I’m a fat influencer.
I figured it was best to say it up front, so you’d get it out of your system. Yesterday, if someone told me I’d be posting on Reddit–you know, the former home of subreddits with names like “fatpeoplesuk”–I would have told them about the time a fellow influencer had her wedding photos reposted here. She’s not on Instagram anymore because of that, but I know what happened to her isn’t what happened to Devon.
I think. Oh god, I should probably call her.
Anyway, I heard from a friend of a friend that, fatphobic reputation notwithstanding, this was the place to post about…weird experiences. And this was definitely weird.
…I’m really struggling to anonymize this. I mean, what’s the point if you don’t know enough to avoid it? But at the same time, I don’t want thousands of strangers being able to find ME. Maybe some of you are still mad about your other favorite subreddit being shut down.
But thing is that Reddit, much as I hate to admit it, still has a bigger reach than any TikTok video I’ve ever made. And, weird as it may seem, I still feel responsible to my community. And when I say “my community,” I don’t just mean the influencers. I mean other fat people. And I know some of you have to be fat… or really, any of you could become so, considering the constantly moving target of “fat” vs “thin” in our culture. Any of you might be desperate enough to do this.
Like I said, I’m a fat influencer. I do clothing hauls of alternative fashion and tell people how well they fit fat bodies. It’s a more difficult task than you think–a lot of places claim they have “extended sizes”, when in reality they’re actually a size 12, not a 1 or 2x. And while a lot has changed in the past decade–there are now brands that carry only plus sizes that aren’t Dress Barn or Torrid–for a truly plus sized person, we usually still can’t go into most clothing stores and buy underwear that fits. Not underwear that is ugly, or underwear that is slightly too big or too small: underwear that will go over our thighs and asses. Or bras that can fit up to a 40” breast band, and G cup breasts. It can be soul-crushing to go into an entire store and realize none of it will fit–
Do you care about any of that? Probably not. But that’s probably why I stuck with it, even when I’ve never been able to quit my day job. I felt like I was giving back to the fat online community, the one place I went where people respected me and my opinions. Where people taught me how to talk to doctors, how to stand up for myself… and stop wearing long sleeve tops in the summer.
I feel so stupid writing that out now. Like I genuinely thought of myself as some kind of fat Captain America figure, bringing clothing justice to the survivors of the 90s war on weight. It seems like such an incredibly small thing now, freeing people to wear shorts in summer and coats that fit in winter, but at the time that’s all I wanted from life.
That’s probably also why he found me. When I met him, I was at the level of online influencer where I still had a day job and it was 50/50 as to whether I was going to give up or go into fat people porn, and I wasn’t ready for the second one. So of course when I got a generic email inviting me to the opening of “Sugarland”, a new “Instagram destination” in my city, of course I went.
I can’t think of a good name that won’t eventually hint back at him, so I’m going to call him John, which is the most boring name possible. When you imagine him, think of the biggest person you follow online… or whoever you think the hottest member of BTS is. Or Sephiroth.
I know, I know. But there’s a reason why I’m a Millennial doing alternative fashion, okay? I showed up at this event, and an incredibly beautiful man with waist-length hair told me his name was John the Super Mega Influencer, and he took my hand like we were in an episode of Bridgerton and I giggled. I fucking giggled.
Of course, Devon–not his real name!–was there too. I think, if I remember correctly, Devon was actually standing next to me the first time I met John, looking polite but wary. Just the week before, Devon had told me that he was at a point in his life where he didn’t trust thin people, that he never wanted a thin friend, and that went double for thin white people. And thin white people was exactly what John was.
He didn’t shake John’s hand–or did he? I don’t remember! But that’s probably not how it’s spread. Did he eat something I didn’t that night, or was it after? I just can’t believe Devon would do something like this voluntarily…but if I’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that I can’t claim to have a great understanding of anybody else’s motives.
Here’s the thing I know none of you will believe about Devon: he was beautiful too. He was just as symmetrical as a thin person, and he had a gorgeous bone structure. He did some kind of magical 12-step skin program, so he was always glowing–when I started seeing people say “Lizzo’s face card never declines”, it made me think of Devon.
His fashion was also worlds better than mine was. Devon did suits, primarily, and he somehow managed to “bring forward the colors of the diaspora while satirizing menswear’s colonialist roots,” which is a real line from a podcast he was on once. He was the kind of man who could wear rings on every finger without it looking cheap, had an emerald green silk suit, and taught me how to properly tie a scarf when I was wearing pearls. He was also probably 400 pounds, so I knew better than most people how hard he had to work to find those clothes and how much effort he put into his accompanying tea reviews in order to make up for the fact that there just aren’t that many men’s suiting companies willing to make items in his size.
What a fucking eulogy. How is the only things I can think to say about Devon are that he was “good at tea” and that he “had a good bone structure”?! The fucking things you say about people when they’re dead… I should be saying that Devon was a great friend, that I knew all his secrets, but I can’t say that because I spent the past year getting further and further away from him.
Anyway, I don’t even know if it started for Devon at that particular event. All I know is that I was expecting the typical Instagram destination things–flower walls, old timey phone booths painted pink, etc. Instead, I saw mountains of cake.
Imagine a ballroom, with a black-and-white checkered floor. The walls are painted black, but instead of furniture or any other ornaments, there’s just cakes stacked up at least a story high. Every kind of cake: three-tier wedding cakes, birthday cakes, Costco sheet cakes with multi-colored buttercream roses, even those Japanese cakes with the neat rows of strawberries inside, stacked up like bricks or sagging into a ruin of sugarwork and runny icing. And in the middle of it all was a banquet-style table, meant to seat a hundred.
When he first saw “Sugarland,” Devon leaned over to me and whispered, “Is this fatphobic?” and I honestly didn’t know how to answer.
The cake was a lie, of course. It was made of cleverly painted sponge and caulk–you can see videos about it on TikTok. At one point, when I was asking John if the cupcakes on the plate next to him had edible jewels, he turned the whole thing upside down, showing how they were affixed to the plate itself. Both of us laughed, awkwardly, and I wondered if I’d somehow messed up everything.
As I was writing this, I thought this was some kind of weird “gotcha”–the influencer wasn’t eating, just making it LOOK like he was eating! But with the benefit of hindsight, I remember this event was, ostensibly, for taking pictures of yourself and people don’t like photos of half-eaten food on plates. John did make an effort to make sure I was seated next to him for the dinner portion of the evening, and yet both of us struggled to make conversation until finally, out of desperation, I started talking about the embarrassing number of exotic animal pet groups I belong to, including snakes and spiders. Then the ice was broken, and we ended up talking all night.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think that anecdote says more about John than anything: on the outside, he was a polished Professional Influencer, while inside, he was as big a dork as the rest of us. Sometimes, people give you respect just based on how you look, and you either accept it as your due or you’re unable to accept it and are constantly asking yourself why no one notices your essential nerdiness. Or rather, why your essential nerdiness is no longer an issue when you look a certain way…
I have to stop thinking of John like that, though. It doesn’t excuse what he did.
But what did John do, at the end of it? Or rather, what did I actually SEE him do? In stories like this, there’s usually a bit where you find a box of photos in the attic, or I’d get a string of text messages from Devon where it doesn’t sound like him, and I’d make connections. Neither of those things happened, exactly.
This is what I do know:
First: even after all the nights I spent at John’s apartment, I only once saw some of his family. He was wrapping up a Facetime call with an older woman when I came in the door, and he smiled at me, said “Bye, Mom!” and rang off. But the woman on his screen looked very, very fat–a completely different body type than her son’s.
Second: I never fully understood exactly what John sold as part of his lifestyle programs. In part, that’s on me, and in part that’s because a lot of influencers don’t actually make anything that they’re selling. Even makeup influencers don’t sell their own makeup–they usually buy it pre-made, even the “custom” palettes, and slap a label on it. So there’s a chance that John maybe didn’t actually know what he was selling, just putting his name on it. And yet…
Should I try to break into his email after this? Or is that too psychotic a thing to do to your sort-of-boyfriend?
Third: John really did have pet snakes. I know there’s a weird rumor going around that the snakes actually are some sort of rental animal, like the one Britney Spears wore with her bellydance outfit, but I was at his house often enough that I’ve helped him feed his Burmese python, Snowy, several times. He also has a hognose, Digger, which I have yet to see. Both their tanks are in our bedroom.
Fourth: John knows how to make his own pill capsules. I’ve seen the stuff in his apartment, but it’s not anywhere near the level he’d need to be making his own pills and selling them wholesale to his followers. He took me through the process one time and it sounded like he was essentially making his own vitamins, only he called it “biohacking” and I teased him about it. I knew he read a lot about “biohacking” a lot on his own time, though–he was genuinely excited about that dude who managed to give himself a fecal transplant. (I told you John was a nerd.)
Fifth: Three months after the “Sugarland” event, Devon started selling weight loss teas on his channel.
If you’re not fat, it might be hard for you to understand what a betrayal this was. Devon and I were part of a small, local group of fat influencers who had spent the past five years pulling ourselves up through the ranks of clothing and foodie accounts, and we’d spent hours talking about what kind of responsibilities we had towards “the fat positive community”. We were all trying to balance selling beauty and food items with our ideals–that fat people were worthy of care, respect, and love–and “tummy teas” were the antithesis of that. As we learned from Jamila Jamil, “tummy teas” primarily work by making you shit yourself until you’ve lost a few pounds, which is the absolute opposite of what “health at every size” is about. And yet, they’re incredibly popular–I think I read somewhere that the Kardashians make a lot of their money selling weight loss teas.
Now that I think of it, Devon did always tell me that the ones he was selling worked “differently.” I thought he’d finally given in to weight loss rhetoric, but now I’m not so sure. Anyway, it also resulted in one of the biggest fights we’d ever had, and while we later apologized, I never really did the work I should have to make sure our relationship actually healed. In hindsight, I was too busy with John. I was also too busy with the rest of my life: I got a new desk job in marketing, and I was still trying to do my own videos on the side.
The sixth thing I know: just a few months after our big fight, Devon sold almost his entire wardrobe.
I was even at that fucking event, because Devon wasn’t the kind of person that let gender stand in the way of a great blouse purchase. Fuck, I still have those clothes: a gorgeous, floor-length pleated skirt in black wool, some of his spikier necklaces. Some of the stuff he was selling was real vintage, real Chanel bags and designer shoes, and yet he was willing to let it all go. John came with me, and even joked about how he was looking forward to watching me buy all the clothes while he would only be able to buy jewelry (for fat fashionistas, it’s usually the reverse.)
To my surprise, Devon looked happy to see John. There was a warmth there I hadn’t seen in previous interactions. But I wasn’t really paying as much attention as I should have, because this was also when I really started to realize that Devon was losing weight.
Devon was one of those people who was fat due to at least one underlying health condition–don’t ask me what it was, it’s not important. What was important was that, to my eye, he had to have lost close to a hundred pounds.
The weird thing about fat people is that we do, believe it or not, know something about weight loss. And losing a hundred pounds, even spread over several months, is incredibly fast. The “recommended” weight loss amount is something like five pounds a month, and if you’re losing weight faster than that, you’ve either elected to get bariatric surgery or are in the advanced stages of cancer.
But of course I didn’t ask Devon what was happening, because I was afraid of being rude–no one knows the potential landmines of asking “Have you lost weight?” like another fat person. I also, unlike most of the stories I read here, didn’t overhear John and Devon talking about selling each other’s rebranded teas in the other room while I was looking through Devon’s closet. Instead, I thought that Devon was hitting the weight loss teas too hard. He might be losing weight now, but he’d eventually plateau, like every other fat person I know, and gain it back.
…in short, I was incredibly jealous. And cruel, though I didn’t say any of these things to him directly. I just paid him for his clothes, made small talk, and left with John. Maybe, in my own way, I was shutting myself away from who I used to be now that I had something I never thought I’d have: a partner that everyone else agreed was beautiful, instead of the loser that everyone assumed would be my lot as a fat girl.
Here’s the final thing I know: Devon had a closed casket funeral.
It was yesterday, and it still doesn’t feel real. Both John and I went to the funeral, and there were dark jokes about how, due to the number of influencers in attendance, it would be one of the most photographed funerals in the world. But to be honest I don’t remember much. It was all so sudden, and all I could think about was how Devon would have wanted to be buried in his green silk suit, but it would never fit him now, and then I’d remember what I’d thought about him the last time I’d seen him at the clothing sale, and on and on. I spiraled for his entire service.
John, to his credit, was also a wreck. He was white, and bloodless, and incredibly jumpy. From guilt? Or…oh god, was that how it happened? Were he and Devon seeing each other, somehow? Was that how he spread it to others, like some fucked-up STD?
But the thing is, until last night, I thought Devon had killed himself. It’s the dirty little secret of both the fat positive and influencer worlds: no matter how good our online presences make us look, there’s still hundreds or thousands of people sending us anonymous hate every day. I still think about the fat trans artist who painted pithy sayings in nail polish, then simply stopped posing one day. About a month later, it finally trickled down to me–not a friend, just a follower– that zie had killed themselves.
Sometimes the world is just too much.
But Devon was only 35, for God’s sake! And he’d told me that his health issues were under control, and he didn’t post about spending any time in the hospital before his death…
I thought, last night, that John had to be thinking it was a suicide too. I tried to talk to him about it, but he told me we should think of something else, anything else, and we ended up watching Avatar: the Last Airbender of all things.
But it makes sense that I’d think we were going to have sex last night, right? Sex after a funeral is nearly a cliche. I need you to understand that so that you’ll get why, when I woke up in the pitch black of his bedroom because I felt a light touch on my lips, I assumed he was kissing me and tried to murmur something soothing.
That’s when I realized there was something in my mouth.
Whatever it was, it was broad enough to get in the way of my tongue, but very thin. My mind supplied similar textures: a fragment of tendon, a piece of chicken skin, tripe…but there was no corresponding chicken taste. Instead, it was something not exactly pleasant, but also not unfamiliar. A sort of musky taste.
Human senses really are amazing things: I had made this flavor/texture assessment in milliseconds, while in real life I had just started fumbling to brush whatever was touching my lips away. Only it wouldn’t brush. It pulled. And to my dawning horror, I felt an answering tug deep inside my throat.
I scrabbled for my phone, desperate for light, and in the darkness of John’s bedroom it was like turning on a small sun. Enough to stamp the afterimage of what I saw on the inside of my eyelids, even though I dropped the phone almost as soon as I saw it. John jerked awake at my scream, and I heard his corresponding yell of terror as he lunged for…me? No: at the horrible thing that had stretched from my mouth to his nostril, connecting us like a strand of spit stretches across an open mouth.
I gagged, tried to cough and scream together, spit streaming from my mouth as John and I fell half off the bed in a panicked tangle. Then John shut himself in the adjoining bathroom.
It was so anticlimactic after the flurry of panicked shouting that for a moment I lay half in the bed, half on the floor, feeling a surge of rage and abandonment. When it became clear from the noises coming from inside the bathroom that John wasn’t coming out any time soon, I somehow managed to get up, clear my throat–the horrible pulling sensation was gone–and turn on the lamp. While John ran water in the bathroom, I frantically searched the sheets, my clothes and turned on my phone camera to look for signs of whatever had been…biting me? Something worse?
I found nothing. In desperation, I pounded on the bathroom door, yelling at John to ask if he was all right.
He yelled back, “It was the snake!”
I’ll spare you the full replay of the incredibly strange conversation we had next. At first it was through the bathroom door, then in the bathroom itself after he finally opened the door and I pushed past him to frantically brush my teeth.
According to John, I’d woken him up screaming because his albino hognose snake, Digger, had somehow gotten out of his tank and had curled up in bed with us to get warm. When I said that wasn’t what I saw, that I’d seen something coming out of his nose, he said that he’d had a nosebleed. “The snake got out, and I had a nosebleed,” he kept saying. “That’s all that happened.”
I was brushing my teeth for the second time when he took the bathroom trash can away. I thought he had thrown up in it, so I didn’t stop him, but I heard it loud and clear when he started up the garbage disposal in the kitchen down the hall.
I screamed again. I demanded to know what he was doing, and he flat out refused to tell me. Instead, he came back down the hall, sans trash can, and handed me pills. They were in a traditional amber pill bottle, but unlabeled, and he said I had to take them right away because they were antivenom.
I haven’t taken the pills. But I did take the bottle with me when I called an Uber back to my house, even though it was 2am. Now it’s closer to 2pm, and I’m still staring at the bottle and what I’ve written here, trying to make it make sense.
The thing that really gets me is the clumsiness of the lie. John knows how much I love snakes, though I’ve never owned one. I belong to six Facebook groups on snake care alone, and I’ve never heard of any kind of antivenom that’s administered in pill form. Besides that, hognose snakes are venomous…but their venom is closer to that of a bee sting than that of a cobra.
I also haven’t had any of the traditional symptoms of being bitten, like puffy skin or trouble breathing. And I posted in all my exotic pet groups, but there’s no hognose, no matter how sick, that looks anything like what I saw. There were no eyes, for one thing, and I’m not even sure it had a mouth.
Instead, I’ve had a very different set of symptoms. I feel nausea, with the occasional spike of abdominal pain. In the mirror, I think the shape of my face looks different, while my clothes are starting to feel loose. And I won’t get too TMI, but I’ve also written the last couple paragraphs while sitting on the toilet.
I’ve done a lot of Googling while sitting here too, and while some of my symptoms aren’t not what you can also get from a snakebite, they fit way more closely to the side effects of a very different animal.
Maybe I’m having a psychotic break. Because what I’m thinking now is fucking insane: there’s a high-level lifestyle influencer that’s secretly killing fat people??? But then I think of John’s obsession with “biohacking”, whatever that meant. One time, he told me how useless the doctors in his life had been to help him. About how he compounded his own vitamins and supplements because he’d learned the only help he’d get was from himself. About how he’d taken his health into his own hands.
Maybe instead of my sort-of-boyfriend being a secret serial killer, he’s just a high-level lifestyle influencer selling a weight loss product he doesn’t really understand. I keep replaying every conversation me and John ever had, thinking about how quietly, wryly funny he could be. About how he seemed to know all the little annoyances of a really fat person’s life, and planned accordingly: he only had armless chairs in his apartment, for instance, and wider than average towels. The kind of knowledge you can only really gain through experience of having a body the world isn’t made for, rather than just being a really devoted fetishist.
I think about how fatness runs in families, about the glimpse I got of his mom. And how I’ve never seen photos of him as a kid, or even from more than a handful of years ago.
At one point, worried about the supposedly innocent snake and unable to square it with how quiet John was, I demanded, “Did you kill it?” And after a pause John said yes, he had killed it.
Have I thought about this too long? Have I somehow hurt myself by not taking these pills yet?
I guess in the end, this is all I have to offer you: if you’ve bought any kind of tea, weight loss powder or other ingestible from a lifestyle influencer in the past year, throw it the fuck out. And if it’s too late for you and you already tried it: maybe see if you can talk your doctor into giving you a course of antiparasitics. Just in case.