Because, this is my approach. I want somebody who is athletic and I feel that they deserve the same. I try to be as fit as I can. Certainly, I'm getting older now and I will never be able to look like a twenty year old, but I can at least look like a very fit fifty year old. I guess part of it with the body image is, apart from the sexual image, it conveys other things. It conveys an attitude of how people feel about themselves. So I feel that somebody who looks good and who works hard at keeping their body looking good has a certain amount of self-respect, which is another quality that I want to see in people. So, it's not just an entirely physical thing. It's what that physical image suggests about them as a person, you know, beyond their external appearance.

One thing these interviews do show is that there is no correlation between body size and self-respect. There were people who would have fit Lance's ideal who did not value themselves. There were also people of all sizes, including fat people, who valued and respected themselves.

"Not Thin"
It was startling to note that the only consistent reference to what women's bodies were most attractive, made by both women and bisexual men were "not too thin." Even though most would say that appearance wasn't very important, most women and bisexual men indicated a preference for "larger" women. This seemed, and was some times even articulated as, a direct rebellion against the "culture of thinness" as depicted by mainstream media.
Only Petrina stated a preference for thin women. This might seem to imply a reversing of the bias against fat women towards thin women. But it is also important to note that none of the thin women said they felt they were "too thin." Nor did any of the participants report being told by others they were "too thin." (Though I am aware that this does happen to some thin women.)
None of the bisexual women said they would prefer thin men. As in their statements, generally few gave any physical criteria. It is notable, however, that one woman and one man who said they had a preference for larger women said they did not feel the same way about larger men. Dan explains:
I wouldn't say that overweight is anything that is unattractive to me in any way. As a matter of fact, I'm more attracted to overweight women than to the societal "average." Although I would say that overweight men tend to put me off a bit. Mostly because overweight men are associated with couch potatoes and overweight women are associated with motherly figures in my mind. When I really think about where that comes from.

The people who seemed most critical of thin men were thin men. In addition to Mark, Dan also said he is not comfortable with anyone who looks like him. He says he "is bony enough" and wants someone "cuddly to snuggle up to."

Mismatched Ideals
One way in which lesbian and bisexual women were very similar to heterosexual women, was that they were more judgmental of themselves than they were of their partners. Many mentioned having no physical rules for who was attractive, but very strong reasons why they themselves were not attractive. Where the gay men were more likely to impose the same standard on themselves and others, women were more likely to be accepting of others but not themselves.
Several women, regardless of size, who said they would prefer larger women or at least women who were "not thin" still wanted to be thinner themselves. For example, Paige is a tall, thin muscular athlete, who is a bulimic struggling with recovery and still trying to lose weight. Her ideal is larger women with hairy legs. Yet, even though she found these women attractive, she still claimed she had to lose weight or she would not find a lover.

Race
Both the black women participants, Cherry and Paige, talked about reclaiming their bodies and their attractions for other black women. Paige told how wasn't attracted to black women until going to Africa with her grandmother. None of the white or Latino women mention either preferences for or against the race of a potential partner.
There were quite a few white men who stated that they preferred, or at least enjoyed, dating men of color. These were often related to physical features. Lance said he prefers a "smooth body," which he often finds in Asian men. Fred and Alex both said they liked "dark" skin and hair tones.
One man, Anton, said he used to be a "white supremacist" but now is against racism. He gave few physical criteria for his potential lovers, stating he looks for "quirkiness" and that he is not looking for "physical perfection," just "physical normality." He never stated whether he was attracted to people of color or not.
Mark and Rico both stated that they were not interested in black men. Mark explained that it was like fat men, he just didn't find them attractive. Rico's explanation was much more complex. He says he is really attracted to other Latinos and anyone else with "olive, dark features" like him. He says he likes white people too, but "don't like anything black." He explains this is because his abusive step-father was a black man. One problem with the explanation is that other Latino men and women in his family also abused him and yet he prefers Latino features.

Crones & Trolls
In "feminist" perspectives, the word "crone" is a reclaimed word referring to older women as women of power and respect. Cherry mentioned both the positive aspect of this "status" and its drawback. She felt that she could not date a "very young dyke" because they would put her in a position of "crone" or elder. She wants to date someone who she feels will treat her as an equal. None of the other women in the study stated any preference for age of partners.
Jessie felt that the lesbian community was "very tentative." She felt that one way to overcome this would be for young lesbians and older lesbians to associate with each other more. She said she felt some of the younger women may see "us old folks" as "stodgy." She felt these young women were missing an important part of their history as a community. She didn't mention age discrimination in dating but this might be implied from the sense of isolated groups she describes.
Lawrence says that the gay media creates problems for men by selling an "image of youth." He says that gay magazine rarely show male model above the age of 24, and that most of them are between the ages of 19 and 23.
And Ozzie tells many anecdotes about blatant age discrimination in the gay/bi men's community. He is angry and hurt over the exclusion of older gay men by both younger gay men and other older gay men:
It's so irritating because I think it's okay to like a younger person or an older person. But not at the expense of your very basic human side to the point that you become rude. Not only do you become a non-entity, or a so-called troll among some gay people, but then you also become irrelevant and you become abhorrent, which is even worse than irrelevant. .... It's funny 'cause I never wished to be twenty-one again. Rather, I have wished for these people to look at me in a different way.

And for men like Ozzie and Corey who are over forty and single, the discrimination from their peers can be painful. They say they would like to be with someone closer to their own age but most men their ages only want younger men. Ozzie says:
It pains me. Not that I am forty-four. That doesn't pain me much. What pains me is that I may not have a great treasure to give but I have a little gem or two inside my box and it really hurts that no one values it. Like the anecdote with that person, that I'm not allowed to even explore a friendship. Even in a friendship, it does make you feel good when somebody shows interest. When there is no sexual interest, then just a friendship. That someone says, I'd really like to talk with you some more. So, it pains me that even just for a friendship, someone is evaluating me.

Bears & Twinkies
Bears, according to several of the participants, are large, hairy men, and their supporters. This "sub-culture within a sub-culture" tries to promote body acceptance for gay and bisexual men. Lawrence explains:
And to be comfortable with yourself and what you are is a very important thing I've learned from being around the Bears. To me, the Bear community is a very warm, nurturing, and accepting group, where the emphasis is not on appearance. That yes there are some body types and so on that people do find attractive, and it's okay to be attracted to either one type or many types. The problem gets to be is when you try and say, "I like this type, this is the only type, everybody in the world should be attracted to only this type." That's where it gets to be wrong. And as a gay man, we're taught by the gay media that there is only one type of gay man to be sexually desirable. Of course, this type evolves over time.

And bears sometimes refer to this "gay ideal" as a "Twinkie." Bill says,
A Twinkie is your stereotypical young buff blonde hairless gay man. Just like you see in The Advocate. ... But Twinkie is historically "attitude."

Lawrence says that it is the idea, not the person, which is a "Twinkie:"
"Twinkie is not a body type, it's an attitude." That to me, my own personal definition of a Twinkie is a person who buys into that idea that there is only that one type of gay is good-looking and anything else is a troll. The Twinkie attitude to me is a discriminating type of attitude, one that discriminates on body type and image.

And Ozzie and Lawrence suggest that Bear "culture" is less ageist as well as less concerned with body size.
And for young men like Cody, the Bears have given him a community to socialize with that promises not just protection from harassment because of his appearance, but a celebration of his body. Cody points out that by getting to know people in the Bear community and other groups over the last year, he has been able to challenge his beliefs and fight against the discrimination he experiences.

Broadening the Ideal
The Bears weren't the only ones challenging the stereotypes. There were many people whose ideals of both the self and the other, were more realistic and accepting. Even some of the men with fairly narrow parameters for their ideal, were happy with lovers who did not fit this ideal. John, for example, explained that his attractions are becoming more diverse and that even before, who he slept with was not based on the ideal:
... the people I sleep with, it's not just for sex. It's because I like them, I love them, I care for them. So it's more of an intimate experience. ... But every other time it's been, it's been a projected hug if you want to say. Really, it's been a intimate, caring experience.

Corey felt that what he found attractive had evolved over time. He says that when he looks back twenty years, he was "terribly physically bound," but as he matured he finds those "incidental." What matters to him now is spiritual grounding, intelligence, curiosity, and a capacity to give.
Most of the bisexuals and some of the lesbians said that not only does appearance not matter, gender doesn't either. Carol, Sherlock, and Max, who all identify as lesbian, said that it wasn't the size or gender of their partner that was important, but their love.
When I asked George what body types he finds attractive, he answered, "those with a pulse." And TJ, who likes dogs, explains:
I don't care if a dog is big or small or hairless or ugly or whatever. It's the personality that counts, you know. It's not the shape of the body. You know I've had some crushes on some pretty large women at times. But it's the person, it's not the body that makes the difference. And it didn't even seem to bother me [falling in love with a man]. [My partner] was just a really great friend and I really cared for him a lot and then we just fell in love and that was all. It took a little getting used to the sex part. You know? But that takes getting a little used to with anybody, 'cause everybody does things different you know.

Susie says that her ideal is someone with a certain energy and intelligence. And she is suspicious of people who have a narrow physical ideal:
I guess it strikes me as a little juvenile. Because a person's physical beauty is only entertaining for so long, like twenty minutes? Thirty, maybe, if they're really gorgeous. But then you have the rest of dinner to get through, you know? (laughs) And if somebody you know is attracted to only one physical type, it seems to me that their attraction is only about physicality. Which is just a pretty shallow level of attraction. You know, what do you do through breakfast?

Conclusions
Some scholarship on attitudes towards appearance among lesbian and gay people has depended on essentialist notions of gender and sexual orientation to assess the "risk" of body image distortion and eating disorders. The assessment of "risk groups" for culture-bound conditions such as eating disorders can both stigmatize and erase the experiences of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. These "risk groups" have tended to reinforce prevailing stereotypes without examining the dynamics of gender and sexual identity construction. Frequently, lesbian, bisexual and gay people are reduced to their sexual orientation, and other important aspects of their experiences are ignored.
This study has shown that other factors such as sexual abuse, family history, race, age, political activism and the "coming out" process also play important roles in the development of attitudes bodies and appearance among lesbian, bisexual and gay people. This study found no correlation between self-acceptance and a particular body size. There were people of all sizes who disliked their own bodies, and the same was true for those who accepted their bodies. For all participants, there was a significant correlation between the acceptance of the own bodies and their attraction to people of the same size. This suggests a correlation between values of the "ideal" and personal desire.
Bodies and appearance are an important aspect of the symbolic system of culture. Lesbian, bisexual and gay bodies are structured within both the mainstream cultural system and their more specific subcultures -- each providing sets of symbols, often contradictory, about the meanings of appearance. Lesbians and bisexual women were more likely to point to the larger society, and the media in particular, as their largest negative influence. They saw women's culture as a positive influence which helped many women, though not all, come to accept their bodies. Some bisexuals also spoke of values held within bisexual groups about body acceptance. While gay and bisexual men either heavily indicted or defended their "culture of desire," there were many men who resisted these values and were seeking to change them. Whether they agreed with the mainstream culture or a subcultural value, every participant seemed aware of these interactions as they accepted or resisted these values.
Through their personal experiences, the study participants reveal that they are involved in a dynamic interaction between personal desires and cultural values. Neither "free" of cultural pressures nor "dupes" of culture, the participants were aware, at least to some degree, of the pressures and of their own process in accepting, resisting or changing these ideals. This process was key in negotiating both individual and group identity. If the identity of lesbian, bisexual and gay people is, at least in part, grounded in their "sexual desire," then it follows that the values around desire and appearance would be a central aspect of this identity and the development of community. Seen in this light, "appearance" is not a superficial issue. What is at stake then is nothing less than the parameters of lesbian, bisexual and gay identity.


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