The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant by Dan Savage Page A
Authors: Dan Savage
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three-hundred-pound Japanese ladies, hefting one leg around the other with dainty criss-cross steps. Our guts grow to enormous proportions. We get so fat we can't be cremated. Dead Savages are soaked in a vat filled with a particular enzyme that breaks us down into our composite elements—beer, brats, and cheese— which are then packaged and distributed to food pantries all over the Midwest.
My boyfriend was unaware of my impending enormousness, and I had no intention of bringing it to his attention. Once hewas bound to my side by a web of car payments, shared possessions, and children, then I'd tell him what was in store.
Or I'd show him.
Unfairly, while I am destined to be fat, I am not in the least attracted to fat people. Not even to the slightly overweight. Lucky for me, my boyfriend is one of those hateful people who can live on deep-fried bacon, coconut milk, and crème brûlée and not gain an ounce. He could eat nothing but pork fat ten hours a day and you would still be able to count his ribs while he's wearing a parka. Terry is just skin and gristle stretched over beautifully proportioned bones. Naked, my boyfriend looks like a broad-shouldered Kate Moss with a dick. And this is how he is always going to look. His mother has the body of a twenty-year-old, and his grandmother looks pretty damn good for an eighty-year-old woman.
If Terry does gain weight, if he's got some recessive fat gene that blows up someone in his family every tenth generation, I will dump him. For while I am not destined to be slim myself, I do require slimness in lovers. Yes, I am a goose-stepping (good for the glutes!), black-shirt-wearing (so slimming!) body fascist. I believe people should have to get permits before they go shirtless in dance clubs, and that no one over the age of forty should go shirtless in public regardless of the shape they're in. One of the reasons I no longer attend gay pride parades is the inevitable belly-dancers-of-size contingent proudly heaving their guts down the street in a misguided effort to combat antifat prejudice. If one of these dancers were to drop dead from heat stroke, and sooner or later one will, her belly will go on dancing for half an hour after she hits the pavement.
I say these cruel things with full awareness that I will one day be heavy myself, for it is my genetic destiny. I would not make fun of black people or the disabled unless I woke up black or disabled one day. But I feel that I can in good conscience make fun of fat people, because I will one day be hugely fat. My family gets fat in middle age, so it could happen any day now. Every joke is just my sadistic way of adjusting myself to the future state of my body.
And when the pounds come my way, I don't want people— especially other gay people, who can be so cruel!—to look at me and say, “Wow, Dan really let himself go. Can't he get himself to a gym?” I want them to say, “Dan's priorities have changed. Hehas children. He doesn't have time for the gym. He has more important things to do.”
That's why kids.
There's one more reason we decided to have kids early in our relationship, rather than waiting until we'd been together longer. And I'm afraid that, like having a hobby and getting fat, it wasn't a very good reason. But I want to be honest about everything that's shaped our decision.
I write a syndicated sex advice column. One day I was minding my own business, writing my column, when along came an agent, an editor, and a book publisher. They offered me a book deal, and I accepted. I signed a contract, and then I cashed an advance check with a lot of zeros before the decimal point. The problem with the book deal was that I didn't have the faintest idea what I wanted to write a book about.
There are thousands of writers out there with books they've already written who can't get book deals, much less deals with fourteen-gazillion-dollar advances, and it must pain them to read that someone got a book deal with no
My boyfriend was unaware of my impending enormousness, and I had no intention of bringing it to his attention. Once hewas bound to my side by a web of car payments, shared possessions, and children, then I'd tell him what was in store.
Or I'd show him.
Unfairly, while I am destined to be fat, I am not in the least attracted to fat people. Not even to the slightly overweight. Lucky for me, my boyfriend is one of those hateful people who can live on deep-fried bacon, coconut milk, and crème brûlée and not gain an ounce. He could eat nothing but pork fat ten hours a day and you would still be able to count his ribs while he's wearing a parka. Terry is just skin and gristle stretched over beautifully proportioned bones. Naked, my boyfriend looks like a broad-shouldered Kate Moss with a dick. And this is how he is always going to look. His mother has the body of a twenty-year-old, and his grandmother looks pretty damn good for an eighty-year-old woman.
If Terry does gain weight, if he's got some recessive fat gene that blows up someone in his family every tenth generation, I will dump him. For while I am not destined to be slim myself, I do require slimness in lovers. Yes, I am a goose-stepping (good for the glutes!), black-shirt-wearing (so slimming!) body fascist. I believe people should have to get permits before they go shirtless in dance clubs, and that no one over the age of forty should go shirtless in public regardless of the shape they're in. One of the reasons I no longer attend gay pride parades is the inevitable belly-dancers-of-size contingent proudly heaving their guts down the street in a misguided effort to combat antifat prejudice. If one of these dancers were to drop dead from heat stroke, and sooner or later one will, her belly will go on dancing for half an hour after she hits the pavement.
I say these cruel things with full awareness that I will one day be heavy myself, for it is my genetic destiny. I would not make fun of black people or the disabled unless I woke up black or disabled one day. But I feel that I can in good conscience make fun of fat people, because I will one day be hugely fat. My family gets fat in middle age, so it could happen any day now. Every joke is just my sadistic way of adjusting myself to the future state of my body.
And when the pounds come my way, I don't want people— especially other gay people, who can be so cruel!—to look at me and say, “Wow, Dan really let himself go. Can't he get himself to a gym?” I want them to say, “Dan's priorities have changed. Hehas children. He doesn't have time for the gym. He has more important things to do.”
That's why kids.
There's one more reason we decided to have kids early in our relationship, rather than waiting until we'd been together longer. And I'm afraid that, like having a hobby and getting fat, it wasn't a very good reason. But I want to be honest about everything that's shaped our decision.
I write a syndicated sex advice column. One day I was minding my own business, writing my column, when along came an agent, an editor, and a book publisher. They offered me a book deal, and I accepted. I signed a contract, and then I cashed an advance check with a lot of zeros before the decimal point. The problem with the book deal was that I didn't have the faintest idea what I wanted to write a book about.
There are thousands of writers out there with books they've already written who can't get book deals, much less deals with fourteen-gazillion-dollar advances, and it must pain them to read that someone got a book deal with no
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