Fat Girl Gets Married Week #27: The Fanfare
"You deserve all the happiness in the world. You deserve a partner that cherishes you and is so excited and proud to be with you. You deserve all of the fanfare. You deserve it all."
This week I’m opening up Fat Girl Gets Married to all subscribers! FGGM is a living, digital memoir focused on my experience as a plus-size, anti-diet bride. Welcome to Week #27 of the 52-week countdown to my wedding.
It’s always a joy to have a guest on Fat Girl Gets Married. This week I chatted with a fat-positive (and fat) queer bride named Hutch. Hutch co-owns the record label Plump Records with their husby, Kevin. Here’s a music video featuring Hutch and Kevin:
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Hutch what words of advice they’d give to all the current and future fat brides, they replied:
"You deserve all the happiness in the world. You deserve a partner that cherishes you and is so excited and proud to be with you. You deserve all of the fanfare. You deserve it all."
I think this might be a little spell or incantation! The theme of “fanfare” - and the question, “Do you have enough fanfare in your life?” - is the focus of this week’s FGGM. Press play below to listen to our conversation, and/or scroll down to read the transcript of the interview and watch Hutch’s most recent music video, I’m Hutchtastic, which is incredible and also probably NSFW?
Please enjoy this interview with Hutch!
Hutch: My name is Hutch, and my pronouns are they, them, and I live in Oakland, California.
Virgie: Cool, and then when did you get married?
Hutch: I got married on May 6th, 2023, so coming up on one year ago now.
Virgie: Yes oh my god! Happy early anniversary!
Hutch: Thank you
Virgie: And I know you got married in Saint Helena?
Hutch: Yeah, Saint Helena.
Virgie: Okay cute! so like wine country?
Hutch: Yeah, it was really super cute. Like our venue was basically just like an event venue like it used to be a restaurant and so now they do on-site catering but they have all this amazing outdoor space and then they back up right into like vineyards so the vineyards are not actually like part of the venue but we were able to just like wander around and take pictures in them like during golden hour and stuff and it was like the backdrop for our ceremony. So yeah, super beautiful.
Virgie: Oh, that sounds so beautiful. Can I ask you, what does it mean to you to be like an anti diet/fat positive bride?
Hutch: I just am kind of an anti-diet, fat-positive person in life and existence and also just like a fat person. So for me being a fat-positive bride is just like to show up and be unapologetically myself, which i think is just so important and powerful because there's so much diet culture baked into the wedding industrial complex, if you will, and so much pressure for brides to be a certain size for their wedding or for their pictures or whatever. So fuck all that, you know!
Virgie: Yes definitely wedding industrial complex, I think that's a very accurate descriptor because it does rely on a lot of really grody history and cultural normativity stuff absolutely yeah.
Hutch: I didn't always think that I was going to get married for a lot of reasons. Like I just didn't feel like I cared about the government putting their stamp of approval on my relationship or something. And that definitely shifted. Obviously, I did get married and there was something really powerful for me about having a ceremony and inviting all these important people in my life to hold that container and to show up and to be witness to my partner and I committing to each other in that way. But at the same time, the history of marriage as being a form of women being transferred as property from their father to their husband and on and on is not always something that I wanted to participate in.
“So with my wedding, it was important for me, and even if it wasn't in explicit ways, just in myself and how I related to it, to be sure that I was finding ways to subvert that (problematic history of marriage) and for it to just be about us and what we were trying to create and to distance myself and our process from some of that.”
Virgie: I don't know about you but growing up, I was always really scared of weddings. Everybody seemed so sad or there was something kind of like an energy of like, “what is this feeling?” and I think a lot of weddings that I went to as a child they were at church, and church kind of freaked me out and scared me a little bit. But it's like that juxtaposition of like the early memories of weddings being so scary and creepy and weird and religious and like all the stuff you're talking about where it's like sort of it is an exchange of property and then kind of the backdrop of: how do I make something that is a ritual that is fraught, how do I make it my own? I've been thinking of it more like the wedding at this point is more like a performance art piece than it is like you know a ceremony per se. I know we talked about the role of having this ritual be something witnessed by community and I think to your point a lot of what makes a wedding really scary for people is that act of being witnessed. Is the act of all eyes being on you and diet culture saying, “you're never going to measure up, and that's why nobody should be looking at you,” you know?
Hutch: Yeah, totally. I think that a lot of fat people, especially like fat women and femmes, uh, you know we're taught that we don't deserve or ought not to be like the center of attention you know that we should like blend in and be on the sidelines not draw focus to ourselves because we're not conforming to these standards of like what a good woman should be or whatever.
Virgie: Yeah absolutely. Visibility is a big part of your life as an artist.
Hutch: Yeah absolutely I like to be loud and proud.
Virgie: I remember we were traveling together (in Bali) and you were wearing this shirt that said, “My weight is none of your business unless I'm sitting on your face,” and I was like yes! I'm like yes this is exactly exactly perfect! Can you talk about some formative moments in your journey of becoming both this visible artist this visible bride?
Hutch: You know, it's been it's been a long one for sure, with different sort of phases of just gaining confidence in myself. I think on one hand I always have been loud um and so it's been sort of a shift of that being something that I thought was wrong with me to that being something that like I take ownership of and empowerment in and just in you know gaining comfort in my body and shedding a lot of shame. And yeah just like this idea that like I wasn't living up to what I was supposed to be because I was fat. And yeah it's been a process. I think one really sort of formative phase of that was just like leaving the Midwest and coming to San Francisco. I think the Bay Area just has a lot more I mean obviously like San Francisco has been like a counterculture mecca for many decades and so there's a lot more alternative thinking and people kind of going against the rules or going against societal norms and upon arrival here I slowly started to become more familiar with like the sex positive communities, like kind of Burner adjacent. I started going to Burning Man and that really opened up my world a lot and I kind of had this whole journey I guess it's a never-ending journey in some ways. I had a lot of experiences that kind of helped me to feel more empowered in myself and in my body.
“Growing up as a fat kid in Detroit suburbs, I got a lot of messaging that I was not valuable as a girl, as a sexual being, and so I sort of had this awakening when I came to San Francisco that I was like: wait a second, maybe that's not true. I had a lot of really unsatisfying sexual experiences as a young person where my pleasure wasn't centered. I didn't think that I deserved to center my own pleasure and definitely people that I was having sex with, men that I was having sex with, especially when I was young, didn't necessarily care about getting me off.”
And then there was really like this turning point was I had a friend who told me this story about how he would have he would meet men on Craigslist that would just like come to his job and like give him a blowjob in the bathroom and leave like completely unreciprocated and I just like found that completely mind-blowing that like someone would just do that because I think I saw sex before that like sort of as everyone trying to get their own or something. So I was like relating this story to like another friend and he was like, “Well you could totally do that.” And I was like, “What are you talking about? Could I really?” and he was very confident. He's like, “Well Craigslist is kind of over. It's not the place to meet sexy people anymore, but he's like OKCupid you could totally do this.” And so this friend of mine was like a professional I mean he still is like a photographer, like a pornography still photographer and erotica writer and so he like ghost wrote this profile for me and did like a really great job of kind of capturing my sassy essence and I put this profile up on OkCupid that was like very explicitly only looking for men that wanted to provide me with unreciprocated oral sex and I just got inundated with messages like I would get 10 to 20 or sometimes more messages every single day so I would just you know look through them and respond to the ones that I thought were interesting.
I got a lot of hate too you know people like that saw it as an opportunity to like tell me that I was fat and horrible and I was like yeah I am fat and I'm not horrible and who cares what you say you know. So I needed a thick skin for that endeavor. And if you weren't creepy or something and then I would have these guys back to my house and they would eat my pussy and then they would go away and yeah and so that was like a really powerful experience for me because it really kind of it was like this very visceral like counter narrative to like what I had thought for so long that was like I was not desirable, that I was like not valuable.
I was like, “Look at how valuable my pussy is that even just to like get close face first is enough that people are like willing to get in line!”
And it was always like, “You can get yourself off somewhere else on your own time.” Like they wouldn't even take off their pants you know and so that was just like and I felt like yeah it was sort of this my personal stance uh in the face of this like much larger cultural sort of issue of like it was it was very much like I wanted men in that situation even though at the time I was also like dating and having sex with people of other genders it wasn't appealing to me it was like this sort of you know counterweight to this like gross imbalance that exists in the world or something if that makes sense.
Virgie: Yes and you were like righting the universe in your own bedroom!
Hutch: Obviously like you need more than one person to like right the whole problem.
Virgie: But like you’re doing your part.
Hutch: Exactly.
Virgie: I love love love this story. It just makes me so happy every time you talk I mean it's like I think about this story and it was like a really earth-shattering moment for me to witness you sort of undertaking this thing that I think is not only so powerful as a fat person but as a woman/femme person. So you're in a queer relationship interacting with the wedding industrial complex, kind of like all these weird cultural things. Did that experience set you up to perhaps be in a position where you could become a happier person long term in relationships?
Hutch: Yeah more open and like I think a more deeply equitable relationship because I’m not like constantly worried about getting taken advantage of.
Virgie: Yeah I love that and i think it speaks to kind of like how oppression just cycles through us where it's like we're experiencing these things, these exploitative and hurtful experiences, and then we take them in and we believe this is how the world works and then it makes our world smaller and smaller and smaller you know? Which is like the hidden tax of that marginalization. I'm curious what you like yeah if there was like a little time capsule and you could put like a note in it for the for all the future of like you know fat babes getting married fat babes living their best life whatever their relationship rituals look like what is in what note are you writing and what's going in the time capsule?
Hutch: Yeah so what a good question. I would say that my note would be like, “You deserve it. You deserve all the happiness in the world. You deserve a partner that cherishes you and is so excited and joyful and proud to be with you. You deserve all of the fanfare you know just like you deserve it all.”
Virgie: The Fanfare. Oh my god, I love that.
I think there's something very telling that the only time a woman is expected to be the center of attention and take up space (literally in a giant poufy dress) is when a man is "acquiring" her. Fascinating read!